And the most treacherous neglect of Rome. If Constantine had lost Rome would've lasted longer as the Emperor he replaced (Maxentius) was focused on making Rome great again.
Rich people, living in the countryside, in proto-castles, with paid guards and tenant farmers, making deals with kings. Did these "preppers" become Medieval nobility?
In some places, that's pretty much exactly what happened. There were, of course, places in Western Europe where similar systems had been in place before the Romans took over the general management.
The retainers were called the Bucellarii and could be small bands or a small personal army. The model of the self-sufficient farm etc. is like the Medieval system but without the feudal ties that bound people together. They were just guarding their estates. As noted in the video, the great landowners made deals with the German nobles (in Italy and Gaul. Other areas like Noricum and Britain were destroyed. Generally keeping about a third of their former holdings, the Romans were then able to live under Roman law while the Goths and other Barbarians lived under their own. The wealthy of both socialized together.
As always, one should understand life expectancy as an average, not a limit. With high rates of child mortality (that ran up into the 20th century), an average age of 25 does not mean that a 30 year old was the wise old sage. Once past the age of five, your chances of living to what we call old age increase. For example, Augustus Caesar was 75 when he died. Tacitus was 76. Gordian I was 81. Even hundreds of years before, Plato was in his mid-70s. Old age was not uncommon, though on average less so.
Yeah, but, the referencers you quoted were members of the 1% of their time. I suspect that the average Joe was screwed just as much with health care in the ancient world as the average Joe is today.
Keep in mind every man you mentioned was wealthy. The lower classes would live less, just like nowadays plenty of famous rich people live to 100 but average Joes generally live to 80
@@ColasTeam I don't have any data for what you claimed at the end, but since I have met several people near or at 100 and none of them were rich at all. But I get your point, that the wealthy have greater access to healthcare today, and likely did so then. But the reason I can only site "wealthy" people is that they are the only ones searchable in the records. But we can see my argument translate to closer times quite easily. Our great-grandparents, or perhaps a generation more depending on your age, lived at a time when life expectancy was around 45 - 48, but we all have numerous examples of our regular ancestors living to old age, and often very old age. This is likely to have remained a trend back through history. The dramatic shift came as we tackled childhood mortality. It raises the average dramatically.
Just because you could technically live to 75 or so, it does not mean you are likely to or even on average would. There would be a skewed probability curve that peaks at 25 and then declines with age. So your chances of living to 25 were higher than to 30 etc. But your chances of living to 70 are very very small. The exceptions do not prove the rule. Poor people today have better healthcare than the wealthy elites did in antiquity, or even, until very recent times. The life expectancy curve hasn't just gotten larger, it became far less steep as well. There really is no comparison.
@@obsidianjane4413 I don't think you understand how these statistics work. The curve is very sharp early. Once you make it past five, the average leaps by many years of expectancy. This is why the average is so low, because many children died before the age of five. Since the latter half of the 20th century, there has been a continued increase in life expectancy by degrees. This is because of medical advances primarily. But it was conquering early childhood mortality that raised the average. Look at just a century or so ago, and we had many, many old and very old people. My own family history had many people in their 80s back during the 19th century when the average life expectancy was only forty. Do the math. 5 + 80 / 2 = 42.5 One childhood death offsets one long life. Even now, if you live to be 70, chances are you'll make it to 85, which is way above average. This is because you have missed dying of all the causes that typically get people earlier.
The last Roman to be carried in a sedan chair may have been their bishop, who used his "sedia gestatoria" on ceremonial occasions. That was a silk armchair supported by two poles carried on the shoulders of twelve men. Four men walked outside carrying a canopy over his head, and another two walked beside the incumbent carrying ostrich feather fans: these were abolished by Pius X. The sedia gestatoria was replaced by the Popemobile in 1978.
So, I'm still hoping to hear you to cover "how family names from ancient Rome morphed into modern Italian names and when that occurred ". One would think that a family name would be handed down from generation to generation and not change much. thanks, jeff
There's an anecdote I have found in several versions, so it's unlikely real, but it illustrates the subject. (Roman Mornings by James Lees-Milne, cited in the blog Spenceralley): The Massimi are a family of the greatest antiquity and claim descent from the patrician Fabius Maximus who in 202 B.C. had led the armies of Rome against Hannibal. Of their origin they have long been exceedingly proud and about its authenticity correspondingly sensitive. When Napoleon interrogated one of the Massimi with that brusqueness which intimidated most people: "Is it true that you are a descendant of the Roman general?" he received the curt retort: "I cannot prove it, but the tradition has been current for over a thousand years in my family."
@@thomasjamison2050 Yep. Besides the "even officials were almost illiterate back then" and the changes on birth certificates (multiple instances on both my mother's and my father's side of the family around 1900), even the names of cities changed over time, and those are a bigger deal for more people than just the name of one family.
Were there preppers in the ancient world? Short answer, yes. Everyone was a prepper in those days, because at least small scale disasters were routine. It is really only in the last century or so (depending in part on where you live) that small scale disasters have become a rarity. Which has enabled people who aren't prepared, to continue living despite their lack of preparedness. Another huge factor is that the majority of people until fairly recently were farmers, and almost all farmers in those days built / fixed / grew pretty much everything they needed. As such they were career preppers. To a large extent it is specialization that has allowed people to *not* be career preppers. And of course the widespread specialization is dependent on capitalism.
Prepping in an agricultural society meant storing grain and other food for lean years when the harvest was poor. That was what the king did, too, and he was responsible for hanging hoarders who put up prices during a famine. That ended under capitalism, when the kings were replaced by trading companies who saw the opportunity to corner the market in an essential commodity, and laws were made AGAINST charity.
I have asked a several times, what happened to the Black Sea Greek colonies when Rome tookover the Hellenic world? There were loads dotted up and down the Black Sea coast both on the West, North and East - that didn't fall within (what the maps show as) the Roman Empire
The "Hellenic world" was never unified, and Rome never expanded just for the sake of expanding. It was more common for Rome to make trade deals with various Greek colonies. Even if the colonies didn't formally join the Roman Empire, they tended to look to Rome for protection, and gradually became part of the Roman sphere. Meanwhile, those colonies tended to survive by entering into diplomatic relationships with the locals, including lots of intermarriages, meaning they became less Greek over time. The cities still retained some Greek language and culture for a long time, but they were eventually flattened by the Mongols, then absorbed by migrating Tatars and Turks.
Maybe they integrated with their neighbours and faded away, like the Greek cities of Central Asia. The Black Sea colonies may have been part of the Khazar world and converted to Judaism, either directly or via some form of Christianity, before becoming Muslim under the Golden Horde and later the Crimean Khanate before the Russian annexation. Their last descendants would have been deported to Siberia by Stalin during world war II.
American author Mark Twain was once famously given some wheat taken from the tomb of a pharaoh. He planted it and it grew. With that in mind do we know which variety of wheat was grown in ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome?
I was reading a book called The Cambridge Companion To The Roman Economy Economy, it had a chapter about life expectancy that matched the information in this video pretty closely. It said the main cause of short lifespans were seasonal diseases like malaria. It also said, interestingly, that things like lifespan and height often actually decreased during the peaks of Roman power, likely due to the increased population density.
i wonder if it was depressing to live in a world where the farther back in time one looked at buildings and tombs it seemed like people were richer and fancier, then it'd seem like things only get worse over time. but nowadays we're used to thinking that aside from the disastrous hiccups of world wars and techno violence we can expect things to become more amazing
With the exception of electronics and motor vehicles, just about everything was better until about 100 years ago, when it started going to shit, and 70 years ago or so, it REALLY started going to shit. Now most new construction I drive past I just shake my head...
Good thing everyone know everything and so smart and so inclusive! Yay! Everybody so smart let’s do drugs and drink and we still smarter then everyone else yay! So smart! So smart! We know everything! Yay! lol good thing Israel is there to tell us that Gaza attacked first right? Two major religions still acting like two year olds fighting over something that means nothing. So smart and inclusive though. Israel has to be one culture but the rest of the world can just figure it out for themselves? Interesting. Who’s in control of the fiat debt based currency? Oh ya a Jew…
After a city or town was sacked/raided how long did it take to recover? And how many people died, not from the sacking/raiding itself, but from the aftermath caused by such events?
A good deal of the time, such cities never recovered, and people just set up shop elsewhere. Living on the site of a sacked city is a bad omen. When Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 the population went from 700,000 to 100,000 and then never recovered, hovering around 40,000 until the renaissance and almost entirely consisting of clergy.
Thank-you. This was interesting. The big "prepper" activity was surely when "civility and gentleness fled to the cloister." (W.C.H. Frend?) E.g., if you look at St. Martin's first chapel on the farm at Ligugé (360 CE) you'll see it was tiny, and very quickly had to be enlarged to meet high demand.
I have a couple of follow-up questions about travel. How did people - of different status - travel between towns and areas? How did, for instance, affluent people travel to Baiae with - I presume - quite a retinue? And were (trusted) slaves sent on errands to other towns, and how did that work? And I presume that ordinary legionaries marched along the famous Roman roads, but there was cavalry as well, and did the cavalry reach the destination in advance? (Stupid question, perhaps, but I have absolutely no experience of the army and troop movements in war and during relative non-war.) And also, I wonder if the horses were shod and how that worked on paved roads.
I have this thought: I'm sure a historian could answer best, What are the thing that we will never know about the romans? P.S. This is a "we will never get the necessary info trough archeology and surviving texts, unless we have a time machine" situation.
Most things actually. The majority of archaeology from this time period does not last. Historians and Archaeologists have spent all of their time researching Rome and not really bothering with others, partly because of how obscure it is to find stuff from rural populations. That should give you an idea.
Between 20-30 is actually better than I thought. Even as recently as the late 18th and early 19th century the average life expectancy for a working-class Briton was around 30-40 years, and much less if you had a working class job such as coal miner or tradesman. Even by 1900 it was only about 45 for men and 50 for women. Now I wonder which imperial capital was more crowded and squalid, Victorian London or ancient Rome!
@@lalli8152 This is true. In 1800 London it was about 329 deaths per 1000 live births, so 1 in 3 did not live to see their 5th birthday. There was rapid scientific progress in that century and it fell sharply, but even by 1900 it was still about 150 infant deaths per 1,000 live births (in contrast, in the present day UK it's about 3.3 deaths per 1000 live births). Even so, life in Victorian Britain was hard, and working class people would often die around 25. Soot from the coal would damage their lungs, they were malnourished, toxic chemicals like arsenic were common place etc. I don't know so much about Rome, but they obviously didn't have the same level of industrial pollution to deal with. So in many ways it's an apples to oranges comparison, though late 18th century medicine wasn't all that further along than in Rome.
@@lalli8152partially, but not entirely. In short, the odds of a new born making it to 5 were about 50:50, a 5 year old similarly has even chances of making it to 25, and then a 25 year old of reaching 55, and the same 50% chance of that person making it to 65. Sources are in Garrett's book and while they're not super precise, they are diverse enough that the general pattern is reliable. This is for free men in the Roman empire as a whole, would be worse in the big cities or for slaves, but better for the wealthy.
As for squalid and cramped, Rome would beat (or rather, lose to) Victorian London hands down. The population density of imperial rome was absurdly high, approaching modern Hong Kong levels of insanity but without high-rises. In fact, it's so absurdly dense that we're probably overestimating the population of Rome or underestimating its sprawl.
@@QuantumHistorian I was going to suggest the same thing. The longer that you lived, past the age of 0, the better chance you had to make it to adulthood.
I know in a recent video you talked about Roman’s minimalist furniture especially for the less well-off Roman. Did people spend a lot of time in their houses like we do or did this vary by class? Where did they typically go to hang out if not and did some people spend all their time cooped up/as a hermit? (This is not accounting for work, maybe the hermit lifestyle was unsustainable and more of a modern concept with technology) maybe there was the Roman equivalent of a modern park/coffee shop to hang out at during the day lol
To what extent did people Western Roman Empire citizens specifically from Italy migrate to the territories of the Eastern Empire? Are there any examples of Republic era patrician families migrating?
The Anicii, Decii and the Fabii. Later Roman writers in the middle ages attribute the latter's lineage to Nicephorus Phocas who ruled in the 10th century. But we have solid evidence of the former: Anicia Juliana settled in Constantinople and married Aerobindus, a Germano-Roman general in service of emperor Anastasius, who reigned in the late 5th to the early 6th century.
Did large-scale peace protests or rallies calling for an end to a war ever occur throughout Roman history? Also, bonus question that might heat things up a bit. What is your opinion on whether ancient Macedon was Hellenic or not? I know that the nobility and upper class usually strived to appear Hellenic which was common for most of the region's nobility at the time, but was the general culture of everyday people the same as that of their southern neighbors?
I wonder if the Slavs were set free or how that worked… oh wait … nope that was British and American ideology that saw slaves go free… Brings up a better question. How many Slavs were there in all of history, almost an untold amount I imagine as everyone who wasn’t Roman was a barbarian… weird how we never heard about those numbers of Slavs I think the going rate at one point was a jug of Roman wine for a Slav… pretty sad history for all humans…
aww it's sad to think that every hoard we find meant not a happy ending for the original hoarder. 😞unless..maybe after burying their treasures they discovered life was more fun and vibrant and free from the worries of finances and they happily never looked back on their old lifestyle...and that they found love too and lived happily ever after
I might take to burying hordes... deep... having to go out and dig a deep hole for a bit of cash would help resist the temptation to draw on ones savings.
more possible than you think. in times of stress, faith, hedonism and savagery are the main ways people deal with it. Religious movements of people denying material possessions must have been popular in the dying days of rome.
@@bmetalfish3928 Just to note, if anyone here wishes to relinquish the burden of wealth and material possessions, I can provide that service for a fee... since I am being burdened with wealth and possessions - I can't do that for free.
Native aluminum is really only found in extremely small quantities, it was only able to be discovered in 1825 by advancements in chemical science. However alum, a compound containing aluminum, was mentioned by Herodotus as being utilized by the ancients.
Questions: what determines the popularity of an Emperor? Nero is a popular Emperor in his days while Justinian isn't, while later historians award them with totally different reputations. What caused the disparity between contemporary opinion of romans (mobs) and modern historians?
Hello! With December coming up I was hoping to throw a Saturnalia party for my friends. Other than electnig a Saturnalia Princeps, giving each other joke gifts and puting a "gold" statue of Saturn on a tiny Chez lounge, what are some less known Saturnalia traditions that would make for a fun party?
3:40 I once read a translated sarcophagi inscription of a man, Lucius Retonius Lucius who served 58 years in the legion and died at 78, around the 3rd century AD. However even the insription seemd pretty impressed with that.
Did any greeks worship the titans over the olympians and think the titans either a) were the actual victors or b) would rise again and over throw the olympians?
Do Classical sources mention static shocks or static cling? It’s a fairly common phenomenon. What did they think it was, if they didn’t recognize it was the power of lightning on a smaller scale?
I once had a professor compare early Christian groups to counter-culture or “punk rockers”… there were a few giggles, but no one disputed the comparison.
I have a question for the next session: I was thaught that the Ancient Greeks started founding colonies because their homelands could not fit all their people anymore. If so, how come the Greek population grew so fast and why not in other places too?
The Star Trek episode "Bread and Circuses" has the crew of the Enterprise arriving on a planet with a history similar to Earth, except that the Roman Empire has survived to the 20th century. In our own planet's history, what would it have taken for the Roman Empire to survive so long? Perhaps it will help to constrain the question to specify that the 20th-century Empire has the form depicted in the show.
You won’t like the answer but it’s women’s rights. They will always lead to collapse of civilisation as they undermine the pillars that society stands on
From wiki: "When infant mortality is factored out (i.e., counting only those who survived the first year, 67[10]-75% of the population), life expectancy is around 34-41 more years (i.e., expected to live to age 35-42). When child mortality is factored out (i.e., counting only those who survived to age 5, 55-65% of the population), life expectancy is around 40-45. The ~50% that reached age 10 could also expect to reach ~45-50.The 46-49% that survived to their mid-teens could, on average, expect to reach around 48-54" "Upon surviving the perils of infancy and childhood, individuals in ancient Rome experienced a notable increase in life expectancy. Recent studies suggest that those who reached adulthood had a life expectancy of approximately 50 years or more" -Barchiesi & Scheidel
Regarding the last question it’s important to note that the phenomenon you discussed was the beginning of feudalism. The elite and wealthy fleeing the cities and their subsequent employment of workers is what laid the groundwork for feudal Europe.
All I can think of is the legendary life span of John the Evangelist who lived to be about 100 according to Christian legend so take it with a grain of salt.
@@edwardmiessner6502don't see how it is legendary. There were few but some people who reached the age of 90 at the time. The only confusion modern scholars face is whether there are 1 or 2 only Johns.
How did religion function in Pagan Rome? Was their rivalry between the priests/temples of the variouse gods. Did these temples have "Parishes" like many modern Christian churches have today? Or did the population just worship "Willy-Nilly" as the spirit took them?
Was there international leisure travel in Ancient Rome, to Gaul, Germania, or Parthia. Additionally, what was the state of leisure travel to the provinces.
This would be an interesting area. We know of at least one emporer who constructed an artificial lake with a decked out boat. It wouldnt be implausible that other wealthy Romans were interested in the same delights. Maybe Amphatheater cruise lines preceded Carnival.
Bonjour M. Ryan. I am a big fan. Could you tell us more about the so-called Gallic empire that sort of seceded from Rome at some point. How and why did it happen? Was it driven by popular will or simply by power hungry leaders? Were these leaders Gauls, Gallo-Romans or Romans? Thank you. Merci beaucoup.
Possibly because of your mic-positioning, this video is extremely left-side mixed which makes it hard to hear without turning it too loud. If you want to keep this mic setup instead of pointing it at you I think you should consider changing the audio to mono. Thanks!
Was there ever a chance of there being a German emperor, and would integrating Germans into the Roman leadership have saved the empire? Mike Duncan made that claim in his podcast on the History of Rome, so I wanted hear what your thoughts were.
Roman policies that discriminated harshly against the German refugees they let in to the empire before the Western Empire fell accelerated the fall. It was a self-own: Rome lost the ability or willingness to absorb new groups. And guess where a good number of the slaves in the Western Empire came from: the raiders were often seen as liberators.
Would roman religion better seen as a collection of religions rather than a whole religion? It seems there were competing gods, gods with different goals, very diverse rituals for different gods, imported gods, cult to the emperor, etc. It seems to me it was more like a collection of many religions with only some overlapping.
Ahhhh now you too show your face now! Another channel recently did this, theres always a threshold when it’s just the right time to make that decision.
On the question of Julius Caesar taking emetics, can you give me a source? I have been chasing the source of a few scattered references to this in several books but nothing regarding that specifically has ever turned up in my investigating. It's not at all helped by the vomitorium myth basically poisoning every internet search I've ever tried.
What was childhood like in ancient Rome? I read recently: "The Origins of War in Child Abuse" in which the author claims to give a brief history of childhood. One of the claims was the commonplace practice of infanticide and a brief discussion on Plutarch's book on the topic of how to identify if a child is worth rearing (clearly stating that some children didn't get reared...). Curious what more there is to know on the topic and how reliable the information in the Origins of War is. Thanks!
Hi! I would like to know how you would party if you could spend one night in ancient Rome. If parties aren't your thing how would you spend the night? what would you do till dawn?
We know that Claudius wrote extensively on Etruscan matters. What survives is what the early Christian monks chose to copy and recopy by hand for about 1500 years. Foreign language works would have been the hardest to do. The Etruscan priests were at first their direct competitors. Also, their books were like our play scripts: they were read in public at or after dinner, so what survives may be closer to our TV dramatizations than textbooks.
Question #1: What occupations existed for the majority or entirety of the Roman Empire, but died out prior to the Medieval period of Europe (for the sake of simplicity I'll just say 700AD leaving at least 2 long lifetimes for knowledge to be lost or phased out). If the answer is rather mundane then my other question might be preferred. Question #2: What technologies did the Ancient Romans have that they utilized but never fully realized its potential. Obvious examples are the aeolipile and the industrial revolution esque water wheel factories for mass producing flour. But I'm sure there are other less known examples in the written record.
Like now, there are lots of people that wish to secede from the world. In the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, religious people fled into the desert to live ascetic lives full of work and prayer with as little food as possible. Eventually, some of them banded together and formed male and female monasteries. St. Benedict of Nursia is, in Western Christianity, considered the father of the monastic movement as known now. He created a Rule, that is, rules regulating prayer, work and rest: roughly eight hours of each. Unlike the ascetic practices, the Rule of St. Benedict's relatively modest demands were endurable, if austere. This is relevant to preppers for several reasons. The period of Benedict's life is roughly the period that the Western Roman Empire (early 500s) was definitely in decline, with worse on the way. Monasteries were strongly built and hard to break into. The end of the world figured greatly in the theology of the time, with Jesus expected to return quite soon by some people. Monasteries also needed to be self-sufficient: they grew their own food, brewed their own wine or ales and participated in other trades to make things useful to the monastery or tradable to the outside for a reasonable price (as specified by the Rule).
There was a whole movement of Doomsday Preppers. In fact they were the ones that came up with the whole idea of a Doomsday being imminent. While the movement did contribute to the Fall of the Western Empire, they have been waiting for their imminent doomsday for 2000 years.
If someone brought a camel to rome in response to that ban on cart and horse, would they get away with it (since they clearly had money and Rome's justice system was infamously multi-tier) or what?
What I read was that it was the Eastern Empire/Greek invasions to reestablish the Western empire that destroyed Italy to the point that the Dark Ages resulted. From that point on, nothing could be rebuilt.
