Did the Romans live better than us? | Quality of Life 

очень интересно и познавательно, но не могли бы вы уточнить цены на покупку, рент дома, квартиры, комнаты и стоимость лошади

ppl didn't change a lot for the last 2k yrs.

You said that Theodorius works 6 days a week but you didn't say how many hours a day he works.

@Gábor dusk till dawn, every hour of light was important

Ahh the good old Stronghold 2 soundtrack

I'm pretty sure Roman plebeian children worked in the fields with their parents.

@Tim Matthew which wouldn't be much more then basic farming

@thewildcard person Farming can be hard labor. Ploughing, for example, is difficult and slightly dangerous.

@thewildcard person you have no idea how hard 'basic farming' is because it makes factory work look pathetic. I bet you did not see a farm in your entire life

@Tim Matthew During sowing and harvest absolutely. not all year round.

Consider they only buy food and sustain the basic needs. They don't have to purchase electronic devices, go bar resturants, internet and telephone connection.

@Beta Cenaturi shhhh, let them leave in their dream world where a bunch of farmers with no access to modern medicine, entertainment, limited oportunities of growth, no education and limited food options aside from high child mortality somehow had a better lifestyle than modern humans because they could have some savings

You could do it today. Just live mostly on bread, which you bake yourself. Dont use any electricity, dont travel and wear the same clothes for several years

​@carso1500 I'll put my two cents in. The benefits of modern civilization may be quite misleading. We may not have as high infant mortality as in the past but we make up for it with child obesity and myopia epidemics (and also youth depression and suicide rates). We don't have plague and smallpox outbreaks anymore but have HIV pandemics (and sporadic outbreaks of ebola and other extremely deadly pathogens). The modern medicine may be close to cure some forms of cancer but still there are a lot of people that can't afford basic health insurance. There are people outside of western civilization that cannot afford any healthcare at all. We may not have as many wars as in the past but the wars that are yet to come will be far worse than that (think of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, armed drones, rocket launchers, machine guns - last weeks have shown us that the time of relative peace we have now is very fragile, I would rather be an ancient hoplite armed with a spear than a modern soldier or civilian during war getting shot or blown up by a rocket). The rich in the past didn't have many options to hide their wealth or transfer it to other countries - they had to stay with the common people and fight together to save their homeland. The modern rich can say sod off to the people and escape with their fortunes to exotic countries. Also money in the past was linked to tangible goods like gold or silver or even grains. Modern money is not linked to anything tangible. Authorities can indebt whole counties at the expense of the working class to make financial elites even richer. Real estate ownership becomes out of reach for ordinary people. Families are becoming poorer. Children are giver far less options than their parents. During ancient times youth were taught civic virtues and practical knowledge of geometry, rhetorics, law, logic etc. Modern youth is taught that using wrong personal pronouns or peeing while standing up is morally unacceptable, hahaha.

they often focus on that because history of old was often written about the rulers, not of normal people. or at least their records were the best kept ones. but likely historians were hired to write only about the rulers.

Gotta hand it to Diocletian for having all the items valued and written down in a lot of places. These records are rare.

Have some sympathy for this poor scribe. He must have toiled soullessly like a slave to produce these figures. OTH the tenant farmer will have been better off, since he will have produced his own olive oil and wine, had goats grazing beside his chickens, plus bartered things like leather with his sibs, cousins and in-laws. Wealth is a measure of how we compare to poverty.

It's actually difficult to track a direct exchange value to the US dollar from the Denari. Because their economy was partially still based on a bartering system, prices would fluctuate with the season, sometimes food was more valuable than actual currency, or if there was a grain shortage which could last years money was worthless if everyone was starving people needed to keep their food.

have you heard of the most expensive sugar produced in the history of the world?

I know right can't buy slave cheap these days all of them are too expensive. Looks like I gotta get them myself like the Roman legionnaire did. Anyone up for some raiding?

@Hunter of Darkness It is tho. Sex trafficking and forced labor still exist. Just because it is illegal sadly doesn’t mean nobody has slaves anymore.

we need more wars so decrease supply probllems.

@Unreal69 But have you seen the prices?

Whatever the specific numbers are, you can bet that our wealth increases dramatically all around the world as you go forwards in time. Nowadays we are all extremely rich. And every person born makes us even richer, it's pretty insane. You would think we are a burden, but we really are a blessing. If we wanted to, no one of us would ever have to go hungry ever again. But even with our stupid conflicts and self sabotage holding us back, we are still growing insanely quick. I've heard that by 2100 we will be about 300% richer than today again, which is almost unfathomable. Once we all start working together, humanity will explode into insane progress never seen before.

Didn't once mention africa

Mauritania is in Africa

@Katarina Love to which purpose does this comment serve?

Sounds about like modern life tbh

@Sean 1st guy: lives 2nd guy: lives and goes to the cinema, gets a takeaway 3rd guy: I want this Bugatti

@Pauldog what color is your ostritch

Poor 3rd guy, no money left.

@Sean Everyone nowadays, in Europe and America and many parts of Asia, live waaaaay better than anyone from the past ages and if you disagree with that you should educate yourself more. Obviously they didn’t live like shit back in the days, however non of them had a hot bathtub, a stove, washing machine (all at your own home) enough and affordable clothing, electricity, light, enough food, variety of food, a car, a safe and warm house, …

A perfect world? Impossible.

I wish this could be applied to the average worker as well.

World*

You may be interested in The Natural Law Institute. It's had some similar takes on this.

@Al Sanchez palabra

And for sure you cannot sustain a family of three on One wage.

@Luca Tonelli Right now at Greece, we are actually at the point that we need a basic wage of three, to sustain a family of two.

I'm in Serbia. Wife is unemployed and we have a 5 yeard old kid. My salary is exactly 2.5 times bigger than average salary here and we live quite modestly since i'm paying a credit for apartment. I wouldn't be able to live if i had less money.

Imagine selling clothes at just half the market price while having Victorian Era Automated Looms. Now I get how the first industrialized countries and people got so rich lol

True but we tend to forget how much work it takes and how difficult it really is to weave and make good quality clothing by hand

@Saber *HAHA AUTOMATED LOOM GOES SHRICK SHRACK*

@Sir Nikkel the fuck does that even mean?

Theodorus should have gone to school and become an aristocrat too if he was after the prestige and the wealth. he just didn't have the right mindset for it.

@U A not really the point

Just imagine what they might think of us 😂🤣

If they browse Wall Street bets they’d develop a strain of contagious aneurysms

😂

@Jon Etxeberria Rodriguez atleast we arent the egyptians, have you ever heard the story of the competition between the gods horus and osiris?🤢

@Jon Etxeberria Rodriguez Historians: This is the 21st century, also known as the Century of Strife. From plagues, to risk of all out nuclear warfare, to world wide economic crashing, supermassive volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis to all at the same time, it is safe to say that this is one of the most important turning points in human history. This is the age where humanity proves that even if all things can't possibly get any worse, we persevere and make sure we set new records on all time lows by triggering a nuclear warfare. Humanity only survived due to the efforts of the Swiss Government, who amidst all the chaos retreated to their bunkers and brought out their ancient jewish superweapons and brought all superpowers to heel, and stopped the war

Thank you! ;)

Yep

They lived better than I did for 2 years when I was working at Gatwick Airport in England, from the looks of things.

​@Megan How is that possible? We get paid decently in the UK and can get so many luxuries

For reference a Roman denarius was a silver coin the size of a modern dime... but in the time of this video it was greatly debased in terms of the silver content

Ancient Rome was just a game xD

My players already accuse me of being expensive. Imagine if I trying to charge 36000 sp for a draft horse.

As mentioned, the coins of this time were very devalued. If you want real silver pieces, maybe divided Diocletian's prices by 25. In Nero's time a soldier might receive 250 denarii a year, plus military support. The Greek drachma was similar to the original Roman denarius, and a drachma/day was good income for a skilled worker; Athenian jury duty paid half a drachma. In actual weight, the drachma was about 4.25 grams of silver -- 100 to a pound! -- while the early denarius was a bit less. D&D coins have tended to 10 or 50 per pound though, 43 grams or 9 grams.

​@Play Together Phoenix By the time of Diocletian the Denarius was no longer struck since it had been replaced by the Antoninianus. The amount of silver in the Denarius coins that were still circulating was based on their production year. But you are correct about the large debasement of silver in Roman coins.

Yes, you are right but this is a snapshot of all the Roman Empire. As you said, there are multiple variants and lots of different scenarios. In this case we followed the sources to the letter. If we started adding stuff for which we have no clear reference the video would lose it's scientific aura and fall into the "what if" realm. Hope that you liked the video :)

Kids were not such a problem, as they add work force. 8-12, as you suggest, would be less productive, but still work. By ages 12 to 14, they are already strong enough to work as adults, so they would actually add a lot more to the family income. The idea of teens, or even children, not working is quite modern.

also, greece, which is where thera is located, was historically one of the richest regions in the roman empire. You would expect a gallic (ancient french) peasant to earn a whole lot less. these children that you mentioned, would help a lot with the farmwork

As the growth of the global and known Roman empire's population will tell you... very few children survived to adulthood. The world population grew extremely slowly at this period due mostly to infant mortality.

There is another thing to add: it would have been relatively rare to buy thread, cloth, or clothes. His wife and any female children would have worked wool, spinning it into thread to weave and sew into garments. The spinning portion took the most time, but even very young children could participate in that. Emperor Augustus even boasted (potentially propagandized) that he wore clothes spun and made by Livia Drusilla rather than purchasing at the market

It’s not for everyone but the simplicity and direct your-work-is-your-food has an ease to it, namely a joy to the work and a lack of monotony, that the world of specialization doesn’t have. But even among the family members and communities that farm there can be specialization.

Great point on the seasonal impact on farmer civilizations. This leads me to believe that civilizations in more northern latitudes with colder weather were inclined to raid their southern neighbors for resources to survive the winters or to escape the colder environment. Vikings, Mongols, etc.

My grandparents were farmers and I would stay there often. My grandfather would often sleep on the floor right in front of the furnace (for heating the home) which was right next to the front door. He did this because he would have to get up in the middle of the night every couple of hours to change irrigation flows and he didn't want to wake his wife. He didn't sleep much.

The Ancient Sumerians wished they had modern technology to keep out hostile tribes and ensure the vast majority of babies and birth mothers survive!

@Neon Peon depends on season. But doing something for yourself has a different motivation then working for others.

Same!

super useful for my minecraft world

Super useful for my dungeons and dragons Minecraft world

Isekai story

Quoting homer simpson "neeeeeeeeeeeerd"

It's bad when our modern day family can't live on a single wage. Even if they try to go bare minimum. Heck, it wasn't too long ago when a family living on single wage was the norm only decades ago

You forgot barbarians, violence, a less then 40 years life expectancy, diseases, and watching your children die young. That's assuming you were not a slave, or a woman, or a non citizen. Still compared to how people lived outside the empire it was remarkably good

​@APC 971 I imagine it wouldve been super dope at Rome's peak

@SilverHawkScape You can thank doubling the workforce by letting women work, outsourcing of jobs and importing cheap labor.

Yeah, its funny how he mentions that but then goes to list all the food they need for a week as family.

Jo Jo 100%, there’s never time for leisure even on a small farm, something’s always breaking or getting lost

Jo Jo "If it was anything like being a rural farmer today" It was not. Farm workers were idle for large portions of the year, and often took up other employment. This is part of why the city of Rome had much less population in late summer. The work you are talking about is the problem of the land owner. The number of workers he would need when not planting or harvesting crops is far less.

@Matthew Alexander yeah Most of modern day farmers own their land so they have to give everything to tend the land....which is not a small task My town grow tobacco and corn....sometime a bad harvest would force them to take a loan which need two good harvest to get rid of the debt Alot of young people left to work in the factory, even if it was 9-10 hours work with minimum wages cause they don't have to worry about work all the time like farmers

@John Paul Cross It depends how you run your farm too.... as someone who's worked in farms before, I promise you we had some leisure time. And modern farmers do take time off on occasion. But theirs is a more continuous job than most.

@My Hentai Girl Exactly correct. This is one of the things people get wrong about the Industrial Revolution. People moved into the cities to work factory jobs precisely because they paid more and required less work. They seem awful by our modern standards, but they were a blessing to the poor former farmhands.

It's very helpful for writers and dungeon masters.

This should be fascinating.... But unfortunately its not TRUE

@Marko D Care to elaborate?

@Gábor Rigó for starters the description of the diet is completely false. and if you don;t know what people are eating then ... you dunno how they are living

I don't think that's possible.

And it was a WOMAN making purple cloth! That was radical. I’d like to know more about this Lydia chick.

@Mary Valentine Women doing retail or craft labour was not rare in the past, in most societies.

@Myndir well probably not… But the purple cloth was kind of a big deal. For a woman to be in control of something like that would indeed be rare. It was an extremely valuable commodity.

true i know ceasar life better than i know my dads xD

Very true. It's tiring to hear about the scheming of the kings again and again. None of those can relates to daily lives

@NEKOmancer it's not supposed to be relatable. It's supposed to tell you why things turned out the way they are, and there the details of the daily lives of the average person don't say much

@Fox nor did I said it's supposed to?

We are very glad you enjoyed it, and wish you all the best in your teaching career!

No breakdown of expenses during the Black Death era, unfortunately. Sadly, just survival of the fittest.

the guy was a wagie. didn't have the independent entrepreneur billionaire top-g winner mindset.

Two factors caused the dark ages. Most importantly, it was a 'little ice age' and crop failures were rampant. Secondly though, the church became all powerful and made life generally miserable.

@T Oadaly Mongols and other tribes came and burned everything down couple of times and great roman achievements were almost all lost. So we had a fast reboot of civilization (period of dark age).

@Sasa Grcevic mongol empire is irrelevant to dark age. society advanced very quickly as the mongols were already advanced society they just spread their ways around asia just like rome. it went from sword and bows to early guns, first hand grenades , first cannons, first paper money , the first democracy , semi end of slavery , proto parliament. khan was chosen by the ethnic mongols in the khurultai assembly renewed by every 4 year, chingis khan was former slave. best mongol generals were ordinary blacksmith. in the that time the slave becoming king is unheard of, even more so than the king ending slavery of his own people. the ideas eventually find it way to the rest of the world. without mongol empire we the common people still be slaves , no democracy , no modern system of governance.

@QWE RTY You are wrong. They ended existing advanced civilizations. Democracy existed before even Rome in Greece. Better version then today one might argue. Governing was effective back in the day. And people would eventually get out of slavery cause of lack of wars and most came from servitude later in roman history. And mongols didntend shit. Abolition was in 18th century. Roman empire in some key aspects was more advanced then society today, not to mention Athena long before them. People werent dumb back then its just that life was different.

@Sasa Grcevic they didnt end any advanced civilization they were THE advanced civilization. mongol states started the end of slavery. yassa law 15 No citizen of the empire may take a Mongol for servant or slave. they wouldve ended slavery if not for the black plague that ended mongol empire. mongolia established the eurasian trade routes with an intricate system of roads called yam. the period of time known as pax mongolica. its a fact that yuan dynasty used paper money and had parliament khurultai with unicameral legislature when no one else had at that time.

Cue Monthy Python "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life"

ah pero el Cesar Macrium XVI...

@Robert Smith this has been happening in the usa since it's founding

@justin allen Are you including the several decades where the United States functionally didn't even have a national currency?

Yeah they had salaries taxes contracts like we do nowadays

The music is taken from Stronghold 2... or it's free and Stronghold 2 uses it as well.

This video is about the period long after the age of rapid expansion and hundreds of thousands of war prisoners being sold as slaves every few years.

So your over a hundred years old?

@Master Dreadeye What makes you think that I would be over a hundred years old? My grandparents had servants, between the 50's and the 80's. And they were quite cheap.

@Jacques Mertens servents arent owned like slaves. So no your grandparents didnt own slaves.

@Master Dreadeye His grandfather could have fathered his father at an age of 90+ and his father could have fathered him at an age of 90+. If Jacques is 40, then his grandfather at the age of 20 could have owned slaves 200 years ago. Besides there are still countries where you can buy slaves today.

That's a good observation. The reason for the weird reversal in the west is twofold. First of all our agriculture is exceptionally efficient, secondly we outsource or automate most of the production jobs. Simply put luxury items like electronics are still exceptionally expensive... in the countries that produce them. If a factory worker in Asia earns $4/hour assembling $400 laptops they would need to work non-stop for 100 hours. With my job I make almost $40/hour so I'd only need to work 10 hours. By shipping the luxury item to a more affluent nation the relative price drops. This is also true for labor. A native westerner is more expensive than foreign labor. A Polish carpenter will build a house for much less than a Norwegian carpenter because the cost of living in Poland is lower than the cost of living in Norway. This is all to say that the western world is a pretty weird place.

@A potato thank you potato

@A potato exactly, the slaves of the Roman world who did the menial manufacturing work for finished goods have been replaced with the low labor cost and regulatory lax third world arenas worth of workers. Kind of an indirect servitude sort of thing.

@Kyle Davis except capitalism develops their wages with time, too. some are now complaining china is becoming too expensive to outsource, that they need to find cheaper place because wages have naturally risen. people aim for education with the money, they don't want their children to be factory workers like they were for 40 years. chinas GDP has risen multifold in 40 years while western world, at least European unions, GDP has stagnated for 40 years. so its not permanent slavery system compared to romans. in roman times, a slave would be same slave for thousands of years. in capitalism, china has developed and become wealthier in 40 years, a lot wealthier relatively. in 1980, chinas GDP was 190 billion. now it is 17 trillion. that is not ten times increase, that is 89 times increase. they are not slaves, forever stuck. if you think so, that is not only offending to them, but also highly factually incorrect.

@redmanticore I'll concede that China's GDP has improved drastically over the last forty yeara, and even in the restrictive governmental system thye have, that rising boat has lifted almost all. And, in comparison to the slaves of Ancient Rome, despite still living in a restrictive government, they are better off, on the whole.

You are very right! The true human nature and instinct did not change a bit. If you took a baby from their time and grew it up in ours, there would be no way to tell it apart from us. 2000 years is too little for us to change! :)

Programmers that make virtual stuff for pleasure mostly earn the most. They don't improve system for bringing food which is bad, they don't build houses, so yea

​@Bane Kondic no-cushy-webdev-job guy takes an L

As long as we are Homo Sapiens, we will have things in common.

@Bane Kondic Programmers are building the modern world, my friend. Most definitely they contribute to the system.

Getting bitched at to replace expensive uniforms and wasting all your money on booze for parties does sound familiar

@Luca Tonelli I'm not really sure how you came up with that take....

And for the landowner and farmer, it would make far much more sense to pay him in produce than money unless an absolute requirement, given that it would cost him less to give a relatively small portion of it to the farmer than to pay him and transport that much more, unless the margins for $ on food were a lot higher than they seemed after accounting for transporting and selling them.

it wasnt said how much food ration was provided for him and his family. he might have needed to buy food anyway to supplement. maybe it wasn't "you and your family can eat all you can once a day from a buffet" but more like "here is your 1 personal daily egg and a piece of bread." ​ @Matthew if you are not a slave, you wanted more than just food. only slaves were left with just food.

he made the guy and his family eat a different kind of lentil every night. who can live with so much gas? just dip the bread in olive oil and eat. 60 denarii into the piggy bank every week ez.

"If that's the case, why are we bothering to list out his expenditure on things like bread and eggs" Did you watch a different video than I did? in the video I just watched, nowhere in theodorus' calculation did he list out the price of things like bread and eggs. Just special things like meat and alcohol...

@jort93z ? theodorus is the peasant and LITERALLY THE FIRST EXPENSE is wheat/bread

What if birds grabbed them by the husk and carried them to Rome?

I agree

You couldn’t pay me a billion dollars to wear a puffy shirt or a toga for the rest of my life

@Works V3 hm it was worth a try

@Works V3 I agree, you'd look too good for what you are wearing those

@Works V3 If your body was better taken care of, you might enjoy showing more of it off.

they used olive oil as fuel??? what the shit man

@U A There's three grades of olive oil - "Extra virgin" - with subtle flavors, is used raw for dipping things like bread, and for salads. - "virgin" - used because cooking heat removes the flavors, used for baking, frying, marinating, basting, soups, coating a pan so food doesn't stick, etc. - "base" - low grade, used for oil lamps and soap making. It's the type that ancient Greeks used to clean themselves at the gym; wipe it on, then used a curved bronze "strigil" to scrape it off along with the dust and sweat from working out.

Easy to say from a 1st world perspective but most of the people on this planet don't have the option of living below their means

Unless spending below their means includes not eating, unable to afford transportation for work, or being homeless.

Unfortunately, very few in the middle class live below their means. The vast majority are tied to the credit card as consumers for life !! 🤪

Who lives below their means anymore in our modern capitalistic society world? 🤪

It was his wife's birthday, it was a special occasion. Plus the feasting was not only a flex of wealth, but it was also a time to network with other aristocrats, propose marriage alliances, business opportunities, and ways to get over the Roman state or their workers.

Actually, speculation was a very serious issue in Ancient Rome, especially at the end of the Republic. And believe me, I don't think that one can say that "the Roman economy worked well". Conquest was the only way Rome has ever managed to sustain its insane expenses (500 000 soldiers active under Diocletian, which is more than almost every nation on Earth today, etc). The inflation was a nightmare, trade was irregular at most, inequalities were prodigious, fraud and extortion were everywhere, and so on. When the Empire stopped conquering under Hadrian, things started to break down.

The same happens today too but it's done within companies

One could argue that’s simply the price we have to pay for advanced civilization. Hunter gatherers worked the least of any group in human history. Next was feudal peasant farmers in the classical and medieval periods. Then the people of today who work the most and the hardest. However, despite the fact we work the hardest of any group in history, we also have the highest standard of living EVER by a vast margin. This is seen as an upward trend as the average person works harder and harder with each successive period. The average person today may work much harder, but also has the standards of living equal to a monarch 400 years ago. Personally, I think it’s an even trade. I may work harder, but I literally live like a king. Seems fair to me 🤷‍♂️.

You're kidding. Greed isn't new. The drive for financial security isn't new. The ancients worked dawn til dusk for food & shelter. We work 40 hours a week & have a higher standard of living than Queen Victoria at the height of the British Empire.