1. COLLECT POOP
2. DRY POOP
3. ???
4. PROFIT
2. DRY POOP
3. ???
4. PROFIT
Magna Graecia: Titanomachia (A City State Quest)
- Thread starter Cetashwayo
- Start date
- Original Alt. History
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- Tags
- ancient greece alternate history empire builder civ quest democracy gods save us granary management hubris it's an eretrian thing. let lose the weasels of war lithocracy lithocracy is my fetish maximum hellene my big fat greek divine wedding this granary aint gonna fill itself cetash unwinnable
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hmm, well, you don't see anyone else doing so, so logically there's a untapped market ready and willing to be taken!
All joking aside, yeah, I'm honestly not sure what we can export ahead of time, as it were.
Professor Vesca
Good News Everyone!
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
I mean in terms of fuel the most notable and prominent source of coal known to the Greeks is the area near the modern Megalopoli mine in the Peloponnese. However, unlike in Britain most Central Mediterranean sources of coal are low quality lignite and not as easily accessible. Where coal was more accessible, plentiful and efficient, as in Medieval China and Roman Britain, coal was extensively burnt as a fuel. However, the mere exploitation of coal is no indication of impending industrial revolution.
- Location
- Texas
On the plus side, I now have a pretty good idea for how we might render tribute in-kind if Athens ever tries to levy tribute on us.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A cargo ship packed with weasels?
- Location
- Luton Airport
Well obviously, it's going to be the foundation of our booming biopolymer industry!
Theres this frosty scandinavian lady with exotic taste in boat
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Apollo From His Marble Nymphs...:
"That one has a good side and a bad side. Pick one, and stay on it."
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
The discussion is amusing to me because there is a potential path to the development of more advanced technologies but such a development is unlikely to start in Eretria or be provoked by clear player choices
Technology advance in another field...dry dung fuel...got it!
Dry Dung Fuel as an extremely renewable fuel for use in boiling water 24/7, with the addition of copper's anti-microbial properties plus sand filters would lead to an advancement in the field of water sanitation!
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Kilopi, dried dung isn't a super-fuel. It's not somehow superior to all other forms of fuel. There's nothing amazingly advanced that you can do with it, that you can't do by burning other fuels such as wood.
If Eretria ends up giving rise to technological advances, it'll probably be because our weird labor market creates weird incentives, or because our presence as a sizeable naval power with an incentive to keep the Adriatic clear and the luxury of being at least partially detached from whatever Shit Is Going Down in Greece at any given time somehow enhances trade or the exchange of ideas.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
I'm not sure mitigating deforestation is a major macro concern for ancient Greeks
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
OK but:
1) As others have pointed out, burning dung as fuel directly conflicts with other uses ancient societies would put dung to. Many of these are uses that are no longer a factor in modern times even in the developed world, simply because of changes in the supply chain for other materials (i.e. better fertilizers than dung, no longer using dung as a building material because sheets of galvanized iron or cinder blocks are cheaper and more waterproof, no longer using dung to make leather because sandals made from old tires are cheaper even if you're an African subsistence farmer, et cetera).
2) While deforestation was a real problem in the ancient world, it's not necessarily a pressing problem right here where we are. Eretria isn't necessarily chewing up the surrounding forests at an unsustainable rate given its moderate size.
3) At the population densities where deforestation does become a critical problem even in ancient times, it's entirely possible for deforestation and other kinds of habitat loss caused by having all those cattle around to also become a critical problem. Supplying a city the size of, say, Principate-era Rome with dung fuel would almost certainly require very very large herds of cattle.
4) Ultimately, mass-scale deforestation and the associated problems of climate change don't arise in full force until during and after the Industrial Revolution. At which point the driving factor behind them in Europe is charcoal production (an economic necessity for metalworking; dried dung is not a viable substitute) and land clearance for agriculture (which makes fuel supply issues irrelevant).
So you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist in the form you think it does, or doesn't exist in the context we're operating in.
EDIT:
And this is aside from the part where there's no strong IC justification for the OOC desire to prevent deforestation.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Rather stinky. Our public sanitation and cleanliness are on the bad side. We have a public works option to take care of this, but not for the next term of the boule.
- Location
- Pilipinas
The job of cleaning up animal poop and nightsoil in our city are done by metics, serfs or slaves? Also do we use it as fertilizer or just dump them outside the city?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I have a horrible suspicion that the answer is "no."
More generally, we don't have serfs. We do have slaves, but due to a longstanding rule created shortly after the founding of the city, no Eretrian is allowed to own more than two slaves. This originally resulted in the rise of what I can only call "rent-a-slave" business concerns in which a group of citizens pooled their two-slaves-per into a larger labor force that they used sort of like a temp agency. It also resulted in high demand for metics as unskilled and semi-skilled laborers.
I don't remember if the "rent-a-slave" businesses are still in service, but i they are, I'm pretty sure that inasmuch as public sanitation is handled in Eretria at all, it's handled by the city hiring rent-a-slaves. Because it's an extremely dirty job and metics would tend to gravitate away from it and leave the work to slaves.
- Location
- Pilipinas
Poop everywhere then, at least the foreign POVs were being generous in describing our city
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
To be fair, few cities of the era, if any, were truly clean by modern standards.
As I understand it, there were a lot of places where the height of good public sanitation practices was to yell "LOOK OUT BELOW!" before emptying your chamberpot from a second-story window.
- Location
- Pilipinas
Is the concept of cleaning gangs and other services like a fire fighting "club" alien at this point? How prevalent are wheeled vehicles and wheelbarrows at this time?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
There isn't a lot of archaeological evidence for wheelbarrows being common in classical Greece, though they may not have been utterly unheard of.
Carts and so on in general are A Thing, it's just that long range land transportation isn't very practical because of the lack of roads.
I'm sure cleaning gangs are A Thing, but the idea that whole cities have collectively got people in their employ to keep the place clean is a big step up from the idea that a rich man can hire a team to janitorialize his own estate.
Obviously @Cetashwayo will be able to answer more definitively if he feels inclined.
EDIT:
I suspect sanitation in Eretria actually does suffer from the fact that the city has a low slave population. Cleaning human and animal waste off the streets is not an agreeable or likeable job, and if you're a free man, you'll probably choose to do almost anything else, all else being equal.
Street-sweepers and other public sanitation workers in Eretria would have to be drawn from that very small slave population, or be paid what are in relative terms very high wages. The wages have to be good enough to make working with sewage all the time more attractive than, say, being a subsistence farmer and working with dung only SOME of the time.
Since the city's budget for such things (both directly and in a more metaphorical sense) is limited, this may make it prohibitively expensive to maintain street-cleaning crews on a scale that would be possible elsewhere in the Greek world.
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Actually we do have serfs just not allowed to exit the estates or anything a slave can do since since there are differences in their treatment with the serfs working the land and the slaves working for their master. I saw from the original quest of the serfs' status in Eretrian society with them being less free than even a slave.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
No one has really bothered to have systemized street cleaning of any kind, no. Sometimes the city will hire Metics or slaves to do it but that tends to be expensive. However it was not until recently that this was really necessary; Eretria did not really become a true urban center until 10-15 years ago.