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Magna Graecia: Titanomachia (A City State Quest)

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Cetashwayo said:
I have always been suspicious of the "sudden" transition of the Romans to seapower. I actually suspect this is another area where their allies helped make up the difference; the Romans might not have been a very naval people, but they had a number of Greek allies in Southern Italy and Etruscan allies in Northern Italy who were and who could supply the technical knowledge and shipbuilding techniques that the Romans didn't have. However, this isn't an interpretation that shows the Romans as the best most adaptable awesome people who could reverse engineer any ship and become masters of any craft.



What do you think all the Metics in Eretria Eskhata are doing? :V The majority of them are tenant laborers and form Eretria Eskhata's peasant class, while some of the other ones are more urban craftsmen or merchants.
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Yeah, I am pretty sure that we have mentions of Rome and especially its allies doing quite a bit on the sea before the whole conflict with Carthage really started. Plus they clearly recognized the usefulness of sea-trade since I think quite a few of their early conflicts and expansion was focused on that.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Horses eat grass. Dogs eat meat.

Grass is cheap. Meat is expensive.
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Fun fact: Dogs are actually omnivores, like us. It's actually good for them to have a more balanced diet, even.

If you read medieval hunting manuals, which are just a an amazing all-around read*, and the bits where it talks about the feeding of royal hunting dogs, who you would logically expect to have some of the best diets of any dogs, one thing it mentions a lot is feeding them bread. Not exclusively bread, of course, but bread alongside meat. One could put this down to medieval people just not fucking understanding nutrition, and to an extent, yeah, but honestly nothing we have seems to indicate that these dogs were unhealthy.

Even today, most dog foods that are designed for health actually have a high proportion of cereal content. Also dogs? Love pasta. Seriously, you cook some whole wheat fusili or rigatoni with carrot, and some boiled chicken, maybe a bit of meat gravy mixed in, and give that to your dog? They will love you until approximately the end of time. The only issue will be making them eat regular dog food again.

Honestly a dog is probably a lot cheaper than a horse to keep, one-for-one, for most people without access to a lot of "free" pasturage. The issue is as has been mentioned that a horse can do a lot more pulling than a dog in a lot of contexts. Although even then, it depends; no one would use a warhorse for pulling carts, it would be like using a Ferrari to pull a trailer.

For all we know some local tinkers and peddlers are already using dinky little dog carts to sell knick-knacks from, but I don't think we should expect this to like, unleash an economic revolution suddenly. Like a lot of these ONE WEIRD TRICK ideas, it's probably the kind of thing our people may already be doing to the extent that it's actually useful.

Now, if we were talking about Chinese wheelbarrows, it might be different, but how we would randomly think of that, I'm sure I don't know.



*(Did you know that Otters are the literal incarnation of Satan? Neither did I!)
 
Cetashwayo said:
What do you think all the Metics in Eretria Eskhata are doing? :V The majority of them are tenant laborers and form Eretria Eskhata's peasant class, while some of the other ones are more urban craftsmen or merchants.
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So Metic sharecroppers? Or Metic waged labour? I am guessing the former.

Cetashwayo said:
I have always been suspicious of the "sudden" transition of the Romans to seapower. I actually suspect this is another area where their allies helped make up the difference; the Romans might not have been a very naval people, but they had a number of Greek allies in Southern Italy and Etruscan allies in Northern Italy who were and who could supply the technical knowledge and shipbuilding techniques that the Romans didn't have. However, this isn't an interpretation that shows the Romans as the best most adaptable awesome people who could reverse engineer any ship and become masters of any craft.
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Yeah, I agree. But that doesn't change the fact that the Romans got there.

I think the Romans get a bad reputation mostly because of branding (where they say "look, we, a city of terrible sailors beat Carthage, how awesome and virtuous must we be?") and that we have good records of them. By comparison, we don't have many records of Carthage that survived. So we have many more stories of Roman admirals messing up than we do stories of Carthaginian admirals messing up because we have more stories of Romans doing things period.

Admiral Skippy said:
If you read medieval hunting manuals, which are just a an amazing all-around read*, and the bits where it talks about the feeding of royal hunting dogs, who you would logically expect to have some of the best diets of any dogs, one thing it mentions a lot is feeding them bread. Not exclusively bread, of course, but bread alongside meat. One could put this down to medieval people just not fucking understanding nutrition, and to an extent, yeah, but honestly nothing we have seems to indicate that these dogs were unhealthy.

Even today, most dog foods that are designed for health actually have a high proportion of cereal content. Also dogs? Love pasta. Seriously, you cook some whole wheat fusili or rigatoni with carrot, and some boiled chicken, maybe a bit of meat gravy mixed in, and give that to your dog? They will love you until approximately the end of time. The only issue will be making them eat regular dog food again.
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Bread and pasta, one of which won't be invented for another 2000 years, are more expensive than barley, hay and oats though.

fasquardon
 
McLuvin said:
What happened to the Serf system? We debated on it for ages, did it die out? Or was did it become relegated to the Aristoi?
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The Demos Drakonia, in an attempt to earn the support of the Peuketii cheaply and in response to Harpos' complaints, ended the supply of serfs from the Peuketii, because the demand for flesh was disrupting them and ended the slave-to-serf conversion. The remaining serfs grow through natural population increase and work on the largest farms.

fasquardon said:
So Metic sharecroppers? Or Metic waged labour? I am guessing the former.
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Sharecropping and rented land, mostly.
 
fasquardon said:
Bread and pasta, one of which won't be invented for another 2000 years, are more expensive than barley, hay and oats though.
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It's not actually a relevant aspect of the argument when pasta specifically has been invented, the point is somewhat more general than that. :V

(Also, you're a little off about the date, there are recipes for pasta in the Decameron.)

Also oats, cheap? Are you kidding? Weight for weight, maybe a little cheaper, but the amount of oats that a large draft horse or thoroughbred will eat in a day will make you want to weep. Replacing a dead horse could cripple medieval men-at-arms financially. Maintaining a horse for most people could literally eat you out of house and home, doubly so if you're in a city and pasturage is at a premium.

Dogs? You can feed them on household scraps, if you have a small farm or decent-sized home. This is not something we need to derive from first principles, because we know dog ownership was very common in Greece and Rome from literature references, both as watchdogs, household protectors and companions. Owning your own horses? Considerably less so, and in fact often a marker of being from an elevated social class.
Adhoc vote count started by Admiral Skippy on Jun 1, 2019 at 8:53 PM, finished with 236 posts and 60 votes.
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Ironanvil1 said:
You can quite happily feed dogs cooked grains.
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That said, again, this originally arose in the context of "oh hey I bet we could get poor people into trading with dogs for traction with this One Neat Trick."

If you're a very poor person in a society like this, even feeding grain to an animal is iffy. People can eat that grain, and may need to in a hungry year.

There's a reason that most "low-end" domestic livestock species are the ones that eat things humans can't or won't eat, rather than competing directly with humans for food or requiring pasture land that then is not available for agriculture to grow food for humans.

Admiral Skippy said:
It's not actually a relevant aspect of the argument when pasta specifically has been invented, the point is somewhat more general than that. :V

(Also, you're a little off about the date, there are recipes for pasta in the Decameron.)

Also oats, cheap? Are you kidding? Weight for weight, maybe a little cheaper, but the amount of oats that a large draft horse or thoroughbred will eat in a day will make you want to weep. Replacing a dead horse could cripple medieval men-at-arms financially. Maintaining a horse for most people could literally eat you out of house and home, doubly so if you're in a city and pasturage is at a premium.

Dogs? You can feed them on household scraps, if you have a small farm or decent-sized home. This is not something we need to derive from first principles, because we know dog ownership was very common in Greece and Rome from literature references, both as watchdogs, household protectors and companions. Owning your own horses? Considerably less so, and in fact often a marker of being from an elevated social class.
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I mean yes, a dog eats less than a human, let alone a horse.

But then, these dogs generally aren't being made to do heavy traction labor, which I suspect adds to their calorie requirements quite a bit. Feeding a dog to sit around the house and be fuzzy and bark at intruders is different from feeding them to drag a cart.

There are only so many kitchen scraps to go around, after all.

Cetashwayo said:
I have always been suspicious of the "sudden" transition of the Romans to seapower. I actually suspect this is another area where their allies helped make up the difference; the Romans might not have been a very naval people, but they had a number of Greek allies in Southern Italy and Etruscan allies in Northern Italy who were and who could supply the technical knowledge and shipbuilding techniques that the Romans didn't have. However, this isn't an interpretation that shows the Romans as the best most adaptable awesome people who could reverse engineer any ship and become masters of any craft.
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Well, I rather like the narrative of "Romans as people who succeeded through integration and knowing when to borrow skills and ideas from others rather than just being axiomatically perfect at everything by themselves," personally.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
I mean yes, a dog eats less than a human, let alone a horse.

But then, these dogs generally aren't being made to do heavy traction labor, which I suspect adds to their calorie requirements quite a bit. Feeding a dog to sit around the house and be fuzzy and bark at intruders is different from feeding them to drag a cart.

There are only so many kitchen scraps to go around, after all.
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What is even the contention being discussed here? I was responding to the idea that dogs are more expensive to keep than draught animals, or that they only eat meat, which they manifestly are and do not. Even when used for pulling small loads, quite often they work out comparably or cheaper, although only for smaller loads. Rottweilers were bred to pull carts after all.

The idea that this was going to unleash some kind of economic revolution or get-rich-quick scheme was something I shot down in my first post. So we may be Agreeing Loudly, at this point.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Well, I rather like the narrative of "Romans as people who succeeded through integration and knowing when to borrow skills and ideas from others rather than just being axiomatically perfect at everything by themselves," personally.
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Yes! Very well put.

Admiral Skippy said:
Dogs? You can feed them on household scraps, if you have a small farm or decent-sized home.
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Table scraps? Are you some kind of rich person?

Admiral Skippy said:
Also oats, cheap? Are you kidding? Weight for weight, maybe a little cheaper, but the amount of oats that a large draft horse or thoroughbred will eat in a day will make you want to weep. Replacing a dead horse could cripple medieval men-at-arms financially. Maintaining a horse for most people could literally eat you out of house and home, doubly so if you're in a city and pasturage is at a premium.
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Cheaper than wheat. And you're talking about some pretty high-performance horse breeds there. Draft horses as we know them are a product of the agricultural revolution, thoroughbreds aren't bred for traction at all. A person rich enough to afford an equine to pull their cart in this era would be using something that was more of a pony with dietary requirements closer to that of a military draft horse (a breed that's extinct, so far as I know) and they'd still be considered a big show-off for using said pony instead of a donkey like a normal person.

Ironanvil1 said:
You can quite happily feed dogs cooked grains.
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Cooking still pushes the price of the feed up by some ways.

Admiral Skippy said:
(Also, you're a little off about the date, there are recipes for pasta in the Decameron.)
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It is possible that those recipes are for things that are properly pasta, but unlikely. More likely they were proto-pastas that are between bread and true pasta in its shelf life and hardness.

Admiral Skippy said:
What is even the contention being discussed here? I was responding to the idea that dogs are more expensive to keep than draught animals, or that they only eat meat, which they manifestly are and do not. Even when used for pulling small loads, quite often they work out comparably or cheaper, although only for smaller loads. Rottweilers were bred to pull carts after all.

The idea that this was going to unleash some kind of economic revolution or get-rich-quick scheme was something I shot down in my first post. So we may be Agreeing Loudly, at this point.
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Well, yes. I think so. And educating each-other so when civilization collapses we know that training rottweilers to pull our one-man flame-thrower sleds is an economic way to Mad Max after the refineries are abandoned, but if we want to go for the full tower of speakers and flamethrowing guitars, we'll need draft horses to pull all that equipment.

Witness me!

fasquardon
 
Simon_Jester said:
That said, again, this originally arose in the context of "oh hey I bet we could get poor people into trading with dogs for traction with this One Neat Trick."

If you're a very poor person in a society like this, even feeding grain to an animal is iffy. People can eat that grain, and may need to in a hungry year.

There's a reason that most "low-end" domestic livestock species are the ones that eat things humans can't or won't eat, rather than competing directly with humans for food or requiring pasture land that then is not available for agriculture to grow food for humans.

I mean yes, a dog eats less than a human, let alone a horse.

But then, these dogs generally aren't being made to do heavy traction labor, which I suspect adds to their calorie requirements quite a bit. Feeding a dog to sit around the house and be fuzzy and bark at intruders is different from feeding them to drag a cart.

There are only so many kitchen scraps to go around, after all.

Well, I rather like the narrative of "Romans as people who succeeded through integration and knowing when to borrow skills and ideas from others rather than just being axiomatically perfect at everything by themselves," personally.
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It's how the mongols were so successful. Genghis Khan would hire people who had skills his tribesmen did not have access too.
 
fasquardon said:
Cheaper than wheat. And you're talking about some pretty high-performance horse breeds there. Draft horses as we know them are a product of the agricultural revolution, thoroughbreds aren't bred for traction at all. A person rich enough to afford an equine to pull their cart in this era would be using something that was more of a pony with dietary requirements closer to that of a military draft horse (a breed that's extinct, so far as I know) and they'd still be considered a big show-off for using said pony instead of a donkey like a normal person.
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Owning a horse enters you into the Eretrian aristocracy, and horses are bred primarily for war, not for labor. Oxen or donkeys are used for that. As a military resource horses are far too valuable to be wasted on that.
 
Professor Vesca said:
It's how the mongols were so successful. Genghis Khan would hire people who had skills his tribesmen did not have access too.
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True.

I think it's a bit more obvious in that case because the Mongols were extremely specialized- very good at everything they were good at, and in many cases barely even aware of "wait, that's a thing?" in the areas they were bad at.

The Romans, in terms of having a diverse array of arts, crafts, and so on were more diverse, not so much "perfectly specced horse nomads."
 
fasquardon said:
Cheaper than wheat. And you're talking about some pretty high-performance horse breeds there. Draft horses as we know them are a product of the agricultural revolution, thoroughbreds aren't bred for traction at all. A person rich enough to afford an equine to pull their cart in this era would be using something that was more of a pony with dietary requirements closer to that of a military draft horse (a breed that's extinct, so far as I know) and they'd still be considered a big show-off for using said pony instead of a donkey like a normal person.
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As @Ironanvil1, dogs can eat grains soaked in water as well, and the bread a lot of our people are going to be eating is not exclusively going to be wheat. Also, at the quantities horses eat, even ponies, grains are not cheap. Grains are not cheap, even oats.

It is true that thoroughbreds are expensive and high-performance, but this is again maybe getting a bit hung up over the specific examples raised rather than seeing the general point. Horses are expensive. Even donkeys and ponies are the equivalent to a transit van in terms of how much of someone's wealth and livelihood they might represent. Absolutely essential to your living, in some cases, but not cheap.

Then again, I don't get the impression we disagree about this.


fasquardon said:
It is possible that those recipes are for things that are properly pasta, but unlikely. More likely they were proto-pastas that are between bread and true pasta in its shelf life and hardness.
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Pasta in Italy can definitely be dated to the middle ages.

There are enough textual hints that it's actually entirely possible Eretria may have more primitive forms of it now, although as you say, there are a lot of things you can do with various kinds of dough that are similar to pasta but not exactly the same.
 
Simon_Jester said:
True.

I think it's a bit more obvious in that case because the Mongols were extremely specialized- very good at everything they were good at, and in many cases barely even aware of "wait, that's a thing?" in the areas they were bad at.

The Romans, in terms of having a diverse array of arts, crafts, and so on were more diverse, not so much "perfectly specced horse nomads."
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No, but they also weren't stupid. The only thing stopping them from say, using Eretrian ship sheds, carpenters, rowers, and admirals, is their pride.
 
Cetashwayo said:
Owning a horse enters you into the Eretrian aristocracy, and horses are bred primarily for war, not for labor. Oxen or donkeys are used for that. As a military resource horses are far too valuable to be wasted on that.
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Right. Their sheer size and slightly worse caloric efficiency means they lose out to donkeys. Horses as farm and commerce animals are really a post-agricultural revolution thing. And even then, most horse breeds were for war.

fasquardon
 
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