Hey folks, Fireside this week! I’m currently working on a post “On the Gracchi” taking a somewhat darker look at everyone’s favorite Roman reformers (though hardly the same black takedowns Alexander and Cleopatra got) , which will hopefully be ready for next week.
Before we dive into this week’s musing, I do want to take a moment to clarify the rulers for the comments section, as we had a bit of episode in the comments of the last post. First, note that the way the system is set up, new commenters (or suspicious comments) go into a moderation bin for me to approve before they show up, which is why some comments may be delayed in appearance, but that also means I don’t approve (or necessarily read) all of the comments all the time; I couldn’t even if I wanted to, it would take too much time.
Nevertheless, I do have some basic expectations for the comment section that I want to make clear. First, this is not a politics blog; it sometimes comments on contemporary politics simply because this is the outlet I have for those thoughts, but I don’t do so frequently. I do not want the comments beneath every post, whatever the topic, to become a battlefield for the latest political fight or culture war; instead, comments should try to stay broadly on topic to the subject of the post.
Second, I expect everyone to show a degree of civility here and to interact the same way you would if this was a classroom discussion environment. That means both assuming good faith and, in fact, operating in good faith. It also means respecting that we have folks here from a wide range of background who have a wide range of perspectives (some of which, yes, code politically). I don’t ask you to agree, but to be civil.
With that out of the way (for now; this comes up every so often), on to this week’s musing, where I wanted to expand just a little bit on something more on-topic that came up in last week’s post on pre-modern currencies and fantasy gold, which was just how preposterously massive the notional value of standard ‘adventuring equipment’ is in a lot of fantasy settings; as ‘Dan’ put it, “Even a simple analysis shows that a high level party is walking around with the equivalent labour hours to the Great Pyramid of Giza on their backs, if you attempt to work out how many labor hours high level equipment represents in wages.” Which is true and silly and it works that way for game balance reasons, rather than an effort to model historical societies (and I do understand the need for games to consider gameplay experience).
But it got me thinking it might be interesting to discuss: how much value might a heavily armored fighter or warrior be carrying around on their backs in the real world? Because I think the answer here is informative.
Here we do have some significant price data, but of course its tricky to be able to correlate a given value for arms and armor with something concrete like wages in every period, because of course prices are not stable. But here are some of the data points I’ve encountered:
We don’t have good Roman price data from the Republic or early/high Empire, unfortunately (and indeed, the reason I have been collecting late antique and medieval comparanda is to use it to understand the structure of earlier Roman costs). Hugh Elton notes that a law of Valens (r. 364-378) assessed the cost of clothing, equipment and such for a new infantry recruit to be 6 solidi and for a cavalryman, 13 solidi (the extra 7 being for the horse). The solidus was a 4.5g gold coin at the time (roughly equal to the earlier aureus) so that is a substantial expense to kit out an individual soldier. For comparison, the annual rations for soldiers in the same period seem to have been 4-5 solidi, so we might suggest a Roman soldier is wearing something like a year’s worth of living expenses.
We don’t see a huge change in the Early Middle Ages either. The seventh century Lex Ripuaria, quotes the following prices for military equipment: 12 solidi for a coat of mail, 6 solidi for a metal helmet, 7 for a sword with its scabbard, 6 for mail leggings, 2 solidi for a lance and shield for a rider (wood is cheap!); a warhorse was 12 solidi, whereas a whole damn cow was just 3 solidi. On the one hand, the armor for this rider has gotten somewhat more extensive – mail leggings (chausses) were a new thing (the Romans didn’t have them) – but clearly the price of metal equipment here is higher: equipping a mailed infantryman would have some to something like 25ish solidi compared to 12 for the warhorse (so 2x the cost of the horse) compared to the near 1-to-1 armor-to-horse price from Valens. I should note, however, warhorses even compared to other goods, show high volatility in the medieval price data.
As we get further one, we get more and more price data. Verbruggen (op. cit. 170-1) also notes prices for the equipment of the heavy infantry militia of Bruges in 1304; the average price of the heavy infantry equipment was a staggering £21, with the priciest item by far being the required body armor (still a coat of mail) coming in between £10 and £15. Now you will recall the continental livre by this point is hardly the Carolingian unit (or the English one), but the £21 here would have represented something around two-thirds of a year’s wages for a skilled artisan.
Almost contemporary in English, we have some data from Yorkshire. Villages had to supply a certain number of infantrymen for military service and around 1300, the cost to equip them was 5 shillings per man, as unarmored light infantry. When Edward II (r. 1307-1327) demanded quite minimally armored men (a metal helmet and a textile padded jack or gambeson), the cost jumped four-fold to £1, which ended up causing the experiment in recruiting heavier infantry this way to fail. And I should note, a gambeson and a helmet is hardly very heavy infantry!
For comparison, in the same period an English longbowman out on campaign was paid just 2d per day, so that £1 of kit would have represented 120 days wages. By contrast, the average cost of a good quality longbow in the same period was just 1s, 6d, which the longbowman could earn back in just over a week. Once again: wood is cheap, metal is expensive.
Finally, we have the prices from our ever-handy Medieval Price List and its sources. We see quite a range in this price data, both in that we see truly elite pieces of armor (gilt armor for a prince at £340, a full set of Milanese 15th century plate at more than £8, etc) and its tricky to use these figures too without taking careful note of the year and checking the source citation to figure out which region’s currency we’re using. One other thing to note here that comes out clearly: plate cuirasses are often quite a bit cheaper than the mail armor (or mail voiders) they’re worn over, though hardly cheap. Still, full sets of armor ranging from single to low-double digit livres and pounds seem standard and we already know from last week’s exercise that a single livre or pound is likely reflecting a pretty big chunk of money, potentially close to a year’s wage for a regular worker.
So while your heavily armored knight or man-at-arms or Roman legionary was, of course, not walking around with the Great Pyramid’s worth of labor-value on his back, even the ‘standard’ equipment for a heavy infantryman or heavy cavalryman – not counting the horse! – might represent a year or even years of a regular workers’ wages. On the flipside, for societies that could afford it, heavy infantry was worth it: putting heavy, armored infantry in contact with light infantry in pre-gunpowder warfare generally produces horrific one-sided slaughters. But relatively few societies could afford it: the Romans are very unusual for either ancient or medieval European societies in that they deploy large numbers of armored heavy infantry (predominately in mail in any period, although in the empire we also see scale and the famed lorica segmentata), a topic that forms a pretty substantial part of my upcoming book, Of Arms and Men, which I will miss no opportunity to plug over the next however long it takes to come out. Obviously armored heavy cavalry is even harder to get and generally restricted to simply putting a society’s aristocracy on the battlefield, since the Big Men can afford both the horses and the armor.
But the other thing I want to note here is the social gap this sort of difference in value creates. As noted above with the bowman’s wages, it would take a year or even years of wages for a regular light soldier (or civilian laborers of his class) to put together enough money to purchase the sort of equipment required to serve as a soldier of higher status (who also gets higher pay). Of course it isn’t as simple as, “work as a bowman for a year and then buy some armor,” because nearly all of that pay the longbowman is getting is being absorbed by food and living expenses. The result is that the high cost of equipment means that for many of these men, the social gap between them and either an unmounted man-at-arms or the mounted knight is economically unbridgeable.
To bring it back to the classic adventuring party, your D&D party’s fighter is probably walking around in equipment that represents a level of wealth your party’s rogue can never hope to have (outside of dragon-slaying related windfalls).
Now part of the reason for that is that the adventuring party is, itself, patterned off of a knight’s retinue, the lance fournie, “an equipped lance” (lance here being a unit name, like ‘squad’). A knight might travel to war with himself as a fully-equipped and mounted warrior, plus a coutilier (or coustillier, literally a ‘dagger-man,’ a lesser non-noble combatant), archers, other infantrymen and non-combatant pages. The unit didn’t usually have a fixed size, but we’re talking three to perhaps at most a dozen men, which is to say roughly the range of adventuring parties. And you can see the Fighter (the knight), the rogue (his coutilier), the ranger (those archers) fitting in neatly in our embryonic adventuring party, along with non-combatant retainers who might include chaplains (that might represent our spellcasters, both divine and arcane).
Except of course a lance fournie wasn’t an egalitarian formation: the knight was both the boss and commander of the unit and the guy who was paying every other member of the unit. Definitionally, he did so because he could dispose of wealth they could not. But of course setting up your adventuring party where one player is simply the boss of every other play would produce terrible table dynamics in most groups, so no one does it that way. INstead, the assumption is a basically egalitarian relationship between the party members (and a need for that to be mirrored in their economics), which means its tricky to have the Fighter, simply by virtue of being a Fighter, rolling around in enough armor to buy and sell the Rogue’ and his entire family’s entire household. But that was precisely the economics of the lance fournie.
(As an aside, a more interesting experiment might be to have the knight of the lance fournie be a GMPC, with the players only consisting of the retainers (and thus notionally equals), though I think making this fun would require playing the GMPC-Knight as something of a hopeless buffoon, since he needs to not steal the spotlight from the players, but that too could be fun and funny. I, uh, I have something a reputation in my RPG group for Well Meaning But Hopeless Buffoon knightly types as both PCs (when I’m not DMing) and NPCs, so I find the archetype fun.)
All of that, I think, can help explain in part why, despite how much war these societies engaged in, how they retained such a relatively inflexible and unmoving social hierarchy, with very little social mobility: you might make decent money (for your class) by serving in the army, but the gap between you and the next class (who got paid more) was so vast that even your relatively decent regular-soldier paycheck would never get you there. And of course the jump from infantryman to cavalryman was just as big, as you often had to supply the horse, which meant not only buying the horse, but also storing him when you weren’t at war (which is to say, you need a farm estate large enough to raise horses on or to be a close retainer of someone else who has one).
On to recommendations!
First, I want to note that our heroic narrator is back providing narrated audio versions of ACOUP posts. The recent additions are audio versions of the three-post series on “Decline and Fall,” along with “The Roman Dictatorship” and “Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?”
Over on YouTube, Roel Konijnendijk is back with Insider for another video rating the historical realism of battle scenes in films and TV, including Gladiator II, some House of the Dragon, Rings of Power and an appropriately angry review of 300: Rise of an Empire. He notes, among other things – in a line that will surely excite his many fans – that the sea is the “mother of all ditches.” But as always, there are a lot of good observations here about the importance of formations, the role of signalling, the use of archers, what artillery is for in a siege and so on.
The other notable ancient history story making the rounds right now is a PNAS study arguing that atmospheric lead levels during the early Roman Empire may have been sufficient to reduce aggregate average IQs among the Romans by 2.5-3 points. That’s gotten a lot of attention, but I would first point you to a blog response by Neville Morley (via the latest Pasts Imperfect) who notes some substantial flaws with the reasoning connecting this all to the fall of the Roman Empire (which is certainly how the media has opted to read it). Morley points out some of the key problems here, the main thing being that IQ is defined as a testing result over a population with 100 as a mean, so saying a population had its IQ reduced by 2.5-3 is hard to parse, since this would just cause the measure itself to be re-meaned to return the average to 100; the key question here is ‘decline relative to what?’
And that was my issue seeing the study as well. 2.5 to 3 points of average movement sounds really significant, I think to folks because the general perception is that intelligence both individually and on average over populations is static, but it isn’t and a 3-point movement over two centuries is actually quite slight. IQ measures in the United States and Europe have actually been far more volatile over the last century, resulting in IQ tests needing to be regularly re-meaned as performance improves (the ‘Flynn Effect’) at a rate of nearly 3 points per decade. One of the proposed reasons for at least some of that movement is lead abatement in wealthy countries, so without any basis for comparison, what we may be seeing is a situation where “because of Roman silver smelting releasing lead, the Romans went from being 2010s smart to being merely 1990s smart over the course of 200 years,” which hardly sound very explanatory. It should be noted the cumulative Flynn Effect impact in developed economies since WWII is often placed at around fifteen points, massively larger than the lead effect the PNAS study proposes for the Romans.
Finally, I should note that, given the small size of the effect found, there’s a lot of reason to suppose disease and parasite pressures are going to be more impactful on ancient populations without modern medicines when it comes to growth and development. More broadly, I think a lot of the popular discussion (I won’t speak for the researchers) here is asking the wrong question: it’s focused on “why did Rome fall” as if empires normally last forever. The Roman Empire united a geographic region (the Mediterranean littoral, construed broadly), which no other empire at any point in history earlier or later has ever united, and then held it that way for four centuries, which is also longer than most empires last in any form. The collapse isn’t the unusual thing about Rome: the rise and long sustained height are the things that demand explanation.
On to this week’s book review!
This week I’m going to recommend E.A. Hemelrijk, Women and Society in the Roman World: A Sourcebook of Inscriptions from the Roman West (2021). Now this is, as the title notes, a sourcebook, which is to say that primarily consists of a collection of primary source materials, in this case inscriptions from the western half of the Roman Empire, mostly (but not entirely) from the imperial period. Normally, this kind of sourcebook is primarily going to be used in classroom settings (so it’s great that it is in an affordable paperback that students could actually buy!) but I think this volume also has a lot of value in the library of the enthusiast who is interesting in Roman society or the lives and values of historical women more broadly. For those without a firm grounding in Roman gender roles and values, each chapter and also the subsections within chapters do have introductions that provide some of that framework and also lay out some key Latin terms (the inscriptions are in translation, but key Latin terms are noted).
The bulk of the text consists of translations of Latin inscriptions – funerary epitaphs (think ‘tombstones’), dedicatory inscriptions, honorary inscriptions, legal documents and so on. All of the inscriptions are presented as translations in clear, approachable English, along with a date and location, as well as a brief but often quite valuable description of the context of the inscription, like if there is accompanying artwork or if the quality of the carving is notably good or notably bad. Some of the inscriptions – about 70 of them – also come with black-and-white images of the actual object (mostly in cases where they have artwork) which is a great touch that gives the reader some connection to the physicality of these texts.
Of course the real stars of the show are the inscriptions themselves and this is where I think the great value of a volume like this is found: as opposed to the often quite impersonal nature of the literary sources for Roman history, written often centuries after the events and concerned almost entirely with the doings of senators, generals and emperors, these inscriptions are often intensely personal. Many of them are funerary epitaphs, written by husbands or children about dead wives or mothers (or those wives and mothers, burying husbands, sons and daughters), extolling their virtues or describing their lives. Many are quite touching, for instance, inscription 1.12, a funerary epitaph written by a husband for his deceased wife, “…she lived with me for five years, six months and eighteen days without any foul reproach. He [the husband] had this [the monument] made during his lifetime for himself and for his wife and dedicated it under the axe. You, who read this, go bathe in the baths of Apollo, as I did with my wife. I wish I still could.”
It’s a vision into the fundamental humanity of these people, especially of these women, figures whose humanity we so rarely get to see in our male-dominated aristocratic literary sources.
That said, there’s also a lot of very solid historical content here, about the structure of Roman families and family life, what was valued in Roman women, the occupations, status and positions they might occupy (often with more prominence than you might expect!), their place in public life (again, more than you might think!), their role in religion, their social relations. The inscriptions are divided thus by topic. I think as the next step up from the sort of introductory sourcebooks (typically the Shelton and Ripat, As the Romans Did, also a really valuable volume for the Roman history enthusiast or scholar or student) focused particularly on women, this book has tremendous value. Precisely because our literary sources so often leave women out, a book of inscriptions, presented here so accessibly and carefully translated, is quite fantastic and well worth a read.
