'Once-in-a-century' discovery reveals luxury of Pompeii
140 comments
·January 17, 2025noduerme
perihelions
Isn't it the exact opposite? Every single house in the modern world has running water—it wouldn't be code-compliant, in any functioning country, to not have that. That was a high-status luxury in Rome. (It was even a largesse of the Emperor to be gifted[0] the right to have a private plumbing connection to an aqueduct—something considered highly desirable in that world).
The fact people today build inexpensive plastic Thermae as a novelty object, reflects how thoroughly we've solved all the *actually hard* problems of water infrastructure. The formerly expensive parts are now unimaginably cheap, so, we're exploring new places to cut costs that we previously wouldn't think of.
(It's akin to how computer keyboards are now 10x cheaper and junkier than they were in the 1960's–1980's (?), because, the other problems having been solved, that became a new focus of economization. No one would think twice about paying (the modern equivalent of) $100 for a well-engineered mechanical keyboard, in an era when the corresponding PC went for $5,000. The expensive object reflects an economic difficulty elsewhere; and the expensive Roman stonework baths perhaps reflected the costliness of water in general).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct#Distribution
EncomLab
My former house was built in 1927 - it had every modern convenience and was 100% better constructed than the terrible house we live in now that was built 2 years ago that was thrown together in the cheapest ways possible but still cost multiples of the inflation adjusted price of out former home when new.
JoelMcCracken
I think this is the key.
As a generally smart person with disposable income, I am unable to figure out how to find/purchase higher quality products that are not optimized for obsolescence. Increasingly it seems that _everything_ is as cheap as possible: expensive products are not higher quality, but are instead designed to appeal to the premium market segment.
dylan604
New homes are a bit of unique version of the "built to last" theme. Most of the individual components are some of the best we've ever had, while some of them are the worst. Modern windows are amazing. Modern insulation is amazing. Insulation is so good, you need less of it in appliances so you gain space inside fridges/ovens even though the unit itself is the same physical size. If you built the house out of something besides #2 pine, homes could be amazing. On top of that, you have nail guns where the builder doesn't even notice (or care) if the nail misses or not. People just don't care about the attention to detail during construction. It's not like they're building their own home.
MarcelOlsz
Currently living in an 1800's converted church. It's ridiculously well insulated and solid. It's -15 outside but with a little fireplace, and $50 in oak slabwood per month, I'm solid in the winter. The upstairs stays 22 and only drops 2 degrees at night. Meanwhile my old condo had a 4 foot "cold front" in front of the floor to ceiling windows.
thijson
I think what you are describing is what the central bank calls hedonics. They substitute one good for another in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation. Otherwise the inflation figure would be much higher than it is. So instead of solid 2x6 studs in the floor, we use engineered struts. I visited Pompeii, I was amazed at how well preserved all the marble was.
astrange
If it has modern conveniences and is even vaguely up to modern electrical code, that means someone renovated it at one point.
All modern buildings are compliant with building codes and there is very little room for creativity. If you don't like the building then you don't like the code.
gregschlom
Don't forget to adjust for survivor bias. You don't see all the terrible houses that they built in the 1920's because, well, they didn't last. But you better believe that then just like now plenty of people were throwing together houses in the cheapest way possible.
WalterBright
I'm pretty sure that labor is the most expensive part of building a house.
idunnoman1222
I mean, the insulation of a modern house is clearly better than your house stuffed with horse hair in the 20s, also using 10 times the wood to build a house I suppose is better…
mschild
I don't think they are lamenting the fact that these things have reduced in price but rather significantly in quality as well.
There is something to be said about price reductions, but at some point the quality lowers to a point where it has become a waste of resources as the product you bought will seize working within a short time frame.
I've always made this unfortunate experience with shoes. With good care, 100 Euro sneakers would last me about 2 years. A pair of handcrafted leather shoes I bought 12 years ago are still going strong. While the leather shoes were almost 4 times the price, they've paid for themselves at this point.
pdfernhout
Obligatory mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory "The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory that people in poverty have to buy cheap and subpar products that need to be replaced repeatedly, proving more expensive in the long run than more expensive items. The term was coined by English fantasy writer Sir Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, illustrates the concept with the example of boots. The theory has been cited with regard to analyses of the prices of boots, fuel prices, and economic conditions in the United Kingdom."
Tangentially related on the bigger picture: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1280581-the-state-of-t... "Money is a sign of poverty. (Iain M. Banks)"
autoexec
> Every single house in the modern world has running water...reflects how thoroughly we've solved all the actually hard problems of water infrastructure.
It's worth pointing out that even in the US, the richest nation on Earth, millions of Americans don't have access to clean, safe. drinkable water. We still have a lot of hard problems in water infrastructure that need to be solved. It's not only problems in the engineering of those systems, but also in the management of those systems as much of our existing infrastructure is both inadequate in terms of meeting our current and projected needs and literally falling apart and at risk of failure.
We're way ahead of Rome in a ton of areas, but we're still nowhere near where should be. Look at our grades:
Dams: D
Drinking water: C-
Inland waterways: D+
Levees: D
Stormwater: D
Wastewater: D+
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/infrastructure-categori...
pinoy420
OP assumign that everyone in ancient rome had a house like this. Trying to compare his $10000 friend’s hot tub extension with a $40,000,000 estate. Lol
YouWhy
> That thing isn't going to last 3 winters let alone a volcanic eruption.
Could it have been a case of survivorship bias? I.e., perhaps jankier facilities have been built at Pompeii but simply did not make it at all or were not prioritized for excavation?
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4gotunameagain
People are downvoting you because it is simply due to the different materials and building methodologies of the past.
Things took much longer to build and were much more expensive, but they were very durable as an effect.
There were no plastic hot tubs in Pompeii that burned when the pyroclastic flow swept past.
shawabawa3
There were no plastic ones but there were very probably some wooden ones, or other luxurious wooden items which were destroyed without a trace and we'd never know
therealpygon
“People” often fancy themselves to be smarter than they are and capable of judging others wrong based on their limited information and passing knowledge, as well as what they have decided to be true rather than what is fact. Things like “because things were made of stone, all things were made of stone”, or “because some things survived the tests of time, all things were built better”.
It is exactly the bias that was pointed out by the commentor.
matkoniecz
Ability to buy cheap stuff, accessible to regular people and not ultra-wealthy is new.
You can still spend massive piles of money on long-lasting stuff.
This hot tub cost was likely higher than lifetime earnings of average citizen.
Also, its cost was likely greater than what would cost to buy several slaves. And likely was in fact built by slaves.
Of all things I see nothing to be depressed about here given our situation.
marginalia_nu
Wealthy Romans had a bit of a culture-boner for leaving a lasting legacy, maintaining the dynasty, and that sort of thing, and conversely often relied on ancestral clout to borrow credibility from. I don't think anyone today would try to base their credibility on being the distant relative of Ben Franklin in the way an upstart roman might invoke their familiar relationship with Scipio Africanus.
Makes sense they built stuff to last in such an environment.
sandworm101
Survivorship bias. The only artifacts we see are the ones that were meant to last. Those Romans who did not build for eternity have not been remembered, which distorts our view of thier society. It is akin to classic car enthusiasts who think cars were made better way back when. They think that because they only see the survivors. They do not see all the junk that history has rightly forgotten.
Anotheroneagain
The city was buried in two days, if anything we may not see the most valuable possessions.
beardyw
I think also they were very much more in touch with their own mortality than is common today.
pjmlp
Other thing would not be expected in a war driven society, where being a legionary was quite common, and very few managed to return back (alive) to civil life after doing their part on the assigned legion.
tejohnso
> In some accounts of the Roman triumph, a companion or public slave would stand behind or near the triumphant general during the procession and remind him from time to time of his own mortality
ElevenLathe
It was also impossible to make things out of fiberglass, but hand-carved stone was actually available.
marginalia_nu
So was non-permanent building materials such as wood, to be fair.
Aniket-N
Well, this bath house was owned by some one ultra wealthy. There were multiple people (possibly slaves), just toiling away to keep the furnace going.
Today a hot tub can be had by millions.
throw0101a
> That thing isn't going to last 3 winters let alone a volcanic eruption.
He can have a hot tub that could survive a volcanic eruption, he just has to to pay for it. Is your friend willing to allocate the resources, or is he happy with 'good enough'?
ASalazarMX
Nothing stops any modern person from building in this long-lasting style if they want to; except for the incredible expense, that is.
In your defense, I still think your friend could do better than a three-year outdoor hot tub, but that was them being unnecessarily cheap.
infecto
You could still build a hot tub out of tile in such a way that it will last for a very long time.
qq66
"The bodies belonged to a woman, aged between 35 and 50, who was clutching jewellery and coins"
Funny to see that some things never change. You're about to get vaporized by a pyroclastic avalanche and your first thought is to grab your bling.
melling
No banking system. I imagine without any money in ancient times, you could end up in trouble quickly.
worldsayshi
They must've had banks. I don't think you can have organised society without some form of banks.
cjs_ac
There were money lenders (argentarii) but they were just individuals setting up stall in the local forum. If you exhausted your credit with one argentarius you just went and found another who didn't talk to the first.
rsynnott
They had… bank-like things, but in general they’d have been quite local; if your city is in the process of being destroyed, the prospects of your bank are poor.
neuronic
Archaic banking existed since 4th-3rd millenium BCE. This was surprising to me.
The modern form of banking is rooted in 14th century Italy (Medici and so on) [1].
dboreham
There was some sort of financial system. Evidence for this is a large lead "whiteboard" in the museum in Rome that records a bunch of mortgages.
Ekaros
But not certificates of credit. So you could store money, but you could not deposit it and then get fungible currency from other bank.
Terr_
Local banks don't necessarily mean your balance would be safe if the city were destroyed.
inglor_cz
It is hard to build a distributed banking system without reliable accounting, and reliable accounting in Europe only became possible with the import of Indian/Arabic positional numeric system.
We underestimate just how much of a burden on arithmetics the previous systems were. Too unwieldy.
On a similar note, I believe that for the same reason, the Chinese language will never achieve mass adoption in the rest of the world. The script is too complicated and reaching effective literacy takes much longer than with Latin characters.
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andrelaszlo
"The woman was still alive while he was dying"
If I ever die, I hope it's after I'm long gone...
mimentum
Probably were prayer beads or something. Still 'bling' I guess.
INTPenis
I'm convinced that most of the victims found are part of the working/slave class. So I can't help but fantasize that they had gone through their already evacuated owner's possessions thinking the world was ending, they died clutching whatever they could grab.
morkalork
When you said something about things never changing, I thought you were going with the part where they think she (30s) could be the rich man's (50s) wife.
chgs
People who have a grab bag will have some cash in it today.
araes
Something to acknowledge. Slightly wanted to mock because of how predictable it is that they're holding money while they died. And that the priority seemed like it was the coins and jewelry.
However, even in the modern era, somebody with a "bug out bag" or a "Wake Up, Stuffs Happening (WUSH) bag" still includes "cash" as one of the main includes in the top priorities [1]
[1] Basic 72-Hour Bug Out Bag List, https://www.bugoutbagbuilder.com/learning-tutorials/bug-out-...
worldsayshi
Perhaps they were in the process of evacuating and they wanted to gather their valuables to protect from looters?
Oarch
What always jars me the most is how modern ancient Roman taps and valves look.
kibwen
Alternatively, you can consider how ancient our modern taps and valves look, and not in a bad way. Sometimes engineering problems get solved once and don't have a pressing need to be revisited.
potato3732842
Exactly. You can see this in all sorts of things. Sure an clean sheet design of a adjustable wrench or semi trailer coupling generic roller chain or whatever other 100yo item might net a few % improvement in some areas by no longer having to design to the manufacturing tech and material costs of 100 years ago but often times the ecosystem that standardization enables is worth more than a couple percent of improvement somewhere.
araes
Came here to post almost the same. Always have this impression from modern media that Roman civilization was thatch roofs and aqueducts with maybe a hole in the wall that poured water out or a well you went to the local square.
May have been that way for the poor, or the less status enabled, like many commenters have noticed. Yet it's still a dissonance that such high quality piping, boiler rooms, insulated engineered waterworks, and other similar ideas were available. Even if in limited quantities.
dzonga
also shows - how on a basic comparison some rich people back then lived way better than some poor folks do today in terms of assets. though in terms of relative access to goods poor folks today are better off.
bmicraft
> though in terms of relative access to goods poor folks today are better off.
What's that meant to imply? The people starving today certainly aren't better off than those wealthy Romans were. Not in any way other then a theoretical "if they stopped being poor" sense.
dboreham
Quick note for anyone who hasn't visited, and has an interest in western civilization: Pompeii, and the somewhat more impressive nearby Herculaneum are well worth visiting at least once. It's really not possible to have the experience remotely from pictures or videos, not the same as being physically immersed. Best to avoid the high summer due to heat and load, but go then if you have no alternative. Herculaneum in particular is never that busy because harder to get to and less publicity.
teleforce
>Archaeologists have discovered a sumptuous private bathhouse - potentially the largest ever found there - complete with hot, warm and cold rooms, exquisite artwork, and a huge plunge pool.
Essentially this Roman luxury mansion has an indoor replica of a typical communal Roman bath place.
Communal Roman bath normally has three section hot, warm and cold, and the latter so called frigidarium normally come with a pool [1].
The ancient Egyption, is as ancient to Roman, as to our modern world to Roman, and the rich ancient Egyptions typically have pool inside their luxury mansions.
Fun facts early ancient Egyptions didn't call their kings Pharaoh only the later ancient Egyption kings are called Pharaoh literally meaning "Great House" that almost certainly has pool inside their mansion or palace since swimming is one of their favorite free time or sport activities [2].
As for the modern world, when my friends and relatives who're recently retiring with excess money to spend, the first thing they did are installing permanent private pools inside their new renovated retirement houses.
It seems in house pools are human innate luxury craving items that common across time and culture.
[1] Frigidarium:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigidarium
[2] Ancient Egyptian Sport:
dottjt
I don't know if this is a silly train of thought, but won't Pompeii just get buried again in the future? Is it a waste of time to try and unbury it?
Trasmatta
All of humanity will die eventually, and all of its accomplishments will be buried, so why do anything?
axus
The information (history/discoveries) can be distributed throughout the world and not dependent on one place anymore. Past that, we'll have to leave the planet.
braunjohnson
[dead]
tumsfestival
Kind of depressing how some people two millennia ago had bigger homes than most people alive today. Then again, if they were alive today their homes would be 10x the size.
YouWhy
The home in question is thought to have belonged to the wealthiest family around - which, for a society where economics are generational and local, practically means super-rich.
In modern societies such super rich people flock to major cities, but in pre-industrial societies relocating would leave familial assets under-attended. Accordingly a well adjusted wealthy person would arrange for an excellent standard of living adjacently to their possessions
marginalia_nu
From what I understand it, affluent Romans typically moved back and forth between countryside villas in the summer, and a smaller residence in the city during the winter.
Also Roman economics were not really very local. The Romans had a large road network and were very mobile and traded even farther. You have for example Pelagius, a figure in church history, who was born in Britain and died in Egypt.
matkoniecz
And in turn if you take random/average/low-income citizen and compare their situation (like their home) with what equivalent has now, their situation would be much better nowadays.
Even if you compare homes of ultrawealthy then and now I expect that most would take homes of XXI century.
chgs
The side of the planet 2000 years ago was the same as today. The population today is a thousand times larger.
Smithalicious
Estimates for the world population 2000 years ago seem to be some 150M-300M
dboreham
There are plenty of smaller houses in Pompeii. Another thing to consider is that the ash covered basically the first floor of buildings, while the upper floors were either blown away by blast or pillaged by later generations. So there could have been one or two upper floors of accommodation for poorer people no longer visible. Also possible there were lower quality buildings on the town outskirts that haven't survived. Archeology understandably focuses on the larger villas.
It's amazing what people built 2000 years ago, and sort of depressing too. I went over to a friend's house recently who had gotten a new outdoor hot tub. That thing isn't going to last 3 winters let alone a volcanic eruption.