Farmed meat was a luxury in Roman times and game or wild meat was likely also expensive enough to not be eaten every day. We live in different times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine/
https://www.historyhit.com/what-did-the-romans-eat-food-and-...
https://www.quora.com/What-did-soldiers-eat-in-the-Ancient-R...
https://www.thoughtco.com/did-roman-soldiers-eat-meat-120634
If they had access to big mac they'd be eating that all the time
Is that likely? Per calorie, meat is more expensive, and people weren’t that rich, on average, at the time. Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine states: John E. Stambaugh writes that meat "was scarce except at sacrifices and the dinner parties of the rich."
Also, gladiators may have been loading carbs to gain a protective layer of fat. https://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.htm...:
”Gladiators, it seems, were fat. Consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates, such as barley, and legumes, like beans, was designed for survival in the arena. Packing in the carbs also packed on the pounds. "Gladiators needed subcutaneous fat," Grossschmidt explains. "A fat cushion protects you from cut wounds and shields nerves and blood vessels in a fight." Not only would a lean gladiator have been dead meat, he would have made for a bad show. Surface wounds "look more spectacular," says Grossschmidt. "If I get wounded but just in the fatty layer, I can fight on," he adds. "It doesn't hurt much, and it looks great for the spectators."”
Pain also is highly subjective, and can depend on psychological factors. A gladiator may have thought “that looks as if I fought hard, so they will let me live, and it is survivable”, rather than “that’s half an inch deep, bleeds like , and I will never be able to use that arm again!”
Regardless, that gash in your fat arm easily beats an equally sized gash hitting a major artery or cutting into a bone.
Presumably as a gladiatorial slave you wouldnt need to worry about abstaining from food choices.
I’m a marathon runner and my best runs are in full on ketosis. I’ve experimented with a vegitarian ketosis diet but never did a full marathon while eating like that, but felt pretty good otherwise.
There are some UFC fighters who eat vegetarian, paleo, keto, some trying the “warrior diet” (which I think is like paleo with some intermittent fasting...but not entirely sure what those athletes are really doing daily). It’s also worth noting most of the recent studies on gladiators also suggest they were not lean and resembled more of the strongman contest physiques.
It is worth noting that many gladiators, and Olympic competitors, were in fact not slaves and many were actually quite wealthy.
Gladiators would do alright purely off of sexual relationships, rather high-class Roman maids and matrons like Hippia actually walked away from her family to be with a gladiator. There are many rumors from the time that allege various sons of powerful people to be bastard offspring of gladiators. There's even tell of some being 'the care and suffering of women' such as one byt he name of Hermes that Martial wrote of.
You can tell how wealthy some were simply by looking at the fines issued to them. If you look at charioteers Theogenes and Porphyrius you can see good examples, Theogenes for example was once fined 2 talents for withdrawing from an event (about 250k dollars).
If you look at a 2nd century prize table from Aphrodisias you see 500-3000 drachmas and there were several games referred to as 'the 3000-drachma Games', some would see prizes of 6000 drachma and in at least one instance of 30,000 drachma (about 100 years of a solderier's pay) being paid for a single athlete just to appear. At the Panathenaic games the lowest prize was 100 amphrae of olive oil, about 225k$ worth and winners were often fed by their home city for life if they won. Diocles, another charioteer, would compete for prizes up to 60,000 sesterces at a time which would be worth 2.5-3 million dollars today and if you look at his known life time winnings you get 35.8 million sesterces making him a billionaire and then some in today's dollars.
Everything in the book should be taken as liberal interpretation of history, however that being said he does cite where he gets facts and figures from so you can do your own research of the subjects.
Here's a source of the 30k figure https://books.google.com/books?id=QMgsAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=P...
Here's an article that actually puts Diocles worth 15 billion https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/794...
Hence my qualifier gladiatorial slave. Yes presumably a free gladiator had more choice than a gladiatorial slave.
Your use of “many”, doesn’t shed much light on the subject, by all accounts most were slaves, free gladiators were definitely the exception not the rule. But yes some were the superstar athletes of their day and the wealth (women) that goes along with that status.
Gladiators and Olympic competitors are completely different things. Olympic competitors were free men - I don't think slaves where allowed to participate.
Gladiators on the other hand were mostly slaves. It was considered a dishonorable occupation - basically on the level of prostitution - and therefore not suitable for a free man. If a free man partook in gladiatorial combat he would lose a number of civil rights.
Chariots were owned by wealthy free men, and presumably they would be the ones paying a fine.
His winnings reportedly totaled 35,863,120 sesterces, allegedly, over $15 billion in today’s dollars, an amount which could provide a year's supply of grain to the entire city of Rome
My thought is $15 billion in today's dollars is an absurd amount for "a years supply of grain for Rome", since Rome was supposedly around a million people. $15,000 per person for food alone is more than the global per capita GDP in 2018!
So in the United States, one acre of wheat yields an average 37.1 bushels of wheat. That's about 210,000 kcals of flour per acre using modern machinery.
If we look at https://livinghistoryfarms.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/grain-ha... we find that in the 19th century a skilled cradler could harvest 1 ½ -2 acres a day.
Grain was harvest by hand until the first century when the vallus was invented so I'm going to just estimate a difficulty increase of 4 people being able to harvest an acre in a day without a vallus or a cradle.
Beloch's 1886 estimate for the population of the empire during the reign of Augustus suggests there were 23 million European Romans, if we assume 'Rome' means the city I haven't a clue what the population would have been, if we assume the whole empire then Beloch's estimate was 54 million.
Let's just assume 1 million people with 20% of their caloric intake being grain and assume an even 2000 kcals per person.
So we need a bit over 1900 acres assuming no spoilage per million people. Wheat has a fairly narrow harvest window as you need to harvest it once it reaches a certain moisture level and if you leave it too dry too long it can easily be damaged/detached from wind and rain.
Let's assume a team of 4 people can realistically harvest, and prepare for further drying, 5 acres in the window.
That means we need 3800 people per million mouths fed a diet that gets 20% of it's kcals from wheat using ancient harvesting methods. Obviously this is an estimate but I tried to be generous in favor of the harvesting and my kcal number is likely low. Yields would also be markedly reduced back then without chemical fertilizer/herbicides/pesticides.
So 3800 people per million mouths earning 800-1000 sesterces a year ( https://www.slideshare.net/javierredondas/jobs-salariesrome ) let's assume another 10% in cost for milling (probably low) so we'll assume 3,762,000 sesterces per 1 million people for 20% of their kcal needs.
Converting sesterces to modern money is a bit tricky but at 1990 silver prices a single sesterce was worth about $1 and by mid 2010 would have been about $3.25 according to https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spqr/money-1.h...
So anywhere from 3-12 million dollars per million people. I'm guessing this would have been more like 15-45 million dollars per million people so even with that figure we're looking at maybe 2 billion dollars for all of the Roman empire.
So yeah, I like the (IIRC) 1.5 billion dollar figure mentioned in the book I referenced elsewhere which is why I left it at 1 billion and then some in my comment.
There's also a minimum amount of essential fatty acids to consider... at the time it's not like they had canola oil. So there was definitely animal products in their diets. Revisionist theories in order to support a vegetarian agenda are pretty annoying to me. A lot of it doesn't even pass a common sense sniff test.
IIRC Barley + Lentils can give you a complete protein profile, and it's possible that maybe 1/3-1/2 of their protein intake was from non-meat sources. But I seriously doubt that even a significant minority were abstaining from meat.
Eating below the minimum RDA of 0.8 g/kg is unlikely to cause diseases of protein deficiency. The RDA minimum is fairly generous to allow for a certain margin of error. Most of the studies cited by https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234922/ indicate that 0.6 g/kg is likely a sufficient reference, and that a recommendation of 0.75 g/kg allows for enough confidence to cover individual variation. There was one study cited which found a 0.8 g/kg minimum, but most of the rest found that lower values should be sufficient; it sounds like 0.8 was picked just to be on the safe side.
> At 220# that means 80-120g protein as a minimum. That's a fair amount, and far more than you're likely to get from vegetarian sources at the time alone.
I doubt that most Roman soldiers were 220#. The minimum height requirement was 5'5", and estimates are that the average height was 5'7".
> There's also a minimum amount of essential fatty acids to consider... at the time it's not like they had canola oil.
There's a certain vegetable oil that Rome and Italy are quite well known for.
I'm with you on being skeptical that they were vegetarian, but I think you're overstating the requirements a little bit. I think it's fairly likely that they ate a fairly low meat diet just due to the logistical difficulties of obtaining fresh meat or carrying preserved meat.
The word "linoleic" derived from the Greek word linon (flax). Oleic means "of, relating to, or derived from oil of olive" or "of or relating to oleic acid" because saturating the omega-6 double bond produces oleic acid.
So protein only constitutes 12% or less of their caloric source. Just about all food have some proportion of protein. Cooked oatmeal is 16% protein by calories.
edit: could include fish, depending on the location.
It’s doesnt matter if a vegetable is considered a carb, that can still have a significant amount of protein.
Some that fall in that category include: broccoli, spinach, asparagus, peas, Brussels sprouts, mushrooms, (as others has said legumes).
In my own regimen when I was trying to maintain ketosis while eating vegitarian I ate a lot of seeds and nuts, they of course have carbs but significant amounts of fat/protein. Also I had tons of coconut oil and coconut butter (about the best fat you can get from an energy perspective medium chain triglyceride).
They may not have had canola, but olive oil was a big staple, and that’s an example of a non-meat that packs significant calories and fat.
For vegetable sources, they were referred to as barley-eaters and barley is 12% protein.
The article says legionnaires and gladiators were eating 5000-6000 calories daily, with 78% from primarily wheat and barley. An average ancient whole wheat would probably be somewhere near 15% protein by weight. Daily consumption of those grains even on the low end of their estimates would contain well over 100g of protein.
Likely. Guys like Brian Shaw eat 10-12k kcals a day but they are walking around near 400lbs, amateur and semi-pro male powerlifters and oly lifters will eat 3-6k for maintenance and lean bulk depending on their size and weight class and that's just an hour or two of lifting 3-5x a week.
They'd have been shorter and likely leaner so I'd say 3k-4k kcals is a good guess based on my experience in strength sports and martial arts.
"The legionnaire's daily ration consisted of 78% carbohydrates, mainly from wheat or barley. This diet has the advantages to provide slowly absorbed carbohydrates, to be provide high energy, and to be easily digestible. It provided good intestinal ballast, and was able to restore the energy reserves of the organism (Fornaris and Aubert, 1998; Lemon et al., 1992). The best fighters in the ancient world were essentially vegetarian."
78% from carbs != vegetarian. by their measures, I'm pretty sure most people are vegetarian.
That Plinius with his historical revisionism. Calling gladiators barley-eaters is obvious propaganda from the vegetarian lobby of ancient Rome.
This is suspected to be part of the reason for the neotenic expression of blond hair and blue eyes that emerged in Scandinavians, as you would normally get enough vitamin D from meat sources, so the evolutionary pressure for very fair skin is presumed to have come from the lower strata of society trying to live off grains and other vegetables while getting very little sunlight.
> we should expect that gladiators had a high protein diet. However, analysis of their bones has put forward the hypothesis that gladiators were vegetarian athletes
Who says that a mostly vegetarian is low-protein? No mention of specific foods that were eaten in ancient Rome, such as lupines ("lupini beans"), which are low carb high protein and easily dehydrated, transported, etc, and would make an obvious staple for soldiers.
As you say, what if the roman soldiers ate mostly lupines + dried fish? And perhaps not because they thought it was ideal for a warrior (though it may be), but simply because they were easy to carry?
This is not a hypothesis (a speculation to be confirmed or denied), this is a conclusion derived from a series of palaeoethnobotanical and stable isotope analysis studies.
> Plants contain higher levels of strontium than animal tissues. People who consume more plants and less meat will build up measurably higher levels of strontium in their bones.
How can we rule out that they weren't just eating tons of strontium-rich meat like seafood and less strontium-deficient meat like chicken? Or that they weren't just eating WAY MORE plant carbs than your average person being warriors and all? Maybe gladiators were like marathon runners and were always carb-loading to pack calories. That would effectively multiply their plant over meat intake by orders of magnitude. But just because marathon runners eat way more grains than meat doesn't mean they are vegetarians.