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…are you taking the piss?
Urine big trouble mate, taxes are due
Pretty sure I still see a urine tax on my monthly water bill.
Where I live we do not have sewers for storm water, yet still get charged for storm water runoff. Same thing in my book.
Can’t believe people just throw away such useful substance!
Real talk, in a time when other societies (and up into the modern day, for that matter) had people pissing on the side of buildings, “I’m going to put a public piss-pot on a street corner because I can sell the piss” is a win for everyone involved - pisser, pedestrians, piss-collector, and tax-collector XD
Fuck Excel and Teams I would do that job with jazz hands, they’d call my ass Bob Phossy
And what was the use for urine during that time?
Bleaching cloth and treating leather, mostly! It has to ‘ferment’ to let the ammonia settle, which is part of the reason why such industries were excluded from the limits of many Roman cities - or relegated to the poorer areas.
Thanks !
So was it like a specific job to sell dwarfs? Or was it a subset of jobs in the slave trade? Or just like an additional specialty that someone that was already a slaver picks up because of…reasons?
Lucius the Dwarf Seller might not sell only dwarfs, but he’s the one all the other slave traders know will pay a good price for any dwarfs they buy. After all, it’s a much narrower clientele seeking dwarf slaves than slaves of ordinary height, and ancient trade is all about who you know and what connections you have.
I’m actually not aware of any direct evidence of specialized dwarf sellers in ancient Rome, but I do know that there were slave traders who specialized in certain kinds of slaves, and that dwarfs were in high-enough demand that their import from outside of the Empire is noted, making it likely that there were such specialized slave traders.
Fun, or not-so-fun, fact: even in Rome, a society deeply intertwined with slavery, slave traders were regarded as the scum of the earth.
That last paragraph is the case in every slave society I’ve heard of. People may buy their wares, but they know it’s all monstrous and a whole lot of the culture becomes a means for slave owners to convince themselves they’re less evil than they are
tbf, some societies simply embrace the monstrousness of it, like the Spartans.
But yes, most societies, especially as philosophical and political thought develops, end up with an increasing tension between the cruel realities of slave ownership and their own self-image.
For leather I’m guessing?
iirc that’s where the term piss-poor came from.
