imperialus81 t1_ix6nmo0 wrote on November 21, 2022 at 3:38 AM

Reply to comment by Northstar1989 in what was the population of ancient Mesopotamia? by Omastnar

I picked on red meat as a straight forward protein source that every ancient society would have at least had access to. It's also why I counted 2200 of their 2500 calories as coming from bread.

Were there other options? Sure. Beans and other legumes would fit the bill and would have likely played a significant role but beans also would have needed more water, which would have further complicated things. Plus, not every society would have had access to the same sorts of legumes so in the spirit of keeping it simple I put the number at 4oz of meat since going into more detail than that is just going to get too situational. As a note Tacitus does speak briefly as to the meat requirements of a Roman legion numbering it at around 150 swine/day for a full legion of 6000 troops plus their supporting folks. Now he was speaking about a legion in garrison, not on the march and we have no idea if it was some super special 'Legate Picard Day' or something but the point remains, that's a hell of a lot of food.

I also left out fat requirements since the Romans solved this through olive oil but I have no frigging clue how the Assyrians or Egyptians would have done the same outside of imports.

Northstar1989 t1_ixbr6xm wrote on November 22, 2022 at 6:33 AM

Tacitus was a late Imperial historian writing in a period of relative peace, and known to be subject to exaggeration and outright flattery at times to ingratiate himself with the powerful.

That being said, he was most definitely talking about garrison troops. Legions did occasionally travel with substantial swine herds to eat, but nowhere near the scale of 1 hog per day per 40 men. A figure of around 1 hog per day per 250 men might be more accurate for an army on a prolonged campaign.

Note that few legions in Tacitus' day actually went on such long campaigns. The legions were generally fairly sedentary at the time, only marching relatively short distances to deal with border incursions.

The Dacian Wars towards the end of Tacitus' life were one major exception to this rule: and although the legions were exceptionally well supplied during them as Dacia was quite close to major Greek and Illaryian holdings of Rome (and connected to them by navigable rivers), you'll likely find that meat consumption for the actively canpaigning legions even then fell substantially below this figure of 1 per 60 if you look into any reliable statistics available for the wars.