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I hadn’t seen that cross with plumb bobs on it before. Searched and found this for anyone else interested.
For road building and laying out settlements in the distinctive grid patters, the main tool of agrimensores was a device known as the groma, believed to have had its origins in Egypt. This instrument consisted of a long wooden staff, pointed at the lower end and topped with a wooden arm, about 25cm/10" long. This cross arm had a pivot to support the stellata, which was the main part of the instrument and consisted of a wooden cross with plumb bobs at the end. To use the groma, the surveyor set it up where two roads were to intersect at right angles, and used the plumb bobs as guides for laying out a line of stakes or flags. Using the naked eye, these stakes could be constantly realigned, to maintain a straight line as the course of the road was plotted. Source
Damn, did the Romans have sunscreen? Those guys in nothin’ but undees must be getting burned like roasted peppers!
They may not exactly have been unionized workers. Or paid. Or voluntary. Or free.
The wealthy and athletes sometimes used olive oil for that purpose, but I have a few doubts about the likelihood of these poor working sods having any such luxury!
Maybe if they got the stuff with the carthage label, heard they were so infamous for low quality product that they began labelling it as coming from Cyrenaica because of how much Greek stuff went for.
I just realized…the wealthy and athletes thought the solution to being sun baked was to deep fry themselves in olive oil instead‽
Olive oil has a SPF of about 8, which means it, surprisingly, is not totally useless. They would have to scrape it off with a tool (or have a slave or assistant scrape it off) after they were finished with their outdoors activities, though.
Sounds like less effective salt case baking
I think their solution was to have slaves do the sun baked toiling instead of doing the work themselves.
From what I’ve read in books like The Odyssey, and The Illiad, they applied olive oil afterwards for moisturization and to soothe burns, chaffs, and cracks.
Why do they build it layer by layer? They could have saved a lot of effort by just building the top layer.
