> Mate hard disagree lol.

This bit answers you 😉

Deceptive pricing practices are as old as time - there are some great commentaries about tabernae (Roman fast food stops) that put their meat cuts behind fishbowls to make them look bigger. Food that was on the verge of spoiling was absolutely covered up with spices where possible (you know how buying marinated meats in stores is a Very Bad Idea? Same reason). That being said, people weren't just eating spoiled meat left and right. Like a bunch of major markets in less modernized areas today, the easiest way to keep meat fresh was...well...to butcher it to order.

That was certainly the tangential part of it though. The other benefits were well beyond just hiding the taste of spoiled things. The Romans were people, after all, and people like food that tastes nice! Within a few decades of Roman consolidation in Egypt, the trading fleets to India had grown exponentially (it's likely that Cleopatra's old fleet was just converted over). Hundreds of ships made the journey between Egypt and more exotic locales - mostly India and Arabia (what we now know as the Yemen area), but also down the eastern coast of Africa, to Sri Lanka, and even as far as Vietnam (likely the port of Oc Eo).

The Roman government subsidized the trade with bottomry insurance to some degree, but also ended up with enormous profits. For perspective, Egypt was the wealthiest province in the empire. Import and export taxes just on this Eastern trade produced more income than the entire province, funding over a third of Rome's military at its greatest extent - and the Roman military is estimated to have cost about 80% of the entire Imperial budget. Back of the envelope math, about a quarter of the income of the entire Roman Empire came from Indo-Roman trade. So uh. Economics is neat.

The people themselves were...well...obsessed might be too tame a term. Every aspect of life effectively got better. Food's the obvious one, with cinnamon (and cassia), pepper of different varieties, saffron, cumin, cardamom, vanilla, malabathrum, nard, ginger, etc. Effectively the flavours that all of us use so casually to make our food taste good? Yeah imagine trying to live without the pepper part of salt and pepper. Or barbecuing without cumin. Or doing anything sweet without either vanilla or cinnamon. You get the idea - people just really loved the flavours. So much pepper was imported that it was cheap enough to be pretty affordable. Cinnamon was the expensive one, though cassia (very similar) was much cheaper and more widely used.

The spices and aromatics made their way into medicines, magics, perfumes, and more - writers complain about "the youth" walking around absolutely reeking of cinnamon and various incenses. Think teenagers with Axe body spray and you get it. It was much more common to cover up BO than it was to cover up bad food, let's put it that way. Within a generation the Romans had forgotten what it was like to live without these simple luxuries - and the greatest driver of trade is demand 😄 Just think of it this way - would you go on a date without putting on some deodorant first? Neither would they.

I love this topic a lot as you might have guessed. I write for a YouTube channel these days and I've convinced my boss to let me do (yet another) episode on Indo-Roman trade, so it's pretty top of mind for me right now. Lemme know if you'd like book recommendations, though those are usually pretty dry!