Talk:Roman metallurgy

Inaccurate and idiotic section on output.
I have taken the task of removing completly the section on output until someone rewrite a better version.

The source used is the farthest thing from the truth and uses a completly, a word that I wish to print on the mind of everyone here, fallacious reasoning : Taking the production of a small region specialized in iron production and scaling to the entire empire is complete stupidity, to think someone wrote such garbage and that other stupid and/or biased people are copy pasting throught the web is even more unbelievable.

The actual figure of industrial output of the roman empire is very difficult to know but know it for a fact, it's most likely not a even a fifth of that, the backward technological base of the roman empire that did not even have blast furnace, actual industrial centers, an economy based around ineffecient slave man power, and the lack of anything other than wrought iron and bronze is proof enough that the roman empire could have near even the figure stated by these so called historians. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.239.55.3 (talk) 19:40, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Questionable output section
The entry for annual output of gold is suspect. It is listed as 9 tons, but, according to Diodorus xvi.8, the output of Philippi alone was 1,000 talents (~50 tons) per year during Philip II's reign (ca. 300bc).

Kmote (talk) 17:45, 14 April 2023 (UTC)


 * All sorts of numbers are thrown around, no one knows how much gold was found in the roman empire. In Las medulas gold mine the security detail alone involved an entire legion, that is ~5000 soldiers and they did not work for free. Add to that the cost of transport, building the infrastructure and the paid workers (thousands) building the aqueducts, mining the mountains and separating the gold, and we are talking about a very expensive operation that have to had run a surplus or the mine would have made no sense at all.
 * The entire roman empire at the peak would have had hundreds of gold mine involving hundreds of thousands of people working, most of them paid as the slaves we deemed inefficient and replace by paid miners who extracted more wealth at a much higher rate out of the mines, this happened already during the republican era. 79.159.202.35 (talk) 16:56, 20 November 2023 (UTC)