Bret Devereaux

Wrt Bret's point abt athleticism offset by poor nutrition I don't buy that. If discussing hoplites & athletes, these were mostly citizens who had adequate calories and protein Classical skeletal analyses show high animal protein consumption and few periods of nutritional stress

Speaking from the perspective of someone who has used ancient farming methods to include working oxen, that "reasonably" in the description of the modern person is doing a LOT of work. Most moderns would struggle to complete ancient farming tasks.

Ox yokes are heavy, so just getting your team ready to go is going to be a struggle. But then keeping the point of an ard driven into soil is also a lot of dang work. Using a pitchfork to stack hay is a lot of dang work. Hoeing a field by hand, etc etc.

So I guess the question is what we're defining as a "reasonably fit" modern person, cause I don't actually let John Q Public help yoke oxen at demos, he's likely to overestimate his ability to lift and hold the yoke while getting the bows in place and drop it.

Problem: modern subsistence farmers do tend to suffer regular bouts of malnutrition which often leaves lasting negative health effects (esp. in childhood). Demographically, we see evidence for the same (via seasonal mortality) among ancient subsistence farmers.

Which leads me to conclude that - whatever the skills of John Q Public - ancient farming methods appear to regularly have been performed by individuals whose nutrition was, at times, borderline.

Now, many hoplites - especially in front-rank or ekdromoi capacity - were not these marginal farmers. They were well-to-do, we know, because they had expensive armor & weapons. But we know those marginal farmers existed.

I think we can be pretty sure, for instance, that the enslaved laborers who yoked Cato the Elder's animals were not in optimal nutritional health, given what he tells us about how he fed, supplied and clothed them.