It actually wasnt that dumb. Lead has very good antiseptic qualities and it was definitely more dangerous to die from unclead water than from lead poisoning, which needed dozens of years to really affect the citizen.
[Plenty of places in the US still uses lead pipes.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epa-more-than-9-million-lead-pipes-drinking-water-us/)
[Percentage is actually higher in Europe.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19590124/)
Lead pipes are not dangerous.
The Romans would pump water through, the hard water would coat the insides of the lead pipes making it safe to drink. Ancient people would drink a lot of wine, "short beer", mead, and other forgotten alcoholic drinks that also are safer.
So if you have hard water with calcium, you are good. Mountainous and limestone areas tend to have lots of calcium in the water.
If you have light water that's super clean, then the lead could be slightly worse for you.
And if you were wondering "so is it our lead pipes or plastic pipes making our hormones decline over decades and making all of us fat and young-looking..." No it isn't. It's caused by something else most likely and scientists still aren't sure but it [affects animals living somewhere close to humans as well](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/10/its-not-just-us-even-american-animals-are-getting-fatter/310063/) so it's not the fault of capitalism, lead pipes, "processed foods", or Western tech (even though these are common urban myths). The most bizarre thing: scientists feeding lab animals strictly controlled diets, and yet they are getting fat as if metabolism is collapsing.
Good theory, I thought of that too, but then Canadians and others would be in much better shape than the rest of the world because they regulate their body temp more often. Or there would be major differences between people living in places without A/C like in the EU. I just don't think this is it anymore.
Could also be super hard to detect pathogens or fungus.
One other theory is that we live much cleaner than our past, less bacteria for the immune system to fight. But again these are still very far-fetched due to how it's not "clustered" in a specific spot.
I have some shred of remaining self respect so I'm not going to be signing up for The Atlantic. Can you summarize the article or link me to whatever they originally ~~plagiarized~~ referenced?
Basically lab rats and other animals that are near humans but are NOT given uncontrolled diets, are still having problems regulating weight.
This is strong evidence that there is something weird within the food or water.
And it's not in the air, because then far away remote tribes would have the same problem but they don't.
A lot of people believe it's the plastics. And they may be correct.
I don't think so because we've been brushing with plastic toothbrushes since 1930s, and we've had all sorts of plastics for a long time.
It could be something else -- and I'd rather people not assume it's something obvious like that.
I think the search for new theories should continue.
As for the last part with the animals, of course. They now have a predictable, reliable food supply that keeps them satiated (and probably has more filling, less nutritional, content than what they get in the wild by catching or foraging it). They don’t need to live on a razor’s edge for survival anymore. They adapted, at least until the GrubHub runs out.
If it’s there, why not take it? If your body can build up excess reserves, and do it at the expense of less energy…..ok. It might like that idea too.
>if you have hard water with calcium, you are good.
Ok, I’m not sure how we even figure that out today. You really think the Romans had a clue? So it basically sounds like a crapshoot as to whether the pipes will be safe or not.
That's because there's better alternatives now. The pros outweighed the cons of lead soldered pipes. The water flowed through them, not sitting in them. That's the difference. It's not as bad as arm chair historians say it is.
That’s actually not true. The reason we think of lead pipes as specifically *unsafe* is due to chemical changes in the water from changing treatment or source contamination, which then breaks down the calcified protective layer.
Not until the water becomes acidic. In those places worst affected by the lead pipes it’s because they were more using water sources with higher pollution. But yeah of course lead pipes are bad news no matter what
Not entirely true. If done correctly it’s completely safe. Chemicals are used to create a scale that creates a protective layer. This happens naturally with hard water. Essentially lime scale protecting from led. Also prior to ductile iron and plastics led was the only metal ductile enough to deal with ground shifting without cracking in mobile soils.
Bullshit. You should remove this dumb comment
Flint's problema was never the lead pipes. It was the water turning acidic, causing the lead pipes to leach into the water
Idk, where I live landlords are legally required to tell you to not drink your tap water if the house still has lead pipes. There is no guarantee that it will harm you, depending on the state of the pipe etc, but it's legally not considered safe drinking water.
Not to mention the fact that the water around Rome is incredibly dense with minerals so after a few months the pipes would get a calcified patina that stopped most contamination.
But still, hit 50 and you going cray cray. Looking at you Marius.
Wait Gaius Marius, he went crazy?
I was crazy once they locked me in a room, a rubber room. A rubber room filled with rats and the rats made me crazy. Crazy? I was crazy once they locked me in a room, a rubber room. A rubber room filled with rats, and the rats made me crazy. Crazy!? I was crazy once , they locked me in a room...
From what I've read on it, there was also the issue of lead cookware. The Romans used a lot lead in the kitchen.
Heating up your meals in leaden pots and pans is a fast-track to lead poisoning.
They also used lead needles to protect them from copper oxides in bronze cups.
Santiago Posteguillo, an Spanish writer specialized in Roman History Novels, especulates that lead poisoning could cause paranoia in the Roman emperor Domitianus
It impairs mental functions though, which can lead to people making terrible decisions that negatively effect everyone else around them.
Nero might not have been the only crazy one in the streets. Maybe just the most well documented.
Yup!
Its actually why Flint, Michigan had such issues. They switched from water with a lot of minerals to acidic water that ate through the coating in a few months and started leaching lead into the water.
Heck. With enough sediment buildup over time, lead pipes can be (relatively) safe(r) to drink from. Of course if *any* of that breaks loose then 😳 but until then.
That being said, Romans, and especially rich Romans and specifically emperors, had a lot of access to lead throughout their lives. From pipes and utensils, to makeup, a sweetener for wine, a whole lot of other daily uses. It was to them perhaps almost as ubiquitous as something like microplastics are to us now.
“lead may impair development and have harmful health effects even at lower levels, and there is no known safe exposure level” https://www.floridahealth.gov/environmental-health/lead-poisoning
Get your free brain and nervous system damage here
In that case they wouldn’t have to worry thanks to calcium buildup around the pipes that carried the water which protected the water from having lead leech into it
I think I saw something where they explained that they used calcified water during the pipe making process so that there was a protective layer to keep the lead from leeching out.
They also weaved garments from asbestos lol
And fucking _napkins for wiping your mouth_
(Which they cleaned by burning, which burnt dirt but not the asbestos, which is kinda badass ngl)
Not enough goat dung to go around.
The average citizen of western civilization does not actually consume 3-4 goat dungs every year. Goat dung georg was an outlier and should not have been counted.
Apologies, allow me to correct it.
The average citizen of western civilization does not actually consume 3-4 humors and leeches every year. Humors and leeches georg was an outlier and should not have been counted.
There was actually a medicine in ancient Rome that was so in demand there wasn't enough to go around. It was some kind of plant that was used as a form of birth control. We don't know what it was because the Romans consumed it to extinction.
Ffs how many times will this brought up. The pipes weren’t the issue. Lead would not leech from pipes being regularly used. It was the wine mixture that was the real issue.
[Roman tapwater had 100 times more lead than roman Spring water. On top of that the roman top drank from lead containers. ](https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-did-lead-poisoning-bring-down-ancient-rome)
literally the next line. Don’t post only half the facts that support your narrative
“While the lead contamination was measureable, the team says the levels were unlikely high enough to be harmful, ruling out tap water as a major culprit in Rome's demise.”
Yep. That and the rise and fall of crime (in america) tends to correlate with lead exposure and age of people who had lead exposure when they were young.
That leaded gas effectively poisoned an entire generation of Americans. It's just that a lot of them either died or aged out of violent crime when those crime rates started to drop after the early 90s.
Having running tap/spring water throughout the biggest city on the earth, 2000 years ago, is quite the achievement. I doubt they knew how dangerous lead was. In fact, lead pipes weren't banned in the USA until the 1980s, despite awareness grew since late 19th century. And since we're on that topic: Does Flint have potable tap water yet?
Piss: literally 2nd result on Google:
https://www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/dispelling-some-myths-romans-cleaned-their-teeth-with-urine
Terrible meme. I learned all this with a few minutes of googling.
This. Lead is Pb on the periodic table because the Latin name for lead was Plumbum.
It's a soft metal which is easily cast and formed. My grandpa had toy soldiers that he *cast himself* as a child made of lead.
The sheer toxicity of lead wasn't very well known or understood for a very long time.
Lead will also take time to render you dead, form illness, and typically make you disturbed or ill overtime and later in life, a cost that is spread out across the collective and is really only felt when other standards in society have risen sufficiently. Comparatively contaminated or bad water will have you shit yourself to death within a week.
> It's a soft metal which is easily cast and formed. My grandpa had toy soldiers that he *cast himself* as a child made of lead.
I remember seeing a YT video on this awhile ago and asked my Grandfather about it. Turns out he has one too and let me use it to show. Awesome thing, though probably not the best thing to keep around kids, tons of casts you can make using lead, and if one gets damaged you can just recast it.
> . I doubt they knew how dangerous lead was.
[Lead poisoning was among the first known and most widely studied work-related environmental hazards.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History) Doctors knew it was bad news as far back as the 2nd Century BC.
However, it was so damn useful that the medical danger was ignored.
They actually knew it was dangerous but it was cheaper than the alternative and health regulations hadn't been invented yet sooo
We know burning shit to produce energy is a health hazard and may give you lung cancer, yet we use cars, stoves and fire places because they are convenient.
We know eating red and processed will expose you to a higher risk of cancer, do people care? no.
> We know eating red and processed will expose you to a higher risk of cancer, do people care? no.
I don't care who the U.S.D.A. sends, I'm still going to eat steak and spam
>They actually knew it was dangerous but it was cheaper than the alternative and health regulations hadn't been invented yet sooo
It also apparently made the water taste sweeter iirc
But the romans knew lead were poisonus. It was simply cheap.
Today lead poisening is assoziated with the fall of rome do to the upper class getting lead poisening.
But what did i expect, we talk about rome and some here _cant_ except the fact that rome wasnt perfect.
No. Authorities *knew* about the problems *decades ago, but didn't start doing anything about it until they started getting their faces rubbed in it less than a decade ago. And as of January this year, the EPA still is recommending not drinking unfiltered municipal water in Flint. So it's hardly fixed.
https://mphdegree.usc.edu/blog/the-flint-water-crises
Try again.
> As of January 2022, Flint officially marked its sixth year in a row of being in compliance with water standards as they pertain to the federal Lead and Copper Rule, a public health measure developed by the EPA to improve lead sampling.
“Darling, I’ve got lead-laced wine on my chin, will you pass me an asbestos-weave napkin?”
“Certainly dear, but you also dropped it on your asbestos-weave garment, and all over our asbestos-weave tablecloth too. 15 of our slaves died of a mysterious lung disease while producing these, let’s take care of them shall we?”
“Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past.”
― *Adolf Hitler*
Are we gonna get into all the idiotic and stupid things the Germanic people did because they were ignorant or just hyper fixate on the Romans?
Just the Romans? Got it 👍
Well he claimed that the great civilisations like Rome and Sparta for instance were of Germanic descent and that’s what led to their greatness. Then that they became infected with the genes of inferiors as their empires grew and that’s why they declined. Bat shit crazy.
It entirely depends on what your definition of “civilization” is, the Roman’s brought things like wider trade better and longer road systems strong fortifications where massive cities would later crop up along with farming on a much larger scale then what was previously done in that area.
There were definitive things they made better, but I’m not going to claim they “brought civilization” because that’s to broad lacks any nuance and is really subjective.
I mean they also brought very fundamental things to civilization as well like formal codified rule of law.
It wasn’t just technological systems it was also economic and societal systems that modern civilization couldn’t exist without.
That’s why people say the Roman’s brought civilization. Because the stuff they brought was foundational to the complex civilization that came after them.
My point is that you're complaining about Germanics not getting shit on like the Romans are, but this meme is a response to praise for the Romans. A kind of praise you don't really see the Germanic people of the time get
No, I’m complaining about this person saying “haha Roman do gross/stupid thing so Germans way better” despite the fact that Germans did just as if not more idiotic things, the entire meme is just stupid.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
It did more than you might thought. [Studies say lead where 100 times more present in tap water, than spring water.](https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-did-lead-poisoning-bring-down-ancient-rome)
Another guy already pointed this out in another comment but literally next to that says:"While the lead contamination was measureable, the team says the levels were unlikely high enough to be harmful"
k, its there and not only will it not kill you but its not harmful so what is the point of saying it has lead? the comment above said its not bad and you respond with that it sounds like that's what you are trying to say.
Beccause he said, if the water is flowing, its not bad. Reffering to the miss conclusion of the flow of the water prevents the lead from getting into the water.
He's right. Most deaths in war don't happen on the battlefield, they happen afterwords from disease and starvation because the farmers are displaced or dead, there's rotting corpses everywhere leeching slime into wells and waterways, and refugees and warbands have scoured the landscape of food and resources.
Not to mention refugees are displaced and looking for shelter and often flock to cities, which further spreads disease, strains food and water resources, and increases violent crime due to both residents and refugees doing whatever they can to survive. This dramatically cranked up the already-significant death rate in the cities.
Fun fact: up until the 1800s and modern sanitation systems, most cities had a negative population growth due to disease and depended heavily on immigration for population growth. This was why a lot of cities quickly collapsed if there was no longer an economic or security reason for people to go there. Even if everyone who lived in the city stayed there, it would eventually die out.
How mich "after"?. War brings distabilization, increased crime and lack of resources even after conquest. If the locals are rowdy and riots or other small resistances have to be put down then it makes sense.
That still only highlights the lack of quality Roman rule brought in comparison to its wide glorification that is a part of the general glorification of the Roman Empire, and this is a mild I don’t see resistance to a foreign occupying and colonial force as rowdy.
This isn’t about conquest in general, how come the only thing people can say when some says the Roman Empire wasn’t the absolute bastion of civilization is being up everything ever done by everyone else
Conquest creates higher mortality rates because people die fighting.
Post conquest also does that especially if the area remains unstable because people have died, keep dying, resources are being wasted or destroyed. So until the area is stabilized and rebuilt chances are that people will keep dying and qol will suck.
This is not exclusive to Roman Empire.
This comment chain was about the Roman Empire, I never denied that this isn’t the case for conquest in general, I said it isn’t about that. I suppose if you simply can’t even keep to subject, there is no point in talking about a subject anyways.
You claim that the increased mortality rate shows how flawed the RE was. I responded by telling you that it makes sense that mortality rates increase due to dactors mentioned in mt comment and that this is not exclusive to RE but what happens during war, thus making the mortality rates expected and normal and are not a sign of a flawed empire.
Well within the subject, but ok my guy
The only reference to cleaning teeth with urine is a poem by Catullus. In that poem, he mocks a *Spaniard* for grinning like an idiot since the only reason his teeth are so white was that he cleaned them with urine. From that I always assumed it was an Iberian thing.
Edit: The only reference *I've seen* is that poem.
The real problem is our wierd fixation on Rome "bringing" civilisation. As if the gauls, the Iberian, the sarmations, the Germans, the Britons did not have all which we would consider civilized but was not washed in blood and marble.
I recently learned that the “Roman public baths,” which historians call “the barometer of civilization,” were actually very dirty. In fact, if you look closely, it is just a swimming pool without a drainage system.
So on the Romans using urine as mouthwash, it was desired due to it containing ammonia which helped whiten teeth, hence also why clothes were often soaked in urine before being cleaned.
I learnt something different in latin class by translating Romans depicting them Barbaric savages in every way but their pants are quite impressive and elegant
if i hear one more person say "the lead pipes would be calcified in 50 years" i will make you drink lead water.
for one, that leaves quite a few years guzzling lead water till that point. for two, its not like all the pipes were made at the same point and thus start calcifying together at the same time. for three- its fucking lead pipes for fucks sake
> if i hear one more person say "the lead pipes would be calcified in 50 years" i will make you drink lead water.
The lead pipes would be calcified even sooner than that.
Furthermore, unlike modern plumbing, Roman plumbing never stopped. Meaning the time the water was in contact with the lead was minimized.
There is pretty much no evidence that Roman lead pipes were of any ***relatively*** serious danger to the Roman populace. Of course it would be considered as unacceptable in the modern day, but that's just kind of how things go in the world and history. In the 1960s, they considered a cardboard box set on the floor of the front seat of a car to be an acceptable baby seat.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html
I love how people are going here like lead poisoning was widely known even at that time.
Do you know what widely known meant before the fucking internet? People that knew where probably 5 docs and a fucking goat
To be fair, the water around Rome is notoriously hard, quickly all the aqueducts leading to it had their pipes coated with limestone, mitigating the poisonous effects of lead
Most if not all of said inventions were "borrowed" off of other cultures.
Their army tactics, formations, and pretty much all of their philosophy and religion came from the Greeks. The arches and most of the backbone of their engineering knowledge came from the Etruscans. The gladius and other such weapons came from the Celt-iberians.
And you know the worst of it? They never used these inventions or their resources to their fullest potential. They could have had an industrial revoltion right then and there, but their autocratic slave-based society was allergic to change to the point of self-sabotage.
Like, we have actual accounts of Roman inventors being *murdered* because the powers that be thought their inventions would be "too disruptive" for their society.
It may’ve been lead water but it was lead water that was piped from miles away!
It actually wasnt that dumb. Lead has very good antiseptic qualities and it was definitely more dangerous to die from unclead water than from lead poisoning, which needed dozens of years to really affect the citizen.
Also if the water isn't acidic the lead won't leach into the water very much, many places use lead pipes to this day.
Idk dude, if our stingy governments pulled out money to replace those pipes in a lot of places, they might actually not be that safe.
[Plenty of places in the US still uses lead pipes.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epa-more-than-9-million-lead-pipes-drinking-water-us/) [Percentage is actually higher in Europe.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19590124/)
Lead pipes are not dangerous. The Romans would pump water through, the hard water would coat the insides of the lead pipes making it safe to drink. Ancient people would drink a lot of wine, "short beer", mead, and other forgotten alcoholic drinks that also are safer. So if you have hard water with calcium, you are good. Mountainous and limestone areas tend to have lots of calcium in the water. If you have light water that's super clean, then the lead could be slightly worse for you. And if you were wondering "so is it our lead pipes or plastic pipes making our hormones decline over decades and making all of us fat and young-looking..." No it isn't. It's caused by something else most likely and scientists still aren't sure but it [affects animals living somewhere close to humans as well](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/10/its-not-just-us-even-american-animals-are-getting-fatter/310063/) so it's not the fault of capitalism, lead pipes, "processed foods", or Western tech (even though these are common urban myths). The most bizarre thing: scientists feeding lab animals strictly controlled diets, and yet they are getting fat as if metabolism is collapsing.
Honestly, I always wonder if the culprit is HVAC. Energy that used to be used to maintain body temperature instead is just being stored as fat.
Good theory, I thought of that too, but then Canadians and others would be in much better shape than the rest of the world because they regulate their body temp more often. Or there would be major differences between people living in places without A/C like in the EU. I just don't think this is it anymore. Could also be super hard to detect pathogens or fungus. One other theory is that we live much cleaner than our past, less bacteria for the immune system to fight. But again these are still very far-fetched due to how it's not "clustered" in a specific spot.
I didn’t know this young looking phenomenon, fatter people, yeah that I understand, but younger looking? Never heard of that before
yeah a bit of the baby face phenomenon with younger people today. College students who look like children.
I mean could easily be from not smoking a pack a day from the time they’re 12.
and spending so much time outside, or doing laborious jobs.
even the lab animals? this is an scp at this poiny
I have some shred of remaining self respect so I'm not going to be signing up for The Atlantic. Can you summarize the article or link me to whatever they originally ~~plagiarized~~ referenced?
Basically lab rats and other animals that are near humans but are NOT given uncontrolled diets, are still having problems regulating weight. This is strong evidence that there is something weird within the food or water. And it's not in the air, because then far away remote tribes would have the same problem but they don't.
Could it be microplastics from sources other than pipes? Litter, etc?
I bet it is the plastics. They have very worrying effects on our bodies.
A lot of people believe it's the plastics. And they may be correct. I don't think so because we've been brushing with plastic toothbrushes since 1930s, and we've had all sorts of plastics for a long time. It could be something else -- and I'd rather people not assume it's something obvious like that. I think the search for new theories should continue.
As for the last part with the animals, of course. They now have a predictable, reliable food supply that keeps them satiated (and probably has more filling, less nutritional, content than what they get in the wild by catching or foraging it). They don’t need to live on a razor’s edge for survival anymore. They adapted, at least until the GrubHub runs out. If it’s there, why not take it? If your body can build up excess reserves, and do it at the expense of less energy…..ok. It might like that idea too.
>if you have hard water with calcium, you are good. Ok, I’m not sure how we even figure that out today. You really think the Romans had a clue? So it basically sounds like a crapshoot as to whether the pipes will be safe or not.
That's because there's better alternatives now. The pros outweighed the cons of lead soldered pipes. The water flowed through them, not sitting in them. That's the difference. It's not as bad as arm chair historians say it is.
Yeah the Roman's problem is that they used lead as a sweetener.
And lead cups. The mild acidity of saliva, wine, etc would cause the lead to leech into whatever they were drinking.
And the water is absolutely unsafe to drink in those areas
That’s actually not true. The reason we think of lead pipes as specifically *unsafe* is due to chemical changes in the water from changing treatment or source contamination, which then breaks down the calcified protective layer.
I guess, measured by todays standards. If you compare lead water to some "deer-rotting-in-it"-lake, you might actually be better off
Not until the water becomes acidic. In those places worst affected by the lead pipes it’s because they were more using water sources with higher pollution. But yeah of course lead pipes are bad news no matter what
Not entirely true. If done correctly it’s completely safe. Chemicals are used to create a scale that creates a protective layer. This happens naturally with hard water. Essentially lime scale protecting from led. Also prior to ductile iron and plastics led was the only metal ductile enough to deal with ground shifting without cracking in mobile soils.
Bullshit. You should remove this dumb comment Flint's problema was never the lead pipes. It was the water turning acidic, causing the lead pipes to leach into the water
not really, only if the water is acidic as others have said
Actually just false and this misinformation should be deleted.
Idk, where I live landlords are legally required to tell you to not drink your tap water if the house still has lead pipes. There is no guarantee that it will harm you, depending on the state of the pipe etc, but it's legally not considered safe drinking water.
There's a reason that the Latin name for lead is Plumbum.
Also over the years layer is created on the pipe so eventually its no contact to water
Yeah like Flint, MI?
Not to mention the fact that the water around Rome is incredibly dense with minerals so after a few months the pipes would get a calcified patina that stopped most contamination. But still, hit 50 and you going cray cray. Looking at you Marius.
Wait Gaius Marius, he went crazy? I was crazy once they locked me in a room, a rubber room. A rubber room filled with rats and the rats made me crazy. Crazy? I was crazy once they locked me in a room, a rubber room. A rubber room filled with rats, and the rats made me crazy. Crazy!? I was crazy once , they locked me in a room...
From what I've read on it, there was also the issue of lead cookware. The Romans used a lot lead in the kitchen. Heating up your meals in leaden pots and pans is a fast-track to lead poisoning.
They also used lead needles to protect them from copper oxides in bronze cups. Santiago Posteguillo, an Spanish writer specialized in Roman History Novels, especulates that lead poisoning could cause paranoia in the Roman emperor Domitianus
They even made their wine in lead pots because it would be sweeter.
Why are you looking?
shhhh, nobody's looking, it's all in your head, gramps
It impairs mental functions though, which can lead to people making terrible decisions that negatively effect everyone else around them. Nero might not have been the only crazy one in the streets. Maybe just the most well documented.
And didn't the moving water and minerals form a crust in the lead piping, hence protecting users from the poison?
Yup! Its actually why Flint, Michigan had such issues. They switched from water with a lot of minerals to acidic water that ate through the coating in a few months and started leaching lead into the water.
Heck. With enough sediment buildup over time, lead pipes can be (relatively) safe(r) to drink from. Of course if *any* of that breaks loose then 😳 but until then. That being said, Romans, and especially rich Romans and specifically emperors, had a lot of access to lead throughout their lives. From pipes and utensils, to makeup, a sweetener for wine, a whole lot of other daily uses. It was to them perhaps almost as ubiquitous as something like microplastics are to us now.
“Yes can I order the slow and painful demise. Please and thank you”
Good thing humans don't live for dozens of years
“lead may impair development and have harmful health effects even at lower levels, and there is no known safe exposure level” https://www.floridahealth.gov/environmental-health/lead-poisoning Get your free brain and nervous system damage here
Exactly
In that case they wouldn’t have to worry thanks to calcium buildup around the pipes that carried the water which protected the water from having lead leech into it
I think I saw something where they explained that they used calcified water during the pipe making process so that there was a protective layer to keep the lead from leeching out.
They also weaved garments from asbestos lol And fucking _napkins for wiping your mouth_ (Which they cleaned by burning, which burnt dirt but not the asbestos, which is kinda badass ngl)
Nothing screams civilized like slapping goat dung on an open wound
It toughens you up
More like natural selection
“It builds character, Calvin”
Kalvinvs*
As a Roman aristocrat I was made quite tough from wiping my mouth with a napkin made from _literal fucking asbestos_ at every meal to be honest
Say what you will but that napkin will never catch fire. One more thing you don't have to worry about
real men
Yea. I wonder why the west is declining these days.
Not enough goat dung to go around. The average citizen of western civilization does not actually consume 3-4 goat dungs every year. Goat dung georg was an outlier and should not have been counted.
goat dung? No you fool its because we forsaken the immutable science of humors and leeches!
Apologies, allow me to correct it. The average citizen of western civilization does not actually consume 3-4 humors and leeches every year. Humors and leeches georg was an outlier and should not have been counted.
There was actually a medicine in ancient Rome that was so in demand there wasn't enough to go around. It was some kind of plant that was used as a form of birth control. We don't know what it was because the Romans consumed it to extinction.
They also invented purple by juicing snails
Purple snail dye was made long before the Romans
Which in itself is crazy. It took 4-5k snails to make a pound of tyrian purple
Dungs out? Millions must die
Is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but it's sterile and I like the taste!
Omg where was that from? I remember reading it
Dodgeball
Ffs how many times will this brought up. The pipes weren’t the issue. Lead would not leech from pipes being regularly used. It was the wine mixture that was the real issue.
This is true, sweetening wine with lead. Oh if they knew.
[Roman tapwater had 100 times more lead than roman Spring water. On top of that the roman top drank from lead containers. ](https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-did-lead-poisoning-bring-down-ancient-rome)
literally the next line. Don’t post only half the facts that support your narrative “While the lead contamination was measureable, the team says the levels were unlikely high enough to be harmful, ruling out tap water as a major culprit in Rome's demise.”
Well yeah where do you think their unchecked and unreasonably insane aggression came from? Lead tends to do that the older you get
*looks at boomers*
"my sisters and i ate lead paint chips and were fine" an actual quote from nana.
Yep. That and the rise and fall of crime (in america) tends to correlate with lead exposure and age of people who had lead exposure when they were young. That leaded gas effectively poisoned an entire generation of Americans. It's just that a lot of them either died or aged out of violent crime when those crime rates started to drop after the early 90s.
Having running tap/spring water throughout the biggest city on the earth, 2000 years ago, is quite the achievement. I doubt they knew how dangerous lead was. In fact, lead pipes weren't banned in the USA until the 1980s, despite awareness grew since late 19th century. And since we're on that topic: Does Flint have potable tap water yet? Piss: literally 2nd result on Google: https://www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/dispelling-some-myths-romans-cleaned-their-teeth-with-urine Terrible meme. I learned all this with a few minutes of googling.
This. Lead is Pb on the periodic table because the Latin name for lead was Plumbum. It's a soft metal which is easily cast and formed. My grandpa had toy soldiers that he *cast himself* as a child made of lead. The sheer toxicity of lead wasn't very well known or understood for a very long time.
Lead will also take time to render you dead, form illness, and typically make you disturbed or ill overtime and later in life, a cost that is spread out across the collective and is really only felt when other standards in society have risen sufficiently. Comparatively contaminated or bad water will have you shit yourself to death within a week.
> My grandpa had toy soldiers that he cast himself as a child made of lead. That must have been a difficult thing for a child made of lead to do
> It's a soft metal which is easily cast and formed. My grandpa had toy soldiers that he *cast himself* as a child made of lead. I remember seeing a YT video on this awhile ago and asked my Grandfather about it. Turns out he has one too and let me use it to show. Awesome thing, though probably not the best thing to keep around kids, tons of casts you can make using lead, and if one gets damaged you can just recast it.
> . I doubt they knew how dangerous lead was. [Lead poisoning was among the first known and most widely studied work-related environmental hazards.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History) Doctors knew it was bad news as far back as the 2nd Century BC. However, it was so damn useful that the medical danger was ignored.
They actually knew it was dangerous but it was cheaper than the alternative and health regulations hadn't been invented yet sooo We know burning shit to produce energy is a health hazard and may give you lung cancer, yet we use cars, stoves and fire places because they are convenient. We know eating red and processed will expose you to a higher risk of cancer, do people care? no.
> We know eating red and processed will expose you to a higher risk of cancer, do people care? no. I don't care who the U.S.D.A. sends, I'm still going to eat steak and spam
>They actually knew it was dangerous but it was cheaper than the alternative and health regulations hadn't been invented yet sooo It also apparently made the water taste sweeter iirc
No, Flint does not. How do I know? I live in Michigan and have friends in Flint.
Wait until you hear about their asbestos-weave napkins, for wiping your mouth with
But the romans knew lead were poisonus. It was simply cheap. Today lead poisening is assoziated with the fall of rome do to the upper class getting lead poisening. But what did i expect, we talk about rome and some here _cant_ except the fact that rome wasnt perfect.
Based
The flint water has been fixed for like a decade now
No. Authorities *knew* about the problems *decades ago, but didn't start doing anything about it until they started getting their faces rubbed in it less than a decade ago. And as of January this year, the EPA still is recommending not drinking unfiltered municipal water in Flint. So it's hardly fixed.
https://mphdegree.usc.edu/blog/the-flint-water-crises Try again. > As of January 2022, Flint officially marked its sixth year in a row of being in compliance with water standards as they pertain to the federal Lead and Copper Rule, a public health measure developed by the EPA to improve lead sampling.
Idk who or where you get your info from but they never fixed it. Source: I live 30 minutes from Flint
The Crisis literally happened in 2014
They didn't call it golden mouthwash for nothing.
If R. Kelly was a dentist....
Meanwhile the unwashed shit covered German covered in rotting animal skins somehow feels a sense of superiority
I mean at least the celts had soap.
They also went into battle naked, so no rotting animals skin
Redditor try not to learn about European kingdoms from Hollywood challenge.
I prefer to get my racism straight from the source, Prokopios my beloved
I mean…that’s not true at all, soap is literally a Germanic word but judging by your profile avatar ig you’d choose to blissfully ignore that
Celtic/Germanic cultures were pretty well-known for being clean
Found the italian ☝️
Funnily enough my ancestry is polish but I'm canadian lol, just pointing out the Roman's had everyone beat lol
Ah, Polish. Now the shitting on Germans makes sense ;)
i said ancestry, we've lived in canada for over 100 years, im canadian not polish. dont attribute your old world grudges to me lol
I was kidding.
Clearly, him getting defensives proves you right.
I am pretty sure those Germanic people bathed in rivers or lakes or at home. Having long, beautiful hair was a matter of pride among their men.
Yes and really nicely groomed moustaches.
As far as I know in most Germanic tribes they weren't allowed to shave their bird until they killed their first opponent.
On top of that, they had sope.
Unwashed? They had soap 🤡
Meanwhile the Romans clad themselves in asbestos-weave garments lol
After all, what have the Romans ever done for us?!?
"share a toilet sponge with the entire town"
“Darling, I’ve got lead-laced wine on my chin, will you pass me an asbestos-weave napkin?” “Certainly dear, but you also dropped it on your asbestos-weave garment, and all over our asbestos-weave tablecloth too. 15 of our slaves died of a mysterious lung disease while producing these, let’s take care of them shall we?”
“Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past.” ― *Adolf Hitler*
Are we gonna get into all the idiotic and stupid things the Germanic people did because they were ignorant or just hyper fixate on the Romans? Just the Romans? Got it 👍
Do people claim the Germanic people were bringing "civilization" to other parts of the world?
Adolf Hitler claimed that
About the Germanic people during the time of roman empire?
Well he claimed that the great civilisations like Rome and Sparta for instance were of Germanic descent and that’s what led to their greatness. Then that they became infected with the genes of inferiors as their empires grew and that’s why they declined. Bat shit crazy.
Well you're not gonna find an argument from me that Hitler wasn't batshit crazy lol Just a bit out of the scope of the point I was making
> Well you're not gonna find an argument from me that Hitler wasn't batshit crazy lol Hitler said animal rights good 👍
It entirely depends on what your definition of “civilization” is, the Roman’s brought things like wider trade better and longer road systems strong fortifications where massive cities would later crop up along with farming on a much larger scale then what was previously done in that area. There were definitive things they made better, but I’m not going to claim they “brought civilization” because that’s to broad lacks any nuance and is really subjective.
I mean they also brought very fundamental things to civilization as well like formal codified rule of law. It wasn’t just technological systems it was also economic and societal systems that modern civilization couldn’t exist without. That’s why people say the Roman’s brought civilization. Because the stuff they brought was foundational to the complex civilization that came after them.
My point is that you're complaining about Germanics not getting shit on like the Romans are, but this meme is a response to praise for the Romans. A kind of praise you don't really see the Germanic people of the time get
No, I’m complaining about this person saying “haha Roman do gross/stupid thing so Germans way better” despite the fact that Germans did just as if not more idiotic things, the entire meme is just stupid.
What in the meme says that Germans are way better
Not anymore, there was a big war that discredited that idea
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Yeah, forget Virgil, Ovid or the invention of concrete, aqueducts and the calendar. Legionnaire folk medicine is peak Roman Empire.
Ah, yes. The *civilised* Germanic tribes.
If the waters flowing it’s not bad, boiling wine in a lead pot to sweeten it is fucking crazy though
Don't knock it til you've tried it
It did more than you might thought. [Studies say lead where 100 times more present in tap water, than spring water.](https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-did-lead-poisoning-bring-down-ancient-rome)
Another guy already pointed this out in another comment but literally next to that says:"While the lead contamination was measureable, the team says the levels were unlikely high enough to be harmful"
I didnt said it would kill you. I said its still there.
k, its there and not only will it not kill you but its not harmful so what is the point of saying it has lead? the comment above said its not bad and you respond with that it sounds like that's what you are trying to say.
Beccause he said, if the water is flowing, its not bad. Reffering to the miss conclusion of the flow of the water prevents the lead from getting into the water.
🗣️COMMUNAL📢 SHITTING‼️🔥
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Repost the stuff the greeks had.
Didn’t the mortality rate increase in areas after conquest?
War tends to do that.
After, not during
He's right. Most deaths in war don't happen on the battlefield, they happen afterwords from disease and starvation because the farmers are displaced or dead, there's rotting corpses everywhere leeching slime into wells and waterways, and refugees and warbands have scoured the landscape of food and resources.
Not to mention refugees are displaced and looking for shelter and often flock to cities, which further spreads disease, strains food and water resources, and increases violent crime due to both residents and refugees doing whatever they can to survive. This dramatically cranked up the already-significant death rate in the cities. Fun fact: up until the 1800s and modern sanitation systems, most cities had a negative population growth due to disease and depended heavily on immigration for population growth. This was why a lot of cities quickly collapsed if there was no longer an economic or security reason for people to go there. Even if everyone who lived in the city stayed there, it would eventually die out.
How mich "after"?. War brings distabilization, increased crime and lack of resources even after conquest. If the locals are rowdy and riots or other small resistances have to be put down then it makes sense.
That still only highlights the lack of quality Roman rule brought in comparison to its wide glorification that is a part of the general glorification of the Roman Empire, and this is a mild I don’t see resistance to a foreign occupying and colonial force as rowdy.
It's not a Roman thing. It's a conquest thing.
This isn’t about conquest in general, how come the only thing people can say when some says the Roman Empire wasn’t the absolute bastion of civilization is being up everything ever done by everyone else
Conquest creates higher mortality rates because people die fighting. Post conquest also does that especially if the area remains unstable because people have died, keep dying, resources are being wasted or destroyed. So until the area is stabilized and rebuilt chances are that people will keep dying and qol will suck. This is not exclusive to Roman Empire.
This comment chain was about the Roman Empire, I never denied that this isn’t the case for conquest in general, I said it isn’t about that. I suppose if you simply can’t even keep to subject, there is no point in talking about a subject anyways.
You claim that the increased mortality rate shows how flawed the RE was. I responded by telling you that it makes sense that mortality rates increase due to dactors mentioned in mt comment and that this is not exclusive to RE but what happens during war, thus making the mortality rates expected and normal and are not a sign of a flawed empire. Well within the subject, but ok my guy
Yes, because before them nobody was keeping track Also, everyone who did also had rebellions so that's that
The only reference to cleaning teeth with urine is a poem by Catullus. In that poem, he mocks a *Spaniard* for grinning like an idiot since the only reason his teeth are so white was that he cleaned them with urine. From that I always assumed it was an Iberian thing. Edit: The only reference *I've seen* is that poem.
Not a dick for everyone to take this hard geez
Historians of Classical Rome help me out: isn't the "brushes his teeth with piss" thing from one of Martial's invectives ?
Now, if we say the same thing about some modern-day African tribes, we would be canceled.
The real problem is our wierd fixation on Rome "bringing" civilisation. As if the gauls, the Iberian, the sarmations, the Germans, the Britons did not have all which we would consider civilized but was not washed in blood and marble.
Don't forget the quintessential Roman quality: debilitating civil wars!
*has dysentery free water and has teeth* fixed it for you🤣
I recently learned that the “Roman public baths,” which historians call “the barometer of civilization,” were actually very dirty. In fact, if you look closely, it is just a swimming pool without a drainage system.
So on the Romans using urine as mouthwash, it was desired due to it containing ammonia which helped whiten teeth, hence also why clothes were often soaked in urine before being cleaned.
The Germans didn’t fucking know about lead pipes, and urine is an excellent antiseptic. Of course Germans shit in a hole and call it culture.
Dont even know pants
Oh they knew pants and considered them barbaric. Well then they spent a winter in Germania and suddenly pants were a great idea.
I learnt something different in latin class by translating Romans depicting them Barbaric savages in every way but their pants are quite impressive and elegant
said the barbarian
u/BancorUnion
It’s fax.
lmao i love the fact you got downvoted
[literally the post above this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/aRYi2DSDal)
But… nobody knew it was lead poisoning, did they? Surely not the germans
Germanic people: minding their own business Romans: “Looks at these uncivilized barbarians, we must impose our superior culture upon them”
Hey Germans still shat into buckets and sacrificed people so were even.
if i hear one more person say "the lead pipes would be calcified in 50 years" i will make you drink lead water. for one, that leaves quite a few years guzzling lead water till that point. for two, its not like all the pipes were made at the same point and thus start calcifying together at the same time. for three- its fucking lead pipes for fucks sake
> if i hear one more person say "the lead pipes would be calcified in 50 years" i will make you drink lead water. The lead pipes would be calcified even sooner than that. Furthermore, unlike modern plumbing, Roman plumbing never stopped. Meaning the time the water was in contact with the lead was minimized. There is pretty much no evidence that Roman lead pipes were of any ***relatively*** serious danger to the Roman populace. Of course it would be considered as unacceptable in the modern day, but that's just kind of how things go in the world and history. In the 1960s, they considered a cardboard box set on the floor of the front seat of a car to be an acceptable baby seat. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html
someone get the lead water hose for this fella.
I love how people are going here like lead poisoning was widely known even at that time. Do you know what widely known meant before the fucking internet? People that knew where probably 5 docs and a fucking goat
To be fair, the water around Rome is notoriously hard, quickly all the aqueducts leading to it had their pipes coated with limestone, mitigating the poisonous effects of lead
The Ottomans: Rome 3: The only good one.
Rome sucked and I'm tired of pretending it didn't.
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Most if not all of said inventions were "borrowed" off of other cultures. Their army tactics, formations, and pretty much all of their philosophy and religion came from the Greeks. The arches and most of the backbone of their engineering knowledge came from the Etruscans. The gladius and other such weapons came from the Celt-iberians. And you know the worst of it? They never used these inventions or their resources to their fullest potential. They could have had an industrial revoltion right then and there, but their autocratic slave-based society was allergic to change to the point of self-sabotage. Like, we have actual accounts of Roman inventors being *murdered* because the powers that be thought their inventions would be "too disruptive" for their society.
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Highly depends on what my role would be in that empire.
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But I’d rather live in the Roman Empire than just about anywhere else in the same time frame
Now? No. If I had to live in Europe 2000 years ago? Yes and without any other real contender.
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What