I'll drink to that
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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I mean we are poisoning the world and ourselves today and the vast majority of people don't seem to mind enough to stop it. I imagine it was like that.
How many things do we know that are bad for us, and simply ignore the consequences?
Off the top of my head:
- gasoline/smog
- coal
- microplastics
- alcohol
- tobacco
- excessive sugar
Not even to touch the conversation on the mass extinction we're causing.
Some good responses so far. I want to add an addition component.
My recollection is that the Romans knew lead was poisonous and worked to manage direct exposure. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to them, all the lead smithing put lead into the air, which they couldn't detect, and that was the cause of their lead poisoning.
And we still are putting lead in the air via piston aircraft running on antiquated leaded AV Gas LMAO…
I miss PugJesus and their context/sources lol it’s hard to find anything off a Startpage search atm outside of the basic lead-made-the-Roman-empire-fall theory.
Speculating here - it’s possible that the ancient Romans who knew were about as equally numbered as today, but also like today, stubbornly willful ignorance and/or economic interests outweighed the voices calling for its cessation?
It could also be logistics - communications being fragmented and/or unable to source materials to replace the infrastructure rather than simply “not knowing”
The comparison that I find most relatable is that lead was the plastic of their day. It was a very useful, plentiful and cheap material with mostly known health effects. Alternatives exist but they aren't as useful, plentiful and cheap as lead/plastic
One reason lead was so plentiful is that a lot of the silver ore in Europe contains a hundred times more lead than silver by weight and the lead has a lower melting point, so the quest for silver produced an enormous amount of lead as a byproduct.
As with all things, its complicated.
The romans knew that those who worked in lead mines or were lead smiths suffered tons of problems and died early because of their occupation.
The dangers of lead were never a mystery.
But they also knew that it takes more than simply touching lead to get sick. So they knew their lead pipes were fine since it was a low pressure gravity system unlike our modern system that is pressurized. Lead pipes in a pressurized environment actually mixes with the lead and causes problems.
And water logistics are NECESSARY to keep a city like Rome alive. So lead smiths were needed because lead is CRAZY USEFUL for all things precise and plumbing related.
But, lead also famously has a sweet smell when formed into lead acetate. And romans love sweet wines. So they'd boil down grapes and berries in lead pots to make a lead acetate sweetener. This theyd mix with wines to enhance them. Something they generally knew was bad but who knows. I like to think of it as the ancient roman equivalent of smoking. Yes objectively bad, but sometimes you need an extra sweet wine to take the edge off.
I'll give you better sources later. I think I got this from Mary Beards "SPQR" which is a must read. Not chronological, but fuck chronology. Where my thematics gang at!
Difficult to imagine there wasn't a group of proto-magats with "I should have the right to drink lead if I want it! I thought this was a civitas liber! I'm not gonna live in fear, not gonna let those liberales tell me excrementum."
You are awesome thank you for sharing all this context 😄
That all makes a lot of sense, there’s definitely similar concepts today where it’s understood that the dose makes the poison, so to speak.
I’ll have to check out that book it sounds fascinating, for sure
Love Mary Beard! She’s the host/presenter of a number of Roman documentaries that can be found on YouTube, if anyone else is interested.
The more things change, the more they stay the same huh?
(I also miss Pugjesus)
I’m out of the loop, what happened to PugJesus? Did they get burned out or did something happen?
He made a post saying that he was stepping away. I don't want to speak for him, but the main thing seemed to be frustration with some activity caps implemented on the server he had moved his communities to, and knowing that it would be a ton of work to move them all again.
Averaging ~~41~~ 28 posts per day?
I barely I even LOOK at ~~41~~ 28 posts per day.
I appreciate the effort to load this place up with content but that couldn’t have been easy
EDIT: I did a better math
I thought he just got tired of mass banning people who disagreed with him.
They did sweeten wine with it, so I'm going to say it's more complex than that. At least they didn't burn it with petrochemicals poisoning the whole of biosphere for a whole (two?) generation.
More like four ..
Shit.
From my understanding, they knew it wasn't exactly healthy, so they did limit the intake to a "healthy" level. Their life expectancy wasn't that great anyway compared to now, so i think it was a bit of a mixed bag. People thought that cigarettes were healthy, and then they figured out they are not, but people still smoke... Like a lot.
Their life expectancy wasn’t that great anyway compared to now
Low life expectancy has always been caused mostly by high infant and child mortality, not adults dying young of natural causes. Augustus and Tiberius lived well into their 70s, for example.
Duck.ai-generated list, if anybody wants to see it
| Roman | Born | Died | Approx. age | Cause |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Augustus | 63 BC | AD 14 | 75–76 | Natural causes, probably illness |
| Agrippa | 63 BC | 12 BC | About 50 | Natural causes, probably illness |
| Maecenas | c. 70 BC | 8 BC | About 62 | Natural causes |
| Tiberius | 42 BC | AD 37 | 77–78 | Probably natural causes, though ancient sources alleged foul play |
| Vespasian | AD 9 | AD 79 | 69–70 | Natural illness |
| Titus | AD 39 | AD 81 | 41–42 | Natural illness |
| Trajan | AD 53 | AD 117 | 63–64 | Natural illness, possibly a stroke |
| Hadrian | AD 76 | AD 138 | About 62 | Natural illness |
| Marcus Aurelius | AD 121 | AD 180 | 58–59 | Natural illness, probably infection |
| Constantine the Great | AD 272 | AD 337 | About 65 | Natural illness |
| Virgil | 70 BC | 19 BC | 50–51 | Natural illness |
| Ovid | 43 BC | AD 17 | About 59–60 | Probably natural causes |
| Galen | AD 129 | c. AD 216 | About 87 | Probably natural causes |
Excluded: Julius Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, Caligula, Domitian, Commodus, and others who were assassinated, executed, killed in battle, or died by suicide. Claudius is also excluded because he was probably poisoned, and Pliny the Elder died during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Low life expectancy has always been caused mostly by high infant and child mortality
In demography, the life expectancy of a modern population is calculated by fitting a curve to the most recent infant and child mortality (< 5 years old) measurements. Not relevant to ancient Rome, but for the modern world life expectancy is not just heavily influenced by infant and child mortality, but is rather 100% a measure of infant and child mortality.
You are shown AI slop by a grue
Recent research showed that they had lead-polluted air on top of things like lead-sweetened wine. Apparently the lead air pollution was also a byproduct of silver mining (which was mostly for coinage). e.g. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2419630121
Yeah some of them wrote and complained about it but they still didn't do anything about it systemically. The wealthy few could somewhat avoid it if they were knowledgable enough but the workers in their slums couldn't do jackshit about it. Nor could the slaves mining it (obviously)
Is that pop-culture in the room with us?