I really wish we had more popular representations of the later empire. So many people believe that today’s world where people visit and settle from all around is something completely new and perhaps bad. Perhaps if they knew what the Roman empire stretching from London to Palmyra looked like, it might amend their perspective.
(And for anyone who’d jump on this: No, it wasn’t this mixing of peoples that brought Roman down. The story is much more complicated than that.)
Ancient Romans had a ritual of visiting the baths daily. Doing so helped them reduce the spread of diseases. I remember learning in highschool latin class that Greek medicine focused on curing diseases while Roman medicine focused on avoiding diseases. If you were able to go back to Roman times you would find that people were realitively clean and well fed, even the plebian class.
Any long lasting civilisation had people that were relatively clean and well fed - that's a very fundamental requirement for the civilisation to last long, after all!
You will find that even older civilisations, such as Egyptians, ancient Indians, Mesopotamians, etc. all had a relatively good nutrition.
Cleanliness here is extremely relative, though, as modern standards of cleanliness were revolutionised by fresh water supply and sewage systems. If any modern person visited an ancient city, they would have some trouble dealing with the stench.
It's hard to tell how ubiquitous using a sewer for waste disposal rather than simply throwing it outside was, since a lot of accounts come from those with a vested interested in making Rome look good/bad. However, there were laws ordering compensation of those who the throwing of waste injured, so it was unlikely to be as sanitary as a modern city.
I an supprised that there could be much controversy over Roman sewers. There are preserved Roman streets across Europe and the sewers still exist today for us to inspect. The physical evidence is there in hundreds of sites. Of course their standards of cleanliness were different than ours. They had a system of collecting urine from each home so laundry services could wash clothes in pee! (It was a good source of ammonia.)
Tangentially I was blown away to read that the age of the court officials during the Ancient Chinese Three Kingdoms period could allegedly go as high as in the 70s which is pretty crazy for ~200AD
But supposedly disease was well contained in at court by the sparsity of people for the given area because everything was so vast.
Pretty crazy is how modern scholars don't see a difference between average lifespan at birth and at some age.
Humans were always living up to 100, conditional on survival until some age.
Moreover, to become court official, one had to reach some wisdom first, hence the age
“Some age” doing a lot of work here. Yeomen in 14th Century England who made it to 20 years old still had a life expectancy of just 48-52 (depending on when in the century).
Life expectancy is mean not median, and the median wouldn’t work like that either.
Of course, some people loved to 70, I think there would be virtually no circumstances where that would be expected (ignoring ad absurdum takes like “age 69 and 364 days”)
> One possibility Mitchell offers is that it may have actually been the warm communal waters of the bathhouses that helped spread the parasitic worms.
There was no causality proved, so you can't say that for certain.
Also, washing clothes in urine isn't necessarily bad. It's pretty clean and contains ammonia, which is a cleaning chemical.
> Read the graffiti uncovered in Pompeii. Nearly half of it deals with people taking a crap in the street.
Half? I could imagine one or two pictures; citation needed to sell me on more.
> Ancient Romans being a bunch of cruel slaving
Yeah, keeping slaves was bad.
> filthy rednecks
Well that seems needlessly pejorative and intended as much to intended a particular people group of today.
Can't everyone just appreciate what the Romans did do right and agree that keeping slaves is bad? Also Roman slaves weren't always treated like stereotypical "plantation slaves"; which is a common misconception when people hear "slaves". Still bad, though.
You can see the graffiti yourself at http://ancientgraffiti.org . Cursory inspection revealed zero referring to people relieving themselves in the street, though I don't doubt those exist. Isolated names are very frequent.
Some of these are pretty interesting:
> IV Non(as) Iul(ias) paenulam, palliolum [?posita ad Fau]stilla(m) Pr[o---] L usur[a] [deduxit?] XIIIS (?) [aeri]s a(sses) VIII
> Four days before the Nones of July, a traveler's cloak and a small cloak (were deposited with Fau)stilla (for collateral). Fo(r) fifty (denarii?) she [is charging] 13.5 (coppe)r a(sses) (per month, as interest). 8.
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> ABCDEFGḤỊKOPQRTVX
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> ABCDEFGHLIMPKONQRXTVS
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> ABCDEFGHI (gap) KL (gap) MNOPQRSTVX
This one is an exact mirror of the modern alphabet (except Y and Z); I'm not sure why there are gaps.
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Some are timeless:
> Victor cum Attine hic fuit
> Victor was with Attine here.
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> Hic ego puellas multas futui
> I fucked a lot of girls here.
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> Fututa sum hic
> I [a woman] was fucked here.
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> Antiochus hic mansit cum sua cithera
> Antiochus stayed here with his cythera [not sure what this means]
Don’t forget engineering. Which, to be fair, they used in large part for war. Roads are great for getting your army to Gaul to fight. Concrete piers to sail your army where the roads don’t go.
The romans did envy the Greek culture quite a lot - Pompeii and Herculan are filled with “copies of greek statues”. And they did copy the mythology wholesale.
But speaking about this I can’t not mention the hilarious sketch from Monty Python - [what did the romans ever do for us](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uvPbj9NX0zc) TL;DR; Quite a lot given the relative cultures and civilizations of the time.
Most of what I know about Romans comes from listening to my gamer friends slash military history buffs, while we sat around pounding Mountain Dew and waiting for someone to finish their turn.
I was always impressed by how open Romans were to assimilating other people's culture, gods, tech, whatnot. I can't help but think that the Roman strategy of an ever expanding definition of "us" (vs them) was critical to their success.
I wish we knew more about the Etruscans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization I have the impression that they were the first culture assimilated by the Romans. Conquered militarily (or economically) and then basically fostered into the Roman society. So much so that it's now hard to discern the differences between the two.
The paper seems to me to suggests that the Romans got sicker due to increased exposure to virus and disease as they got more integrated, wealthy and populous. Perhaps this was a hidden trend behind the fall of pre-industrial age civilizations. "Romans paid a price for their wealth with a deterioration of their health"
Lol, and then a downvote, prob by OP.
How dare I call you out and hurt your revenue by doing so, right? It's all about you, screw the masses of people who've been annoyed and distracted by you with nothing in return, right?
The infomarketing worms are everywhere.
(And for anyone who’d jump on this: No, it wasn’t this mixing of peoples that brought Roman down. The story is much more complicated than that.)