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Well, if you can't trust Pliny the Elder, who then can you trust.
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Aug 10, 2023 07:26
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Tunicate posted:and while some people at the time definitely mentioned they thought lead pipes were less healthy than alternatives, the reason they could keep mentioning it across multiple centuries is that there was a lot of lead plumbing Yeah. The problem was you had two options for plumbing, lead or ceramic. And ceramic pipes are, from what I understand (I am not a pipeologist) a huge pain in the rear end compared to lead ones. So lead keeps getting used. Tulip posted:I mean the two things that are motivating my question are that 1) Chinese emperors persisting with some pretty whack ideas about cinnabar and 2) some just absolutely insane beliefs about a lot of medical things that continue into the modern era, even today as common folklore. #2 is kind of the bigger one but #1 is definitely on my mind of like, what do we MEAN when we say "they" "knew"? Would we expect every regular Julius Quintius Romanulus to know this? I dunno what you want from me man. We have a tiny, tiny amount of surviving Roman writing compared to the whole and "lead fucks you up bro, don't eat it" shows up multiple instances in different time periods in that tiny amount, so I don't think it's a big stretch to say that it was a thing people knew about. I can't tell you what level of education included that knowledge.
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Aug 10, 2023 07:26
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Lead pipes (and just consuming mercury) are also not as toxic as modern memes suggest. When you heat them as part of mining and processing them, they are very dangerous to the extent it's well known to ancient societies. But their solid forms are less so, because they are more inert and the damage accumulates over time. Compared to the constant risk of deadly disease you face anytime before the mid 19th century, it's frankly not a big deal at all.
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Aug 10, 2023 10:08
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zoux posted:I eat better food than any English king, There's a fair chance the current one eats better than you do, I would expect.
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Aug 10, 2023 13:27
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feedmegin posted:There's a fair chance the current one eats better than you do, I would expect.
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Aug 10, 2023 13:59
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feedmegin posted:There's a fair chance the current one eats better than you do, I would expect. He lives in England so I doubt it
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Aug 10, 2023 15:04
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Grand Fromage posted:I dunno what you want from me man. We have a tiny, tiny amount of surviving Roman writing compared to the whole and "lead fucks you up bro, don't eat it" shows up multiple instances in different time periods in that tiny amount, so I don't think it's a big stretch to say that it was a thing people knew about. I can't tell you what level of education included that knowledge.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:19
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Halloween Jack posted:Does this mean that everybody knew about the cabbage juice that makes you poop? A cup of cabbage juice flushes the parasites away.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:55
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https://nitter.net/AltHistCody/status/1689013030611288064#m
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Aug 10, 2023 15:57
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Halloween Jack posted:Does this mean that everybody knew about the cabbage juice that makes you poop? Buddy, they won't even let me poop the cabbages.
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Aug 10, 2023 16:33
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah. The problem was you had two options for plumbing, lead or ceramic. And ceramic pipes are, from what I understand (I am not a pipeologist) a huge pain in the rear end compared to lead ones. So lead keeps getting used. I'd imagine there was a certain amount of socio-economic pressure too. Like, people knew that if you lived on the top floor of an insula, you had a high chance of dying in a fire. That didn't stop people doing it.
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Aug 10, 2023 17:54
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Grand Fromage posted:I dunno what you want from me man. We have a tiny, tiny amount of surviving Roman writing compared to the whole and "lead fucks you up bro, don't eat it" shows up multiple instances in different time periods in that tiny amount, so I don't think it's a big stretch to say that it was a thing people knew about. I can't tell you what level of education included that knowledge. I mean I'm not trying to be an rear end in a top hat here, I just get a little...I'm not sure what the word is but definitely some sort o feeling about the idea that an entire population simply all knew a fact because it was an accurate theory about reality. People often believe inaccurate things about reality, even when they're very well presented and available, and I kind of bristle a little bit about flattening Roman knowledge and perception into such an inhuman shape. Heck those Pliny quotes also include timing the boiling of wine with the conjunction of the moon. And yeah I know we don't have a lot of surviving Roman sources, its part of my motive for my general reminder that while there are some things we know quite a lot about with ancient Rome, we definitely have major gaps.
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Aug 10, 2023 19:44
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Tulip posted:I mean I'm not trying to be an rear end in a top hat here, I just get a little...I'm not sure what the word is but definitely some sort o feeling about the idea that an entire population simply all knew a fact because it was an accurate theory about reality. People often believe inaccurate things about reality, even when they're very well presented and available, and I kind of bristle a little bit about flattening Roman knowledge and perception into such an inhuman shape. Heck those Pliny quotes also include timing the boiling of wine with the conjunction of the moon. I don't think anyone is claiming that everyone knew this, any more so than we could claim that everyone in the US knows what the Eastern Roman Empire was. It doesn't mean that the US in 2023 as a society doesn't know about it, but the over-all penetration of that knowledge might not be very deep. My read is that the point being made is that the sort of educated people who's work has come down to us were certainly aware of it and commenting on it, and that in general as a society there was a basic understanding that huffing lead fumes wasn't great for you. But Julius Random Plebe in the top floor hovel of the insula might not have any real knowledge or understanding of it. Which, to be fair, one could say the same thing about people today. Source: the guy a few blocks down I watched melting scrap lead to cast into ingots a few weeks ago, standing right over the pot without a mask.
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Aug 10, 2023 20:02
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Nowadays you'd have people drinking lead performatively to prove it's just more lib propaganda "They say molten metal is hot, but look, it's a cool silver color"
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Aug 10, 2023 20:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:I don't think anyone is claiming that everyone knew this, any more so than we could claim that everyone in the US knows what the Eastern Roman Empire was. It doesn't mean that the US in 2023 as a society doesn't know about it, but the over-all penetration of that knowledge might not be very deep. So, it is a perception that I have seen among laypeople about ancient Rome within the last week: that Romans only briefly used lead for consumer products, figured out it was poison, and then never touched it again because it was so widely and well-known. This is used both to illustrate that that certain Roman behaviors (that are attested to!) were not practiced, and to make a point about decline of civilization since Rome, in a "Romans would not have tolerated leaded gasoline" argument for trad stuff. I know these are not up to date academic beliefs, but I do encounter them in the wild which makes it worth interrogating and exploring in public, non-academic contexts like this thread. And I know this is somewhat my own personal thing about "don't overestimate how wide-spread beliefs were" but I just do think its valuable to be skeptical, judicious, and curious about broad claims in intellectual history.
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Aug 10, 2023 20:14
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We've got an arch conference in town for the next few days and between the campfire ban and the 10 pm quiet hours I legitimately believe we have a chance to recreate the fabled "Archaeologists drinking every bar dry" this year as every arch migrates to and around town once it gets dark.
Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Aug 10, 2023 20:19
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Do you also object if someone says, for example, Romans were good at building roads? Since surely most Romans didn't have the faintest idea how to do it. "the idea that an entire population simply all knew a fact because it was an accurate theory about reality" is a thing no one here has said or thinks. I tend to assume people in this thread, for the most part, are history nerds and I don't have to caveat something as straightforward as the fact not all Romans had equal knowledge of everything. I accept you weren't trying to be an rear end in a top hat but that's how it came across. Telsa Cola posted:We've got an arch conference in town for the next few days and between the campfire ban and the 10 pm quiet hours I legitimately believe we have a chance to recreate the fabled "Archaeologists drinking every bar dry" this year as every arch migrates to and around town once it gets dark. The day my archaeology study abroad emptied the only store in walking distance of its entire wine supply was a sad one. Especially since we had like two weeks left.
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Aug 10, 2023 20:43
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Grand Fromage posted:Do you also object if someone says, for example, Romans were good at building roads? Since surely most Romans didn't have the faintest idea how to do it. "the idea that an entire population simply all knew a fact because it was an accurate theory about reality" is a thing no one here has said or thinks. It's a frustrating thing about text communications online, right? Like I am genuinely curious about what we know about these things: do we have a timeline of this belief, do we have arguments for and against it in a Roman context, where there regional variations in the belief, etc., but genuine curiosity often looks like sealioning and one of those is a lot more common online than the other. I know that, most likely, the answer is "we don't know much," but I'd hate to never find out because I was too lazy to ask. Again, I was absolutely not trying to be an rear end in a top hat. Pedantic maybe, curious definitely, but a dick? No. And I guess I just don't think its as good an assumption. I've run into some, well, hot nonsense in lots of history nerd locations, so I tend to treat them as especially important spaces to be extra-precise.
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Aug 10, 2023 21:25
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Tulip posted:Roman behaviors (that are attested to!) were not practiced, and to make a point about decline of civilization since Rome, in a "Romans would not have tolerated leaded gasoline" argument for trad stuff. LMAO, oh my God. (not at you, at the guy you're referring to)
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Aug 10, 2023 21:28
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The problem with medical knowledge in the ancient area was sure there was a lot floating around, but there was also a lot of false knowledge floating around as well that could block out the true stuff. And it's not like there was much scientific rigor to determine what was true and what was not or even let people know that they could determine what was true or not. Medical knowledge is one of the hardest things to sort out, you basically need advanced statistical analysis or some very weird experiments to know anything for sure. And of course, that's at the best of times when lines of communication throughout the world are good and you'll have plenty of trained-up scholars who will even be exposed to the grand total of accumulated knowledge. A lot of the time you don't have that going and it's random what few texts you'll have a local copy of or a local scholar will have seen once, and sure hope that they understood and remember what they saw that one time.
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Aug 10, 2023 23:10
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Lead fucks you up because it's full of ghosts. It puts ghosts in your blood and they haunt your brain. This is basic mineralogy and would've been intuitively understood by The Ancients.
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Aug 11, 2023 01:38
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which is also the reason bullets are deadly because they inject a massive amount of ghosts into your bloodstream and create a hole for more ghoulies to creep into and also why bullets are not dangerous to werewolves who are only killed by silver bullets because silver is Jesus metal and werewolves are undead (and thus already full of ghosts
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Aug 11, 2023 01:44
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Where does the Holy Ghost fit this?
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Aug 11, 2023 02:43
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Brawnfire posted:Where does the Holy Ghost fit this? Common misspelling. It's the Holey Ghost
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Aug 11, 2023 02:49
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SlothfulCobra posted:The problem with medical knowledge in the ancient area was sure there was a lot floating around, but there was also a lot of false knowledge floating around as well that could block out the true stuff. And it's not like there was much scientific rigor to determine what was true and what was not or even let people know that they could determine what was true or not. Medical knowledge is one of the hardest things to sort out, you basically need advanced statistical analysis or some very weird experiments to know anything for sure. And we have records of experiments, iirc the picatrix has one where he's like "so there's this old remedy for scorpion stings, you press these seals into this type of frankincense and then cook it into a potion and feed it to the patient. I did some experiments changing factors and it turns out you don't actually have to use expensive frankincense, the active curative agent is the seals, this is why it is important to test the knowledge we get from the ancients so we know it is effective."
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Aug 11, 2023 03:08
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Tunicate posted:And we have records of experiments, iirc the picatrix has one where he's like "so there's this old remedy for scorpion stings, you press these seals into this type of frankincense and then cook it into a potion and feed it to the patient. I did some experiments changing factors and it turns out you don't actually have to use expensive frankincense, the active curative agent is the seals, this is why it is important to test the knowledge we get from the ancients so we know it is effective." Although, that's the 11th century. The Ancients were, generally, less keen on experimenting, and would have doubled the incense just in case.
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Aug 11, 2023 03:11
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The point is more that even with the mindset of "let's test to see what works instead of taking it all on faith", dude ended up making a completely absurd conclusion because medical experiments are hard to actually conduct rigorously. The idea that you could improve on the knowledge of the ancients wasn't exactly foreign; for instance De Aquis mentions recent improvements they've made, and areas where the ancients hadn't understood this or that about water flows. There's a bit of a modern myth of "One Day We Discovered The Idea Of Science And Nobody Before Thought To Test or Improve Things They Were Just Dumb Tradition-Followers"
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Aug 11, 2023 03:24
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In general, you can find plenty of examples of people giving lip service to empiricism a very long way back. Actually putting empiricism into practice in a useful way was (and still is, frankly) rather rarer.
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Aug 11, 2023 03:59
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Yeah, rigor is the key word there. You need people to be doing these experiments up to some kind of standard and have respect for others doing their experimentation, and really even have ongoing academic dialogues across the world and get broad acceptance to make sure that what they say is more reliable than just having heard a thing from a guy once.
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Aug 11, 2023 04:14
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Something else to keep in mind is that the ancient world isn't a monolith. It's not just "the Roman Empire" - that's a Latin administrative layer over a wealth of local customs, traditions, and cultures. So at the same time as you might have some educated people in the cities that have figured out people who work with lead all day end up sick, you might also have some local cultures with a tradition that boils down to "yo, don't eat too much cinnabar, poo poo's not good for you." Or hell, vice versa, maybe there's some local gaul or celt who thinks boiling a big pot of lead and huffing the vapors drives out the evil spirits that cause head colds. Point being talking about Rome (or any ancient empire) as a single, monolithic entity doesn't really reflect reality.
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Aug 11, 2023 13:36
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Cinnabar is such an appetizing name though. Galena, that I wouldn't eat.
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Aug 11, 2023 15:05
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"I can't believe the Romans built their plumbing with poisonous lead," I think, shaking my head and tutting in disapproval while typing on my plastic keyboard and sitting on my plastic chair, sipping micro-plastic infused water from a plastic cup
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Aug 11, 2023 18:23
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For people living in what became Italy, what was the transition from Roman identity to Italian identity like? There's obviously the Roman Empire, and then the unification of Italy in the modern era, but in the meantime you had a variety of states of varying sizes in there. How long did it take for the Roman identity to be lost once the post-Roman kingdoms came in?
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Aug 11, 2023 19:52
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I think people probably still had a strong local identity even when they were under Roman authority. After Rome fell, they just were themselves still. Even today a lot of Italians see themselves as different than other Italians depending on where in the boot they're from.
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Aug 11, 2023 20:02
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Mr. Nice! posted:I think people probably still had a strong local identity even when they were under Roman authority. After Rome fell, they just were themselves still. Even today a lot of Italians see themselves as different than other Italians depending on where in the boot they're from. Hell opposite of a bay will be more than enough for them to want to slit each others throats over.
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Aug 11, 2023 20:09
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Mr. Nice! posted:I think people probably still had a strong local identity even when they were under Roman authority. After Rome fell, they just were themselves still. Even today a lot of Italians see themselves as different than other Italians depending on where in the boot they're from. There's also a lot of stuff going on in late antiquity / earl medieval period with the various germanic tribes that are rolling through. I knew a guy a few years back who did his dissertation on . . . I want to say Ostrogoths somewhere on the northern Italian Adriatic coast. He had a whole spiel about how much of a fingerprint they left on the region, compared it to the Norse in northern England. Point being, that it's not just the ancestors of the people who were there in 300AD, you've also got all the influences from the people who washed through at one point or another in the intervening 1000+ years before the Medicis.
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Aug 11, 2023 20:33
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Nationalism is a hideous idea and I don’t think easily translates back to 2000 years ago southern Europe
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Aug 11, 2023 20:49
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Hamson brothers
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Aug 11, 2023 20:50
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two fish posted:For people living in what became Italy, what was the transition from Roman identity to Italian identity like? There's obviously the Roman Empire, and then the unification of Italy in the modern era, but in the meantime you had a variety of states of varying sizes in there. How long did it take for the Roman identity to be lost once the post-Roman kingdoms came in? A couple hundred years, more or less, depending on which kingdom. Many of the early sub-Roman law codes legally distinguish between Romans and Goths (or Franks, or whatever). This had been an attribute of late Roman law as well (the Theodosian Code bans Romans from marrying barbarians, for example). Some of these kingdoms operated on the logic of “Roman law for Romans, Gothic law for Goths” for awhile. Over the generations though, the ethnic or racial distinction would have become increasingly unclear, and Rome itself ceased to directly politically pertain to most peoples’ lives (even in Italy). By the mid-7th century some law codes (I’m thinking of the Visigothic Liber Judiciorum here) no longer made this distinction but sought to apply one law for everyone. Someone probably knows when this happened in Italy specifically, since the Lombard law code is enormous and well-studied, but I have no idea unfortunately. Probably a big contributing factor to the decay of Roman identity was the (eastern) Roman Empire as well, where people really did continue to call themselves Romans all through the Middle Ages. There’s a fascinating passage in Liutprand of Cremona’s account of his embassy from the Holy Roman Emperor to the eastern Roman Emperor (968) where the emperor Nikephoros refuses the westerners’ claim to Roman identity and calls Liutprand a Lombard (Liutprand claims he answered with a bunch of highly literate backsass about how he was proud to be a Lombard, Romans suck, and the original Romans were just a bunch of scrubs who followed Romulus). More local identities would have been more important for most people of course. And I think a lot of the slack of an common “international” identity across broad swathes of the Roman world was taken up by Christianity.
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Aug 11, 2023 20:55
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I get the sense that the Roman Catholic Church proclaiming an Emperor of all Romans is generally indicative of people continuing to have an idea of them all being "Roman" in some sense, although in practice that tended to be more about German politics. The idea of Roman-ness didn't go away even though the empire proper died. But it wasn't a particularly useful idea. The de facto state of Europe for most of the medieval era was that pretty much anybody had to rely on some local power for protection, law enforcement, and infrastructure it was common for even people in large regions united under one ruler to not really bother to find that much commonality with many of the other groups that they share their boss's boss's boss with. At least, not until centuries later. The idea of modern language as the thing defining the separation between one culture and the next didn't really come around until the printing press made it relevant for people to publish for the masses, but even then it took until Italy was reduced to being controlled by foreign powers and minor players for the Italian identity to become a major political thing, and by then you're in the 18th-19th century. And even after that, there's some strong regional rivalries within Italy that maybe one day could threaten Italian nationalism as a whole.
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Aug 11, 2023 21:48
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