Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome Expert Answers Roman Empire Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED
WIRED | 28 Nov. 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF-93e26uys

2:33 Reminiscing from the visit to Pompei, where one house was a quick food bar.

Olives, sardines, other things you can store in olive oil, served on flat breads and with wine?

(I'd have loved dried tomatoes in olive oil, but that's "Columbian exchange" I think).

6:35 That's precisely what I saw, if not the same house, at least the same setup.

9:24 Not my favourite Emperor.

I am aware of Christian martyrs martyred by him.

If you want me to give one, it's "honest Nerva" as the Acta Ioannis terms him (he released St. John from Patmos and was arguably also his mailman to the seven churches).

Prior to Constantine, that is.

10:22 "clean water"

The slabs on top of the aquaeducts certainly kept out solid things, but liquid dirt, no.

There was a reason why water was generally served with wine or vinegar.

10:36 In those baths, the water would be cleaned by heating.

13:53 So, when the Renaissance starts curtailing nearly all of these rights for women, if it doesn't come from Rome, does it come from Athens?

20:12 If they had been with the she wolf too long, they would have been feral children, they would not have been able to learn to talk.

However, if they were only with the she wolf a week or two, no problem. Or mid long, perhaps just enough problem to explain the behaviour of Romulus and Remus, around that pomerium. Like wolf cubs trying to show each other who's stronger, but the wolf cubs don't use swords in the process. Feral children show this is a possible reaction for mammalian animal mothers. We cannot rule it out on that ground. The Empire era Romans who regularly used wolves as a "post partum abortion method" would not have the same experience as we have.

The scepsis about the seven kings is a 20th C. thing, we don't find Livy saying "well, probably Romulus, Numa, Ancus and ... my bad, Tullus and Ancus didn't really exist", we don't find Cicero denying his gens physically was fathered by precisely Tullus, the third king.

Now, there was an archaeologist who on archaeological grounds denied that the first four kings had existed, Raymond Bloch, the series Que sais-je ?, the book n° 216, Les Origines de Rome: ch. V.

One of the things he notes is how the oldest city scape in what's now Rome is carbon dated to 550 BC. However, what he did not know is the Hallstatt Plateau, which means that in carbon dating, almost any date between 750 (or close on 760) BC and 450 BC will exhibit a carbon date of c. 550 BC.

So, Bloch thought that the carbon date of 550 BC infirmed the seven kings, I think it confirms them.

And when it comes to the kind of lupa you'd expect in a lupanar, I think the guys who thought that way were anachronistic.