5 Disturbing Truths About Ancient Rome

while we usually look back on Ancient Rome with ore it's all beautiful architecture and times birchy there are quite a few truths about age Rome and her culture but even those of us still living in the Romans Shadow and tradition would find well rather disturbing [Music] most people are aware that the Romans love torture the most famous method being crucifixion however what most people don't know is that torture which came in many forms was more than just an occasional punishment reserved for the most heinous criminals or used by the most sadistic rulers rather it was in many situations required by the Roman judicial system and often for people who were Witnesses of a crime not just the perpetrators themselves as you probably guess those people were the slaves who at times made up around a third of Roman society the Roman legal system held that a slave wasn't trustworthy and you could only get true testimony out of him Through Torture usually for information regarding their masters disputes or actions not anything they themselves had done as a result if someone lost a legal battle part of the penalties would involve reimbursement for the other party's slaves who at the very least were injured during the proceedings if not killed during the Roman Republic and early days of the Empire torture was confined to Slaves usually men and citizenship granted immunity from torture in except in the case of treason however as the Empire began to decline more Elite classes increasingly began employing it against the Freeman below them some of the Roman's favorite interrogation techniques included whips with lead tips the rack and leather peeling which involved pouring boiling water over the victim and then ripping off the burned skin in pieces the most popular seems to have been the akuleus or little horse which involved forcing the victim to straddle the sharp upper point of a triangular wooden beam or even a spike weights were then attached to their hands and feet to further press the victim onto the painful angle since it was mandated by the courts this judicial torture was such an everyday part of life that there was a whole profession dedicated to it a carnifex was a torture expert and you could hire him to torture a slave if he didn't have the equipment or maybe just the stomach for it [Music] NYU social psychologist Jonathan hate has regularly reiterated his belief that increased violent crime and suicide in the United States from the 1950s to the 1970s was due to the prevalence of lead in gasoline which was banned by the late 1980s after its toxic physiological and neurological effects were better understood if leading gasoline can have such a dramatic effect on a population just imagine what it did to ancient Rome a society that used leads in pretty much everything one of Rome's most notable achievements its public water supply was heavily laced with lead in addition to lead pipes within the city they used sheets of lead to line their aqueducts that carried water across the Empire as a result it's likely that Roman tap water contained a hundred times more lead than natural spring water Roman food was also full of lead not only were pots and utensils made of lead but Romans added it directly to much of their Cuisine the Romans didn't have access to Modern sweeteners like sugar but they sure did have a lot of grapes they boiled large batches of great must in pots to concentrate it and produce wine and other dishes from this however grape must has a unique ingredient acetate when boiled in a lead pot some of the lead leeches into the Mast and combines with the acetate to form lead acetate which aside from being super super poisonous is quite sweet the Romans actually took this great blood syrup which they called defrutum and started using it extensively in fact of the 450 recipes included in the Abacus a Roman cookbook dated to the 5th Century 100 of them call for the syrup when Sardis tried to remake de frutam they discovered it held lead concentrations 60 times higher than the upper limit per Safe Drinking Water lead accumulates in the body and can cause a range of chronic symptoms such as abdominal pain anemia nausea it can also result in infertility however the biggest effects are on the brain those with chronic lead poisoning exhibit short-term memory loss and depression as well as headaches slurred speech and aggressive behavior though his claims have been widely debated Dr Jerome nuriagu published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine speculating that The Eccentric behavior of many of Rome's Emperors could be attributed to lead poisoning Caligula was said to have sought a consular appointment for his horse in sitatus and Nero is Infamous for his bizarre aggressive behavior like mutilating people while dressed as animals riago goes so far as to postulate the two-thirds of Rome's Emperors exhibited signs of some level of lead poisoning he believes this in addition to population decline from lead induced infertility could actually have been responsible for the Empire's collapse now riago is an environmental chemist by profession and many historians have criticized his interpretations of primary Roman sources However the fact is that Romans had insanely high levels of lead in their bodies a 2019 study examining the skeletons of ancient Romans found their bones had upwards of 123 micrograms of lead a gram and was it a normal Iron Age person have just 2.9 micrograms foreign much of Roman culture seems extreme for modern tastes and sex was no exception far from prudes the Romans were very open about sex and legal brothels abounded there was no homosexual heterosexual dichotomy and the Romans had fluid sexual relations with both genders similarly it wasn't looked down upon for married men to have sex with prostitutes men and women as long as it was in moderation there were also popular erotic novels and sex manuals that other civilizations were shot to find with the belongings of Roman soldiers that they captured more than that sex was at the Forefront of fine art and decoration with upper-class individuals filling their homes with paintings and sculptures that would be and are as you'll see considered pornography in the modern day most of our knowledge of ancient Roman erotic art comes from the remains of Pompeii and heraculinium these cities were basically flash preserved in the Asha Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D the most common decoration archaeologists have found is the erect phallus either alone or on a deity such as pan or hanging from wind chimes and built into facades these works of art May Verge on comical for modern viewers if not erotic but for the Romans who celebrated masculine sexuality they represented fertility and protection from Evil and don't worry there are plenty of women portrayed in Roman erotic art too there are endless frescoes in homes brothels and public places in Pompeii featuring lone women women being pleasured or women having sexual relations in a wide variety of situations and positions there are even a number of Works portraying sexual activity with animals archaeologists continue to uncover these frescoes the latest a graphic depiction of the myth of leader and Swan leader having sex with a swan which was discovered in 2018. the reason researchers still haven't found all the art is because until recently they were kind of too embarrassed to do so though the ruins of Pompeii were discovered at the end of the 17th century extensive excavations didn't begin until the mid-18th century quite a bit of erotic art had been discovered by 1819 when King Francis the first of Naples decided to visit the Exhibition at the Naples National archaeological museum with his wife and daughter he was so horrified by the erotic art that he ordered it to be locked away in a gabonetto Secreto or secret room after the failed Revolutions of 1848 the bourbon monarchy even suggested destroying the artifacts though there were some demands to unlock the secret room in the 1960s the Italian government only fully opened the exhibit to the public in April of 2000. level less children under 14 can only enter with adult supervision foreign the ancient Romans themselves probably would have debated the term infanticide here as they didn't actively kill their infants rather they essentially threw their unwanted babies away in a practice called exposito Latin for exposure they nearly left these infants on the street or worse in the city's massive garbage dumps where they would be subjected to the elements and disease the climate of central Italy may be mild but helpless baby can't make it very long the vast majority of them died especially those in the dumps the only exceptions were those who were quickly found and scooped up by a passerby but these were more often than not taken as slaves not adopted members of the family there were a few reasons a family might subject their newborn infant to exposure the most common was poverty a baby meant another mouth to feed this was especially true for baby girls boys could eventually perform productive physical labor but girls usually required extra support since they face menstruation and pregnancy or a dowry if they were to be married away as a result the poor of the family the more likely they were to get rid of their female and a father might also demand an infant be exposed if he doubted its legitimacy men of Roman household is known as part of familias had ultimate legal domain over other family members and had the legal right to expose any babies they worried weren't actually theirs the last big reason for exposure was deformity or health problems infants with notable defects were called Terrors and were viewed as incarnations of evil in this case the law required the part for meas to get rid of the baby something the Romans considered a point of Pride the famous Roman Statesman an intellectual Cicero put it quite bluntly when he said deformed infants shall be killed in fact Romans celebrated their culture of exposure so much that it formed a prominent part of their founding mythology Romulus and Remus the twins credited with founding Rome were survivors of exposure as infants their mother Ria Silvia was a pastel virgin impregnated by Mars the God of War seeing them as a threat the local King amulius ordered their exposure on the banks of the Tiber where they were helped and saved by a variety of gods and creatures most notably the she-wolf who suck with them as infants the later they were adopted by a Shepherd family although exposure and infanticide were common in the majority of ancient and prehistoric cultures few made it such an integral part of their common identity in reality though exposure was widespread and legally promoted for economic reasons the Roman economy was supported by a slave population that represented some 30 of the whole city exposure was a subtle way of maintaining that number transferring laborers from the free class to the slave class the nickname for a slave was coprius basically Latin for found at the dump this was such a prevalent economic phenomenon that men were constantly worried about accidentally having sex with their children who they'd abandoned only for them to be taken up and enslaved in a brothel as a result many part of amirs put recognizable amulets on their exposed infants which would remain Rhythm for their entire lives assuming that they lived the stoics Jews and later the Christians raised varying degrees of moral protest against exposure but because of its economic function the practice continued and full force until an economic solution presented itself in the year 313 emperor Constantine passed a law allowing families to sell their infants directly into slavery bypassing the need for exposure the practice gradually dwindled until it was replaced by Church run orphanages in the Middle Ages [Music] foreign the Romans had strong opinions about human sacrifice which they considered uncivilized they often criticized their enemies for the practice including The Druids Jews and Christians they even accused their big time rival Carthage of sacrificing infants which might seem ironic if you paid attention to the last chapter of the video it is true that to decree of the Roman senate banned human sacrifice in 97 BC which is why the Romans viewed it as a barbaric Remnant they had evolved away from nevertheless Human Sacrifice occurred in ancient Rome both before and after that date and not just the exposure of infants most human sacrifices were males in May the Vestal virgins Rome's Elite order of priestessors in charge of maintaining the goddess vesters protective fire performed a ceremony where they threw old men off the pond sublikers Rome's most important bridge to their deaths in the Tiber River then at the farai latinia at the end of April the order hung young boys from the trees around the city after the ban on human sacrifice the Vestal virgins switched to puppets instead of actual people however the Vestal virgins weren't as perpetrators of human sacrifice advice they were victims too since they were required to remain virgins until retirement any member of the order who broke her Chastity a crime called incestim was buried alive to appease the gods the gods would only accept the sacrifice if the victim went into it willingly though therefore it involved an elaborate ceremony where the unchast Virgin was taken to the city's ritual border known as the pomerium and led down into an underground Vault prepared with a couch lamp and a table with a small amount of food the pontifest Maximus or high priest and office eventually bestowed on the emperor himself then uttered a prayer and they covered the Vault her lover received a somewhat less lavish death it found they merely beat him to death in reality this type of sacrifice appears to have happened rarely since it would be hard to prove or even catch a Vestal Virgin breaking her vows most historians theorize they oh were usually used to scapegoats if Rome was suffering from some sort of Crisis political figures would blame it on an unchast virgin and about a sacrifice as another example even though gladiatorial games in the great Coliseum of the Roman Empire we're almost entirely for entertainment purposes they had originally Arisen as a religious ritual to honor the mains Roman deities representing their ancestors in the early days of the Republic Romans would volunteer to reenact famous battles as a real or mythological but these rarely ended in death there's an entire industry grew around them slaves and criminals began to take place in the fights and they started killing each other too it's hard to say when the Romans crossed the line from religious theater to secular Bloodsport but one thing is clear regardless of their double standards for the people they conquered and the semantics of what they considered Human Sacrifice the Romans loved a good ritual killing and this is on top of the many other truths of their culture that it's hard not to find rather disturbing today foreign foreign

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Id: Qf8xfgTrz4g

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 06 2023