Ancient Rome Expert Answers Roman Empire Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm Lauren Ginsburg, professor of

ancient

Rome, and I'm here to answer your Internet

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ancient

Rome in ABA Eagle. Why did the Romans use toast? The average Roman did not leave the house wearing a toga because toas were extremely long dresses and extremely complicated to put together, so even elite Roman citizens recognized the toga as a ceremonial dress. I like this image because we have all these people wearing things that are decidedly not togas, since what they are wearing is the basic Roman garment. that any person of any status, male or female, would wear, which is what is called the robe or tunic and this is essentially a long shirt in c450 HS.

Did the Romans really wash their clothes with urine? Yes, and essentially so do we, if you look. In any of your home cleaning products you will see that one of the highest ingredients is usually ammonia, it is very expensive so it is not always very good for your things but it cleans extremely effectively so The Romans were able to recognize that urine when it was stored for a long time. some time it tends to break down into ammonia, so when you took your clothes to a fónica, which is essentially a laundry in the ancient world, the first thing was that it went into a tub that you poured highly concentrated urine into and let it sit there, then the clothes would be washed under clean running water in three or four separate tubs until in the end they were basically perfectly clean and could be air dried Finn Huck, did the Romans really have vomitoria?

Yes, but not in the way you want to say that it is true that if you look at some urban plans in Rome, stadiums, buildings, amphitheaters, theaters, places where tens of thousands of people would come, you will often find the word vomitorium that is written there and somehow a myth has been created that this is where decadent Romans would go after they ate too much food and purge themselves. This is not what those words mean, it comes from the Latin word vomo vay which basically means to send, so yes, on the one hand, send your food, but on the other. can mean sending people in, so what they were actually were big ladders to get a lot of people out of a stadium very quickly, so we actually still use exactly the same

tech

nology that the Romans called vomitoria, we just don't call them vomitoria and I by One thinks maybe we should not land.

Man, they didn't even have popcorn in ancient Rome. True story. What did they eat at the Colosseum? This was in the news last summer because they actually started digging into the Coliseum's drainage system and into the sewers because if you think about it, if you go to a rock concert today you can see everything sticky on the ground, people throwing their food everywhere, where does that go in ancient Rome? It would go into the drains and it would go into the sewers and that means that the things that can survive during those millennia we can say that those were the type of foods that were eaten in all types of nuts and residues of nuts have been found in these fruits of sewer, for example figs, peaches and other fruits, grapes, which were easy to transport.

Also, what they found was that people seem to bring or at least have access to small portable grills, sort of like tailgating grills, little braziers where they could grill meat at the time. As you watched people fight to the death and animals die in Jwad Dog, why does ancient Roman concrete hold up better than modern concrete? If we look at this dome in the pantheon in Rome, today it looks quite spectacular considering what this dome is made of. of concrete and we think of a bridge that might have been built in your town in the 1970s, these two things don't look the same, so last summer a team of civil engineers at MIT set out to find out what this was and they think that They have an answer if you look at Roman concrete, you can see in The Matrix these bits of white material, so this group of scientists at MIT discovered that these white bits called lime classes were deliberate and were also proof that the Romans used something called fast. lime as opposed to lime that had been premixed with water, which had always been Assumption and that quick lime overheats the chemical process as the concrete is produced, so one of the things we've always known about Roman concrete is that it can harden very quickly.

Even underwater, also the other property that they were able to recreate in the lab was that Roman concrete can self-heal up to a certain amount, so if you put modern concrete and Roman concrete in a stress environment for the concrete to crack, the Roman concrete can actually heal those cracks and the key thing that they think they found is that these lime clasts, these calcified whites could immediately distribute the material to those cracks and help with the self-healing properties. It's much more expensive to make concrete this way, so I'm not actually sure we're about to have a Roman concrete revolution, but it's cool that these scientists think they've recreated what the secret of Roman concrete is.

Because of Dylan. Did those Gladiators really fight lions? How often did they do it? Absolutely, the Gladiators actually fought the Lions, it's not even like they were just released through a door and everyone would notice, and architectural research has demonstrated the

tech

nology through which the Lions beneath the surface of the Colosseum floor could being thrown into the air to appear suddenly, but the question about how often they died, we have tombstones showing Gladiators who have won 50 different competitions in their life, evidence of Gladiators who retire from being gladiators and train other Gladiators, for which wouldn't really make sense if every time they entered the arena there was a 50-50 chance that they weren't going to get out, instead what we mostly see when it comes to humans vs. humans.

Gladiator vs. Gladiator is a heavily choreographed fight designed to be extremely exciting for the audience, that doesn't mean that sometimes they weren't killed, we also have evidence that the Gladiators could be killed, but that would have been agreed upon beforehand by whoever was directing the games and who had nominal control over the gladiator's life. Get Gators, what did the Romans invent? Which we still use today. One thing we want to highlight is this word invention because the Romans took things that specifically existed, it's a good example, and perfected them, but the example that I immediately think of is actually surgical. tools scalpel tweezers forceps, but the actual basic tools, if you look, say Gry's anatomy set or some medical show would look extremely similar to what the Romans used in the past and would be made of similar types of metal this is Nico, did they have bars in ancient Rome or did wine just flow freely through the streets?

Unfortunately no but they had bars and they had bars everywhere so they were often called TNI and they were bars where you could have a drink but you could also get food and this is a great example so this comes from from some recent excavations in Pompeii in an area that was open to the public and what you can see here is a large counter, so you could imagine someone behind here serving alcohol, but those large jars you see would also have food in them, like stews. Delicious hot dishes that people would eat as the main meal of the day in the bar or that they would then take home, where they could heat them up simply to make these bars visible.

They appear so frequently in these working class neighborhoods of Pompeii and the analogy I like to use is that they appear as often as a Dunkin Donuts does in the city of Boston and the graffiti that we find on them shows that they are really a social center In the neighborhood, you probably just go to the pub on the corner, the same way we think of neighborhood bars today. Call, let's go. I guess next you will tell me that all those Greek and Roman statues were actually painted by God. Yes, I am here to tell you that all those Greek and Roman statues were painted, but I object to the term Divine.

When people think about what it was like to walk the streets of ancient Rome, they think about these things that are brilliant here. White marble Marble buildings Marble statues The Romans would have found all this white marble extremely boring. They loved vibrancy and were also world-class painters. Last summer there was a fantastic exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that actually featured a series of recreated statues in which scientists had very carefully taken tiny bits of pigment into the statues so that you could see that, say, a statue from someone like Nero, here each layer of clothing would be painted in hues with patterned textures and the same goes for Roman buildings.

Rome was a wash. color Nevada D Knight 67 Was ancient Rome really a free-for-all sex game, so here's what The Romans had a very healthy sex life The Romans had sex inside and outside the institution of marriage The Romans had sex for procreation, yes, but also for pleasure The Romans had access to contraception The Romans, especially Roman women, would rebel when they thought those rights were being restricted. The Romans have photographs and artwork and, uh, literary texts that talk about sexual desire, they talk about sexual acts, they talk about their favorite positions, in short, it's Woman on Top. is what they seem to like a lot men have sex with women men have sex with men women have sex with women women have sex with men and as much as today it was really a spectrum of sexual behavior sexual performance sexual interest from The Kino Corner in that the Roman emperor was objectively the best, the Roman Empire was an autocracy, which means that all the Roman emperors were autocrats and it means that I don't actually think that any of them were very good people.

I think that, in general, that form of government is not conducive. to people who do good things, so I'm going to take a couple of examples of good and bad emperors. Here we have a friend, Nero, who everyone probably agrees is the worst of the worst emperors, and then we have everyone's favorite emperor on the internet, Marcus Aelius. he wrote this nice book of Stoic philosophy and that's why people think he's extremely calm and therefore under his rule things must have gone particularly well, but let's ask this question objectively: which is best for whom? And was he objectively the best for the significant population of the Roman Empire?

At that time, who was enslaved, we always have an idea of ​​what we understand to be best for whom and I just don't think the Roman Empire produced anyone that we would consider today to be a just ruler in the real Ari. How often do we do it? You think about the Roman Empire, well, this is a slightly unfair question because I have to say that the answer is more than daily because it is a professional obligation. I probably think about the Roman Empire more than the average person in Anzora HQ, how effective? They were public baths and baths to keep people clean and what hygiene was like in ancient Rome.

The Romans had extremely advanced water technologies, for example they had extensive aqueduct systems that could carry clean water across vast expanses of land. They had a sewage system. I think that in the 4th century BC. C., that's plantain, they had public bathing facilities, so it was very common that if you were Roman, regardless of your status, you would go and use these bats daily to clean yourself and yes, they also had public baths. It wouldn't be the only place where people would go to the bathroom, but you can see from this that we would have cubicles that probably wouldn't give much privacy and you can see that along the sides there would be places for troughs. of water, so what were the Romans not good at in terms of hygiene with this water technology?

Well, they didn't understand things like dissent about communicable diseases that way, so if you have, say, reusable toilet paper which in the Roman world is a sea sponge and is cleaned in vinegar, which can do some things that They won't stop things like dissidents from passing through Anzora HQ. What kinds of toys did Roman children play with? We have so much wonderful information about the value that was placed on it. about play as a social emotional strategy for raising

roman

children, one of my favorites is actually this doll, this particular one is made of ivory and what's so impressive is that you can see that the limbs are jointed so you can see that you can sit up .

This doll is down, you can make her stand up and this doll actually also has the famous hairstyle of the Roman empress at the time, Julia DNA, so she is also a couture doll. We know that dice games were very common walking toys that would clearly teach young children. aswalking and many of the building blocks that teach children to play with each other were considered particularly important and with this doll could also be considered extremely beloved objects that someone would keep long after their El Gringo Loco childhood, what was the average? lifespan of a Roman peasant, this is a great question because when you search for this you will find on the Internet the idea that the average life expectancy of Romans was 35 years and as a result people often think that, If you manage to reach 35, you were the age of your grandparents and that is not true because we have to think about what an average means: infant mortality in Rome was astronomically high, most children died within the first year of birth, so that was just infant mortality, infant mortality, about 50% of children died. at age 10 and you can see why that's going down and down that average, so if you made it to age 10 as a lower class Roman citizen, whether you lived in the country, you had a pretty high chance of making it to the 50 years. and we know that many people lived past that, our next question is from Christa Colin, how could an archaeologist look at an ancient column and conclude that it was a Roman brothel?

They couldn't do it. We know that there is a very famous specially built brothel in Pompeii, the building is completely full of small stalls and in each of the stalls there is only a platform in the shape of a bed, on top of the stalls there are extremely graphic sexual acts and then there are graffiti and my favorite that has survived is that of a stall and I have to imagine that this was from the sex worker who wrote push slowly putting all those things together, it's pretty easy to see that this was a place where sex work was on the agenda namona TWU What rights did Roman women get in Imperial Rome?

Not voting and that is important, but Roman women could be citizens. Roman women could own property in their own names. They could inherit property in their own name. Roman women could be business owners and some of them were using their own business sense to advance their businesses. Children, especially his sons, and their political ambition. Roman women could hire a lawyer to defend themselves or file a lawsuit in court. Roman women lived with a greater degree of freedom across all social classes than we are used to seeing in the ancient world in Crema. cakes How many civil wars did Rome have, including the Byzantine era?

That is a very difficult question to answer, for very good reasons, one being that the Romans thought that the Civil War was something within them that had to be fought against every day or it would break out. The Romans had documented civil wars and they were the ones who actually invented this term where two Roman armies would fight each other led by two Romans, but what's the difference between that and an uprising of slaves who are part of the Roman population? as? Spartacus is a civil war, what is the difference between the entire system of Roman provinces that rise up against Roman rule?

They are part of Rome and they are rising up and they are fighting, but they are fighting more with Gorilla Warfare tactics. Call that a civil war. You can see that it becomes very difficult to analyze when one part of Rome fights the other, but it happens all the time in blood orange. What the ancient Romans wore during winter. I know it well because of all the images we see. they're in these kind of light linen shirts and sandals, that's our image of Rome and it's snowing in Rome, well the key to Roman happiness in this would be layers the same way they are today and the Romans actually They had access even then to material that we know is the best for keeping you warm and that is wool, so the average Roman would wear socks.

Yes, the Romans really pioneered the idea of ​​socks and sandals. They wore extra thick socks, but they didn't just wear sandals either, they had thick leather shoes. and the more layers of leather, the better those shoes would be in winter conditions and then tons and tons of beautiful layers of wool on top in Robert Smith 29. I was wondering how the Romans produced their Roman coins and how they put the emperor on the coins. The way the Romans made coins was a prior process, so what you would do is have a base and on this base you would put a mold that had one side of the coin and in that mold you would put a metal disc and I would put it face down so you can imagine it's almost like a clam with two molds and the metal disc goes in here, then I take a hammer and I hit it and that's called stamping and that would put the images on both sides of the coin. from a theistic point of view and thought that the ancient Romans went on hikes or went to the beach to relax.

Yes, there was a big leisure time activity in Rome where people went to the coast, especially the Bay of Naples, had villas by the sea and went to these really fancy places. Baths are somewhat like a spa vacation, but they could last for months. The extreme elite of Rome would have access to these seaside villas, so the average Roman person probably didn't have much time to be able to do that, so what did they do? To relax, Rome had many holidays built around a calendar of festivals and these festivals featured gladiatorial combats featured chariot races featured theatrical shows including the ancient equivalent of musicals and we have evidence that people even from rural communities would come for these festivals, especially the big ones, were because they were state holidays in the Empire, there were over 100 days of public holidays in just tamon, so, like in ancient Rome, what happened there was that people worked and then went away. the average Marcus went home and paid rent.

I should say that instead of the average citizen, it could be a shoemaker, it could be someone who sews clothes, it could be a washerman, any of the activities that you need to do in your general urban life would be the same ones that needed to be done in ancient times. Sometimes the house of Rome was right above you, if they were rich enough they could own the space their shop was in, but often they would rent both spaces to one landlord and you can bet the Romans complained about the poor improvements from their owners. Aren't you being taken care of by a neighbor who has too much fun and wakes up the baby in the tweak fan 25?

Did they have marijuana in ancient Rome? Yes, but not in the way you ask. The Romans really loved hemp as a plant and they loved how easy it was. was to make ropes with it, we find hemp products everywhere and hemp, the Latin word is cannabis, so you can see the connection, but it doesn't make sense that the Romans smoked it first, smoking wasn't a particularly good thing in Roman culture , but there's also not much evidence that they recognized mind-altering possibilities in Kevin Feny. It will always be slightly extraordinary to me that Roman historians cannot agree on the answer to the superficially simple question of how many Roman emperors there were.

When Augustus is the first emperor, he declares a successor, Tiberias, Tiberias becomes the next emperor and miraculously we have two, so why is it so hard to keep counting? Eventually Rome becomes great and eventually other people decide that they could be emperors and what it takes to become. Emperor for many Romans, the answer is that an army they are paying can declare them Emperor and they can lay siege to Rome until they are declared Emperor. We move forward later in the Empire of Rome, when we have divided centers, it is the center of Rome, the city. of Rome there is no longer a center in Constantinople and sometimes it is Milan sometimes it is Rena, so we have several emperors or people who could be perceived as emperors at the same time, but we also have usurper types with armies that come in, I think I could do this and who can declare him Emperor at that time there are no rules for this one way or another, it can be very difficult for us to know who the Emperor is and sometimes all we have is a single coin as evidence, just a coin that a type that claims to be Emperor was coined by the Emperor.

We have no idea in the Terara encounters. How many gods did the ancient Romans worship? It's not really fair to ask how many gods they worshiped. It is fairer to ask what gods they did not worship. The Romans saw. Divine in many things Springs had a Divine being the caves had a Divine being they had a festival to protect themselves from mold and it was called Ralia and it was in April and that showed that they also thought that Milo had a Divine spirit in him that Basically, they could bribe them to that they would not destroy their crops, so the Romans made a really big investment in seeing the Divine in as many places as possible and finding a way to religiously connect with that in Shakes Shure.

I need someone to tell me if Ramulus and Remis were Real as immediately Ramulus and Remis are the legendary founders of Rome, they were twins who had been kicked out of their estate by an evil king and were supposed to drown in a river and the legend He says that a wolf found them and took care of them. and he stopped them from dying and then when they grew up they were able to overthrow the evil King and they were able to found their own civilization, but even the Romans are quite skeptical about this story; you can see many historians later actually saying a She Wolf, are we sure she wasn't a sex worker we just call She Wolf?

This was a pretty legendary story, like George Washington and the cherry tree, and they didn't put much objective faith behind it, okay, that's all. We have time for

questions

today. I hope you learned something strange and interesting about the Romans and I'll see you next time.