Sometimes in history great empires rise and fall, great peoples with former great accomplishments become a bunch of idiots. In 1734 Montesquieu published "Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline". He accused opulence and luxury, together with the rise of Christianity, of being causes of Rome's decline. Almost three centuries later, a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences of the United States, points to the Roman silver coins mass production. Silver was extracted from argentiferous galena but, for 1 kilogram of silver, the process liberated tens of kilograms of lead which contaminated everything including the athmosphere. Ice samples from Groenland show that the lead contents in the atmosphere over Europe soared in the 1st c. BC and later again in the late 2nd c. AD, which inevitably had epidemiological consequences : late Romans likely lost an average 2.5 to 3 points of IQ. The article can be read here : https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2419630121
Interesting article. There can be no doubt of their exposure to it. Also their excessive drinking of sweetened wine didn´t help. In ancient Rome, grape syrup was often boiled in lead pots, which sweetened the syrup through the leaching of the sweet-tasting chemical compound lead acetate into the syrup. Incidentally, this is thought to have caused lead poisoning for Romans consuming the syrup. A 2009 History Channel documentary produced a batch of historically accurate defrutum in lead-lined vessels and tested the liquid, finding a lead level of 29,000 parts per billion (ppb), which is 2,900 times higher than contemporary American drinking water limit of 10 ppb. These levels are easily high enough to cause either acute lead toxicity if consumed in large amounts or chronic lead poisoning when consumed in smaller quantities over a longer period of time (as defrutum was typically used)
Estelle Lazar in her book Resurrecting Pompeii goes some distance in debunking the claim that lead poisoning facilitated the fall of the Roman Empire (pp. 214-217). She saw little evidence of such in the human remains at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Interesting history lesson. I'm reminded that before microbiology was understood, water was often one of the most dangerous things a person could drink, especially in densely populated areas where it was easily fouled. It's one of the reasons mead, wine, and beer became popular drinks in the ancient world, as the anti-microbial alcohol made them less dangerous.
I'm not sure the alcohol concentration in beer is strong enough to be very effective, but all the boiling in the brewing process sure is.
