Eric The Viking
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Copper pipes in another thread reminded me...
I don't get enough time to read these days, except on holiday.
For two years, I took Tom Paine's "The Rights of Man" away with me (fits nicely into my camera bag), but now I've gone all tabletty I can take 'weightier*' tomes. This year it was Gibbon's "Decline and Fall".
Being a bit of an intellectual coward, I tend to carefully read the introductions, etc., first off, as I usually need all the help I can get with the rest. I have two Kindle editions. The free one is OK but dense. The paid-for one is good, because it has commentary. In particular, there's a good section of modern critique of Gibbon at the back, including alternative theories (Gibbon's premise is largely that the Empire collapsed through moral decay).
My favourite modern hypothesis is that the Roman Empire collapsed through lead poisoning. Apparently the Romans liked cooking up fruit syrups, 'defrutum' and 'sapa', which were used as sweeteners in a range of other foodstuffs, including wine, and often in cooking. They were made in lead-lined pans, and the hypothesis points out that the acid of the fruit would dissolve the lead, making lead acetate. This in turn easily brings toxic lead into the body.
The proponents point to chemical analysis of bones from Herculaneum, revealing lead at 84ppm, well into the range where it does damage. They contrast it with bones from ancient Greece, at 3ppm.
So did the Romans actually all go mad as hatters (or was that mercury?)?
Wikipedia says, "Symptoms include abdominal pain, confusion, headache, anaemia, irritability..." That would cover quite a few emperors, I'd say, and anyway, madness might well arise from continual headaches and stomach cramps.
If such a dreadful fate befell Roman society, I'm wondering if there is an equivalent in modern, Western life. I doubt it's chemical, but it might well be psychological. For example, might we be driving ourselves slowly mad with the insistent "turn left" of the girl in the satnav, or the buzz of modern 'low energy' lightbulbs. Could we be vulnerable to the ubiquity of Marvel-comic-derived action movies?
Anyone else worried by this, or, to quote Douglas Adams, is it just 'normal paranoia'?
E.
*research published two years ago suggested that the data stored on the entire internet amounted to about the weight of an average strawberry. It didn't say how ripe the strawberry was, nor if it was being used to make defrutum, either.
I don't get enough time to read these days, except on holiday.
For two years, I took Tom Paine's "The Rights of Man" away with me (fits nicely into my camera bag), but now I've gone all tabletty I can take 'weightier*' tomes. This year it was Gibbon's "Decline and Fall".
Being a bit of an intellectual coward, I tend to carefully read the introductions, etc., first off, as I usually need all the help I can get with the rest. I have two Kindle editions. The free one is OK but dense. The paid-for one is good, because it has commentary. In particular, there's a good section of modern critique of Gibbon at the back, including alternative theories (Gibbon's premise is largely that the Empire collapsed through moral decay).
My favourite modern hypothesis is that the Roman Empire collapsed through lead poisoning. Apparently the Romans liked cooking up fruit syrups, 'defrutum' and 'sapa', which were used as sweeteners in a range of other foodstuffs, including wine, and often in cooking. They were made in lead-lined pans, and the hypothesis points out that the acid of the fruit would dissolve the lead, making lead acetate. This in turn easily brings toxic lead into the body.
The proponents point to chemical analysis of bones from Herculaneum, revealing lead at 84ppm, well into the range where it does damage. They contrast it with bones from ancient Greece, at 3ppm.
So did the Romans actually all go mad as hatters (or was that mercury?)?
Wikipedia says, "Symptoms include abdominal pain, confusion, headache, anaemia, irritability..." That would cover quite a few emperors, I'd say, and anyway, madness might well arise from continual headaches and stomach cramps.
If such a dreadful fate befell Roman society, I'm wondering if there is an equivalent in modern, Western life. I doubt it's chemical, but it might well be psychological. For example, might we be driving ourselves slowly mad with the insistent "turn left" of the girl in the satnav, or the buzz of modern 'low energy' lightbulbs. Could we be vulnerable to the ubiquity of Marvel-comic-derived action movies?
Anyone else worried by this, or, to quote Douglas Adams, is it just 'normal paranoia'?
E.
*research published two years ago suggested that the data stored on the entire internet amounted to about the weight of an average strawberry. It didn't say how ripe the strawberry was, nor if it was being used to make defrutum, either.
