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Comment by LessDmesg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, well their bathing actually helped spread worm infections https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/roman-toilets-gave-no-cl...

And don't forget that the Roman idea of dental hygiene was based on urine. They also washed their clothes in urine.

Read the graffiti uncovered in Pompeii. Nearly half of it deals with people taking a crap in the street.

The only thing Romans were good at was war. The rest of culture they had to borrow from the Greeks whom they envied. The Roman nobility spoke Greek, not Latin.

Ancient Romans being a bunch of cruel slaving filthy rednecks is closer to truth.

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From your source:

> One possibility Mitchell offers is that it may have actually been the warm communal waters of the bathhouses that helped spread the parasitic worms.

There was no causality proved, so you can't say that for certain.

Also, washing clothes in urine isn't necessarily bad. It's pretty clean and contains ammonia, which is a cleaning chemical.

> Read the graffiti uncovered in Pompeii. Nearly half of it deals with people taking a crap in the street.

Half? I could imagine one or two pictures; citation needed to sell me on more.

> Ancient Romans being a bunch of cruel slaving

Yeah, keeping slaves was bad.

> filthy rednecks

Well that seems needlessly pejorative and intended as much to intended a particular people group of today.

Can't everyone just appreciate what the Romans did do right and agree that keeping slaves is bad? Also Roman slaves weren't always treated like stereotypical "plantation slaves"; which is a common misconception when people hear "slaves". Still bad, though.

You can see the graffiti yourself at http://ancientgraffiti.org . Cursory inspection revealed zero referring to people relieving themselves in the street, though I don't doubt those exist. Isolated names are very frequent.

Some of these are pretty interesting:

> IV Non(as) Iul(ias) paenulam, palliolum [?posita ad Fau]stilla(m) Pr[o---] L usur[a] [deduxit?] XIIIS (?) [aeri]s a(sses) VIII

> Four days before the Nones of July, a traveler's cloak and a small cloak (were deposited with Fau)stilla (for collateral). Fo(r) fifty (denarii?) she [is charging] 13.5 (coppe)r a(sses) (per month, as interest). 8.

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> ABCDEFGḤỊKOPQRTVX

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> ABCDEFGHLIMPKONQRXTVS

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> ABCDEFGHI (gap) KL (gap) MNOPQRSTVX

This one is an exact mirror of the modern alphabet (except Y and Z); I'm not sure why there are gaps.

---

Some are timeless:

> Victor cum Attine hic fuit

> Victor was with Attine here.

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> Hic ego puellas multas futui

> I fucked a lot of girls here.

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> Fututa sum hic

> I [a woman] was fucked here.

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> Antiochus hic mansit cum sua cithera

> Antiochus stayed here with his cythera [not sure what this means]

greek originated lover?

Not actually a terrible guess; references to the island are an established poetic way to refer to Venus (who originated by washing up on its shore).

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

And there I thought I'd found something different.

Polio can spread through such pools too

Don’t forget engineering. Which, to be fair, they used in large part for war. Roads are great for getting your army to Gaul to fight. Concrete piers to sail your army where the roads don’t go.

War, infrastructure, public services ( eg. Court, water supply, ..)

You don't get to be a empire in ancient times with any of the above.

The romans did envy the Greek culture quite a lot - Pompeii and Herculan are filled with “copies of greek statues”. And they did copy the mythology wholesale.

But speaking about this I can’t not mention the hilarious sketch from Monty Python - [what did the romans ever do for us](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uvPbj9NX0zc) TL;DR; Quite a lot given the relative cultures and civilizations of the time.

Have in mind that a lot of the greeks were themselves a bunch of cruel slaving rednecks too - https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Most of what I know about Romans comes from listening to my gamer friends slash military history buffs, while we sat around pounding Mountain Dew and waiting for someone to finish their turn.

I was always impressed by how open Romans were to assimilating other people's culture, gods, tech, whatnot. I can't help but think that the Roman strategy of an ever expanding definition of "us" (vs them) was critical to their success.

I wish we knew more about the Etruscans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization I have the impression that they were the first culture assimilated by the Romans. Conquered militarily (or economically) and then basically fostered into the Roman society. So much so that it's now hard to discern the differences between the two.

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