> The average ancient Roman worker was riddled with arthritis, suffered broken bones and was dead by 30 thanks to a diet of rotting grains and a lifetime of hard labour, a new study has found
As opposed to all the other ancient empires who were.
The ancient Assyrian empire would allegedly make corpse piles and skull pyramids after putting entires towns to the sword, humans are and always have been cruel to each other.
There's a Catullus poem that suggested they did, but clearly it wasn't all Romans, and some of the others even derided them for it.
(I briefly tried to figure out how to promote that, but I know nothing about starting campaigns of that sort. shrug)
if you want to kill them that is. Pee need to be diluted with water before being used as a fertilizer.
Furthermore, the idea I had was not that urine would be the only fluid the tree would get, but that peeing on a tree would mean flushing the toilet one less time per day. Most toilets use premium tap water, not grey water, and water shortages have been a big global issue.
Plus tree were dying from drought in California by the millions when I had the idea. I'm sure peeing on them would have been less deadly for most of them than extreme drought.
It was summer but no drought though. I guess it depends on the trees.
And I'm not positive, but maybe the average lifespan in Rome was 30(considering all the newborn deaths), but I really doubt adult workers were keeling over at 30 on average.
In fact I think no large city was self-sustaining, perhaps until London, c 1800? Having that many people in proximity simply wasn't healthy. For much the same reason, very few wars before WWI (perhaps none?) had more men killed by the enemy than by disease.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Demo...