A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.
RULES:
No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, etc. The past may be bigoted, but we are not.
Memes must be Rome-related, not just the title. It can be about Rome, or using Roman aesthetics, or both, but the meme itself needs to have Roman themes.
Follow Piefed.social rules.
MORE COMMS ON THE HISTORYVERSE:
Explanation: Despite having a great many features which seem positively modern to our eyes, like public restrooms and clean water supply, other practices of the ancient Romans were less... intuitive to our eyes. Swishing fermented urine, for example, was used as a method of whitening teeth.
Worst part is, it works, though not nearly as well as any modern methods. It's the ammonia.
I wonder if people could pay more for urine from people who ate better. Was asparagus-piss the box wine of the urine-whitening-world?
It was considered that urine from folk in what-is-now Portugal was the highest quality for teeth-whitening!
Don't forget lead pipes.
Not so bad, funny enough! The Romans recognized that lead was unhealthy, but knew that running water through the pipes would cause calcium buildup which prevented the lead leaching into the water supply after a few months' use.
The real lead issue was that Romans boiled down grape sweetener in lead vessels, specifically, because the lead would react with the grape juice and make the resulting syrup sweeter.
Delicious!
