“They Thought Soap Was Gross”: 30 Lesser Known Facts About The Roman Empire

In areas where they grow, birch trees were used as "street lanterns" or to indicate safe paths across moors

Lol, ancient street lights.

The Roman Rhodes that were built hundreds of years ago are still being used whereas the roads in Tucson Arizona fall apart less than three months after they're built.

What a wonderful piece of trivia!

Trivia was also the goddess of crossroads in Roman mythology, I believe

Webster dates it back to 1902.

Bearing in mind that terracotta means 'baked earth', the jars just went home.

There is also an island in the Etang de Diane, Corse that is made by the discarded shells from mussels and oyster shells produced in Roman times. It's called "Ile de Diane", and there is a small church built on top.

Olive oil from Hispania.

He looks a bit like a Roman Ronald Mcdonald in the second photo 🤔

Billo66

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Augustas Zuckerberg

like someone said below they painted them to look realistic not like what you see on the right as one solid color. it was shaded and dynamic. what was also interesting is they used semi precious stones for the irises in many of the larger statues. their temples and buildings were also painted

So they were redheads?

It is simply amazing that they could find those paint pigments and show what those statues looked like so long ago.

"Material properties" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#:~:text=Material%20properties,-edit

The details were worked out fairly recently: https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106 (a multinational research programme involving Italian and Swiss researchers working with academics from MIT and Harvard in Massachusetts)

Wow.

Do yourself a favour and check out Pont du Gard if you’re ever in Avignon. What an amazingly breathtaking piece of architecture - 50 metres high, the aqueduct had a drop of 25cm per kilometre to allow for ware to move along it. Roman engineering 😮

The secret ingredients were saltwater and quick lime. Using that version of lime produces a hot reaction which allows different chemical bonds and if it's done at normal room temperature.

There is nothing "magical" about concrete curing under water. Modern concrete will do the same thing.

Octavian was part of the triumvirate, he eventually became Augustus Caesar. Marc Antony’s implosion in Egypt aside, Augustus’s wife, Livia was a famous poisoner. We had to read Plutarch and Suetonius in school

You can’t get a letter from Rome to Athens in 9 days??

Long before the Pres. Dwight Eisenhower US Interstate Highway System, there was the U.S. Postal Highway network. It's not anything like the Autobahn because most of its highways go through cities, having traffic lights at their major intersections. But, authorized directly by the U.S. Constitution, they allowed for relatively quick cross-country travel. The most famous U.S. Postal Highways are Route 66 (1926), once going from Chicago to Los Angeles, but now supplanted by interstate highways, and Route 1 (1911), going from the Southern tip of Florida to the Maine-Canada border. But the first US highway (eventually numbered Route 40) was built in 1806, to connect the Atlantic coast in Maryland to the Ohio River, from which you could go downstream and reach New Orleans, or head back upstream once you reached the Mississippi-Missouri River and reach Idaho!

When in Rome, go to the Vatican post office, they will deliver mail in a more timely fashion.

I don't believe this.

Truth be told, there probably weren't a lot of letters going anywhere. Not everyone was literate and sending a letter was probably very expensive.

In the series Rome there is a scene where James Purefoy's character has a 'wash' that way. Quite a fascinating scene...

Strigil or stlegis (στλεγγίς) was invented by the Greeks and the Romans adopted it later.

Lye soap is nasty. Burns. Took some fiddling to make soap pleasant to use.

The truth is a bit more complicated. Galen approved of soap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap#True_soaps_in_the_Ancient_world. More here: https://www.soaphistory.net/soap-history/

The "advertisements" for hookers tended to be "entertaining"

The sign above is obviously advertising cookies. I know this because it begins "M-NONI-M"

Reminds me of the scene in The Life of Brian where the Roman soldier teaches Brian the difference between Romanes eunt domus and Romani ite domum.

"Message Julius for a good time!"

The ancient Egyptians did it too. Graffiti is as old as writing.