Rough Roman Memes

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A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.

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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.
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Not sure where to start on Roman history?

A quick memetic primer on Republican Rome

A quick memetic primer on Imperial Rome

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PugJesus

It tastes so fucking good, though (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 days ago by PugJesus to c/roughromanmemes

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[–] PugJesus 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Explanation: One of the favorite sweeteners of Romans was a concoction called defrutum, which was ~~wine~~ grape juice, apparently, boiled down into a sweet syrup. Sounds harmless enough, right?

Well, it was boiled down into syrup in lead vessels. Specifically, lead vessels, because copper and iron alloys left an aftertaste; whereas lead reacted with the wine and made the resulting syrup sweeter.

What's worse, the Romans knew lead was unhealthy, both short and long-term.

But hell, what were the rich supposed to do?! Eat their fancy fruit and ice desserts without additional sweeteners??