Lead, Saturn and the Romans

Lead, Saturn and the Romans



Hence gout and stone afflict the human race;
Hence lazy jaundice with her saffron face;
Palsy, with shaking head and tott'ring knees.
And bloated dropsy, the staunch sot's disease;
Consumption, pale, with keen but hollow eye,
And sharpened feature, shew'd that death was nigh.
The feeble offspring curse their crazy sires,
And, tainted from his birth, the youth expires.
(Description of lead poisoning by an anonymous Roman hermit, Translated by Humelbergius Secundus, 1829)(4)

Roman mythology is rich with gods and goddesses made in the image and likeness of man. One such god was Saturn. The ancient stories say that Saturn leads his brothers and sisters in a revolt against their father and he becomes king of the gods. He marries Rhea and they have six children. Because of a prediction that one day one of his children will dethrone him, Saturn eats each of his newborns until the last one, the one Rhea protects.(1)

Ancient Rome also lent Saturn's name to a form of lead intoxication known as saturnine gout. The Romans noticed similarities between symptoms of this disorder and the irritable god, and named the disease after him.

Lead touched many areas of Roman life. It made up pipes and dishes, cosmetics and coins, and paints. For winemakers in the Roman Empire, lead was an integral part of the process. When boiling crushed grapes, Roman vintners insisted on using lead pots or lead-lined copper kettles.(2)

"For, in the boiling," wrote Roman winemaker Columella, "brazen vessels throw off copper rust which has a disagreeable flavor."

Lead’s sweet overtones, by contrast, were thought to add complementary flavors to wine and to food as well.(3)

Eventually, as a host of mysterious maladies became more common, some Romans began to suspect a connection between the metal and these illnesses.

However, the culture’s habits never changed. Roman aristocrats never dreamed of drinking wine except from a golden cup, but they thought nothing of washing down platters of lead-seasoned food with gallons of lead-adulterated wine. The result, according to many modern scholars, was the death by slow poisoning of the greatest empire the world has ever known.(5) read full article at Heroin and Cornflakes...