Name: 古代ローマ史の教授だけど質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-03-11T08:55:14.000Z
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I'm Lauren Ginsberg, professor of ancient Rome, and I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Ancient Rome Support. ["In the Hall of the Mountain King"] At Abba Eagle, why did Romans wear togas?

Adverbs of degree

The average Roman did not go out of their house hanging out in a toga, because togas were extremely long, extremely complicated gowns to put together, so even extremely elite Roman citizens recognized the toga as a ceremonial gown.

I like this image because we have all these people who are wearing things that are decidedly not togas.

What they are wearing is the basic Roman garment that anyone of any status, male or female, would wear, which is what's called the tunic, or the tunica.

At C450HS, did the Romans really wash their clothes in urine?

So if you look at any of your household cleaners, you will see that one of the highest ingredients generally is ammonia.

It's very caustic, so it's not always very good for your things, but it cleans extremely effectively.

And so the Romans were able to recognize that urine, when stored for quite some time, tends to break down into ammonia.

So when you would bring your clothes to a philonica, so this is a laundromat, essentially, in the ancient world, first thing was it would go into a vat in which highly concentrated urine would be poured, and you would let it sit there.

Then the clothes would be washed with clean, flowing water in three to four separate vats.

Until the end, it was basically perfectly clean and it could be line-dried.

Finn Huckster, did the Romans really have vomitoriums?

It is true that if you look at some urban plans in Rome, stadium buildings, amphitheaters, theaters, places where tens of thousands of people would come, you will often find the word vomitorium that's written there.

And somehow a myth has been created that this is where decadent Romans would go after they ate too much food and they would purge themselves.

It comes from the Latin word vomo, vomere, which basically means to send forth.

And so, yes, on the one hand, send forth your food, but on the other, it can mean to send forth people.

So what these were were actually large, large stairways to get lots of people out of a stadium very quickly.

So we actually still use the exact same technology that Romans called vomitoria.

We just don't call them vomitoriums, and I, for one, think maybe we should.

Man, they didn't even have popcorn back in ancient Rome.

This made headlines last summer because they've actually started to do excavations in the drainage system of the Colosseum and in the sewers.

Because if you think about it, if you go to a rock concert today, you can see everything's sticky on the floor.

People throw their food all over the place.

In ancient Rome, it would go down into the drains and it would go down into the sewers.

And that means that things that can survive for those millennia, we can be able to tell that those were the kind of foods that were snacked on.

All sorts of varieties of nuts and residues of nuts have been found in these sewers.

Fruits, for example, figs and peaches and other fruits, grapes, that were easy to carry.

Also, what they discovered was that people seemed to bring or at least have access to small, portable grills, sort of like tailgating grills, little braziers, where they could grill meat at the time.

As you watched people fight to the death and animals die.

Why does concrete from ancient Rome stand up better than modern concrete?

If we look at this dome in the Pantheon of Rome, it looks pretty spectacular today.

If we consider that this dome is made of concrete and we think of a bridge that might've been built in your city in the 1970s, these two things do not look the same.

So just this past summer, a team of civil engineers from MIT set out to figure out what this was.

If you look at Roman concrete, you can see in the matrix, these chunks of white material.

So this group of MIT scientists figured out that these white chunks called lime clasts were deliberate and were also proof that the Romans used something called quicklime, as opposed to lime that had been pre-mixed with water, which had always been the assumption.

And the quicklime superheats the chemical process as it makes concrete.

And so one of the things we've always known about Roman concrete is that it can harden really quickly, including underwater.

Also the other property that they were able to recreate in the lab was that Roman concrete can be self-healing to a certain amount.

So if you put modern concrete and Roman concrete in a stress environment so that the concrete cracks, Roman concrete can actually heal that cracks.

And the key that they think they found is that these lime clasts, these calcified white chunks would be able to immediately distribute material to those cracks and help with the self-healing properties.

It is much more expensive to make concrete this way.

So I'm not actually sure that we're about to have a Roman concrete revolution, but it is pretty cool that these scientists think they've recreated what the secret of Roman concrete is.

It's not even like they would just be released from a gate and everyone could tell.

And architectural investigation has shown the technology through which lions below the surface of the floor of the Colosseum were able to be launched into the air to suddenly appear.

But the question about how often did they die, we have tombstones that show gladiators who have won 50 different competitions in their life.

Evidence of gladiators who retire from being a gladiator and train other gladiators.

And so it wouldn't really make sense if every time they went into the arena, there was a 50-50 shot that they weren't going to walk out.

Instead, what we see mostly when it's human versus human, gladiator versus gladiator, is a heavily stage-managed choreographed fight that's designed to be extremely exciting for the audience.

That doesn't mean that they weren't sometimes killed.

We do also have evidence that gladiators could be killed, but that would have been agreed upon in advance by whoever was running the games and whoever had nominal control over the gladiator's life.

What did the Romans invent that we still use today?

One thing we want to poke at is this word invention, because the Romans sort of took things that existed, concrete is a good example, and perfected it.

But the example I think of immediately is actually surgical tools, scalpels, tweezers, forceps.

But the actual basic tools, if you looked on, say, the set of Grey's Anatomy or some medical show, would look extremely similar to what the Romans were using in the past, and they would be made out of similar types of metal.

Did they have bars in ancient Rome, or did wine just flow freely down the streets?

Unfortunately, no, but they did have bars, and they had bars all over the place.

So these were often called tavernae, and these would be bars where you could get drink, but you could also get food.

So this comes from some recent excavations in Pompeii in an area that were just open to the public.

And what you can see here is a big counter.

So you could imagine someone behind here actually serving alcohol.

But those big jars that you see would also have food.

So stews, rich, hot items that people would either get to have as their primary meal of the day in the bar, or that they would then take home where they could heat it up simply.

So these bars show up so often in these working-class neighborhoods of Pompeii.

And the analogy I like to use is they show up as often as a Dunkin' Donuts does in the city of Boston.

And the graffiti that we found on them shows that they're really a social hub of the neighborhood.

It's likely that you would just go to the pub on the corner, much the way we think of neighborhood bars today.

Come on, I suppose next you're gonna tell me that all those Greek and Roman statues were actually godly painted.

Yes, I'm here to tell you that all of those Greek and Roman statues were painted, but I object to the term godly.

When people think about what it was like to walk around the streets of ancient Rome, they think about these things that are here.

Bright white marble, marble buildings, marble statues.

The Romans would have found all of this white marble extremely boring.

There was a fantastic exhibit last summer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that actually featured a number of recreated statues in which scientists had very carefully taken tiny bits of pigment on statues so you could see that, say, a statue of someone like Nero here, each layer of clothing would be painted with shades, with texture, with patterns.

And the same thing is true with Roman buildings.

NevadaDenite67, was ancient Rome really a sexual free-for-all?

Romans had sex inside and outside the institution of marriage.