Is there any evidence the Romans knew lead was bad for you?

Factual Questions
1

Avoiding hijacking another thread on this. It was suggested on this thread that the ancient Romans may have known about the.long term dangers of ingesting lead. Specifically @TriPolar said:

I’m pretty skeptical of this. I’ve never heard of any contemporary Roman source that implies the Romans knew of the long term dangers of lead exposure. The idea of lead poisoning leading being a contributor to the collapse of the Roman empire came millennia later.

It’s possible they knew you had to be careful when you used lead as an artificial sweetener in wine (which was a thing), as you could get a lethal dose. But the idea that if something is lethal in large doses it is harmful in small doses would not have been around then (for millennia the opposite was thought true and small doses of things that would be poisonous in large doses was considered a good thing)

This link was given in response but I don’t see any description there of contemporary Roman sources blaming their health problems on lead. Only vague descriptions of health problems that could in retrospect (millennia later once we understood what long term effects of lead exposure) be blamed on lead

2

How about this link that states:

Also:

3

Also, you introduced the concept of lead poisoning contributing to the eventual collapse of Rome into the GD thread on technological collapse. That was unrelated to the debate.

4

In De Architectura (On Architecture), Book 8 (1st C. BCE) Vitruvius explicitly states that lead pipes and lead in general are unhealthy:

  1. Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body.
  2. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome.
5

I don’t have an academic citation handy. However…

I was in Rome a few weeks ago. During the visit, I arranged a tour of the Ostia Antica site, guided by a professional archeologist. This location was settled very early, with some evidence suggesting permanent residency in the 7th century BCE; since it was at the original mouth of the Tiber, it was useful for many reasons over several centuries. It wasn’t really developed into a fully proper Roman city, however, until after 100 CE. It went into decline after the Fall of Rome, and then was almost fully abandoned by everyone except local fishing communities after flooding caused a major shift in the course of the Tiber, which accounts for the site’s relatively good state of preservation, largely frozen at the point of its abandonment. Consequently, there’s layers and layers of history on view.

We saw two things that are of interest for this question.

One: the two major surviving bathhouses are damaged in such a way that the plumbing inside the walls is visible. These pipes are made of terra cotta (very clever technology, warming your bathhouse by bringing heat directly up inside the walls); the partially-fallen structures expose the walls’ innards in cross section. One of the two facilities (the “Neptune” bathhouse, with the famously well preserved floor mosaics) was built and then remodeled in the 300s. The other bathhouse was originally built earlier, but then torn down and a larger one built in its place sometime before 400 CE. So by that point, terra cotta plumbing seems to be the standard.

More interesting is a recently excavated storehouse. Entry isn’t allowed, but you can look inside from the exterior gate. The floor of the storehouse is covered with hundreds of lead pipes, dirty and bent and broken. The evidence is not definitive by any means, but the archeologist said the current interpretation is that, based on their used and damaged condition, these were previously installed, and then were ripped out for replacement and dumped here.

The archeologist did note that while the Romans were vaguely aware of the connection between lead and health issues, they didn’t begin to fully turn away from the metal until very late. It was just too cheap and readily available (it was a by-product from silver mining) and useful for large-scale applications due to its easy workability. The upper-class greatly preferred the more expensive clay pipes because of the health concerns, but lead was left in place in the poorer neighborhoods for a long time.

So it’s possible that the evidence at Ostia Antica shows a snapshot somewhere in this transition. As the city became wealthier and more people could afford to remodel their houses, the old lead plumbing would be torn out and clay replacements installed. Or this could be left over from one of the rebuilt bathhouses. And then, because the Romans essentially abandoned the city in the middle of all this, we get to see them in the process of changing their minds.

Edit to add: ninja’d on the academic citation.

6

Then again lead doesn’t leach into water in huge amounts. It isn’t good, but the exposure from lead in water reticulation generally won’t result in obvious illness. Railing against use of lead for water reticulation wasn’t flawed, but its use is unlikely to have been outright killing the inhabitants. Historically we have lived with lead pipes for centuries. It almost certainly has done measurable harm, but western civilisation didn’t fall. There is a reason plumbers are called what they are. Our use of leaded gasoline is probably going to go down in history as far worse.

Wine may oxidise which creates acetic acid thence lead acetate, which is sweet. So storing wine in lead vessels “improved” sour wine. That is likely a solid source of lead poisoning in those times.

Another one is that white lead was used in some makeup and caused poisoning. Something that has had a long history.

7

Just remembered something else the guide mentioned.

In earlier Roman history, as they first started laying in their water management systems, pipes were originally made of wood or clay — they didn’t start with lead. They began converting only after the metal became widely available as an offshoot of their silver smelting operations. (And, yes, the word “plumbing” comes from the Roman word for lead.)

What’s ambiguous, if I’m remembering the guide’s explanation correctly, is whether the upper classes continued preferring clay pipes because they were aware of the health implications (cf. Vitruvius, per above), or because, like rich people throughout history, they bought the more expensive version simply to demonstrate they could afford to spend the money. Perhaps a little of both. Either way, the increasing use of clay pipes later on wasn’t a new invention but a return to an older technology.

(As a side note, Ostia Antica is absolutely worth visiting. Fascinating place. Not as immediately impressive and spectacular as Pompeii, but in some ways more resonant and educational about quotidien Roman existence in its unflashy simplicity.)

8

Oh, they did more than that. They deliberately introduced it into wine to sweeten it.

9

Lead acetate aka lead sugar.

10

Sometimes that’s true. A small bit of copper, for instance, is an essential nutrient. Too much of it is toxic.

Sorting out the cases in which it’s true from the cases in which it’s false possibly requires a sizeable population and some knowledge of statistics.

11

And of course chemistry was as much an art as a science back then, and biology/medicine scarcely distinguishable from magic. The Romans were limited to what we’d now call anecdotal evidence.

12

I still remember the line from my chem book: “Sugar of lead is reputed to be sweet”. Presumably the textbook writer hadn’t tried it.

13

The effects of low lead poisoning, like from lead water pipes, is slow – takes many years for symptoms to show, and often show up mostly in the next generation – the children of the drinkers.

So in ancient Rome, it might not have mattered – how many people lived long enough to be affected by lead in their water?
And it might not have even been noticed by then – the symptoms are similar to common effects of old age.

14

Re the Romans knowing that that cinnabar (mercuric sulfide, found in ore processed to yield mercury) is toxic:

15

I didn’t bring up the Romans in the other thread. The following post was a response to another post:

What I stated on this subject was:

That was based on the history of metallurgy which showed that processing of lead was known to be dangerous as well as the use of lead eating and drinking utensils. Records and artifacts show that the mining and refinement processes along with the use of lead products changed over time indicative of the realization of the dangers, punctuated by returning to the use of lead from time to time.

However, it was quite easy to find that the danger of lead was known to the Romans, and as usual mining and processing showed the danger in far less than a lifetime.

16

As mentioned in the other thread, the ancient Greeks and Romans were familiar with the concept of building up an immunity to toxins, and so even if they were aware that lead was poisonous in large doses they might have thought there was some critical amount below which one was fine.

Which brings up a point: do toxic metals like lead or mercury have any hormesis level at all, or are they absolutely detrimental to the body at any dose? (Probably no level of lead or mercury is good for you, but is there a level below which the body’s repair mechanisms cope?)

17

There are no known safe levels of lead. From the article below, “there is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects.”

If you want more, here is a literature review from 2016. “Prevention should be the single most important way of dealing with lead poisoning.”

And as a bit of “wait, what?” trivia, the guy who put lead in gasoline also invented Freon. So if causing generations of cognitive issues wasn’t enough, he decided to destroy the ozone layer as an encore.

18

Not sure exactly what you’re saying here - it shows up in the children because the children are also being poisoned, not because their parents were. Lead poisoning in a pregnant woman is going to lead to a dangerous birth, but if the baby survives, it’s the actual effects of poisoning that are going to affect the kids badly, not something congenital.

19

There’s evidence that epigenetic changes due to maternal lead exposure can affect not only the child she’s carrying, but even grandchildren.

20

My own home in Chicago today has a lead service pipe connecting to the main under the street.

In 1986, Congress banned the installation of new lead pipes. Other cities still used lead pipes in 1986, but Chicago was the only city that still mandated their use at the time.