Fifth-century BC marble relief, a physician treating a woman (Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via Getty Images)

Paul Stephenson's phenomenal, recent history New Rome: The Empire in the East (2022) is a salvo not to the political or demographics changes that underpinned the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as we know it in the West, but the seismic convolutions by which the Eastern Roman Empire morphed into a new beast that would live on for another millennium. It is a masterful work in its level of detail and its breadth in combining political and economic history with urban studies and theology and, interestingly enough, climate studies.

The opening chapter of his work is a meticulous exposition of the role of lead both in the climate and health of Late Antiquity, and a suitable teaser for the book at large.

It begins with the Sun.

Solar emissions vary over broad periods of time causing shifts in temperature which have shaped the course of history. Some are familiar with the "Little Ice Age" between 1645 and 1715, others with the "Medieval Climate Optimum" from 950 to 1250 which kicked off the ventures of the Vikings among others historical escapades.

The Romans had their own such warm period, the "Roman Climate Optimum" between 250 BC and 400 AD. It was at the end of this period that the Mediterranean world began cooling, dramatically enough to be arguably a factor in the population decline of the period as less rain led to weaker agricultural output.

But turning from the cosmic impact of the stars upon human civilization on Earth, we can see conversely the impact of human civilization upon our earthly landscape.

Roman metallurgy was simply monstrous in its scope and volume. Arms, coins, infrastructure, smelted across the far-long reaches of Roman geography. The smoke exhaust of lead production is far from clean, and it a testament to how well-developed Roman industry was that metallic compound contamination can be found as far afield as untouched lake beds and bogs of Ireland, Sweden, and Iceland. Most remarkably, even in deep ice layers of Greenland, we have found lead traces whose origin can be traced to Spain, one such metallurgical hotspot in Late Antiquity.

Lead pollutants would rapidly decline by the fifth century, and it would not be until 1700 AD that lead pollution would reach the same levels again.

Lead is a remarkable compound in that "it is malleable and resists corrosion when in contact with air and water (12)". The heights of Rome's trademark engineering were in many ways rooted in lead construction, in columns, roofs, rain gutters, plumbing, and most especially piping. Because of its extensive use in the artifacts and infrastructure of everyday life, we still find lead in regions of the Roman empire where no such mining or production occurred.

Yet as we know today lead is dangerous to the human organism.

The relationship between lead and the madness of Nero and Caligula has already entered popular funfactdom, but ironically the argument that Romans ingested lead through their pipes and drinking vessels is largely a myth (at least so Stephenson claims). Rather, it was intentionally mixed into sauces, medicines, and for sweetening wine. The lead pollution crept into the flora and fauna of the Roman landscape, and studies show that honey bees absorb twice as much lead as drones from the plants they harvest. The Romans loved their honey and children were most often weaned on it. Maternal lactation too transferred the lead-crusted calcium of their bones into the breast milk and consequently the bodies of their infants.

In a morbid twist, archeologists can use lead-heavy skeletons to identify Roman settlements across the world, such as in Dorset where other non-lead populations lived before and after.

The Romans of the Lead Age were remarkably shorter in stature and life span than the Romans who lived before them and the various peoples who lived after them. On average, men were 5'5" and women 5'0".

In the Eastern Roman Empire of the fifth century, life expectancy had dropped below thirty years and even in some locales as low as twenty-three. Neonatal mortality skyrocketed but was not nearly as high as those on young children who were weaned off their mothers' milk and onto lead-heavy nutrition, compounded by other poor nutritional and sanitation. In this period, up to 40% of those born would die before reaching the age of eighteen.

The bones themselves of the residents of this time speak to the various diseases and weaknesses that had defined the new standards and norms of health at this time as deformities continued to abound, skeletal and dental.

And yet they prayed for health, some resorting to magic, as life continued to get worse until a new era could slowly erase the accumulated toxins of lead, though such a process took centuries and generations.

One must consider when reading this chapter what we should think today if we were to replace the word "lead" for "plastic", how there is no intrinsic "nature will find a way" protection that will save us from poisoning ourselves to the brink of extinction, when we make our children too sickly, too weak, too decrepit to continue the human race, just because we want to feed our reckless luxuries.