There are any number of factors that contribute to the demise of an entire civilization, like the collapse of the Roman Empire circa 476 AD. The empire's slow decline is typically attributed to barbarian invasions, failed military campaigns, economic challenges, government corruption, and an over-reliance on slave labor, among other factors. But it's also been suggested that the toxic effects of lead poisoning on increasingly erratic rulers may also have contribute to its demise—a debate that has been revisited in a new Reactions video from the American Chemical Society.
As the Reactions video points out, the ancient Romans loved their lead. They used it in pipes, to line coffins, in their pots, and their utensils. They also used lead acetate as a sweetener, in an era where cane sugar and honey were quite scarce. They did have an abundance of grapes, and used to boil down the juice in their lead pots. Lead ions would leach into the juice and combine with the acetate from the grapes. The resulting syrup was very sweet and used in wines and a wide variety of foods. In fact, of the 450 recipes in a cookbook from that era (the Apicius cookbook), 100 called for those syrups. The Romans also loved their wine, with aristocrats consuming between 1 and 5 liters every day. Researchers who recreated some of the syrups found lead concentrations around 60 times higher than the EPA allows in public drinking water.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07 ... still-out/
