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Professor of Ancient Rome Lauren D. Ginsberg answers the internet's burning questions about the Roman Empire. What did Romans snack on in the Colosseum? Why does Ancient Roman concrete differ from modern forms of concrete? Did gladiators really fight lions? This Roman expert answers all these questions and much more.

Director: Justin Wolfson
Director of Photography: Constantine Economides
Editor: Louville Moore; Ron Douglas
Expert: Lauren Ginsberg
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon White
Production Manager: D. Eric Martinez
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Christopher Eustache
Gaffer: Rebecca Van Der Meulen
Sound Mixer: Michael Guggino
Production Assistant: Sonia Butt
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Paul Tael
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward

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Tech
Transcript
00:00 I'm Lauren Ginsberg, professor of ancient Rome,
00:02 and I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.
00:04 This is Ancient Rome Support.
00:06 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:09 At Abba Eagle, why did Romans wear togas?
00:14 The average Roman did not go out of their house
00:16 hanging out in a toga, because togas were extremely long,
00:20 extremely complicated gowns to put together.
00:22 So even extremely elite Roman citizens
00:25 recognized the toga as a ceremonial gown.
00:27 I like this image, because we have all these people who
00:29 are wearing things that are decidedly not togas.
00:32 What they are wearing is the basic Roman garment
00:34 that anyone of any status, male or female,
00:37 would wear, which is what's called the tunic,
00:39 or the tunica.
00:40 And this is essentially a long t-shirt.
00:43 @c450hs, did the Romans really wash their clothes and urine?
00:48 Yes, and essentially, so do we.
00:50 So if you look at any of your household cleaners,
00:53 you will see that one of the highest ingredients
00:55 generally is ammonia.
00:57 It's very caustic, so it's not always
00:58 very good for your things, but it cleans extremely
01:01 effectively.
01:01 And so the Romans were able to recognize
01:03 that urine, when stored for quite some time,
01:06 tends to break down into ammonia.
01:09 So when you would bring your clothes to a philonica--
01:12 so this is a laundromat, essentially,
01:13 in the ancient world-- first thing was,
01:15 it would go into a vat in which highly concentrated urine
01:18 would be poured, and you would let it sit there.
01:20 Then the clothes would be washed with clean, flowing water
01:23 in three to four separate vats.
01:25 Until the end, it was basically perfectly clean,
01:27 and it could be line-dried.
01:29 @finhuckster, did the Romans really have vomitoriums?
01:32 Yes, but not in the way that you mean.
01:35 It is true that if you look at some urban plans in Rome--
01:38 stadium buildings, amphitheaters, theaters,
01:41 places where tens of thousands of people would come--
01:43 you will often find the word vomitorium that's written
01:45 there.
01:46 And somehow, a myth has been created
01:48 that this is where decadent Romans would
01:50 go after they ate too much food, and they
01:52 would purge themselves.
01:53 This is not what those words mean.
01:55 It comes from the Latin word vomo, vomere, which basically
01:58 means to send forth.
02:00 And so yes, on the one hand, send forth your food.
02:03 But on the other, it can mean to send forth people.
02:05 So what these were were actually large, large stairways
02:08 to get lots of people out of a stadium very quickly.
02:11 So we actually still use the exact same technology
02:14 that Romans called vomitoria.
02:15 We just don't call them vomitoriums.
02:17 And I, for one, think maybe we should.
02:18 @notlandlew, man, they didn't even have popcorn back
02:22 in ancient Rome.
02:23 True story.
02:24 What did they snack on in the Colosseum?
02:26 This made headlines last summer because they've actually
02:28 started to do excavations in the drainage system of the Colosseum
02:32 and in the sewers.
02:33 Because if you think about it, if you go to a rock concert
02:35 today, you can see everything's sticky on the floor.
02:37 People throw their food all over the place.
02:39 Where does that go?
02:40 In ancient Rome, it would go down into the drains,
02:42 and it would go down into the sewers.
02:43 And that means that things that can survive
02:45 for those millennia, we can be able to tell
02:47 that those were the kind of foods that were snacked on.
02:49 All sorts of varieties of nuts and residues of nuts
02:51 have been found in these sewers.
02:53 Fruits, for example, figs and peaches,
02:55 and other fruits, grapes, that were easy to carry.
02:58 Also, what they discovered was that people
03:00 seemed to bring, or at least have access
03:02 to, small, portable grills, sort of like tailgating grills,
03:06 little braziers, where they could grill meat at the time,
03:09 as you watched people fight to the death and animals die.
03:12 @jua_dog, why does concrete from ancient Rome
03:15 stand up better than modern concrete?
03:17 If we look at this dome in the Pantheon of Rome,
03:20 it looks pretty spectacular today.
03:22 If we consider that this dome is made of concrete,
03:25 and we think of a bridge that might have been built
03:27 in your city in the 1970s,
03:29 these two things do not look the same.
03:30 So just this past summer, a team of civil engineers
03:33 from MIT set out to figure out what this was,
03:36 and they think that they have an answer.
03:38 If you look at Roman concrete, you can see in the matrix
03:41 these chunks of white material.
03:43 So this group of MIT scientists figured out
03:46 that these white chunks, called lime clasts,
03:48 were deliberate, and were also proof
03:51 that the Romans used something called quicklime,
03:54 as opposed to lime that had been pre-mixed with water,
03:57 which had always been the assumption,
03:58 and that quicklime superheats the chemical process
04:02 as it makes concrete.
04:03 And so one of the things we've always known
04:05 about Roman concrete is that it can harden really quickly,
04:07 including underwater.
04:09 Also, the other property that they were able to recreate
04:12 in the lab was that Roman concrete can be self-healing
04:15 to a certain amount.
04:16 So if you put modern concrete and Roman concrete
04:18 in a stress environment so that the concrete cracks,
04:21 Roman concrete can actually heal that cracks.
04:24 And the key that they think they found
04:26 is that these lime clasts, these calcifisized white chunks,
04:30 would be able to immediately distribute material
04:32 to those cracks and help with the self-healing properties.
04:35 It is much more expensive to make concrete this way,
04:37 so I'm not actually sure that we're about to have
04:39 a Roman concrete revolution, but it is pretty cool
04:41 that these scientists think they've recreated
04:43 what the secret of Roman concrete is.
04:45 @dylansfault, "Did those gladiators
04:47 "really fight lions?
04:49 "How often did they die?"
04:50 Absolutely, gladiators really fought lions.
04:53 It's not even like they would just be released from a gate
04:55 and everyone could tell.
04:56 And architectural investigation has shown the technology
05:00 through which lions below the surface of the floor
05:02 of the Colosseum were able to be launched into the air
05:05 to suddenly appear.
05:06 But the question about how often did they die,
05:08 we have tombstones that show gladiators
05:10 who have won 50 different competitions in their life.
05:14 Evidence of gladiators who retire from being a gladiator
05:17 and train other gladiators.
05:19 And so it wouldn't really make sense
05:20 if every time they went into the arena,
05:22 there was a 50/50 shot that they weren't going to walk out.
05:25 Instead, what we see mostly when it's human versus human,
05:28 gladiator versus gladiator,
05:29 is a heavily stage-managed choreographed fight
05:33 that's designed to be extremely exciting for the audience.
05:35 That doesn't mean that they weren't sometimes killed.
05:37 We do also have evidence that gladiators could be killed,
05:40 but that would have been agreed upon in advance
05:43 by whoever was running the games
05:45 and whoever had nominal control over the gladiator's life.
05:47 We have get gators.
05:49 What did the Romans invent that we still use today?
05:52 One thing we want to poke at is this word invention,
05:55 because the Romans sort of took things that existed,
05:57 concrete is a good example, and perfected it.
06:00 But the example I think of immediately
06:02 is actually surgical tools, scalpels, tweezers, forceps.
06:06 But the actual basic tools,
06:07 if you looked on, say, the set of "Grey's Anatomy"
06:09 or some medical show, would look extremely similar
06:12 to what the Romans were using in the past.
06:14 And they would be made out of similar types of metal.
06:16 From "This is Nico," did they have bars in ancient Rome
06:19 or did wine just flow freely down the streets?
06:21 Unfortunately, no, but they did have bars,
06:23 and they had bars all over the place.
06:26 So these were often called tavernae,
06:28 and these would be bars where you could get drink,
06:30 but you could also get food.
06:31 And this is a great example.
06:33 So this comes from some recent excavations in Pompeii
06:36 in an area that were just open to the public.
06:38 And what you can see here is a big counter.
06:40 So you could imagine someone behind here
06:42 actually serving alcohol.
06:43 But those big jars that you see would also have food.
06:46 So stews, rich, hot items that people would either get
06:50 to have as their primary meal of the day in the bar,
06:53 or that they would then take home
06:55 where they could heat it up simply.
06:56 So these bars show up so often
06:59 in these working-class neighborhoods of Pompeii.
07:01 And the analogy I like to use is they show up as often
07:03 as a Dunkin' Donuts does in the city of Boston.
07:06 And the graffiti that we found on them
07:07 shows that they're really a social hub of the neighborhood.
07:10 It's likely that you would just go to the pub on the corner,
07:12 much the way we think of neighborhood bars today.
07:14 From attemptsflame.
07:16 Come on, I suppose next you're gonna tell me
07:18 that all those Greek and Roman statues
07:19 were actually godly painted.
07:21 Yes, I'm here to tell you
07:22 that all of those Greek and Roman statues were painted,
07:25 but I object to the term godly.
07:26 When people think about what it was like
07:28 to walk around the streets of ancient Rome,
07:30 they think about these things that are here.
07:32 Bright white marble, marble buildings, marble statues.
07:36 The Romans would have found all of this white marble
07:38 extremely boring.
07:40 They loved vibrancy.
07:42 And they were also world-class painters.
07:44 There was a fantastic exhibit last summer
07:46 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
07:48 that actually featured a number of recreated statues
07:51 in which scientists had very carefully taken
07:54 tiny bits of pigment on statues
07:56 so you could see that, say,
07:57 a statue of someone like Nero here,
08:00 each layer of clothing would be painted
08:02 with shades, with texture, with patterns.
08:04 And the same thing is true with Roman buildings.
08:06 Rome was awash of color.
08:08 Nevada de Night 67.
08:10 Was ancient Rome really a sexual free-for-all?
08:13 So here's the thing.
08:14 Romans had a very healthy sex life.
08:16 Romans had sex inside and outside
08:18 the institution of marriage.
08:19 Romans had sex for procreation, yes, but also for pleasure.
08:23 Romans had access to contraception.
08:25 Romans, especially Roman women, would rise up
08:28 when they thought that those rights were being curtailed.
08:31 Romans have pictures and works of art
08:34 and literary texts that talk about sexual desire,
08:38 that talk about sex acts,
08:40 that talk about their favorite positions.
08:41 Short, it's "Woman on Top"
08:42 is the thing that they seem to like a lot.
08:44 Men have sex with women.
08:45 Men have sex with men.
08:47 Women have sex with women.
08:48 Women have sex with men.
08:49 And so much like today, it was really a spectrum
08:52 of sexual behavior, sexual performance,
08:55 sexual interest.
08:56 From the Kino corner,
08:57 which Roman emperor was objectively the best?
09:00 The Roman Empire was an autocracy,
09:02 which means that all Roman emperors were autocrats.
09:04 And it means I don't actually think any of them
09:06 were very good people.
09:07 I think in general, that form of government
09:09 doesn't lead to people doing good things.
09:11 So I'm gonna take a couple of examples
09:13 of good and bad emperors.
09:14 We have a friend Nero here, who everyone probably agrees,
09:17 the worst of the worst emperors.
09:19 And then we have everyone's favorite emperor
09:21 on the internet, Marcus Aurelius.
09:23 He wrote this nice book of Stoic philosophy.
09:25 And so people think he's extremely chill.
09:27 And thus under his empire,
09:29 things must have gone particularly well.
09:30 But let's ask this question,
09:32 objectively the best for whom?
09:34 And was he objectively the best
09:36 for the substantial population of the Roman Empire
09:39 at that time who were enslaved?
09:41 We always have an idea of what we mean as best for whom.
09:44 And I just don't happen to think
09:45 that the Roman Empire produced anyone
09:47 that we would consider to be a fair ruler today.
09:49 At Royally Ari,
09:50 how often do you think about the Roman Empire?
09:53 Well, this is a little bit of an unfair question
09:54 because I have to say the answer is more than daily
09:57 because it is a professional obligation.
09:59 I probably think about the Roman Empire
10:01 more than your average person.
10:02 On Azorah HQ,
10:04 how effective were public toilets and bathrooms
10:07 at keeping people clean?
10:09 And how was hygiene in ancient Rome?
10:11 Romans had extremely advanced technologies of water.
10:14 For example, they had extensive systems of aqueducts
10:17 that were able to bring clean water
10:18 across vast expanses of land.
10:21 They had a sewer system as of,
10:23 I believe the fourth century BC.
10:26 That's bananas.
10:27 They had public bathing facilities.
10:29 So it was very regular if you were a Roman,
10:30 no matter your status,
10:32 to actually go and use these baths
10:34 on a daily basis to clean yourselves.
10:36 And yes, they also had public toilets.
10:38 This would not be the only place
10:40 that people would go to the bathroom,
10:41 but you can see in this that we would have stalls.
10:43 They would probably not lead to a lot of privacy.
10:45 And you can see that running along down the side of them
10:48 would be places for channels of water.
10:51 So what were the Romans not good at
10:52 in terms of hygiene with this water technology?
10:55 Well, they didn't understand things like dysentery,
10:57 about communicable diseases that way.
10:59 And so if you're having, say, reusable toilet paper,
11:03 which in the Roman world would be a sea sponge,
11:05 and it's being cleaned in vinegar,
11:07 which can do some things,
11:08 that's not gonna stop things like dysentery
11:10 from being passed along.
11:11 A Nazora HQ.
11:13 What kind of toys did Roman children play with?
11:15 We have so much wonderful information
11:17 about the value that was put on playing
11:20 as a social emotional strategy for raising Roman children.
11:23 One of my favorite is actually this doll.
11:26 This particular one is made out of ivory.
11:28 And what's so impressive about it
11:29 is you can see that the limbs are articulated.
11:32 So you can see that you can sit this doll down,
11:34 you can have her stand up.
11:36 And this doll actually also has the famous hairstyle
11:39 of the Roman empress at the time, Julia Domna.
11:42 So she's also a high fashion doll.
11:44 We know that dice games were very common,
11:47 walking toys that would clearly teach little toddlers
11:49 how to walk, and a lot of the building blocks
11:51 that teach children how to play with each other
11:53 were considered particularly important.
11:55 And with this doll could also be considered
11:57 extremely beloved objects that someone would keep
11:59 well past their girlhood.
12:01 From Elgringo Loco.
12:02 What was the average lifespan of a Roman peasant?
12:05 This is a really great question
12:07 because you're gonna find on the internet
12:08 when you look this up, this idea that
12:10 the Roman average lifespan was 35 years.
12:13 And then people often think as a result
12:14 that if you made it to 35, you were grandparent age.
12:17 And that's just not true
12:18 'cause we have to think about what an average means.
12:20 Infant mortality in Rome was astronomically high.
12:24 Most children died within the first year of birth.
12:27 So that was just infant mortality.
12:28 Child mortality, about 50% of children died by age 10.
12:33 And you can see already why that's lowering
12:35 and lowering that average.
12:36 So if you made it to age 10 as a lower class Roman citizen,
12:39 whether you were living in the country,
12:41 you had a decently high chance
12:42 of making it into your mid 50s.
12:44 And we know plenty of people lived beyond that.
12:46 Our next question is from Krista Collin.
12:48 How does an archeologist look at an ancient column
12:51 and conclude this was a Roman brothel?
12:53 They could not do that.
12:54 We do know that there's a very famous
12:56 purpose-built brothel in Pompeii.
12:58 The building is entirely full of tiny stalls.
13:01 And in each of the stalls is only a bed-shaped platform.
13:05 Above the stalls are extremely graphic sex acts.
13:09 And then there is graffiti.
13:10 And my favorite that has survived is over one stall,
13:13 and I have to imagine this was from the sex worker,
13:15 that wrote "thrust slowly."
13:17 Putting all of those things together,
13:19 it's pretty easy to see that this was a place
13:21 where sex work was on the agenda.
13:22 Nomahona Twitu, what rights did Roman women
13:26 gain in imperial Rome?
13:27 Roman women couldn't vote, and that's a big one.
13:29 But Roman women could be citizens.
13:31 Roman women could own property in their own name.
13:34 They could inherit property in their own name.
13:36 Roman women could be business owners,
13:38 and some of whom were using their own business sense
13:40 to advance their children,
13:41 especially their sons and their political ambition.
13:44 Roman women could hire a lawyer to defend themselves
13:47 or to bring a suit in court.
13:48 Roman women lived with a greater degree of freedom
13:50 across social classes than we're used to seeing
13:53 in the ancient world.
13:53 At Ing Cream Cakes, how many civil wars did Rome have,
13:58 including the Byzantine era?
13:59 That is a very hard question to answer
14:02 for very good reasons.
14:03 One is that the Romans thought that civil war
14:06 was something inside them that you had to fight against
14:09 every day or it would erupt.
14:11 Romans had documented civil wars,
14:12 and they're the ones that actually came up with this term,
14:14 where two Roman armies would fight each other
14:17 headed by two Romans.
14:19 But what's the difference between that
14:21 and an uprising of enslaved people
14:24 who are part of the Roman population like Spartacus?
14:26 Is that a civil war?
14:27 What's the difference between the whole system
14:30 of Roman provinces rising up against Roman rule?
14:33 They're part of Rome, and they're rising up,
14:34 and they're fighting,
14:35 but they're fighting more with guerrilla war tactics.
14:37 Do we call that a civil war?
14:39 You can see it becomes very hard to parse
14:42 when one part of Rome is fighting the other,
14:44 but it happens all the time.
14:47 At Blood Orange, what the fuck did ancient Romans wear
14:50 during the winter?
14:51 I know, right, 'cause all the images we see
14:53 are in these sort of lightweight linen shirts
14:56 and like sandals.
14:57 That's our image of Rome, and it snowed in Rome.
15:00 Well, the key to Roman happiness in this would be layers
15:03 in the same way that it is today,
15:04 and Romans actually had access even then
15:07 to material that we know is the best to keep you warm,
15:09 and that is wool.
15:10 So the average Roman would wear socks.
15:13 Yes, Romans really pioneered the idea of socks and sandals.
15:16 They would wear extra thick socks,
15:17 but they also didn't just wear sandals.
15:19 They had thick leather shoes,
15:20 and the more layers of leather,
15:22 the better those shoes would be in winter conditions.
15:24 And then cloaks, tons and tons
15:26 of beautiful wool cloaks on top.
15:28 @robertsmith29, "I was wondering how the Romans
15:32 "produced their Roman coins
15:33 "and how they put the emperor onto the coins."
15:35 The way the Romans made coins was a by-hand process.
15:39 So what you would do is you would have a base,
15:41 and you would put in this base a mold
15:42 that had one side of the coin,
15:45 and in that mold, you would put a metal disc,
15:47 and I would put it face down,
15:48 so you can imagine it's almost like a clam with two molds,
15:51 and the metal disc goes in here.
15:52 Then I take a hammer, and I whack it,
15:54 and that's called stamping,
15:55 and that would put the images on both sides of the coin.
15:58 From @theistonthought, "Did ancient Romans go on hikes
16:01 "or go to the beach for relaxation?"
16:03 Yes, there was a heavy leisure time activity in Rome
16:06 where people would go to the coast,
16:08 especially the Bay of Naples,
16:09 and have seaside villas,
16:11 and go to these really fancy baths,
16:13 sort of like a spa vacation,
16:15 but it could last months.
16:16 The extreme elite of Rome
16:18 that would have access to these seaside villas.
16:20 So the average Roman person
16:21 probably didn't have a lot of time to be able to do that.
16:24 So what did they do to relax?
16:26 Rome had a lot of holidays around a festival calendar,
16:29 and these festivals would feature gladiatorial matches,
16:32 they would feature chariot racing,
16:34 they would feature theatrical spectacles,
16:37 including the ancient equivalent of musicals,
16:39 and we have evidence that people,
16:40 even from rural communities,
16:41 would come in for these festivals,
16:43 especially the big ones.
16:44 That's because they were state holidays.
16:45 In the empire, there were over 100 days of public holidays,
16:49 at just Taman.
16:50 So like, in ancient Rome,
16:52 what was living there like?
16:53 People worked, and then went home,
16:55 and did they pay rent?
16:56 The average Marcus, I should say,
16:57 instead of the average Joe.
16:59 He could be a shoemaker,
17:00 could be someone who sews clothing,
17:02 could be a launderer,
17:03 any of the activities that you need done
17:05 in your general city life
17:06 would be the same thing that they would need done
17:07 in ancient Rome.
17:08 Sometimes home was right above you.
17:09 If they were quite wealthy,
17:11 they might own the space that their shop is in,
17:13 but often they would be renting out
17:14 both of those spaces from a landlord.
17:16 And you bet the Romans complained about their landlords.
17:19 Shoddy upgrades,
17:20 vermin that weren't being taken care of,
17:23 a neighbor who parties too hard and wakes the baby.
17:25 @tweakfan25, did they have weed in ancient Rome?
17:29 Yes, but not in the way that you were asking.
17:31 Romans really loved hemp as a plant,
17:34 and they loved how easy it was to make ropes with it.
17:37 We find hemp products all over the place.
17:39 And hemp, the word for it in Latin, is cannabis.
17:42 So you can see the connection.
17:43 But there's no sense that the Romans,
17:45 first of all, smoked it.
17:46 Smoking was not a particularly good thing in Roman culture,
17:48 but there's also not great evidence
17:50 that they recognized it's sort of mind-altering possibilities.
17:53 @kevinfeeney, it will always be faintly extraordinary to me
17:57 that Roman historians cannot agree on the answer
17:59 to the superficially simple question
18:01 of how many Roman emperors were there.
18:03 So when Augustus is the first emperor,
18:05 he declares a successor, Tiberius.
18:08 Tiberius becomes the next emperor,
18:10 and miraculously we have two.
18:11 So why is it so hard to keep counting?
18:13 Eventually, Rome becomes big,
18:15 and eventually other people decide they could be emperor.
18:17 And what does it take to become emperor?
18:19 For a lot of Romans, the answer is an army
18:21 that they're paying can declare them emperor,
18:23 and they can besiege Rome until they are declared emperor.
18:26 Flash forward to later in the Roman Empire,
18:28 when we have divided centers.
18:30 Is the center of Rome the city of Rome anymore?
18:32 No, there is a center in Constantinople.
18:34 Sometimes it's Milan, sometimes it's Ravenna.
18:37 We're getting then multiple emperors
18:39 or people who could be perceived as emperors
18:41 at the same time, but we also get usurpers,
18:43 guys with armies that come in, think,
18:46 I could do this, and who gets to declare them emperor
18:48 at that point?
18:49 There aren't rules for this one way or another.
18:51 It can become really hard for us to tell who is emperor.
18:53 And sometimes all we have is a single coin as evidence,
18:56 just one coin that one guy who claims to be emperor minted.
19:00 Was he emperor?
19:01 We have no idea.
19:02 @terra_encounters,
19:03 how many gods did ancient Romans worship?
19:05 It's not really fair to ask how many gods they worshipped.
19:08 It's more fair to ask what gods didn't they worship?
19:11 Romans saw divine in lots of things.
19:13 Springs had a divine being, caves had a divine being.
19:17 They had a festival to ward off mildew,
19:19 and it was called the Robigalia, and it was in April.
19:22 And that showed that they also thought
19:23 that mildew had a divine spirit in it
19:25 that they could essentially bribe
19:27 to not destroy their crops.
19:29 So the Romans had a really heavy investment
19:30 in seeing the divine in as many places as possible
19:33 and finding a way to connect with that religiously.
19:35 @shakesure,
19:36 I need someone to tell me if Romulus and Remus were real,
19:39 like immediately.
19:40 Romulus and Remus are the legendary founders of Rome.
19:43 They were twins who'd been expelled from their patrimony
19:45 by an evil king,
19:46 and they were supposed to be drowned in a river.
19:48 And the legend goes that a she-wolf found them
19:51 and nursed them and prevented them from dying.
19:53 And then when they grew up,
19:54 they were able to overthrow the evil king
19:56 and they were able to found their own civilization.
19:59 But even the Romans are pretty skeptical about this story.
20:01 You can see a lot of the historians later saying,
20:04 "Really? A she-wolf?
20:06 Are we sure it wasn't a sex worker
20:07 that we just called a she-wolf?"
20:09 This was a pretty legendary story,
20:10 sort of like George Washington and the cherry tree,
20:13 and they didn't put much factual faith behind it.
20:15 All right, that's all the time we have
20:16 for questions for today.
20:17 I hope you learned something weird and interesting
20:19 about Romans, and we'll see you next time.
20:21 (upbeat music)
20:24 [BLANK_AUDIO]