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Light & Verity

Quoted

Classics professor Joe Manning on visiting ancient cities.

Mar/Apr 2025
Michael Marsland.

Michael Marsland.

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“You do not want to go into a city in the ancient world under any circumstances. It’d be the last place you’d want to visit. They’re so dirty, disease-ridden, dysentery everywhere. The lead is on top of really horrible sanitary conditions.”

—Joe Manning, the William K. and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics and History at Yale, offering a time-travel advisory in a January 6 NBC News story about how high levels of lead in ancient Rome may have lowered the average IQ there.

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