December 4, 2009
Noli Bibere Defrutum

Many people know the phrase “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid”. Perhaps it's most memorable from the Jonestown Massacre. Or maybe Heavens Gate suicides: "To hitch a ride to Heaven on the Hale-Bopp comet, all I have to do is drink this Kool-Aid? Sign me up!" But as a phrase, it’s still applicable when any particular person or group is trying to sell you on something.

It has, I think, especial significance in libertarian circles. Republicans are often Republicans, rarely know why exactly, and never have to think much about it. Same for Democrats. Libertarians have it harder, because libertarianism requires you to use your brain to determine what you think. Which, for most people, in fact rarely lines up with either pre-packaged political platform.

Now, the market for thought creates its own problems. You have people peddling their pet 9-11 conspiracy theories, stick-it-to-the-man tax evasion schemes, or whatever the crackpottery of the day are babbling on about. More often than not, I try to encourage skepticism of things that sound too good to be true. Because they often are. And that’s where this maxim comes in: “Don’t drink Kool-Aid”.

How would you say this in Latin? Now, I’ve never had a class in Latin. But Latin comes up so frequently, once you start seeing it, it’s very hard not to. So you pick it up pieces at a time. But that leaves unsatisfying gaps in your knowledge.

I was walking home the other day--and you have to do something while you're walking--so I thought to myself, “How would you say, ‘Don’t drink the Kool-Aid’ in Latin?”

“Don’t drink” is easy: as stating a general maxim in the third-person imperative, “Noli bibere”.

But “Kool-Aid” is tougher. The popular sugar-drink mix didn’t exist in ancient Rome. That presents a problem. Hmm.

But you know... maybe there's a substitute word? In ancient Rome, they drank a lot of wine. A LOT of wine. But the Romans weren’t very good at making it. It’d often come out bitter, terribly dry, or spoiled. Which is no good if you were a well-respected Roman trying to get your bacchanalia on.

To fix their jug-o-wine, they’d add another beverage: defrutum. Like the name sounds, defrutum was made of fresh-ish fruit (often grapes) that were still sweet. They’d boil down their sweetened fruit concoction into a concentrated form. When ready to drink their wine, they’d add some of this defrutum as a sweetener. A process still emulated by masses of college students attempting to mask the taste of grain alcohol.

Thus, I think “defrutum” is a suitable substitution for “Kool-Aid”. Hence, noli bibere defrutum: “don’t drink the Kool-Aid.”

But my walk was a bit longer, and my thought process doesn’t quite end there. I feel there’s a subtler meaning lurking in there.

You see, in Roman society, the wealthier you were, the more wine you would drink. Of course, you’d drink more defrutum along with it. Particularly, the Roman emperors, leading their lives of privilege, would often drink to excess.

Now, problem was, defrutum was a mash of fresh fruit juices with a lot of the water boiled off. Because of the acids in those fruits, Roman recipes for defrutum noted that you couldn’t mix up a batch in pots made of bronze or iron. The fruity acids would react with the bronze or iron, and the defrutum would end up with an unpleasant metallic taste. So, Roman recipes specifically noted that defrutum should be brewed in pots made of lead.

Yes, that’s right: lead.

When the fruit acids react with lead, they produce lead acetate. Which was also know as “sugar of lead” and used for centuries as an artificial sweetener. Lead didn’t leave that unpleasant terrible aftertaste. In fact, the Romans described the dull sweetness of lead as an acquired taste.

Of course, you and I know that lead is highly toxic. There is no “safe” level of lead that can be ingested: it’s toxic at all concentrations. But today, we say the maximum allowable lead concentration in U.S. drinking water is 10 parts per billion (ppb).

By comparison, the lead concentration in Roman defrutum is estimated to be about 30,000 ppb. So when the upper crust of Roman society got their bacchanalia on—or just had a fine meal—they were very much continually poisoning themselves with lead.

Lead poisons a number of organs and systems throughout the body. Particularly, lead attacks the frontal lobe, which controls a great deal of “higher” brain functions: predicting future consequences of current actions; deciding between good and bad choices; and suppressing socially unacceptable behaviors.

The wealthy of Roman society ingested lead. A lot of it. And we know that lead poisoning destroys brain tissue and drives people to violence and madness. Sound familiar? Caesar? Nero? Caligula? Is it any wonder that many of the emperors of ancient Rome—soon after becoming emperor—seemingly transformed into stark-raving madmen? Not particularly!

But the more curious thing. Surely we know that lead is bad. We have a two-thousand year scientific leg-up on the Romans. Of course, we know lead is toxic. How could the Romans have known… right?

Wrong! At least since the time of Julius Caesar, it was known that drinking liquids that came in contact with lead would cause a gradual “weakening of the mind”. Of course, those wealthy Romans, in their infinite wisdom, chose to do it anyway.

As for libertarian thinking, when it comes to examining what the government and the wealthy do—and try to force others to do—it bears keeping in mind this little Roman lesson: noli bibere defrutum.

December 1, 2009
Another Year Older and Deeper in Debt

Nothing interesting to report.

November 4, 2009
I Should Blog More