DNA Just Cracked The Drug Romans Took Before Battle — And Their Genes Still Walk Modern Italy

DNA Just Cracked The Drug Romans Took Before Battle — And Their Genes Still Walk Modern Italy The thing that made me stop on this one was Galen prescribing Marcus Aurelius a nightly cup of opiated wine, because it turns out that was not considered unusual at all, it was just medicine, and the same pharmacopeia that the imperial physician was drawing from was also sitting on the shelf in every legion's field hospital along the Rhine. The textbooks give you the standard picture of the Roman legionary as a creature of drill and discipline, beaten into shape by the centurion's vine staff, fighting on training and ration wine. What archaeobotany has been quietly assembling for several decades is a rather different picture. Opium poppy cultivated across the Mediterranean throughout the classical period. Cannabis resin confirmed in internal use by Romans, including recovered from a woman's tomb where it had been administered for analgesia. Mandrake and henbane both documented by Dioscorides, the army physician whose De Materia Medica was still being used fifteen centuries later, both mixed routinely into wine, both producing dissociation and pain suppression through tropane alkaloids. Ancient DNA from legionary cemeteries at Vindolanda, Mainz, and Carnuntum has since confirmed that the legionaries were not a separate hereditary caste, they were local provincial men drawn from the same farming populations they returned to after discharge. The empire fell. The legions dissolved. The men who had marched twenty miles a day under sixty pounds of equipment went home to the same Italian and provincial valleys they had come from, and their descendants are still there.