Editing Roman Empire (section)

== Fun Facts and Moronic Misconceptions about Rome ==

* The Romans are one of the first known cultures that practiced the art of the grafiti - you can find everything from penises, scatology, pederasty and funny jokes on the ancient walls. Some notable examples include "Epaphra doesn’t play football well", "Phileros is a eunuch!" and [[Gay|"Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!"]].
* More roman emperors trace their origins from the province of Illyricum (roughly the area of former Yugoslavia) than the Apennine peninsula.
* Roman religion was not a copy-paste of Greek religion and mythology but rather the misconception stems from the fact that Romans used to find equivalents of their gods in other religions like many other cultures did and do. In the city of Rome itself, you could find shrines to almost every deity from the known world, which would be quite welcome if they did not interfere with public order. Romans worshipped gods, emperors, heroes, spirits, ancestors, places, concepts like victoria or pax and even trees.
* Rome originally developed from a native italic group of Latines (think Sabinians, Umbrians and Etruscans) and only later came under the dominion of the Etruscan League and while the former gave them much in terms of architecture and deities, the influence of the Etruscans on the roman development was found recently to be a bit overstated.
* Romans were aware of Han China though only dimly as some vast empire in the east, the Chinese meanwhile called the Roman Empire "Da Qin" or "Great Chin". There was trade between the two but the empires of Persia and Kushan that were the proxies between them were not too keen to lose their middleman status and thus kept them separate in addition to the geographical distances being too vast for anything than a theoretical ambassadorial mission at best.
* While Christianity did give rise to some factors that weakened the empire in the short-term the notion that it turned Romans into ascetic hippies or destroyed the Roman Empire is asinine if for nothing else that for the fact that some of the "barbarians" (who were often adherents of Arianism) demolishing Rome were at that point Christians as well, sparing those Romans who took sanctuary in the churches. There’s also just as much evidence that Christianity helped the Empire, and later Medieval Europe, hold together in the face of various crises like the Antonine plague. And without the church establishing new centers of knowledge in the form of the early Universities and monasteries, what little knowledge Europe held on to would be even less than what had been preserved otherwise, especially since the Library of Alexandria had burned down centuries prior. 
* Romans did have knowledge of making steel but it was produced in very limited quantities, most everyday metal stuff was either iron, bronze or copper with some other metals like tin or lead also having situational use. In of itself this was not unusual up until the 19th century, as before the invention of the blast furnace, steel production was extremely labor intensive and required specialist knowledge to remove impurities and get the iron hot enough.