According to the list:
Christians were prosecuted but were not meal for the lions: It is true that Christians only believed in one God, and saw Rome’s many gods as false idols and a disobedience of God’s command of “You shall have No Other Gods Before Me.” The Romans felt that their gods would be threatened by these Christians, and felt that their gods would not be merciful to Rome. If there was any punishment for Christians in Rome, it did not involve them being some lion’s dinner.
That’s not a scholarly view, but it is reinforced by legitimate scholarship. The famous novel Quo Vadis? and its movie adaptations, have made it a matter of general knowledge that the Roman emperors threw Christians to the lions in the Colosseum, but scholars have said that the stories require nuance. It is not possible to say that such things never happened, but they were never imperial policy, almost never happened in Rome (the provinces were a little wilder), and happened to non-Christians in similar proportion. Later Christian authors mythologized the prosecutions, and made rare instances seem like everyday occurrences.
Thanks to a commenter for pointing out that #10 is just plain wrong. (I missed it completely.) While it’s true that Italians once believed tomatoes to be poisonous, it’s a misconception that this belief dated back to ancient times. Tomatoes were introduced to Europe in the 16th century. They are native to South America and were completely unknown to the ancient Romans.
To add a couple more:
1.By the mid 1300s (pre Renaissance) the average (non Eastern) European was wealthier than the average Roman. The Roman Empire was dirt poor despite its handful of large megaprojects like the roads, aqueducts and colosseum.
2.The reason for this is that Ancient Rome, whatever its religion, revered machoism. Ironically other than for war, the use of labor saving technology was looked down upon as weak. Slaves were okay to use because they were won in war by a person’s hand, but there was no demand for technology. The upshot was not just an economy that didn’t grow except through the ‘brute’ force’ of population growth, but a military that could not make use of civilian technology adapted to military purposes. So, whatever few military technologies were invented were scattershot one offs and were not enough to defeat the fanatical invaders.
#10 is wrong. Tomatoes were native to the new world and not in Europe until after 1492. No Romans involved.
PR
Indeed….and tomatoes were the ancestors of potatoes.