February 8, 2020 • 49 mins
It’s Valentine’s Day again, which summons images of mythic Cupid and his bow. But we often forget that Cupid has TWO arrows in his quiver: the golden arrow of desire and the leaden arrow of aversion. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick discuss the mythic lead-slinger and the nature of his gray metal. (originally published 2/14/2019)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the old vault, this time for
an episode that originally aired on Valentine's Day of nineteen.
That's right, Cupid's a laden arrow. This one is about.
It's about a number of things. You get get a
little bit of cupid mythology in this episode, and also
(00:27):
a lot of discussions of lead, like what is lead?
And then how have we used and arguably misused lad
over the years? You get to learn all about the
culinary virtues of lead. Don't cook with lead, but you'll
find out why in the episode. So let's jump right
in there. From his quiver full of shafts, two arrows?
Did he take of sundry works to one causes love?
(00:51):
The other doth hits slake? That causes love is all
of gold with point, full, sharp and bright. That chase
is love is blunt? Who steal with leadin? Head is dight?
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff
(01:12):
weren't dot Com? Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and so obviously we're talking about Cupid today. That's right,
it's Valentine's Day, is it? Yes? Is it actually Valentine's Yes,
actual Valentine's Day. Okay, yeah, so we figured what we
(01:35):
gotta we gotta do some sort of Valentine's episode. We
had the the episode where we talked to Tomorrow Heart previously,
but this is the day itself Towers of Snail Sex. Yeah,
so it seemed proper to get a little mythological here
as we kick off this episode and to turn to
that mythological figure that got of romantic love, Cupid, the creepy,
(01:56):
smooth baby who shoots arrows with heart tips. Yes, now
that the reading at the top of the episode was
was Ovid. That was from the Metamorphosis, the Golden Translation,
So that was how you get words like dita, which
means clothed or equipped. I had to look that one up. Yeah,
it might not be completely clear, but what Ovid is
(02:17):
basically saying is, hey, Cupid has two different arrows that
he may pull from his quiver. You often forget this,
or maybe he never even learned it in the first place. Well, right,
if you're just going off of cheesy Valentine state cards.
You just think of that cartoon baby, and like you said,
the arrows have just kind of a goofy cartoon heart
at the end, and cupids launch and those at people
(02:38):
and making them falling cartoon love with people. Yeah, well,
you tend to not think of Cupid's arrow as literally
being an arrow that strikes with force and penetrates the flesh.
I guess we are to understand it that way, at
least the ancients did. Like there's this poem by Anna
Creon that Robert and I were talking about before the
episode where it's not actually that great of a poem.
(02:59):
I don't know if it's reading, but it makes this
joke about Cupid gets stung by a bee and he
starts crying and his mother I guess this would be
Aphrodite or Venus maybe comes to him and is trying
to console him and says, uh, you know, you're crying
about being stung by a bee, but you shoot people
with arrows all the time. That must hurt more shot
through the heart. Um. Yeah, so he so he has
(03:21):
two different arrows that he he chooses from when he
decides to nail somebody one of these arrows, as the
as Ovid says, is tipped in gold with a sharp
point and bright right, and so that's the that's the
love arrow, that is the romantic love arrow. But then
he has this leaden arrow, which it sounds like it's
(03:43):
it's probably not an arrow head composed entirely of lad
for reasons will explain, but it is at least coded
or tipped in lead somehow well. And it also says
that it's blunt, meaning I assume it is not meant
to penetrate, but maybe strikes more like a like a
bean bag gun. Yeah, like just to brain you with
this dense leaden arrowhead. Yeah, just to just smack you hard.
(04:06):
And then it also it imparts aversion, so like it
hits you, and now you you want to you want
to not be around somebody. I guess, right. This seems
that this seems to be the most popular interpretation of
the leaden arrows power though I was looking around, uh,
and I did see at least one description saying that
the leaden arrow had to do with set with sensual passion.
(04:27):
But I don't think that's the predominant interpretation. It's certainly
not the one that we're going to spend much time
with here today because sensual passion. There are other gods
for that. Uh, you know, Cupid's domain is more about
that that that that romantic passion, the arrows or or
the philos or I lose track of what love is.
What in Greek philodough your love. Um, yeah, we'll be
(04:52):
we'll be getting into the Greek and Roman stuff shortly, okay,
but yes we're gonna be talking about Cupid. And I
do I do encourage everyone to maybe he put aside
the more cherubic interpretations of of Cupid as we discuss
this figure, because we have to remember he is a god. Um.
He is capable of of of wrecking people's lives with
(05:15):
his mischief. And he's not always depicted as a as
a baby. He's he's often he's usually depicted as youthful, certainly,
and that may be a male youth or a boy.
He's very often and you know, depicted naked or nearly so.
And sometimes he's blindfolded as well. I think it's blind right,
Oh yeah, I didn't think of that. Well. I think
(05:37):
he's often depicted as a baby just because if he
were an adult, he would be a horrifying, gross creep right, Well,
they're still there's STI always room to find Cupid creepy
for sure. All right, Well who is Cupid? Where did
he come from? In the pantheon and the mythology? Okay,
so Cupid is the Roman variant of the Greek god Arrows,
the prime evil god of love, a son of chao Us,
(06:00):
though in later traditions he has depicted as a son
of Aphrodite, who is the Roman Venus, whose goddess of
sexual love and beauty. And as far as the father goes,
it's all across the board. They're very different tellings. Sometimes
it's Zeus, sometimes it's it's Aries. There's at least one
version where it's it's it seems like it's Vulcan, the
(06:22):
god of the forge. But in but then a lot
of stories have it have Hermes as the father, who
of course is the Roman Mercury. So it's a real
Mari show. Yes, yeah, you can very much imagine that
there being a lot of drama around this. But he's
a god of passion and love but also a fertility
to a certain extent as well. Now, in Roman traditions,
(06:45):
Cupid is largely described as a son of Venus and Mercury,
combining their roles into that of a divine messenger of love. Okay,
so Mercury is the messenger, Aphrodite is love. So he
brings you the love signals, the he's he's the radar
of God. Yeah, don't you? So you can't really hate
the messenger, right, I guess that's part of the story
(07:05):
here as well. Now he's often depicted as this kind
of trubic creature like we describe, but also sometimes is
more of a you know, in an androgeneous, youthful figure,
sometimes clad in armor, because I guess love is also
a battlefield, and he's sometimes a mischief maker other times
generous patron of love. His targets include both mortals and
(07:27):
other gods and uh. As always, the versions of the
myth very with the teller and the time. But we
certainly want to to tell the major Cupid story. We'll
tell me the story Robert. Alright. So his mother again
is Venus, and Venus has is subject to bouts of
jealousy pretty much like all of them, the major gods
(07:48):
in the pantheon, right, and so she one day she
has had enough of this beautiful mortal by the name
of Psyche. She's just too too lovely. She's so lovely
that other mortals are afraid to approach her. And in
Venus isn't having it. She tasks her son Cupid and says,
go to this woman, shoot her with a golden arrow
(08:10):
of love, and then make her fall in love with
the first thing she sees, because that's the power of
the arrow in this, in this interpretation of it. And
she adds, make sure that the next thing she sees
is the most hideous creature imaginable. I don't care what
it is, usual imagination. She falls in love with the
font papyrus. That would have been good. Um, so keep it.
(08:33):
Keep it. Goes down to Earth to do this, but
he can't quite bring himself to finish the task, though
he was certainly okay with the plan enough to trick
her parents into abandoning her on a desolate hilltop so
that she could wed a monster, but as far as
actually yeah, because she's taken. The Psyche is taken to
this hill and here you go. Sorry, the gods want
(08:54):
you to marry a monster. It's gonna happen. See you later,
because you know you do what do what the gods
say or her? But then he can't actually shoot her
with arrows, so instead he pricks himself with the golden
arrow and then gazes upon Psyche, falls in love with her,
and so he takes her away, sets her up in
a protected place like a palace, somewhere where he can
(09:15):
visit her safely, but only in darkness. And then but
then one night she cast light upon him and she
learns his identity, spilling wax on him in the process,
and he flees. So Psyche is distraught. She's she's in
love with this this god, this beautiful young god boy.
So she searches for him, and finally Venus agrees to
(09:37):
hand him over, but only if she completes a series
of trials. Oh yeah, never a good sign in a myth.
Right now, you get the feeling that a lot of
these trials might be tricks. Yes, and indeed they are. Uh,
the the exact trials can vary with the telling, but
this is the basic roll out here. First of all,
(09:57):
she has to sort a massive pile of seeds in
a sing gold night, and uh, fortunately some ants help her.
Oh that's a great variation on all the tweety birds
and scugs and the snow white story. Yeah, they'll come
in and help with the chores. Now it's ants and
who knows, maybe Spider's pitch in a bit. Well. The
next task is that she has to fetch the golden
(10:17):
wool from a like a monstrous sheep, like a kind
of sheep that disembowels anyone who gets near it, and
a swarm of cockroaches. A sister, no actually a river
god helps her out um and helps her acquire the
woolf So she turns that in. But then she has
to venture into the underworld and acquire a drop of
the Queen of the Underworld's beauty. Oh yeah, so uh Cupid,
(10:41):
it scenes ends up sort of cluing her in, sends
her some signals and was going to the underworld isn't easy, right, Yeah,
it's it's a dangerous proposition. So Cupid clues her in,
you know, secret messages, letting her know, make sure you
bring coins for torone and treats for a service, important
things that bring along. Right, So she does this, She
(11:02):
wins that drop, brings it back in a golden box,
and brings it to the surface. She's on her way
to deliver it to Venus, but then she decides, well,
I'm going to steal a little bit of that beauty
from the box for myself. And then she discovers the
boxes full of sleep. Sleep comes over her, Cupid comes
to her way and wakes her up, gives her the
nectar of the gods and makes her a god as
(11:22):
well the embodiment of the soul, and she later gives
birth to pleasure. That's a heck of a story. Oh yeah,
there are various treatments of the story. The various you know,
additional stories such as Beauty and the Beast take this
basic structure and then uh, you know, employ it in
a slightly different manner. But yeah, that's the major Cupid narrative.
But there's also a fun one that employs his arrows
(11:46):
in an interesting way in which both of them, this
time both of them as he messes with the god Apollo.
So Apollo is a powerful god and he's he's he's
lusting after the nymph Daphne. And while he's in the
midst of this, he taunts Cupid's archery ability. He says,
You're not much of an archer, are you? And so
it's always good to taunt people holding ranged weapons. Well, again,
(12:09):
the gods are vain and you know, kind of and
it's in vengeful and but also kind of stupid at times.
So what Cupid does is he shoots Apollo with a
golden arrow that makes him of course, you know, lust
like crazy after Daphney. But then he shoots Daphne with
a leaden arrow, ensuring that she wants nothing to do
with exactly. In fact, she runs away to her father,
(12:31):
who also happens to be a river god, and has
him turned her into a tree so that Apollo will
leave her alone. And then Cupid, you know, goes off
and laughs about the whole affair. Now, wait, after this,
is Apollo still in love with the tree or not?
It really depends on the user agreement with the golden arrow.
How does the golden earrow magic work? Can you transform
(12:53):
the essence of the target of the affection? And does
that cancel the spell? Or do you have to roll
a D twenty to find out? Don't know? And then
we are the effects on god's Is that a little
different than an effect on immortal? Who can say? Now
you might think, okay, Cupid sounds like he makes some
enemies here and there. Who's his greatest rival? Is there
(13:14):
like a safety god who's always trying to take his
arrows away? No? No, no, it's none other than the
great god Pan. What one of our favorites. Yeah, in
one corner we have the flighty arrow shooting cherubic son
of of this of Venus U, the lord of love.
And in the other corner we have the wild rutting
he goat king of fornication, uh, surrounded by nymphs prancing
(13:38):
through the forest. And so it's divine love versus earthly love,
and uh spoiler alert, Cupid often comes out on top.
In fact, there's some there are paintings that depict Cupid
kind of wrestling Pan to the ground. Could you also
say that this is like city love versus country love?
I guess you could. Yeah, like Pan was sort of envisioned.
(14:00):
Is the representative of the I don't know, the the
amorous affairs of like shepherds and country people. Yeah, it
is kind of country love versus you know, the divine
love of Mount Olympus. Here. On the other hand, when
you look up artistic interpretations of Pan, he is often
wrestling or doing something like wrestling. So it's it's hard
(14:20):
to say. He's definitely on the losing end of the
scenario here. The pan's a rascal. Yeah. Now, in terms
of other treatments of of Cupid, you know, we're not
going to go through, you know, all the the echoes
in popular culture. I did notice just the most dignified one. Yes,
I did notice that there is a There is a
(14:42):
Cupid in what DC comics that's kind of a feisty redhead,
and it's a it's a female. It's like a cohort
of the green arrow. Is she a got us or
just a human named Cupid? I think she's just a
human who shoots arrows at people. Yeah, it's not a
thor situation. I don't think so. If any comic book
fans out there that want to, um, you know, clue
(15:03):
us in on this, we'd love to hear more. But
I think she just shoots arrows at people and tries
to kill them, you know. Independent of you coming up
with this lead, Robert, I immediately was googling, like Cupid
horror movie? Is there one? And I I came across
something only to discover that you'd already given it a
little right up here. Yes, two thousand and one slasher
(15:24):
film titled Valentine. Now have you seen this before? No?
I looked up a couple of scenes on YouTube. One
actually had kind of a cool set with like somebody's
like walking through a maze made out of TV screens
or something that. Yeah, I kind of like that, but
otherwise it looks so stupid, and it has the ultimate
(15:45):
like two thousand one smart Face cast where it's got
David Boreanaz and Denise Richards. It's like the cast of
Starship Troopers. It also has a has a two thousand
and one alternative rock album, like the most too thousand
and one alternative rock album, Imaginable. Yeah, that the soundtrack is,
(16:06):
does it have what down with the sickness? It doesn't
have that particular track, but Disturbed is present and and yeah,
you can pretty much extrapolate from there what else is
on the soundtrack. But it does have this killer stalking around,
the slasher character with a cupid mask, and there is
one scene at least where he kills somebody with arrows,
and that's the sequence you're you're talking about with all
(16:27):
the TVs. So yeah, as far as slasher films we're seeing,
it's been too long since I've seen it to really
give it a firm recommendation, but as far as slasher
films worth looking up the kills on YouTube, I give
it give it a thumbs up. But in this movie,
unless I'm mistaken, no gold arrows and lead blunt arrows
(16:49):
right right. I think he just has normal killing arrows
because he's ultimately not an actual god. That would have
been a fun twist. Though they don't get deep into
the resonances of the mythology, no, because if there's a
lot there you could really go go nuts with. For instance,
the fact that Cupid is often depicted riding around on
dolphins or even sometimes just on sea monsters. That's odd. Yeah,
(17:10):
and uh, you know, you know we mentioned beating the
Beast already, but I should throw out there even though
I haven't read it, and I don't know why I
haven't read it, because I read a whole lot of C. S.
Lewis at one point in my life. But C. S.
Lewis retells the story of of Cupid and Psyche in
the nine novel Till We Have Faces. I've never read
that either, but that sounds maybe worth check now. So again,
(17:33):
we could keep going on Cupid. We could keep talking
about various mythological treatments, different versions of the stories. Um,
But basically, what we want to drive home here is that,
first of all, he has these two arrows. He has
the leaden arrow and the golden arrow, and these are
the powers associated. And we also just want to drive
home that he's he is more than just this ridiculous
(17:55):
cartoon baby. Now he's an epic creep cartoon baby who
wrestles goat man and rides on sea monsters. Indeed, he
is so On that note, we're going to take a
quick break, and when we come back, we are going
to discuss the leaden arrow of Cupid. We're going to
get into what ancient people knew of lead, how they
used lead, what they thought about its properties. And then
(18:16):
of course we'll well we'll we'll dive a little bit
into the periodic table and discuss exactly what lad is.
Thank alright, we're back. So, Robert, we have already told
the story of Cupid, as especially as described in Ovid's metamorphoses. Uh.
And in the story of these two different arrows, he's
got the gold arrow, which imparts love makes people fancy
(18:39):
one another, and the lead arrow, which is blunt and
maybe seems to cause a version, at least in some
tellings of the story. Right Like if if you were
hit with the lead arrow and somebody passed you a
note in in in high school and said will you
go out with me? Yes and no, you would add
a third box that said I would rather my father
turned me into a tree. Yeah, your head would just explode,
(19:00):
would like in scanners? Yes. Well, other than the general
association of gold being thought of as good, is there
anything any reason we can think of why these particular
metals are picked to have the magical significance they do
in the arrows in the myth? Well, yeah, exactly what
we with gold? Obviously, gold is beautiful, and humans have
thought it's beautiful for ages, and we've been perfectly happy
(19:22):
to squabble over it and kill each other over it.
So it seems the perfect substance to sum up the
appeal and then sometimes the dangers of love. Plus knowing
what we know now, this was an element that was
likely produced in the collisions of of neutron stars long
before the formation of the Earth, which is amazing to consider.
By the way, I mean, just to contemplate this for
(19:44):
a moment. Uh. You know, it was once thought that
most of the universe is heavy elements, like elements heavier
than iron, were created in supernovas, which is when a
massive star at the end of its life cycle collapses
on itself and then explodes, and supernovas can create ate
some heavy elements. But some scientists have argued for a
while that there are too many heavy elements. The proportion
(20:06):
of them that we find in the universe is too
high to be accounted for by what's possible from supernovas alone.
So in recent years there have been some cool experiments
that have shown that the collision of neutron stars, like
you say, could be the alternative. For example, I was
looking at there was a study published in in the
Astrophysical Journal by Code at All that looked at data
(20:28):
from a neutron star merger, and I love that's the
technology they use, like two companies like mergers and acquisitions.
But they should have used the language of love, because
we are creating a substance that will one day be
used by the God of love. Right it is it
should be neutron star copulation, yes, neutron starter course, but anyway,
(20:52):
that this collision was between eighty five and a hundred
and sixty million light years away, and the researchers calculated
that this one event, these two neutron stars colliding, produced
between one and five earth masses of an element called
europium and between three and thirteen earth masses of gold
earth masses of gold. So just think about a solid
(21:15):
gold Earth and then between three and thirteen of them,
and then it just like spits a bunch of this
out into the universe to get bound up with other
gases and stuff like that and eventually end up in
maybe say a planetary accretion disk, where it becomes part
of the crust of an Earth. So if you're wearing
like a gold ring or any other piece of gold
(21:35):
right now, or if you're maybe maybe say using an
electronic device that has a bit of gold in it,
just think about how that element was forged either in
the guts of a dying star as it exploded, or
was probably more likely created in the chaos of rapid
neutron capture when two of the densest objects in the
universe to neutron stars smashed together billions of years ago.
(22:00):
And of course I guess the even crazier thing is
that that doesn't stop at gold, right, like our amazement
that the elements shouldn't stop there, because all the heavy
elements had to be formed at some point. In fact,
all the elements of any kind had to be formed
at some point. A few of the lightest ones are primordial,
you know, you find hydrogen and helium and lithium out
in the original universe. Uh, and then a few more
(22:21):
I think are formed by like a cosmic rays and stuff.
But beyond that, pretty much everything that you could see
and touch and that your body is made of was
in some way forged inside a dying star. Uh. You know,
you got this dying star forge that has slow neutron
capture going on inside it, or it was a supernova
explosion or the collision of neutron stars or something like that. Yeah,
(22:45):
these are the very kind of forges one can imagine
a god like Vulcan would employ, right exactly. Yeah, that's
what's happening when he pumps the bellows, he's just pumping
it to smash neutron stars together. And of course, you
know you mentioned that, you know, anything heavier than iron
likely had this this kind cosmic origin and that includes lead.
So even though it's easy to say, oh, the golden
arrow forged in in cosmic turmoil in in ages past, well,
(23:09):
the same story applies to lead, even though it's not
as shiny, Even though you probably don't have any leaden
jewelry on your body right now. Uh, though, I mean,
lead is an amazing element, and to consider the same way,
I think. I think there are two main explanations for lead,
as I believe. One is that there's slow neutron capture
like the s process that takes place within dying stars,
(23:32):
and the other is the the hot dense starter course,
the neutron star collision Sunday, Sunday Sunday. Now, to come
back to Cupid's arrow, I imagine basically the idea of
the leaden arrow is that lead is not attractive. Lead
is not beautiful. Lead is something that even in ancient times,
it was rarely used in jewelry, or at least as
(23:55):
the primary aspect of the jewelry. Well, no, and and
even more, Uh, I don't know if you can be
mean to lead, but if you, if lead has feelings,
you could hurt its feelings even more by pointing out
that lead. You know, lead doesn't occur generally free in nature.
Lead occur is bound up in ores. Uh. And so
primarily the way lead was created in the ancient world
(24:18):
was as a byproduct of the creation of silver. And
so people are trying to extract silver for something from something,
and you melt out some lead as a sort of
waste product of that. And and it did have uses
because it's got a high specific weight, so you could
use it as like a weight for you know, if
you have like fishing line, fishing nets or something you
want to hold down that it's useful for that. It's
(24:39):
not very good for making like solid like weapons or anything, right,
because it's very soft. Yeah, it's it's not gonna be
it's not gonna be a good metal if you want
to actually forage arrows for combat or forge any kind
of say armor. Um. But but there are a lot
of uses for it if you want to create say,
drinking vessels or so certainly if you want to create pipes.
(25:02):
We're not advocating that, by the way, no, no, but
certainly from a very early point humans were figuring this out.
Lead is one of the seven Medals of antiquity. Humans
were handling lead a long time ago. Cast. Lead beads
found in modern day Turkey date from roughly BC. The
ancient Egyptians used lead as early as five thousand BC
(25:24):
for pottery glazes, solder, and casting. Yeah, and so I
was looking at early examples of lead artifacts. One example
I found was a sort of maybe aesthetic artifact or
maybe something that was used in like a whirld for
for you know, working with textiles. Um. But this was
in a cave in the Negev Desert in Israel, and
(25:46):
it's supposedly dates to the late fifth millennium BC, and
it's just basically this wooden wand that's got leaden beads
at the end of it. And they don't know what
it's for, though I wonder if maybe it's for some
kind of heavy metal lead magic. Yeah, an anti love
repulsion ray. Uh, so we can hope. So the Babylonians
(26:10):
made inscriptions on lead plates soft you can inscribe things
on it. And just to refer everyone back to our
October episode on Curses, we spend a fair amount of
time discussing Roman curse tablets. Oh yeah, we did. And
what were those made out of? Well, like the ones
found in Um in like second or third century Roman
Britain were often they're made in lead. So there are
(26:32):
these places where you can go around like modern day
Lester and dig up these ancient sites where there would
be maybe a shrine or a temple to an ancient god,
maybe in the syncretic religions of Roman Britain, where you'd
sort of combined maybe Roman gods with with native Celtic
gods or or or the gods of Britain there, and
people would be going there to say, curse somebody who
(26:54):
stole something from them, like you know, Servandas shows up
and says, somebody stole my oake. Whoever stole my cloak,
I want him to not be able to pee for
three months unless he gives me my cloak back. And
this would be inscribed on a lead tablet and hung
up somewhere. And part of the idea there is that
it was partially to invoke this power, but also maybe
(27:15):
just to have it hung up in a public place
so people could like know what was going on. Now.
One other important aspect of lead that that I wonder,
and I wonder if it played into the use of
into the creation of these cursed tablets, is that. Uh,
lead does not corrode like other metals. So if you,
if you, if you inscribe your curse and a piece
of lead, like, that's a curse that could speak across
(27:37):
the ages. Right, lead doesn't rust, I mean, well lead
the lead oxides do form, but they're not they're they're
not like like iron rust, you know, the red rusty stuff.
Lead oxide tends to be great, but generally exposed lead
doesn't corrode. And uh and yeah, this does make it attractive,
especially for some purposes, say like if you want to
(27:57):
make something that holds liquids in it, something that is
not gonna receive a lot of punishment, you don't have
to worry about that. Uh, that the weakness of it.
But yeah, you can use it for drinking vessels or
certainly for plumbing pipes. Here's a gross piece of trivia.
Next time you have to call a plumber because who
knows what you tried to flush a whole roll of
(28:18):
paper towels down the toilet. Consider that the English words
plumber and plumbing are derived from the Latin word plumb them,
which means lead. And it's right there in the chemical
elements symbol for lead on the periodic table. You ever
noticed that it's one of those weird ones, like iron
is f E. Why is that? Well, you know it
(28:38):
comes from an archaic word of like the ferrest metal. Uh,
lead on the periodic table is PB. Why is it pb?
That comes from plumb them because ancient Romans loved some
lead pipes and lead aqueducts, and lead reservoirs, and lead cisterns,
lead cooking vessels, and lead based even lead based food additives.
(28:59):
And we'll come back to the food additives point now.
I was looking at at one text from Cassis and
and sort of titled Lead Chemistry Analytical Aspects, Environmental Impact
and Health Effects, and they pointed out that ancient text
showed a bit of confusion over lead and other elements,
using plum bum to describe quote any silvery white, low
(29:22):
melting and easily oxidized metal, including lead, tin, zinc, et cetera.
They pointed out though that yeah, lead pipes have been
used for a very long time. I see them in
ancient Mesopotamia, Cypress, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, of course, and
various Roman provinces. So you know the technology and the
materials would have spread with the Romans as well, and
(29:44):
the Romans likely learned it from the Greeks. And it
wasn't just the pipes. It was used in cases where
iron wire or wooden hoops are currently used today you
know as reinforcing brands for bands, for tanks, vats, um, amphora, etcetera.
So you see it also used in masonry, cesspool coverings, roofing,
(30:05):
damp proofing, foundations, uh, parapet walls, etcetera. Lead vessels were
widely used and uh, this is interesting. Lead was also
long associated with funeral rites, so Roman era caskets and
urns are often made at least in part from lead,
especially apparently in England. Lead was also used in ancient
China in a variety of uses, from glassmaking to cosmetics.
(30:30):
Of course, and now in the modern world we know
that lead can have extremely serious health consequences can and
very often does. Like there there are tons of ways
to get lead in your body, and lead exposure can
happen through through ingestion when when you eat, it can
happen through breathing in lead particles can happen through absorption
through the skin, and lead gets incorporated into the body
(30:52):
and leads to both short term and long term negative consequences.
The short term negative consequences are there are a lot
of different one and so it can be sometimes it's
hard to identify lead exposure in people, but it might
be like you've got stomach distress, like your stomach hurts
and you're constipated. But it also can lead to weakness
and fatigue, and like your arms and legs are weak,
(31:14):
and it can lead to psychological and neurological consequences. People
can be like like tired and depressed and irritable, have
loss of appetite, have trouble remembering things. Yeah, I mean,
it's enough to make you think it's my smartphone made
out of lead, but uh, it is. It's We were
actually talking about this before we recorded the episode, like
(31:36):
there's so much to the story of of of our
realization regarding the harmful effects of lead, that we really
need to come back to it and devote an entire episode. Absolutely, yes, yes, absolutely,
We're gonna do a whole episode on leads someday soon,
I think, maybe with a special focus on the Lord
of Lead, Clacy Patterson. But yeah, we we now know
lead to have all these problems and they're also the
(31:57):
long term consequences, right, those are just like short term
consequences I was mentioning, you know, it can there could
be neurological damage from long term exposure to lead. Enough
lead in a concentrated dose can kill you. They're definitely
like developmental problems that children who have lead exposure experience.
So it's uh, yeah, it's no joke. And the fact
that humans have constantly surrounded ourselves for centuries or even
(32:19):
millennia with just constant routes of exposure to environmental lead
is something that is really horrifying and ridiculous. But I
guess that's just what we do. All Right, We're gonna
take a quick break, and when we come back, we're
going to get back to this idea of lead as
a food headed song hanging there. Soon it'll be time
(32:39):
to eat some lead than Alright, we're back. Okay, it's
Valentine's Day. What do you get your sweetheart on Valentine's Day?
Sometimes they're flowers, but oh, I guess it's already there
in the name, right, you get your sweethearts some sweets. Now,
here's the question I've wondered about before, but I've never
found a good answer to why is it that we
(33:00):
associate sweet foods with like eroticism but not so much
like other flavors, Like why isn't it that you get
your sweethearts some salty foods on Valentine's Day or you
get them some bitter foods or sour foods? Why sweet?
I mean sweets are a decadent treat, right, I mean,
I guess that's part of it. Um, A sweet is
(33:22):
something sweets or something we've always were always craving and uh,
and we're just hardwired to want as much of it
as possible, given that it would be a rarity in
the natural world. But we also crave fat and salt.
Why not, like for Valentine's Day, instead of a box
of chocolates, it's like a bag of poor crimes and
the stick of butter. Well, Um, I guess it would
(33:43):
be harder to keep that secreted away in the back
of the closet for a week or so. Um. But
I don't know. I feel like they're people. Cel rate
cheese is on Valentine's you know, certainly there are other
foods that have a like a romantic or afrodisiac you know,
vibe to them. Yeah, I guess so. Uh, you know,
I guess part of what I'm wondering is is that
(34:05):
link between like love and eroticism and sweet foods? Is
that cultural or is there some biological element to it? Oh? Man,
We'll have to come back and explore that. That would
be that would be interesting to look at, like when
you look at other cultures. Is there something else that
is considered the romantic flavor profile? Um? I don't know.
You know, considering how many like Scandinavian people have written
(34:28):
into the show to to talk about the wonders of
salty licorice, I bet that's what they use over there. Yeah.
And plus it makes me wonder about, say, Chinese traditions,
where there's so much emphasis placed on the balance of
different flavors. Uh, you know, how does that impact uh
sort of ritualized sweets? All right, well, let's talk about
(34:48):
the sweetest of all sweets, sweet lead. So I have
found what has got to be the best entry ever
in any Oxford companions, that is reading the Oxford Handyon
to Sugar and Sweets. Yeah. So it's Oxford University Press,
and there's an entry in it by the American chemist
Michelle M. Francil and this has just got to be
(35:10):
one of the best like Encyclopedia type entries I've ever read.
So Francial writes about this substance called sugar of lead,
also known as lead lead acetate or lead to acetate.
It looks kind of like large salt crystals if you
look it up, or it looks maybe like translucent rock candy,
that kind of stuff you get on a little stick, right, yeah,
(35:31):
but like sort of like white, translucent in color. And
Francial writes, quote, it is sweet, roughly as sweet per
teaspoon as sugar, and only slightly more lethal than strychnine.
So sugar of lead was used as like a medical
treatment in nineteenth century Europe. And even though it is sweet,
it is technically a salt, which is an electrically neutral
(35:53):
collection of positive ions and negative ions. And actually we
only think of salts as salty in flavor because the
most common salt that we refer to is sodium chloride
table salt. But salts don't have to be salty. Salts
can be bitter, and salts can be sweet, and in
this case it is sweet. So in lead acetate, this
collection of oppositely charged ions is made from depositive lead
(36:16):
ions and negatively charged acetate ions. And it turns out
sugar of lead is not the only sweet metallic salt.
French Will points out that lots of barrillium salts are
very sweet, so sweet in fact, that the Greek word
for the element beryllium is glucinium, from like glucose or glycos,
the Greek word for sweet. But as good as these
(36:39):
metal salts that are sweet taste, they are very bad
for you. Lead acetate can be fatal to a seventy
or a hundred and fifty pound adult at a dose
of three teaspoons. So basically what you're saying is that
if anybody has any fancy dining plants this evening and
they see any lead based sweeteners on the menu, I
(37:00):
would advise against it. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that
the ancient Romans used indirectly, I would say indirectly, used
this lead salt as a kind of sweetener, or at
least as a way of avoiding other types of taste
imparted into their foods. So here's how this goes. The
Romans created a syrup that they called sapa, which was
(37:23):
produced by boiling down a liquid called must. Must is
basically weak wine. Frontal describes it as quote mildly fermented
grape juice, so there'll be a little bit of alcohol content,
maybe kind of like grape beer. Almost. Of course, must,
like wine, has some acid in it. It has acetic acid,
and acetic acid is the acid basis of vinegar. Vinegar
(37:44):
is usually just acetic acid diluted with water or some
other aqueous substance. And acetic acid provides acetate ions, which
can react with metals in the pots where they are boiled,
and uh, and this can result in some salts. So
if you boil your must in a copper pot, the
resulting sappa will have some copper acetate salts in it,
(38:07):
and these taste really bad, like they're bitter. Even ancient
Roman writers would would comment on this. In the Natural History,
Plenty discusses the production of sappa and he writes, quote
leaden vessels should be used for this purpose, not copper ones.
So it's like, get that copper out of there, makes
the sappa taste bad? You want lead except no less?
(38:28):
So why use lead? Because remember lead salts are sweets.
So not only does cooking in lead pots not foul
your sappa, it might make it even a little bit sweeter. Uh.
And this is a quote from This is a quote
from Franciles century quote. Chemical analysis of sappa, produced according
to recipes dating from the classical Roman period using kettles
(38:49):
of similar metallic composition as those found at Pompeii and
other sites, suggests that the lead content of sappa was
eight and fifty milligrams per leader, any thousand times higher
than what is generally allowable in drinking water, even diluted
and used sparingly. Sweetening with sappa was a serious risk.
(39:09):
Now I have seen some people phrase this is like
that the lead pots were used specifically to make the
sappa sweeter, and Francill sort of disagrees with that, because
she says the lead was probably not really intended to
add much sweetness to the wine because it wouldn't put
It wouldn't add that much. Really, you you'd already have
(39:30):
a pretty sweet substance and would be the equivalent of
adding like a pinch of sugar to it, So it
wouldn't make a huge difference. It was more that the
lead vessels, if they when they did add flavor, would
sort of complement the existing sweetness rather than adding a foul,
bitter flavor like copper vessels would. Okay, so in a
blind taste test of the in which both vessels have
(39:53):
the same already sweet or semi sweet wine, you're going
to find that the leaden vessel is going going to
impart a like a slightly sweeter, less foul experience, will
probably significantly less foul. But yeah, I don't know if
there's evidence that they thought of it. As the lead
comes out and makes it a lot sweeter, they just thought, oh,
(40:13):
you use lead pots it tastes way better. In the end. However,
this is one of those cases where we also can't
just make fun of the ancients, because this this kind
of thing carried on into a ridiculously recent time. She
points out that the use of lead as a food
additive and treatment did not stop in ancient Rome, and
that lead equipment and additives were used to prevent spoilage
(40:34):
in wine in some cases up until the nineteenth century.
Oh wow, now we do have to just drive home
for everybody, even though again we're not getting deep into
the the the the the dangers of lead in this episode. Please,
if you were if you were tempted, all tempted it all.
Do not go out and drink a bunch of wine
out of lead vessels just to to to test the
(40:57):
sweetening ability of the of the vessel. The amount of
lead you should be absorbing on purposes zero, whatever you're
accidentally getting from the environment is still probably more than
you want. And there's actually a lot more stuff that
There's been an ongoing argument over the years about the
role of lead ingestion and lead exposure in ancient Rome,
(41:17):
because before Ancient Rome there was lead. People did use
lead to make some objects, but it wasn't used in
wide like widespread construction and infrastructure and all that. The
Romans were the ones that really started using lead for
a lot of stuff. And in nineteen three, a Canadian
researcher named Jerome Riyagu argued that lead poisoning actually lead
(41:39):
to the downfall of the Roman Empire. You've probably heard
this before, Yeah, the idea that they just they built
up all this lead essentially lead infrastructure and then poisoned
themselves with yeah, and cooked with this, especially the cooking
with lead vessels, I think um. And so this has
later been called into doubt by others who said, you know,
it doesn't necessarily seem like we can claim that, but
(42:00):
there's no doubt that many robins were exposed to unsafe
levels of lead. I was just looking at a study
from P. And A. S. By the by Delisle at
All called lead in Ancient Rome city waters, and they
found that the tap water, you know, basically the aqueduct
delivered water or delivered through some kind of lead infrastructure,
(42:21):
that water in ancient Rome would have roughly a hundred
times the lead content of local spring water. It's a
lot of lead, all right, was we we wind down here,
Let's just let's just talk once more about just the
properties of lead, right, And I wonder if in looking
at these properties we can figure out what makes it
so special as as the opposite of the love inducing
(42:41):
golden arrow. Yeah. Yeah, And and indeed, why Cupid would
have walked up to his possible father Vulcan and said, hey,
what medal should you use to make my repulsion arrows?
What would make Vulcans say, oh, yeah, lead, lead is
what you want? Okay, Well, one thing we know about
lead is that, for a metal has a pretty low
mel thing point right right, And this means it's a
(43:02):
lot easier to cast with, requires less equipment, and it
made an ideal solder component. Yeah, so if you want
to melt something easily to like seal things together, I
think yeah, and I've read this also makes it like
an attractive additive if you're like casting something in a mold, right.
And then to your point earlier, like it was there
as a byproduct of going after other metals, so it
(43:24):
was available um onto onto. An addition, we've talked about
this a little bit. Lead is DNSE. It is. It's
a heavy metal, and leads density is due to its
high atomic mass, short bond lengths, and a small atomic radius.
And this, along with its high number of electrons needed
to maintain a neutral charge, makes it a useful radiation
(43:44):
shield in our modern world, a scattering X rays and
gamma rays. Yeah, and so you'll actually see it in
use in places where there's a radiation risk. There are
sometimes lead blocks deployed as a as basically a like
the sand bags of the radiation world. Yeah. I mean,
my my father was a dentist, and and so I
was often hanging out in dental offices, and part of
(44:07):
that is being being near an X ray machine. And
of course that big, big heavy lead line smock that
lead one where yeah so so yeah, you see you
see this kind of radiation shielding all over kind of
makes me think back to our our our episode on
the X ray machine that we did for Invention. So
certainly if you want more on on the use of
(44:29):
X rays and the dangers of radiation associated with that
with X rays, I highly recommend that episode of our
other show, Invention. And then the third major attribute of
lead is that it is soft and it's malleable. Uh,
it's limited usage somewhat. You know, while a god might
be able to craft an arrow out of it or
coat an arrow with lead anyway, you're not gonna be
able to fashion anything with it that can sustain any
(44:51):
real stress. But when you're talking about something like water
and sewage pipes or cooking vessels, uh yeah, that that
is an area where lead can can excel as long
as you're not getting into questions of whether it will
poison you or not. Just from a physical and a
physical basis, it can get the job done. You wouldn't
want like a lead hammer, though, I think you can
have like lead alloy hammers and stuff like you can
(45:13):
use alloys to strengthen metals that are inherently soft. So
coming back to Cupid, I mean, maybe the idea is
that the lead in arrows or somehow combating the radiation
of intense, passionate love. The power of love is actually
a it's a it's a type of ray. It's what's
beyond gamma rays. Yeah, and you've got to scatter those
(45:35):
love rays. And the only way to do it is
with with some high end um god forged lead in ammunition.
I'm seeing another residence here because one of the sources
we didn't mention, So we talked about how lead can
be created in like events in space inside like a
dying star and the collision of neutron stars. We also
(45:55):
didn't talk about another. I think it probably accounts for
a much much smaller percentage of it. But lead can
be created as the byproduct of radioactive decay sometimes, like
uranium can decay into some isotopes of lead. So maybe
if we're considering that love is a type of radioactivity
or type of ray, they're actually lead represents what happens
(46:17):
when love dies and decays, you know, like so like
love fades and eventually it becomes lead. What starts as
this golden, splendid, sharp arrow becomes this blunt, dull, lusterless instrument.
We have crucified this myth and taken out all of
the beauty and turned it into a chemical Frankenstein. I'm
(46:38):
so proud of us. Yeah, I I feel like we have.
We've done a good job here today, taking the candy
coated and kind of lame holiday of Valentine's Day, and
I think we've injected some fresh life into it. We've
fed it a lot of lead and uh and and
and uh and in doing so, we've we've killed off
a lot of the uh, the more irritable aspects of
(47:02):
the holiday. Sweet sweet lead. Yes, So big takeaways from
from today. Don't eat lead sugar, right, don't do not
do it. Don't cook in lead pots right, don't drink
from lead leading vessels if you have a choice in
the matter. Be wary of gods with bows and arrows, right,
And and keep in mind that, yeah, cupid has two arrows,
(47:25):
so if he's aiming at you, it's kind of a
toss up which one he's trying to hit you with.
And sometimes even the great god Pan gets out wrestled
exactly all right, so we're gonna close out the special
Valentine's Day episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But
as always, if you want to check out more episodes
of the show, you can always head on over to
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mother ship.
(47:46):
That's where you will find all the episodes of the show.
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throw as many stars as possible at us the golden
(48:07):
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thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams
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(48:29):
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Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff
works dot Com. They're able to set onto join the
(49:03):
part
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the old vault, this time for
an episode that originally aired on Valentine's Day of nineteen.
That's right, Cupid's a laden arrow. This one is about.
It's about a number of things. You get get a
little bit of cupid mythology in this episode, and also
(00:27):
a lot of discussions of lead, like what is lead?
And then how have we used and arguably misused lad
over the years? You get to learn all about the
culinary virtues of lead. Don't cook with lead, but you'll
find out why in the episode. So let's jump right
in there. From his quiver full of shafts, two arrows?
Did he take of sundry works to one causes love?
(00:51):
The other doth hits slake? That causes love is all
of gold with point, full, sharp and bright. That chase
is love is blunt? Who steal with leadin? Head is dight?
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff
(01:12):
weren't dot Com? Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and so obviously we're talking about Cupid today. That's right,
it's Valentine's Day, is it? Yes? Is it actually Valentine's Yes,
actual Valentine's Day. Okay, yeah, so we figured what we
(01:35):
gotta we gotta do some sort of Valentine's episode. We
had the the episode where we talked to Tomorrow Heart previously,
but this is the day itself Towers of Snail Sex. Yeah,
so it seemed proper to get a little mythological here
as we kick off this episode and to turn to
that mythological figure that got of romantic love, Cupid, the creepy,
(01:56):
smooth baby who shoots arrows with heart tips. Yes, now
that the reading at the top of the episode was
was Ovid. That was from the Metamorphosis, the Golden Translation,
So that was how you get words like dita, which
means clothed or equipped. I had to look that one up. Yeah,
it might not be completely clear, but what Ovid is
(02:17):
basically saying is, hey, Cupid has two different arrows that
he may pull from his quiver. You often forget this,
or maybe he never even learned it in the first place. Well, right,
if you're just going off of cheesy Valentine state cards.
You just think of that cartoon baby, and like you said,
the arrows have just kind of a goofy cartoon heart
at the end, and cupids launch and those at people
(02:38):
and making them falling cartoon love with people. Yeah, well,
you tend to not think of Cupid's arrow as literally
being an arrow that strikes with force and penetrates the flesh.
I guess we are to understand it that way, at
least the ancients did. Like there's this poem by Anna
Creon that Robert and I were talking about before the
episode where it's not actually that great of a poem.
(02:59):
I don't know if it's reading, but it makes this
joke about Cupid gets stung by a bee and he
starts crying and his mother I guess this would be
Aphrodite or Venus maybe comes to him and is trying
to console him and says, uh, you know, you're crying
about being stung by a bee, but you shoot people
with arrows all the time. That must hurt more shot
through the heart. Um. Yeah, so he so he has
(03:21):
two different arrows that he he chooses from when he
decides to nail somebody one of these arrows, as the
as Ovid says, is tipped in gold with a sharp
point and bright right, and so that's the that's the
love arrow, that is the romantic love arrow. But then
he has this leaden arrow, which it sounds like it's
(03:43):
it's probably not an arrow head composed entirely of lad
for reasons will explain, but it is at least coded
or tipped in lead somehow well. And it also says
that it's blunt, meaning I assume it is not meant
to penetrate, but maybe strikes more like a like a
bean bag gun. Yeah, like just to brain you with
this dense leaden arrowhead. Yeah, just to just smack you hard.
(04:06):
And then it also it imparts aversion, so like it
hits you, and now you you want to you want
to not be around somebody. I guess, right. This seems
that this seems to be the most popular interpretation of
the leaden arrows power though I was looking around, uh,
and I did see at least one description saying that
the leaden arrow had to do with set with sensual passion.
(04:27):
But I don't think that's the predominant interpretation. It's certainly
not the one that we're going to spend much time
with here today because sensual passion. There are other gods
for that. Uh, you know, Cupid's domain is more about
that that that that romantic passion, the arrows or or
the philos or I lose track of what love is.
What in Greek philodough your love. Um, yeah, we'll be
(04:52):
we'll be getting into the Greek and Roman stuff shortly, okay,
but yes we're gonna be talking about Cupid. And I
do I do encourage everyone to maybe he put aside
the more cherubic interpretations of of Cupid as we discuss
this figure, because we have to remember he is a god. Um.
He is capable of of of wrecking people's lives with
(05:15):
his mischief. And he's not always depicted as a as
a baby. He's he's often he's usually depicted as youthful, certainly,
and that may be a male youth or a boy.
He's very often and you know, depicted naked or nearly so.
And sometimes he's blindfolded as well. I think it's blind right,
Oh yeah, I didn't think of that. Well. I think
(05:37):
he's often depicted as a baby just because if he
were an adult, he would be a horrifying, gross creep right, Well,
they're still there's STI always room to find Cupid creepy
for sure. All right, Well who is Cupid? Where did
he come from? In the pantheon and the mythology? Okay,
so Cupid is the Roman variant of the Greek god Arrows,
the prime evil god of love, a son of chao Us,
(06:00):
though in later traditions he has depicted as a son
of Aphrodite, who is the Roman Venus, whose goddess of
sexual love and beauty. And as far as the father goes,
it's all across the board. They're very different tellings. Sometimes
it's Zeus, sometimes it's it's Aries. There's at least one
version where it's it's it seems like it's Vulcan, the
(06:22):
god of the forge. But in but then a lot
of stories have it have Hermes as the father, who
of course is the Roman Mercury. So it's a real
Mari show. Yes, yeah, you can very much imagine that
there being a lot of drama around this. But he's
a god of passion and love but also a fertility
to a certain extent as well. Now, in Roman traditions,
(06:45):
Cupid is largely described as a son of Venus and Mercury,
combining their roles into that of a divine messenger of love. Okay,
so Mercury is the messenger, Aphrodite is love. So he
brings you the love signals, the he's he's the radar
of God. Yeah, don't you? So you can't really hate
the messenger, right, I guess that's part of the story
(07:05):
here as well. Now he's often depicted as this kind
of trubic creature like we describe, but also sometimes is
more of a you know, in an androgeneous, youthful figure,
sometimes clad in armor, because I guess love is also
a battlefield, and he's sometimes a mischief maker other times
generous patron of love. His targets include both mortals and
(07:27):
other gods and uh. As always, the versions of the
myth very with the teller and the time. But we
certainly want to to tell the major Cupid story. We'll
tell me the story Robert. Alright. So his mother again
is Venus, and Venus has is subject to bouts of
jealousy pretty much like all of them, the major gods
(07:48):
in the pantheon, right, and so she one day she
has had enough of this beautiful mortal by the name
of Psyche. She's just too too lovely. She's so lovely
that other mortals are afraid to approach her. And in
Venus isn't having it. She tasks her son Cupid and says,
go to this woman, shoot her with a golden arrow
(08:10):
of love, and then make her fall in love with
the first thing she sees, because that's the power of
the arrow in this, in this interpretation of it. And
she adds, make sure that the next thing she sees
is the most hideous creature imaginable. I don't care what
it is, usual imagination. She falls in love with the
font papyrus. That would have been good. Um, so keep it.
(08:33):
Keep it. Goes down to Earth to do this, but
he can't quite bring himself to finish the task, though
he was certainly okay with the plan enough to trick
her parents into abandoning her on a desolate hilltop so
that she could wed a monster, but as far as
actually yeah, because she's taken. The Psyche is taken to
this hill and here you go. Sorry, the gods want
(08:54):
you to marry a monster. It's gonna happen. See you later,
because you know you do what do what the gods
say or her? But then he can't actually shoot her
with arrows, so instead he pricks himself with the golden
arrow and then gazes upon Psyche, falls in love with her,
and so he takes her away, sets her up in
a protected place like a palace, somewhere where he can
(09:15):
visit her safely, but only in darkness. And then but
then one night she cast light upon him and she
learns his identity, spilling wax on him in the process,
and he flees. So Psyche is distraught. She's she's in
love with this this god, this beautiful young god boy.
So she searches for him, and finally Venus agrees to
(09:37):
hand him over, but only if she completes a series
of trials. Oh yeah, never a good sign in a myth.
Right now, you get the feeling that a lot of
these trials might be tricks. Yes, and indeed they are. Uh,
the the exact trials can vary with the telling, but
this is the basic roll out here. First of all,
(09:57):
she has to sort a massive pile of seeds in
a sing gold night, and uh, fortunately some ants help her.
Oh that's a great variation on all the tweety birds
and scugs and the snow white story. Yeah, they'll come
in and help with the chores. Now it's ants and
who knows, maybe Spider's pitch in a bit. Well. The
next task is that she has to fetch the golden
(10:17):
wool from a like a monstrous sheep, like a kind
of sheep that disembowels anyone who gets near it, and
a swarm of cockroaches. A sister, no actually a river
god helps her out um and helps her acquire the
woolf So she turns that in. But then she has
to venture into the underworld and acquire a drop of
the Queen of the Underworld's beauty. Oh yeah, so uh Cupid,
(10:41):
it scenes ends up sort of cluing her in, sends
her some signals and was going to the underworld isn't easy, right, Yeah,
it's it's a dangerous proposition. So Cupid clues her in,
you know, secret messages, letting her know, make sure you
bring coins for torone and treats for a service, important
things that bring along. Right, So she does this, She
(11:02):
wins that drop, brings it back in a golden box,
and brings it to the surface. She's on her way
to deliver it to Venus, but then she decides, well,
I'm going to steal a little bit of that beauty
from the box for myself. And then she discovers the
boxes full of sleep. Sleep comes over her, Cupid comes
to her way and wakes her up, gives her the
nectar of the gods and makes her a god as
(11:22):
well the embodiment of the soul, and she later gives
birth to pleasure. That's a heck of a story. Oh yeah,
there are various treatments of the story. The various you know,
additional stories such as Beauty and the Beast take this
basic structure and then uh, you know, employ it in
a slightly different manner. But yeah, that's the major Cupid narrative.
But there's also a fun one that employs his arrows
(11:46):
in an interesting way in which both of them, this
time both of them as he messes with the god Apollo.
So Apollo is a powerful god and he's he's he's
lusting after the nymph Daphne. And while he's in the
midst of this, he taunts Cupid's archery ability. He says,
You're not much of an archer, are you? And so
it's always good to taunt people holding ranged weapons. Well, again,
(12:09):
the gods are vain and you know, kind of and
it's in vengeful and but also kind of stupid at times.
So what Cupid does is he shoots Apollo with a
golden arrow that makes him of course, you know, lust
like crazy after Daphney. But then he shoots Daphne with
a leaden arrow, ensuring that she wants nothing to do
with exactly. In fact, she runs away to her father,
(12:31):
who also happens to be a river god, and has
him turned her into a tree so that Apollo will
leave her alone. And then Cupid, you know, goes off
and laughs about the whole affair. Now, wait, after this,
is Apollo still in love with the tree or not?
It really depends on the user agreement with the golden arrow.
How does the golden earrow magic work? Can you transform
(12:53):
the essence of the target of the affection? And does
that cancel the spell? Or do you have to roll
a D twenty to find out? Don't know? And then
we are the effects on god's Is that a little
different than an effect on immortal? Who can say? Now
you might think, okay, Cupid sounds like he makes some
enemies here and there. Who's his greatest rival? Is there
(13:14):
like a safety god who's always trying to take his
arrows away? No? No, no, it's none other than the
great god Pan. What one of our favorites. Yeah, in
one corner we have the flighty arrow shooting cherubic son
of of this of Venus U, the lord of love.
And in the other corner we have the wild rutting
he goat king of fornication, uh, surrounded by nymphs prancing
(13:38):
through the forest. And so it's divine love versus earthly love,
and uh spoiler alert, Cupid often comes out on top.
In fact, there's some there are paintings that depict Cupid
kind of wrestling Pan to the ground. Could you also
say that this is like city love versus country love?
I guess you could. Yeah, like Pan was sort of envisioned.
(14:00):
Is the representative of the I don't know, the the
amorous affairs of like shepherds and country people. Yeah, it
is kind of country love versus you know, the divine
love of Mount Olympus. Here. On the other hand, when
you look up artistic interpretations of Pan, he is often
wrestling or doing something like wrestling. So it's it's hard
(14:20):
to say. He's definitely on the losing end of the
scenario here. The pan's a rascal. Yeah. Now, in terms
of other treatments of of Cupid, you know, we're not
going to go through, you know, all the the echoes
in popular culture. I did notice just the most dignified one. Yes,
I did notice that there is a There is a
(14:42):
Cupid in what DC comics that's kind of a feisty redhead,
and it's a it's a female. It's like a cohort
of the green arrow. Is she a got us or
just a human named Cupid? I think she's just a
human who shoots arrows at people. Yeah, it's not a
thor situation. I don't think so. If any comic book
fans out there that want to, um, you know, clue
(15:03):
us in on this, we'd love to hear more. But
I think she just shoots arrows at people and tries
to kill them, you know. Independent of you coming up
with this lead, Robert, I immediately was googling, like Cupid
horror movie? Is there one? And I I came across
something only to discover that you'd already given it a
little right up here. Yes, two thousand and one slasher
(15:24):
film titled Valentine. Now have you seen this before? No?
I looked up a couple of scenes on YouTube. One
actually had kind of a cool set with like somebody's
like walking through a maze made out of TV screens
or something that. Yeah, I kind of like that, but
otherwise it looks so stupid, and it has the ultimate
(15:45):
like two thousand one smart Face cast where it's got
David Boreanaz and Denise Richards. It's like the cast of
Starship Troopers. It also has a has a two thousand
and one alternative rock album, like the most too thousand
and one alternative rock album, Imaginable. Yeah, that the soundtrack is,
(16:06):
does it have what down with the sickness? It doesn't
have that particular track, but Disturbed is present and and yeah,
you can pretty much extrapolate from there what else is
on the soundtrack. But it does have this killer stalking around,
the slasher character with a cupid mask, and there is
one scene at least where he kills somebody with arrows,
and that's the sequence you're you're talking about with all
(16:27):
the TVs. So yeah, as far as slasher films we're seeing,
it's been too long since I've seen it to really
give it a firm recommendation, but as far as slasher
films worth looking up the kills on YouTube, I give
it give it a thumbs up. But in this movie,
unless I'm mistaken, no gold arrows and lead blunt arrows
(16:49):
right right. I think he just has normal killing arrows
because he's ultimately not an actual god. That would have
been a fun twist. Though they don't get deep into
the resonances of the mythology, no, because if there's a
lot there you could really go go nuts with. For instance,
the fact that Cupid is often depicted riding around on
dolphins or even sometimes just on sea monsters. That's odd. Yeah,
(17:10):
and uh, you know, you know we mentioned beating the
Beast already, but I should throw out there even though
I haven't read it, and I don't know why I
haven't read it, because I read a whole lot of C. S.
Lewis at one point in my life. But C. S.
Lewis retells the story of of Cupid and Psyche in
the nine novel Till We Have Faces. I've never read
that either, but that sounds maybe worth check now. So again,
(17:33):
we could keep going on Cupid. We could keep talking
about various mythological treatments, different versions of the stories. Um,
But basically, what we want to drive home here is that,
first of all, he has these two arrows. He has
the leaden arrow and the golden arrow, and these are
the powers associated. And we also just want to drive
home that he's he is more than just this ridiculous
(17:55):
cartoon baby. Now he's an epic creep cartoon baby who
wrestles goat man and rides on sea monsters. Indeed, he
is so On that note, we're going to take a
quick break, and when we come back, we are going
to discuss the leaden arrow of Cupid. We're going to
get into what ancient people knew of lead, how they
used lead, what they thought about its properties. And then
(18:16):
of course we'll well we'll we'll dive a little bit
into the periodic table and discuss exactly what lad is.
Thank alright, we're back. So, Robert, we have already told
the story of Cupid, as especially as described in Ovid's metamorphoses. Uh.
And in the story of these two different arrows, he's
got the gold arrow, which imparts love makes people fancy
(18:39):
one another, and the lead arrow, which is blunt and
maybe seems to cause a version, at least in some
tellings of the story. Right Like if if you were
hit with the lead arrow and somebody passed you a
note in in in high school and said will you
go out with me? Yes and no, you would add
a third box that said I would rather my father
turned me into a tree. Yeah, your head would just explode,
(19:00):
would like in scanners? Yes. Well, other than the general
association of gold being thought of as good, is there
anything any reason we can think of why these particular
metals are picked to have the magical significance they do
in the arrows in the myth? Well, yeah, exactly what
we with gold? Obviously, gold is beautiful, and humans have
thought it's beautiful for ages, and we've been perfectly happy
(19:22):
to squabble over it and kill each other over it.
So it seems the perfect substance to sum up the
appeal and then sometimes the dangers of love. Plus knowing
what we know now, this was an element that was
likely produced in the collisions of of neutron stars long
before the formation of the Earth, which is amazing to consider.
By the way, I mean, just to contemplate this for
(19:44):
a moment. Uh. You know, it was once thought that
most of the universe is heavy elements, like elements heavier
than iron, were created in supernovas, which is when a
massive star at the end of its life cycle collapses
on itself and then explodes, and supernovas can create ate
some heavy elements. But some scientists have argued for a
while that there are too many heavy elements. The proportion
(20:06):
of them that we find in the universe is too
high to be accounted for by what's possible from supernovas alone.
So in recent years there have been some cool experiments
that have shown that the collision of neutron stars, like
you say, could be the alternative. For example, I was
looking at there was a study published in in the
Astrophysical Journal by Code at All that looked at data
(20:28):
from a neutron star merger, and I love that's the
technology they use, like two companies like mergers and acquisitions.
But they should have used the language of love, because
we are creating a substance that will one day be
used by the God of love. Right it is it
should be neutron star copulation, yes, neutron starter course, but anyway,
(20:52):
that this collision was between eighty five and a hundred
and sixty million light years away, and the researchers calculated
that this one event, these two neutron stars colliding, produced
between one and five earth masses of an element called
europium and between three and thirteen earth masses of gold
earth masses of gold. So just think about a solid
(21:15):
gold Earth and then between three and thirteen of them,
and then it just like spits a bunch of this
out into the universe to get bound up with other
gases and stuff like that and eventually end up in
maybe say a planetary accretion disk, where it becomes part
of the crust of an Earth. So if you're wearing
like a gold ring or any other piece of gold
(21:35):
right now, or if you're maybe maybe say using an
electronic device that has a bit of gold in it,
just think about how that element was forged either in
the guts of a dying star as it exploded, or
was probably more likely created in the chaos of rapid
neutron capture when two of the densest objects in the
universe to neutron stars smashed together billions of years ago.
(22:00):
And of course I guess the even crazier thing is
that that doesn't stop at gold, right, like our amazement
that the elements shouldn't stop there, because all the heavy
elements had to be formed at some point. In fact,
all the elements of any kind had to be formed
at some point. A few of the lightest ones are primordial,
you know, you find hydrogen and helium and lithium out
in the original universe. Uh, and then a few more
(22:21):
I think are formed by like a cosmic rays and stuff.
But beyond that, pretty much everything that you could see
and touch and that your body is made of was
in some way forged inside a dying star. Uh. You know,
you got this dying star forge that has slow neutron
capture going on inside it, or it was a supernova
explosion or the collision of neutron stars or something like that. Yeah,
(22:45):
these are the very kind of forges one can imagine
a god like Vulcan would employ, right exactly. Yeah, that's
what's happening when he pumps the bellows, he's just pumping
it to smash neutron stars together. And of course, you
know you mentioned that, you know, anything heavier than iron
likely had this this kind cosmic origin and that includes lead.
So even though it's easy to say, oh, the golden
arrow forged in in cosmic turmoil in in ages past, well,
(23:09):
the same story applies to lead, even though it's not
as shiny, Even though you probably don't have any leaden
jewelry on your body right now. Uh, though, I mean,
lead is an amazing element, and to consider the same way,
I think. I think there are two main explanations for lead,
as I believe. One is that there's slow neutron capture
like the s process that takes place within dying stars,
(23:32):
and the other is the the hot dense starter course,
the neutron star collision Sunday, Sunday Sunday. Now, to come
back to Cupid's arrow, I imagine basically the idea of
the leaden arrow is that lead is not attractive. Lead
is not beautiful. Lead is something that even in ancient times,
it was rarely used in jewelry, or at least as
(23:55):
the primary aspect of the jewelry. Well, no, and and
even more, Uh, I don't know if you can be
mean to lead, but if you, if lead has feelings,
you could hurt its feelings even more by pointing out
that lead. You know, lead doesn't occur generally free in nature.
Lead occur is bound up in ores. Uh. And so
primarily the way lead was created in the ancient world
(24:18):
was as a byproduct of the creation of silver. And
so people are trying to extract silver for something from something,
and you melt out some lead as a sort of
waste product of that. And and it did have uses
because it's got a high specific weight, so you could
use it as like a weight for you know, if
you have like fishing line, fishing nets or something you
want to hold down that it's useful for that. It's
(24:39):
not very good for making like solid like weapons or anything, right,
because it's very soft. Yeah, it's it's not gonna be
it's not gonna be a good metal if you want
to actually forage arrows for combat or forge any kind
of say armor. Um. But but there are a lot
of uses for it if you want to create say,
drinking vessels or so certainly if you want to create pipes.
(25:02):
We're not advocating that, by the way, no, no, but
certainly from a very early point humans were figuring this out.
Lead is one of the seven Medals of antiquity. Humans
were handling lead a long time ago. Cast. Lead beads
found in modern day Turkey date from roughly BC. The
ancient Egyptians used lead as early as five thousand BC
(25:24):
for pottery glazes, solder, and casting. Yeah, and so I
was looking at early examples of lead artifacts. One example
I found was a sort of maybe aesthetic artifact or
maybe something that was used in like a whirld for
for you know, working with textiles. Um. But this was
in a cave in the Negev Desert in Israel, and
(25:46):
it's supposedly dates to the late fifth millennium BC, and
it's just basically this wooden wand that's got leaden beads
at the end of it. And they don't know what
it's for, though I wonder if maybe it's for some
kind of heavy metal lead magic. Yeah, an anti love
repulsion ray. Uh, so we can hope. So the Babylonians
(26:10):
made inscriptions on lead plates soft you can inscribe things
on it. And just to refer everyone back to our
October episode on Curses, we spend a fair amount of
time discussing Roman curse tablets. Oh yeah, we did. And
what were those made out of? Well, like the ones
found in Um in like second or third century Roman
Britain were often they're made in lead. So there are
(26:32):
these places where you can go around like modern day
Lester and dig up these ancient sites where there would
be maybe a shrine or a temple to an ancient god,
maybe in the syncretic religions of Roman Britain, where you'd
sort of combined maybe Roman gods with with native Celtic
gods or or or the gods of Britain there, and
people would be going there to say, curse somebody who
(26:54):
stole something from them, like you know, Servandas shows up
and says, somebody stole my oake. Whoever stole my cloak,
I want him to not be able to pee for
three months unless he gives me my cloak back. And
this would be inscribed on a lead tablet and hung
up somewhere. And part of the idea there is that
it was partially to invoke this power, but also maybe
(27:15):
just to have it hung up in a public place
so people could like know what was going on. Now.
One other important aspect of lead that that I wonder,
and I wonder if it played into the use of
into the creation of these cursed tablets, is that. Uh,
lead does not corrode like other metals. So if you,
if you, if you inscribe your curse and a piece
of lead, like, that's a curse that could speak across
(27:37):
the ages. Right, lead doesn't rust, I mean, well lead
the lead oxides do form, but they're not they're they're
not like like iron rust, you know, the red rusty stuff.
Lead oxide tends to be great, but generally exposed lead
doesn't corrode. And uh and yeah, this does make it attractive,
especially for some purposes, say like if you want to
(27:57):
make something that holds liquids in it, something that is
not gonna receive a lot of punishment, you don't have
to worry about that. Uh, that the weakness of it.
But yeah, you can use it for drinking vessels or
certainly for plumbing pipes. Here's a gross piece of trivia.
Next time you have to call a plumber because who
knows what you tried to flush a whole roll of
(28:18):
paper towels down the toilet. Consider that the English words
plumber and plumbing are derived from the Latin word plumb them,
which means lead. And it's right there in the chemical
elements symbol for lead on the periodic table. You ever
noticed that it's one of those weird ones, like iron
is f E. Why is that? Well, you know it
(28:38):
comes from an archaic word of like the ferrest metal. Uh,
lead on the periodic table is PB. Why is it pb?
That comes from plumb them because ancient Romans loved some
lead pipes and lead aqueducts, and lead reservoirs, and lead cisterns,
lead cooking vessels, and lead based even lead based food additives.
(28:59):
And we'll come back to the food additives point now.
I was looking at at one text from Cassis and
and sort of titled Lead Chemistry Analytical Aspects, Environmental Impact
and Health Effects, and they pointed out that ancient text
showed a bit of confusion over lead and other elements,
using plum bum to describe quote any silvery white, low
(29:22):
melting and easily oxidized metal, including lead, tin, zinc, et cetera.
They pointed out though that yeah, lead pipes have been
used for a very long time. I see them in
ancient Mesopotamia, Cypress, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, of course, and
various Roman provinces. So you know the technology and the
materials would have spread with the Romans as well, and
(29:44):
the Romans likely learned it from the Greeks. And it
wasn't just the pipes. It was used in cases where
iron wire or wooden hoops are currently used today you
know as reinforcing brands for bands, for tanks, vats, um, amphora, etcetera.
So you see it also used in masonry, cesspool coverings, roofing,
(30:05):
damp proofing, foundations, uh, parapet walls, etcetera. Lead vessels were
widely used and uh, this is interesting. Lead was also
long associated with funeral rites, so Roman era caskets and
urns are often made at least in part from lead,
especially apparently in England. Lead was also used in ancient
China in a variety of uses, from glassmaking to cosmetics.
(30:30):
Of course, and now in the modern world we know
that lead can have extremely serious health consequences can and
very often does. Like there there are tons of ways
to get lead in your body, and lead exposure can
happen through through ingestion when when you eat, it can
happen through breathing in lead particles can happen through absorption
through the skin, and lead gets incorporated into the body
(30:52):
and leads to both short term and long term negative consequences.
The short term negative consequences are there are a lot
of different one and so it can be sometimes it's
hard to identify lead exposure in people, but it might
be like you've got stomach distress, like your stomach hurts
and you're constipated. But it also can lead to weakness
and fatigue, and like your arms and legs are weak,
(31:14):
and it can lead to psychological and neurological consequences. People
can be like like tired and depressed and irritable, have
loss of appetite, have trouble remembering things. Yeah, I mean,
it's enough to make you think it's my smartphone made
out of lead, but uh, it is. It's We were
actually talking about this before we recorded the episode, like
(31:36):
there's so much to the story of of of our
realization regarding the harmful effects of lead, that we really
need to come back to it and devote an entire episode. Absolutely, yes, yes, absolutely,
We're gonna do a whole episode on leads someday soon,
I think, maybe with a special focus on the Lord
of Lead, Clacy Patterson. But yeah, we we now know
lead to have all these problems and they're also the
(31:57):
long term consequences, right, those are just like short term
consequences I was mentioning, you know, it can there could
be neurological damage from long term exposure to lead. Enough
lead in a concentrated dose can kill you. They're definitely
like developmental problems that children who have lead exposure experience.
So it's uh, yeah, it's no joke. And the fact
that humans have constantly surrounded ourselves for centuries or even
(32:19):
millennia with just constant routes of exposure to environmental lead
is something that is really horrifying and ridiculous. But I
guess that's just what we do. All Right, We're gonna
take a quick break, and when we come back, we're
going to get back to this idea of lead as
a food headed song hanging there. Soon it'll be time
(32:39):
to eat some lead than Alright, we're back. Okay, it's
Valentine's Day. What do you get your sweetheart on Valentine's Day?
Sometimes they're flowers, but oh, I guess it's already there
in the name, right, you get your sweethearts some sweets. Now,
here's the question I've wondered about before, but I've never
found a good answer to why is it that we
(33:00):
associate sweet foods with like eroticism but not so much
like other flavors, Like why isn't it that you get
your sweethearts some salty foods on Valentine's Day or you
get them some bitter foods or sour foods? Why sweet?
I mean sweets are a decadent treat, right, I mean,
I guess that's part of it. Um, A sweet is
(33:22):
something sweets or something we've always were always craving and uh,
and we're just hardwired to want as much of it
as possible, given that it would be a rarity in
the natural world. But we also crave fat and salt.
Why not, like for Valentine's Day, instead of a box
of chocolates, it's like a bag of poor crimes and
the stick of butter. Well, Um, I guess it would
(33:43):
be harder to keep that secreted away in the back
of the closet for a week or so. Um. But
I don't know. I feel like they're people. Cel rate
cheese is on Valentine's you know, certainly there are other
foods that have a like a romantic or afrodisiac you know,
vibe to them. Yeah, I guess so. Uh, you know,
I guess part of what I'm wondering is is that
(34:05):
link between like love and eroticism and sweet foods? Is
that cultural or is there some biological element to it? Oh? Man,
We'll have to come back and explore that. That would
be that would be interesting to look at, like when
you look at other cultures. Is there something else that
is considered the romantic flavor profile? Um? I don't know.
You know, considering how many like Scandinavian people have written
(34:28):
into the show to to talk about the wonders of
salty licorice, I bet that's what they use over there. Yeah.
And plus it makes me wonder about, say, Chinese traditions,
where there's so much emphasis placed on the balance of
different flavors. Uh, you know, how does that impact uh
sort of ritualized sweets? All right, well, let's talk about
(34:48):
the sweetest of all sweets, sweet lead. So I have
found what has got to be the best entry ever
in any Oxford companions, that is reading the Oxford Handyon
to Sugar and Sweets. Yeah. So it's Oxford University Press,
and there's an entry in it by the American chemist
Michelle M. Francil and this has just got to be
(35:10):
one of the best like Encyclopedia type entries I've ever read.
So Francial writes about this substance called sugar of lead,
also known as lead lead acetate or lead to acetate.
It looks kind of like large salt crystals if you
look it up, or it looks maybe like translucent rock candy,
that kind of stuff you get on a little stick, right, yeah,
(35:31):
but like sort of like white, translucent in color. And
Francial writes, quote, it is sweet, roughly as sweet per
teaspoon as sugar, and only slightly more lethal than strychnine.
So sugar of lead was used as like a medical
treatment in nineteenth century Europe. And even though it is sweet,
it is technically a salt, which is an electrically neutral
(35:53):
collection of positive ions and negative ions. And actually we
only think of salts as salty in flavor because the
most common salt that we refer to is sodium chloride
table salt. But salts don't have to be salty. Salts
can be bitter, and salts can be sweet, and in
this case it is sweet. So in lead acetate, this
collection of oppositely charged ions is made from depositive lead
(36:16):
ions and negatively charged acetate ions. And it turns out
sugar of lead is not the only sweet metallic salt.
French Will points out that lots of barrillium salts are
very sweet, so sweet in fact, that the Greek word
for the element beryllium is glucinium, from like glucose or glycos,
the Greek word for sweet. But as good as these
(36:39):
metal salts that are sweet taste, they are very bad
for you. Lead acetate can be fatal to a seventy
or a hundred and fifty pound adult at a dose
of three teaspoons. So basically what you're saying is that
if anybody has any fancy dining plants this evening and
they see any lead based sweeteners on the menu, I
(37:00):
would advise against it. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that
the ancient Romans used indirectly, I would say indirectly, used
this lead salt as a kind of sweetener, or at
least as a way of avoiding other types of taste
imparted into their foods. So here's how this goes. The
Romans created a syrup that they called sapa, which was
(37:23):
produced by boiling down a liquid called must. Must is
basically weak wine. Frontal describes it as quote mildly fermented
grape juice, so there'll be a little bit of alcohol content,
maybe kind of like grape beer. Almost. Of course, must,
like wine, has some acid in it. It has acetic acid,
and acetic acid is the acid basis of vinegar. Vinegar
(37:44):
is usually just acetic acid diluted with water or some
other aqueous substance. And acetic acid provides acetate ions, which
can react with metals in the pots where they are boiled,
and uh, and this can result in some salts. So
if you boil your must in a copper pot, the
resulting sappa will have some copper acetate salts in it,
(38:07):
and these taste really bad, like they're bitter. Even ancient
Roman writers would would comment on this. In the Natural History,
Plenty discusses the production of sappa and he writes, quote
leaden vessels should be used for this purpose, not copper ones.
So it's like, get that copper out of there, makes
the sappa taste bad? You want lead except no less?
(38:28):
So why use lead? Because remember lead salts are sweets.
So not only does cooking in lead pots not foul
your sappa, it might make it even a little bit sweeter. Uh.
And this is a quote from This is a quote
from Franciles century quote. Chemical analysis of sappa, produced according
to recipes dating from the classical Roman period using kettles
(38:49):
of similar metallic composition as those found at Pompeii and
other sites, suggests that the lead content of sappa was
eight and fifty milligrams per leader, any thousand times higher
than what is generally allowable in drinking water, even diluted
and used sparingly. Sweetening with sappa was a serious risk.
(39:09):
Now I have seen some people phrase this is like
that the lead pots were used specifically to make the
sappa sweeter, and Francill sort of disagrees with that, because
she says the lead was probably not really intended to
add much sweetness to the wine because it wouldn't put
It wouldn't add that much. Really, you you'd already have
(39:30):
a pretty sweet substance and would be the equivalent of
adding like a pinch of sugar to it, So it
wouldn't make a huge difference. It was more that the
lead vessels, if they when they did add flavor, would
sort of complement the existing sweetness rather than adding a foul,
bitter flavor like copper vessels would. Okay, so in a
blind taste test of the in which both vessels have
(39:53):
the same already sweet or semi sweet wine, you're going
to find that the leaden vessel is going going to
impart a like a slightly sweeter, less foul experience, will
probably significantly less foul. But yeah, I don't know if
there's evidence that they thought of it. As the lead
comes out and makes it a lot sweeter, they just thought, oh,
(40:13):
you use lead pots it tastes way better. In the end. However,
this is one of those cases where we also can't
just make fun of the ancients, because this this kind
of thing carried on into a ridiculously recent time. She
points out that the use of lead as a food
additive and treatment did not stop in ancient Rome, and
that lead equipment and additives were used to prevent spoilage
(40:34):
in wine in some cases up until the nineteenth century.
Oh wow, now we do have to just drive home
for everybody, even though again we're not getting deep into
the the the the the dangers of lead in this episode. Please,
if you were if you were tempted, all tempted it all.
Do not go out and drink a bunch of wine
out of lead vessels just to to to test the
(40:57):
sweetening ability of the of the vessel. The amount of
lead you should be absorbing on purposes zero, whatever you're
accidentally getting from the environment is still probably more than
you want. And there's actually a lot more stuff that
There's been an ongoing argument over the years about the
role of lead ingestion and lead exposure in ancient Rome,
(41:17):
because before Ancient Rome there was lead. People did use
lead to make some objects, but it wasn't used in
wide like widespread construction and infrastructure and all that. The
Romans were the ones that really started using lead for
a lot of stuff. And in nineteen three, a Canadian
researcher named Jerome Riyagu argued that lead poisoning actually lead
(41:39):
to the downfall of the Roman Empire. You've probably heard
this before, Yeah, the idea that they just they built
up all this lead essentially lead infrastructure and then poisoned
themselves with yeah, and cooked with this, especially the cooking
with lead vessels, I think um. And so this has
later been called into doubt by others who said, you know,
it doesn't necessarily seem like we can claim that, but
(42:00):
there's no doubt that many robins were exposed to unsafe
levels of lead. I was just looking at a study
from P. And A. S. By the by Delisle at
All called lead in Ancient Rome city waters, and they
found that the tap water, you know, basically the aqueduct
delivered water or delivered through some kind of lead infrastructure,
(42:21):
that water in ancient Rome would have roughly a hundred
times the lead content of local spring water. It's a
lot of lead, all right, was we we wind down here,
Let's just let's just talk once more about just the
properties of lead, right, And I wonder if in looking
at these properties we can figure out what makes it
so special as as the opposite of the love inducing
(42:41):
golden arrow. Yeah. Yeah, And and indeed, why Cupid would
have walked up to his possible father Vulcan and said, hey,
what medal should you use to make my repulsion arrows?
What would make Vulcans say, oh, yeah, lead, lead is
what you want? Okay, Well, one thing we know about
lead is that, for a metal has a pretty low
mel thing point right right, And this means it's a
(43:02):
lot easier to cast with, requires less equipment, and it
made an ideal solder component. Yeah, so if you want
to melt something easily to like seal things together, I
think yeah, and I've read this also makes it like
an attractive additive if you're like casting something in a mold, right.
And then to your point earlier, like it was there
as a byproduct of going after other metals, so it
(43:24):
was available um onto onto. An addition, we've talked about
this a little bit. Lead is DNSE. It is. It's
a heavy metal, and leads density is due to its
high atomic mass, short bond lengths, and a small atomic radius.
And this, along with its high number of electrons needed
to maintain a neutral charge, makes it a useful radiation
(43:44):
shield in our modern world, a scattering X rays and
gamma rays. Yeah, and so you'll actually see it in
use in places where there's a radiation risk. There are
sometimes lead blocks deployed as a as basically a like
the sand bags of the radiation world. Yeah. I mean,
my my father was a dentist, and and so I
was often hanging out in dental offices, and part of
(44:07):
that is being being near an X ray machine. And
of course that big, big heavy lead line smock that
lead one where yeah so so yeah, you see you
see this kind of radiation shielding all over kind of
makes me think back to our our our episode on
the X ray machine that we did for Invention. So
certainly if you want more on on the use of
(44:29):
X rays and the dangers of radiation associated with that
with X rays, I highly recommend that episode of our
other show, Invention. And then the third major attribute of
lead is that it is soft and it's malleable. Uh,
it's limited usage somewhat. You know, while a god might
be able to craft an arrow out of it or
coat an arrow with lead anyway, you're not gonna be
able to fashion anything with it that can sustain any
(44:51):
real stress. But when you're talking about something like water
and sewage pipes or cooking vessels, uh yeah, that that
is an area where lead can can excel as long
as you're not getting into questions of whether it will
poison you or not. Just from a physical and a
physical basis, it can get the job done. You wouldn't
want like a lead hammer, though, I think you can
have like lead alloy hammers and stuff like you can
(45:13):
use alloys to strengthen metals that are inherently soft. So
coming back to Cupid, I mean, maybe the idea is
that the lead in arrows or somehow combating the radiation
of intense, passionate love. The power of love is actually
a it's a it's a type of ray. It's what's
beyond gamma rays. Yeah, and you've got to scatter those
(45:35):
love rays. And the only way to do it is
with with some high end um god forged lead in ammunition.
I'm seeing another residence here because one of the sources
we didn't mention, So we talked about how lead can
be created in like events in space inside like a
dying star and the collision of neutron stars. We also
(45:55):
didn't talk about another. I think it probably accounts for
a much much smaller percentage of it. But lead can
be created as the byproduct of radioactive decay sometimes, like
uranium can decay into some isotopes of lead. So maybe
if we're considering that love is a type of radioactivity
or type of ray, they're actually lead represents what happens
(46:17):
when love dies and decays, you know, like so like
love fades and eventually it becomes lead. What starts as
this golden, splendid, sharp arrow becomes this blunt, dull, lusterless instrument.
We have crucified this myth and taken out all of
the beauty and turned it into a chemical Frankenstein. I'm
(46:38):
so proud of us. Yeah, I I feel like we have.
We've done a good job here today, taking the candy
coated and kind of lame holiday of Valentine's Day, and
I think we've injected some fresh life into it. We've
fed it a lot of lead and uh and and
and uh and in doing so, we've we've killed off
a lot of the uh, the more irritable aspects of
(47:02):
the holiday. Sweet sweet lead. Yes, So big takeaways from
from today. Don't eat lead sugar, right, don't do not
do it. Don't cook in lead pots right, don't drink
from lead leading vessels if you have a choice in
the matter. Be wary of gods with bows and arrows, right,
And and keep in mind that, yeah, cupid has two arrows,
(47:25):
so if he's aiming at you, it's kind of a
toss up which one he's trying to hit you with.
And sometimes even the great god Pan gets out wrestled
exactly all right, so we're gonna close out the special
Valentine's Day episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But
as always, if you want to check out more episodes
of the show, you can always head on over to
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mother ship.
(47:46):
That's where you will find all the episodes of the show.
You'll find links out to various social media accounts. You
can of course find us anywhere you get podcasts. That's
that's true across the board, so just search for us there.
So wherever you find subscribe and if you have the
power to do so on these platforms, give us a rating,
throw as many stars as possible at us the golden
(48:07):
kind not the lead ones, uh, and then leave a
nice message about how how awesome the show is, because
you know, these these may seem like small things, but
they really help us out in the long run. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams
and Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in
touch with us directly with feedback about this episode or
any other to suggest topic for the future, we're just
(48:29):
to say hi. You can email us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff
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(49:03):
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