I read this, Xenophon, Oeconomicus, some years ago (one of the Brads made a mountain of the word from some trivial Adam Smith quote), perhaps in the midst of the Panic of '08. The title was alluring. The innerboobs was full of ...confusion about the source of and remedies for westworld's economic ills. (There was a UID among the CA Cohort of Petty Landlords who insisted the cause lay in fetal alcohol syndrome AND the EUR.) Or maybe it was a few years later amid trash talk about stores of value in precious metals (PMs); I wanted to located historical volumes of silver (and its lethal smelt wastes) and recall what impetus (beside debasement of the coin) might have propelled continental adventurers to "discover" FRESH! BOUNTIFUL! deposits of gold (beyond "Asia Minor," Aegean, and Mediterranean). Anyhoo, I recovered an unintentionally funny part of a conspiracy to render current and future funding of epigenetic research utterly useless.

"Well, one day, Socrates, I noticed that her face was made up: she had rubbed in white lead in order to look even whiter than she is, and alkanet juice to heighten the rosy colour of her cheeks; and she was wearing boots with thick soles to increase her height. [3] So I said to her, "Tell me, my dear, how should I appear more worthy of your love as a partner in our goods, by disclosing to you our belongings just as they are, without boasting of imaginary possessions or concealing any part of what we have, or by trying to trick you with an exaggerated account, showing you bad money and gilt necklaces and describing clothes that will fade as real purple?"

Made a "friend" in Xenophon, ever the pragmatist (by comparison to his peers) I further discovered and digressed at length in investigation of that cohort.

So I did not until the other night examine the supposition that neither the Romans nor the Greeks suffered from lead poisoning. My investigation of (free) innerboob references is hardly exhaustive but seems immediately to offer more rhetorical than scientific, explanations as to why my contemporaries are as little bothered as Mr Franklin by toxicology and expediency which poisons what one holds to esteem.

(a) History of Toxicology and Environmental Health: Toxicology in Antiquity
A great portion of this concerns semantic purposes and application, or the ambiguity of the word: remedy or poison. I recommend its reading in order to fully appreciate the err exacting application of the reference text to calculate pathologies of lead poisoning and its incidence in the final 50 pages.

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Heavy Metals

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.