Beware the Ides of March 03/15/2013
According to popular myth on March 15, 44 B.C.E a soothsayer stopped Roman Dictator Julius Caesar on the streets of Rome and whispered, “Beware the Ides of March”. Caesar failed to heed this warning, brushing away the soothsayer. Several hours later Julius Caesar would lay dead on the floor of the Roman Senate, assassinated by a group of Roman Senators.
Since that time the warning, Beware the Ides of March has embedded itself into the popular lexicon and imagination.
The Ides of March is a good time to look back upon the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was one of the first civilizations with functioning plumbing. The Roman Empire had an extensive system of public latrines that were connected to a sewer system. In fact, the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination, the Hall Curia of the Theater of Pompey, was converted into a latrine after Caesar’s murder because it was seen as a place of dishonor. The Roman Empire also had an extensive system of aqueducts that brought fresh flowing water into Roman houses, public baths, and fountains.
Sadly, the Roman Empire, for all its advancements in plumbing, lacked a garbage disposal and trash removal system. Garbage was frequently dumped in the streets. Trash was piled in alleyways and left to rot. According to Lionel Casson’s Everyday Life in Ancient Rome, “Unfortunately its [the Roman Empire] functions did not include house-to-house garbage collection, and this led to indiscriminate refuse dumping, even to the heedless tossing of trash from windows.”
There was so much trash in the streets of Rome builders would frequently build new structures on top of the rubbish instead of removing it. Rome is a city with layers of history and part of the reason for those layers are its lack of garbage removal and trash pick up.
Thankfully we as a society recognize the importance of junk removal and trash pick up in our day to day lives. Frequent trash pick up keeps our cities clean and keeps everyone healthy. Junk removal is a yardstick of modern civilization, and Green Clean Junk Removal is proud to do its part keeping our cities clean and junk free.
March 15, 2013
