Was ‘Golden Age’ of Ancient Greece Tarnished? : Research: Scientists were stunned when they examined skeletons from a Greek colony and found evidence of widespread disease and malnutrition.

In the fabled world of classical Greece, ancient historians wrote, one of the wealthiest societies was Metaponto, a Greek colony in southern Italy. During the “golden age” of Pericles, Metapontine farmers grew rich by shipping abundant crops of grain, olives and wine grapes across the Ionian Sea to their countrymen on the barren soils of Greece.

When the people of Metaponto made an offering to Apollo, it was not a sheaf of real grain but one sculpted in gold. Their dead were buried in walled tombs, in stone sarcophagi with elaborate jewelry, costly bronze mirrors and carved alabaster.

So it came as a shock when scientists recently took their first close look at the skeletons in hundreds of those graves. In overwhelming numbers, the people had been malnourished, disease-ridden and injury-plagued.

Six of every 10 had decayed teeth, and many more had such heavy tartar deposits that scientists concluded there was “a complete lack of dental hygiene.” More than three-quarters had tooth enamel malformed in a way known to be caused by serious disease or severe malnutrition. Of the 233 skeletons that were preserved well enough to study, 56% showed signs of significant disease or injury. These included a form of anemia called thalassemia and, in perhaps the most controversial suggestion, widespread syphilis or a closely related disease.

The skeletons also revealed a large number of broken bones that had not been set and had healed in distorted ways. The researchers said this was startling because Metaponto was famed in the ancient world for its doctors.

On top of it all, the scientists estimated from the skeletons’ ages at death that the life expectancy of a newborn in Metaponto was 32 years. This was typical for contemporary ancient populations, but Metaponto’s reputation for wealth, nutritional abundance and medical care had led to assumptions that its people had fared better.

“You read the literature of classical Greece and you get the picture of a wonderful society with everyone enjoying themselves,” said Joseph C. Carter of the University of Texas at Austin. “But what we see now is that things were pretty awful, even in a place that was supposed to have been so well off.”

Carter, an archeologist who has led excavations at Metaponto for 18 years, is the leader of a group that published these findings in the fall issue of Research & Exploration, a quarterly journal of the National Geographic Society. The skeletons were analyzed by physical anthropologists Maciej Henneberg and Renata Henneberg, both of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Carter said the study of the skeletons--representing people who lived between 580 BC and 250 BC--was one of the largest and most complete on the health of an ancient population. “Health conditions like this may turn out to be much more typical than we imagine,” he said.

The most common sign of poor health, the Hennebergs wrote, was multiple bands of thinned enamel on tooth crowns. This is known to result from bouts of severe disease or malnutrition during childhood.

Anemia was evident in the thickening of many skulls, with pitting in the same areas. The Hennebergs speculate that the anemia was the result of thalassemia, a genetic disease similar to sickle-cell anemia. Both diseases are prevalent in areas with a high risk of malaria, and Metaponto had marshes that could have harbored malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

The case for syphilis is more tentative. It is also controversial because many experts believe that the disease did not appear in Europe until Columbus inadvertently carried it from the New World. Syphilis can damage bones, but there are no known clear-cut examples of it on remains of Europeans who lived before the 1490s.

The Hennebergs say that some Metaponto skeletons show the bone damage, but they note that it can also be caused by tuberculosis or leprosy. But because they found no additional signs pointing to those diseases, they regard the most likely cause as syphilis or one of the other diseases, such as yaws, caused by the same type of bacteria.

Syphilis or not, life in Metaponto was no picnic. Although that came as a surprise to the archeologists, at least one Metapontonite also had a dim view of his plight. In one tomb, Carter said, archeologists found an inscription naming 15 local doctors and “cursing them all straight to hell.”