Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covenant Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here

with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Aniches Innski and once again we have gathered

around the microphones of our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular

order here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that Pompeii's new drain system

is 2,300 years old. Yeah, so this is in Pompeii they have a set of storm drains underneath

the city that were several meters down so they weren't really affected when Vizuvius hit.

Well, I don't think any storm drain would have been able to drain away from Vizuvius. That's a good

point. But yeah, so there's the system which is 450 meters long, they're quite big so if you're

a human you can crawl along it without too much discomfort. And it turns out they've been looked

into they're so clean and empty and well built that they're going to be used again for more

of a perfect and they're looking into another stretch of 500 meters of drains just to see if we can

open those up as well. And so this kind of system is for taking water that comes out of rivers,

or comes from the air and taking it down to the sea. It's not so much for sewage, right?

Yes. Because this is what the Roman sewers were all about. If you had a toilet in your house it

would probably go into a cesspit, it wouldn't be attached to the sewage system. Every now and then

they could do. But the problem was there was no grating between the sewer and your toilet. And so

if you had a toilet and you attached it to the sewer, everything could come the other way as well as

you said. Ah, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's great. So that's why we know so much about their

eating habits because they were just sitting in these cesspit because they they had the

zone menus like we've discovered things that they ate there that include sea urchin, flamingo,

and the only example of a giraffe leg in all of ancient Rome is found in Pompeii.

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