Roman white teeth & Johnny Shumate work

Salvete omnes,
a Canicula post - :)
I admire the historic illustrations by Johnny Shumate - his blog here.
looking yesterday at the one of his newest creations titled Caesar's Centurions I recalled some of my reading about  the Roman daily life, including their health and hygiene, and wondered whether their teeth were really white as seen in many modern illustrations.
I rememberer when reading about Rome that the Romans cleaned their teeth daily, and  at the same time remembered the Egyptian mummies (of the elite Egyptians one must add) and their rather decayed teeth and gums. Images of the skulls with the worn and decayed teeth figure prominently in my mind - scholarly article on the state of ancient Egyptian dental health here. In both civilizations they ate grains, bread and cakes, and used millstone to grind their grains into flour. - an article about Roman milling (part of a large project exploring Roman food etc).
  Thus we know, from the historical sources etc, that the ancient Romans, heavy bread eaters, cleaned their teeth  and in order to do so they used urine. They did is so well that the Roman period jaws and teeth found in the excavated graves show only 5% of periodontitis while modern UK population sports up to 30% and the US population up to 38.8%.
Moreover they did not fluoridate the water, did not floss and did not brush their teeth at all. They used chewing sticks of various trees and also toothpicks and rags to clean the teeth.
They cleaned their teeth with urine passed in the morning, the wealthy women were said to import special urine from what is today Portugal and so on - more about their dental practices in this article, actually that webpage  contains plethora of information on the ancient Roman daily life and more(another article here).

Finally, in addition please find attached one of my Roman horses, a sketch I played around reworking some old pen and ink plus watercolor sketch

there is a new book by dr. Rafaelle D'Amato on the army of  the Roman Eastern Provinces  - :)
enjoy
ps
you could look at and enjoy the wonderful brushwork by Sabine Ott - Sabine paints Akhal-Tekes.