The high rate of increase in global temperature we are experiencing since the last century is commonly ascribed to industrial activities. However, the mean sea level variations inferred from the remnants of the Roman era suggest that a similar high rate of increase may have occurred more than 2,000 years ago. This issue is essentially based on two data points and is admittedly weak, but dismissing these as outliers seems unjustified since neither local geology nor the Italian seismic catalogs support a tectonic origin for such a high rate of vertical motion. On the contrary, independent data on both ocean sediments in the Sargasso Sea and dendrology favor repeated strong temperature oscillations with comparably large gradients in historic times.