This BBC article intends to surprise the reader, and I think the reader has to be extremly cautious with its content. Yet, it briefly mentions that the Roman longevity concerned only the nobility.
> all working-class people who were buried in common graves. The average age of death was 30, and that wasn’t a mere statistical quirk
Back to the BBC article, some of its source are dubious, and I suppose they were selected only because of their "selling power". For instance, the paper on Victorian life expectancy was debated here[^0] with much skepticism.
There was no magic longevity potion those of means had. All they had over the common class are the things we all have and take for granted today - protection from the consequences war and mostly stable access to clean food and water. The upper class of times back then arguably less so on both accounts than even a lower class individual today. This was the whole point. It's not like you could attribute their longevity to sophisticated medicine, because it literally did not exist at the time.
> all working-class people who were buried in common graves. The average age of death was 30, and that wasn’t a mere statistical quirk
Back to the BBC article, some of its source are dubious, and I suppose they were selected only because of their "selling power". For instance, the paper on Victorian life expectancy was debated here[^0] with much skepticism.
[^0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14586145