The Roman Aqueduct System

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. A body of engineering practice plus the administrative office that ran it - the cura aquarum, whose commissioner Frontinus wrote a surviving handbook, De aquaeductu urbis Romae (c. 97-104 CE). Aqueducts are treated here as an institution rather than a place because the interesting thing is not any one channel but the repeatable civic package: a city that became Roman got water, baths and a public building programme, funded partly locally, and that package was a large part of what made provincial elites want the status.
3. Knowledge
4. Roman Citizenship (civitas Romana)
5. The Roman Aqueduct System
6. Connections
7. Roman Citizenship (civitas Romana)
8. Pont du Gard
9. Construction of the Via Appia begins
10. Carthage
11. The Roman Legion
12. The Roman Aqueduct System
13. Leptis Magna
14. Trajan (Marcus Ulpius Traianus)
15. The Antonine Constitution (Constitutio Antoniniana)
16. Evidence
17. Frontinus, as curator aquarum, describes the aqueducts serving Rome, their sources, lengths, administration, maintenance staff and the fraud he found in illegal tapping. It is the empire's clearest surviving evidence that infrastructure was run by an accountable civil office with records, not merely built.
18. The three-tiered bridge carried the aqueduct supplying Nemausus (Nîmes) across the Gardon and is the best-preserved demonstration of Roman hydraulic surveying, evidencing that the imperial civic package of water supply and public building was delivered in the provinces, not only at Rome.