The Roman Aqueduct System

node · earth · Mediterranean-wide; Rome served by eleven major aqueducts

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.