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  • Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome
  • James C. Anderson Jr.
Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome. By Gregory S. Aldrete (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) 338 pp. $60.00

In the most popular of Rome's foundation legends, the infants Romulus and Remus survived their abandonment to the Tiber because their basket could not be put into the main current of the river while in flood. Thus spared, they were washed ashore at the southwest corner of the Palatine hill where flood waters had formed standing pools, to be found by a she-wolf and, later, a shepherd (Livy 1.4.4–6; Plutarch, Romulus [End Page 102] 3.4). Ancient literary and epigraphical sources that even mention Tiber floods, however, are surprisingly scattered and inconsistent, and primary evidence for the severity, extent, or cost of Tiber's floods is scarcer still. Aldrete deals comprehensively with such ancient citations as exist in Chapter 1, providing a succinct table and a brief discussion of each attested flood in antiquity (15). Though he is unable to estimate the geographical extent of Tiber ºooding in antiquity from those sources, he employs the descriptions, drawings, and photographs that he discovers from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and later periods to project suggestions and conclusions onto earlier times.

For the classicist and ancient historian, such projection from later periods into the past always causes some discomfort and doubt, but—given the importance of the Tiber to the topography of Rome in every age and the river's undeniable tendency to flood the low-lying areas of the city at fairly regular intervals in postclassical times—retrojection in this case seems justifiable. Classicists might well consider how much they can learn from later evidence within the topographical boundaries of an ancient city.

Aldrete makes about as much use of ancient evidence as possible, but some chapters in the book contain scant observation that is contemporary with ancient Rome. Chapter 2 ("Characteristics of Floods") and Chapter 4 ("Delayed Effects of Floods") discuss subsequent findings, and sometimes even concentrate on floods beyond the Tiber and outside Italy. In Chapter 3 ("Immediate Effects of Floods"), Aldrete makes telling use of anecdotes, particularly from Vitruvius, Livy, and Tacitus (91– 117), before turning inevitably once again to general descriptive information about injuries and drownings (118–123). "No ancient author's description of a flood lists actual numbers of people who drowned" (121).

When Aldrete returns to textual and archaeological evidence from ancient times in his two concluding chapters, 5 and 6 ( "Methods of Flood Control" and "Roman Attitudes toward Floods"), the effect is far less speculative and, inevitably, more convincing. Nonetheless, the comparative hydrological and flood-disaster evidence that he uses as comparanda is well and carefully chosen. It ultimately results in a broad canvas of what severe and repeated floods of the Tiber must have meant to generations of ancient Romans. Two questions arise: Why has so little been said about them, and why (apparently) was so little done to control or avoid them?

Although no one can be certain of the exact extent or consequences of any specific Tiber flood during antiquity, Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome is a noble attempt to bring interdisciplinary evidence from outside classical sources to bear on a long-standing problem of Roman history and archaeology. [End Page 103]

James C. Anderson Jr.
University of Georgia
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