A Plain Man’s Guide to Roman Plumbing

311 A PLAIN MANIS GUIDE TO ROMAN PLUMBING Roman aqueducts, it is fair to say, are not a subject generally thought of as highly controversial, or even particularly mysterious. Highly regarded as one of the most striking outward manifestations of The Roman Way, the Pont du Gard and the arcades across the Campagna can be relied on to appear among the glossy plates of any handbook on Roman Civilization with the superb infallibility of some astronomical phenomenon--with, if particular stress is laid on the Empirels far-flung sway, Segovia thrown in as well for good measure. Scholars being for the most part reasonable men, no claim is made that we know all there is to know about aqueducts, but the general reader cannot but get the impression that here he is basking in the broad, sunlit uplands of established scholarship, worlds away from, say, the unseen perils, nameless horrors and subterranean chasms that constitute the Dungeons and Dragons of Minoan. But even on the aqueducts all is not plain sailing, and the prospect of writing a book on them impels me to offer this survey of strengths and weaknesses in the state of our knowledge, in the hope of stimulating comment (and criticism) useful to everyone. In such an approach, weaknesses will inevitably bulk larger than strengths, giving a negative tone to the study. But it becomes positive when one remembers that these are the areas where progress can yet be made. Established and accepted fact needs no exposition; I am interested in finding where lies the way ahead. Our chief strengths are three: Frontinus, Ashby, and hydraulics. Within the limits that he sets for himself, Frontinus is accurate, comprehensive, informed--and how lucky we are to have him! Unfortunately, the repeated insistence of the modern specialised commentators that his work is not an encyclopaedia of Roman 312 A. TREVOR HODGE hydraulics 1 is parallelled by the persistence of their more general colleagues in treating it as if it was. Presumably what happens is that in studying aqueducts one frequently feels the crying need to refer to an ancient hydraulics handbook; Frontinus is the closest thing to it, and sometimes the distinction gets blurred as the wish becomes father to the thought. That is hardly Frontinus' fault, and in what he actually does state, or even imply, I am tempted to risk the generalisation and say that Frontinus is never wrong. What he leaves out is, largely, the engineering details, particularly civil engineering. Mileages and discharge are listed in detail, for supply and distribution are his concern, but not the bridges or viaducts. The Ponte Lupo, the Ponte San Gregorio and other great works are passed over in silence, and one has the impression that he could have written on the aqueduct of Nimes without ever mentioning the Pont du Gard. Regrettably, however, this absence in Frontinus{one cannot really call it a deficiency) is parallelled by an even greater lacuna in the modern commentators. Wholly innocent of any literary pretensions (he usually reads like the polished prose style of a railway timetable, a work that in content he much resembles), Frontinus, one would have thought, was to be studied primarily, and even exclusively, for the factual information he conveys. Instead, .that most dreaded of Athenian plagues, banausis, has afflicted modern commentators (particularly the Victorians) with a virulence that even Plato himself escaped, and a journey through the "Frontinus" entries in L' Annee Philologique is a depressing experience. Textual studies are the order of the day, and no problem has had more time spent on it than the authenticity of Book IV of the Stratagems, a work that in its 1Pierre Grimal (Bibliography 1.2), xiv: "A aucun titre, ce traite n est une encyclopedie de I'hydraulique a Rome"; p. xv: "Le ~ Aquae Ductu est done, d' abord, un ecrit pol itique" • (The Bibliography referred to in this and later notes appears at the end of this article.) A PLAIN MANIS GUIDE TO ROMAN PLUMBING 313 entire length tells us nothing we did not already know from other sources, and whose authenticity is here irrelevant to the reliability of the material in it, since it is generally agreed...