Vers une gestion intégrée de l’eau dans l’Empire romain ed. by E. Hermon (review)

In academia, surely among the most predictable and least imaginative approaches, when reviewing a collective publication, is to complain about the lack of cohesion. For once, why not take a more charitable approach by stating that this is a rich and varied volume containing two dozen research contributions, most of which are worth consulting, along with a few texts providing more general reflections. Any reader interested in a particular article will likely broaden her/his horizon by also reading something else in the book, whether it be directly related to the topic under investigation or not.

The papers from the international conference on water management in the Roman world, held at the Université Laval in 2006, were split between two separate publications; this is the second.¹ In geographical terms, the contributions mostly concern water management in Italy or France, while a few studies focus on parts of the Greek world or the Iberian Peninsula. Two thirds of the articles are in French, the rest in English (the language preferred by most Italian participants).

The title of the book is noteworthy. “Vers une gestion intégrée de l’eau dans l’Empire romain” has something of the flair of a modern political slogan, as in “Towards a stronger Classical Association of Canada!”, for example. But the Roman Empire is no more, and there is nothing modern research can do to make ancient Roman water management more ecologically conscious (for that is roughly what is meant by “gestion intégrée de l’eau”, a somewhat odd expression in French as well). Yet there is definitely a political component here, for the large project run by Professor Hermon, which was responsible for the original conference and for many recent similar ventures, had as its overarching goal a comparative approach. The idea was to investigate ancient practices of water management in order to evaluate if the methods employed, which in some cases obviously were traditional (although in some situations the Roman state may conceivably have overturned traditional practices), hold out some benefits for modern society. The importance of water in the modern world is becoming more evident by the day, and it is probably the case that in no field of Classics or ancient history (with the exception of philosophy), is it more tempting to draw parallels between the modern and the ancient world and toy with the idea that we have lessons to learn, than in the field of water supply. Indeed the research project benefited from support from the Canadian UNESCO commission and several international agencies in its study of four large themes: conflicts relating to water use, economic and legal aspects relating to water, the effects of environmental change, and the transfer of methods of water use (9–11).

As far as historical analogies and the transfer of knowledge are concerned, most of the contributions that applied such perspectives were presented in the first volume. The present volume contains a variety of contributions that are sufficiently interesting in themselves, even though they may not always focus on comparative aspects of the subject.

The widest perspective is employed in Elio Lo Cascio and Paolo Malanima’s survey of the use of the water mill from antiquity to the 19th century. Although waterpower can never have provided more than ca 1 % of the energy consumed in these pre-industrial “biological energy systems”, its importance was not negligible where it could be harnessed. The authors argue for the importance of water mills in the Roman world, following the lead of Ö. Wikander and J.-P. Brun, and hold that the ratio of “population to number of watermills” remained the same from Roman times throughout the Middle Ages until the 19th century when the steam engine ushered in the industrial revolution. Although archaeologists have discovered traces of...