Frontinus' Legacy: Essays on Frontinus' "de aquis urbis Romae" (review)

Frontinus' Legacy: Essays on Frontinus' "De aquis urbis Romae." By Deane R. Blackman and A. Trevor Hodge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. xi+170. $39.95/$19.95.

Frontinus' Legacy challenges historians of science and technology, engineers interested in ancient water supply, and classicists drawn to problems raised by the ancient text De aquis urbis Romae, Frontinus' treatise on the aqueducts of Rome. Frontinus composed his work after he was appointed to the post of water commissioner in the year 97 C.E. In addition to providing us with a vast repository of information concerning the aqueducts, he paints a picture of himself as a faithful, responsible servant called to an office long wretchedly mismanaged and tainted. Yet he claimed to administer his charge with dedicated service and economical use of public funds.

The editors, Deane R. Blackman and A. Trevor Hodge, tell us that they hope to address "questions that lie between the lines" of Frontinus' text: How large a workforce was required to build an aqueduct, and how did they go about doing it? What did such an undertaking cost, and who was responsible for paying? Who decided the route to be followed? Why did Frontinus feel a need to write his discourse? And for what audience was it originally intended?

Hodge, one of the world's foremost authorities on Roman aqueducts (author of Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply [London, 1992] and editor of Future Currents in Aqueduct Studies [Leeds, 1991]), is a professor of classics at Carleton University in Ottawa. Blackman is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Monash University in Australia. Together, and with the help of Klaus Grewe, Ph. Leveau, and N. A. F. Smith, they have produced an interdisciplinary volume that uses Frontinus as the springboard for questions about the archaeology, hydraulic engineering, surveying, and financing of Roman aqueducts, and about the processes by which calcium carbonate deposits were formed in their water conduits. While these problems do not lend themselves to "light" reading, they are treated for the most part in lucid, if sometimes casual, prose.

The essays are laid out under three major headings: "Engineering Theory," "Engineering Practice," and a rather idiosyncratic cluster of essays labeled "When in Rome . . ." Very few contributions are attributed to a specific author, which is one frustrating aspect of the book. Chapter 1 explains the water system outlined by Frontinus and defines the terminology of the Roman watermen. The next two chapters, presumably cowritten by Blackman and Hodge, are highly technical. "The Geometry of the calices" includes short sections on such topics as Roman arithmetic and Frontinus' complex measurement system, and "The quinaria" deals with estimates, complexities of Roman hydraulics, continuity, velocity, time, rates, the quinaria (pipes that were five quarter-digits in diameter), and the equality of water discharges for users.

Chapters 4 though 10, those under the heading of "Engineering Practice," take up the bulk of the book. Here we find rather cursory discussion of wide-ranging issues: the planning of the aqueducts, leveling, project resources and management, estimates about financing and costs, maintenance, including matters of water theft and breakage of the mains, an excursus by Grewe and Blackman on calx—the incrustation that plagued the aqueducts—and, finally, a section on the urban distribution of the aqueducts in Rome. The book does not by any means exhaust its subject and shows too many signs of having been rushed to press too quickly.

Fascinating questions are frequently dismissed after only very superficial treatment. For example, the editors note that "a Roman's view of his physical world . . . has no counterpart for us" (p. 16). What does this mean? Further along in this same section we learn that Frontinus would have viewed the "scientific" and "engineering" aspects of his aqueducts quite differently from us. There is no elaboration, however, so one does not learn just how Frontinus did view his aqueducts. At the very least, we...