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ROMAN ENGINEERING III: DRAINS AND SEWERS

The extraordinary greatness of the Roman Empire manifests itself above all in three things: the aqueducts, the paved roads, and the construction of the drains.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 3.67.5

The Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s underground system of seven drains or sewers lines, begun by the last Etruscan king, Tarquinus Superbus, in the 6th century BC, was a canal designed to drain the marshy valleys that lay between the hills of Rome. By the end of the first century A.D., its concrete and masonry tunnels channeled rainwater, wastewater used in the baths, fountains, and latrines, and trash beneath the Fora and around the hills, and stood among extensive drainage networks in the valleys of the Circus Maximus and the Campus Martius. The joint exit is just south of the ancient Roman bridge, now known as Ponte Rotto. Another place where it can be seem is at the eastern stairs of the Basilica Julia at the Roman Forum, where a door leads to the sewer. 

Although it was largely unseen, the Cloaca Maxima was lauded by public figures including Pliny the Elder, who, painted a dramatic portrait of the Great Sewer:

Hills were tunneled into the course of the construction of the sewers, and Rome was a “city on stilts” beneath which men sailed when Marcus Agrippa was aedile. Seven rivers join together and rush headlong through Rome, and, like torrents, they necessarily sweep away everything in their path. With raging force, owing to the additional amount of rainwater, they shake the bottom and sides of the sewers.

Sometimes water from the Tiber flows backwards and makes its way up the sewers. Then the powerful flood-waters clash head-on in the confined space, but the unyielding structure holds firm. Huge blocks of stone are dragged across the surface above the tunnels; buildings collapse of their own accord or come crashing down because of fire; earth tremors shake the ground - but still, for seven hundred years from the time of Tarquinius Priscus, the sewers have survived almost completely intact (Natural History, 36).

Writing under the Empire, Livy described the system as one “for which the new magnificence of these days has scarcely been able to produce a match” (Ab Urbe Condita, I.52.6).  Sextus Junius Frontius, the curator aquarum, or Water Commissioner of Rome, appointed in A.D. 97, compared the Roman water supply system to the monuments and temples of other ancient cultures: 

With such an array of indispensable structures carrying so much water,compare, if you will, the idle Pyramids or the useless, though famous,works of the Greeks!

The Roman’s high valuation of utility has been vindicated over time: parts of the Cloaca Maxima were still in use as sewers in the early 20th century. 

ROMAN ENGINEERING

I. Aqueducts
II. Paved Roads

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