Aqueducts in Rome

The Romans constructed numerous aqueducts throughout the Empire to bring water into cities and towns—often from distant sources. The water supplied public baths, latrines, fountains, and private households. Aqueducts also provided water for mining operations, milling, farms, and gardens.

Aqueducts moved water through gravity alone, usually along a slight overall downward gradient within conduits of stone, brick, or concrete, but sometimes through steeper gradients. Most conduits were buried beneath the ground and followed the contours of the terrain; obstructing peaks were circumvented or, less often, tunneled through. Where valleys or lowlands intervened, the conduit was carried on bridgework, or its contents fed into high-pressure lead, ceramic, or stone pipes and siphoned across. Most aqueduct systems included sedimentation tanks, which helped reduce any water-borne debris. Sluices and castella aquae (distribution tanks) regulated the supply to individual destinations. The run-off water from aqueducts sometimes drove urban water-mills, and scoured the drains and sewers.

Rome's first aqueduct supplied a water fountain sited at the city's cattle market. By the 3rd century AD, the city had eleven aqueducts, sustaining a population of over a million in a water-extravagant economy; most of the water supplied the city's many public baths. Cities and towns throughout the Roman Empire emulated this model, and funded aqueducts as objects of public interest and civic pride, "an expensive yet necessary luxury to which all could, and did, aspire".

Most Roman aqueducts proved reliable, and durable; some were maintained into the early modern era, and a few are still partly in use. Methods of aqueduct surveying and construction are noted by Vitruvius in his work De Architectura (1st century BC). The general Frontinus gives more detail in his official report on the problems, uses and abuses of Imperial Rome's public water supply. Notable examples of aqueduct architecture include the supporting piers of the Aqueduct of Segovia, and the aqueduct-fed cisterns of Constantinople.

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