Nobody wants shit around. “Cacator sic valeas ut tu hoc locum transeas,” reads one of the many graffiti preserved under the ash of Pompeii—“Do yourself a favor by shitting somewhere else.” And a city of a million or so people is obviously going to have its problems of sewage disposal. Rome had its system, and it was famous. Its main collector, the Cloaca Maxima (Principal Sewer), began its underground journey through Rome below the Temple of Minerva in the Forum of Augustus, passed between the Basilica Julia and the Temple of Vesta, went under the Arch of Constantine and the Piazza della Bocca della Verita, and discharged its noisome freight into the Tiber just below the Ponte Rotto through an arched opening five meters in diameter. None of the insulae seem to have any direct connection through downpipes to the sewers. Now and then, plostra stercoraria or shit carts might make an appearance, but not reliably. The ejection of garbage and waste into the public street usually happened at dusk. It was one of the drawbacks of ancient Roman life, especially since (as coarse terra-cotta cost nothing) it was a common habit to throw out the pot with its contents. Juvenal warned the visitor, “You are truly negligent and careless if, before leaving the house to go out to dinner, you don’t first make a will,” because passersby were so often brained by falling night-urns. “Very often you might die, for all the windows open along the streets you travel. Therefore … cultivate within yourself the forlorn hope that the windows will be content to pour out only the contents of their chamber pots on your head.” Roman law did provide some redress for those injured by chamber pots falling from on high: the victim should be compensated for his medical fees and lost work time. But he could not sue the owners or tenants of the insula for disfigurement caused by his wounds, since “the body of a free man is without price.”
The wise night-rambler should wear a padded leather cap to protect his head, not only against such hazards, but from the assaults of other and more delinquent Romans. One of these, according to Suetonius, was the young Emperor Nero, whose sport was to prowl the alleys of his imperial capital with a gang of friends and bash strangers insensible—“He was in the habit of clubbing people on their way home from banquets, and if anyone fought back he would beat him badly and throw him in a sewer.” To be mugged and then half drowned in excrement by a prowling emperor was the kind of fate which not even Georgian London, for all its bad sanitation and royal absolutism, inflicted on its visitors. But it would have been hard to tell if your assailant was a Nero or a mere commoner, since the streets of Rome were unlit and unpoliced. Either you found a lanternarius or lantern-bearing slave to precede you with a flambeau, or you groped your way in fear and darkness. And, naturally, the streets had no numbers or posted names.
The traffic made city life harder still. In 45 B.C.E., Julius Caesar issued an edict which banned carts, wagons, and chariots (with certain exceptions, such as chariots belonging to the vestal virgins or to the winner of a major race) from driving in the city between sunrise and midafternoon. This was a masterpiece of bad urbanism, since, although it did something to make daytime walking and riding in Rome possible, it immediately diverted all Rome’s commercial traffic into the night hours, depriving most Romans of their sleep. Roman carts had wooden wheels with iron tires, and the grinding and clanking of their progress over the ruts and stone pavements raised a din that mingled with the braying and lowing of beasts, the shouts of the carters, the merchants’ bellowing quarrels, and the crash and scrape of goods being loaded and unloaded. This went on all night long, and a stone could hardly sleep through it. It would keep a sea calf awake on the bottom of the sea, Juvenal thought. It would give the Emperor Claudius insomnia. Rome, the enemy of repose! And during the day it was little better: the traffic noise was not as bad, but the sound of voices and pedestrian confusion were still unbearable. The only solution, and a partial one at that, was to be rich and ride at ease in a “spacious litter” that one’s slaves could hoist above the heads of the madding crowd. In it, one could close the windows and perhaps doze. But on foot, wrote Juvenal,
the tide of the crowd before me is an obstacle, while the one following behind me like a compact phalanx is pressing at my back; one man elbows you in the side, another strikes you roughly with a cudgel; the next one bashes your head with a board, the next with a barrel. Meanwhile, your legs grow heavy with mud, your feet are stepped on from all sides by enormous shoes, a soldier punctures your big toe with his hobnailed boots.…
Before it could flow out of Rome, of course, the water had to flow in. It did so mainly through aqueducts. Eleven of these supplied the city with its drinking and washing water, eight entering by the region of the Esquiline Hill. Four more were added after the popes replaced the emperors, two of them in the twentieth century. No other ancient city had such a copious supply of water, and it earned Rome the name of regina aquarum, “the queen of waters.” Almost all of them brought in drinkable water, except for the Alsietina, which carried water from the small Lake Martignano; some thirty-three kilometers long, this aqueduct supplied an arena for naval battles which the Emperor Augustus created on the present site of Trastevere. Probably the best water was that of the Claudian Aqueduct, begun by Caligula in 38 C.E. and finished by Claudius in 52 C.E.; certainly the aqueduct whose construction created the most difficulty was the Aqua Marcia, begun in 144 B.C.E. under the praetorship of Quintus Marcius, with a total run of ninety-one kilometers of which eighty ran underground.
Aqueduct maintenance was a never-ending occupation, done in the main by slaves. The channel or specus of each aqueduct was constantly being narrowed by the buildup of “sinter,” the common German term for deposits of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), carried in the water and deposited on the channel walls. How fast it built up depended on several variables: the “hardness” or lime content of the water, the texture of the channel (rough surfaces encouraged buildup, which roughened the surface more, increased friction, and so trapped more sinter), and the speed of water flow. Research done on the channel of the great aqueduct at Nîmes, in southern France, indicates that sinter deposits (on both sides) narrowed its channel by forty-six centimeters, or a third of its original width, in two hundred years. This yields a rate of about nine inches per century, which may not sound like much, but over the hundreds of linear miles of the eleven aqueducts that supplied Rome with its water, the tasks of grinding and chipping the sinter away added up, as did the maintenance of the terra-cotta or lead conduits themselves. Besides, four miles out of every five lay underground.
The distribution of water to its end users was done mainly through lead pipes. Lead gave its Latin name, plumbum, to those who worked with it, the plumbarii—who bequeathed it to their modern successors in England, the plumbers, and to those in France, the plombiers. It had large advantages for such work. It was soft, very ductile, and had a low melting point—about 375 degrees Celsius. Best of all, it was common and cheap, being itself a waste product. It had one disadvantage: it was highly poisonous, as the grieving parents of many a Victorian child who chewed too often on his lead soldiers discovered.
Rome used a great deal of silver, which was present in tiny quantities in lead’s principal ore, galena (lead sulfide). The galena, when melted, separated into about one portion of silver to three hundred of waste lead. A simple process afforded slaves (who were likely to die of lead poisoning in the end) the means of making lead pipe. Molten lead was flowed over an inclined heatproof surface. When it reached the desired thickness and cooled, the resulting sheet was trimmed and then rolled around a suitable wooden mandrel. Its edges would be soldered together, and the result was water pipe, which usually came in ten-foot or shorter sections.