habitants in Rome, at the extravagant figure of 20,000,000, each person had for his share 172 gallons of water.[1]
As the Romans always brought their waters along a uniform level, what must have been the march of these twenty aqueducts, not only across the plain, but through the city, where we still trace them, in the valleys between the hills?
The aqueducts are beautiful objects while stalking across the country in their naked simplicity; and so does the viaduct of a railway connecting two hills often become a graceful addition to the landscape. But in passing, or cutting, through the midst of a city, it is very different. Can any one imagine that the aqueducts of Imperial Rome strode along as they did outside the wall, without a marble clothing, where they emerged into the public sight, or that they traversed the Forum, or climbed the Capitol, or Palatine, in their inornate suit of grey peperino?
It is incredible. Indeed, the number of bassirilievi allusive to the flow of these waters, and collected by Fabretti, which adorned the aqueducts while yet outside the gates, as well as what we know of the magnificence of Imperial Rome, forbids us to imagine it possible.
But we have yet surviving evidence to the contrary. Twice in the course of their journey five aqueducts meet at two gates of Rome, Porta Maggiore and Porta San Lorenzo, and have to cross one
- ↑ Cavalieri, p. 30. In Paris each inhabitant has only fifty litres or quarts per day. Fabretti, in his classical work 'De Aquis et Aqueductis Veteris Romae,' 1680, gives the catalogues of the 19 and 20 waters, p. 148.
