While today, the city of Rome is a place overflowing with history, culture and influence, it is difficult to associate the modern marvel with the reality of its origins. The area they had first settled into was a swampy marshland. In terms of real estate, the location wasn’t great. There were 7 hills that jutted out of the marshes: Palatine, Capitoline, Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, Quirinal, and Viminal hills. Romulus placed the foundations for his new city, Rome, on the Palatine Hill on April 21st 753 BCE. He then almost immediately got into an argument with his twin brother Remus and consequently murdered him. Some of the other hills had settlements, which were quickly absorbed into the ever-growing city of Rome.
But let’s return to the fact that this area was a marshland. The Tiber River was known to flood the area periodically, making the situation even worse to live in. You can probably imagine that any stone foundations laid down would simply sink into the marshy area and be lost. This is to mention nothing of the potential health hazards that arise from areas such as this. The early kings of Rome knew that this would be a problem if they wanted to expand, which is why they ordered the construction of sewers in order to drain the area.
According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Rome’s three greatest wonders included the roads, the aqueducts, and the sewers. The Cloaca Maxima is the largest sewer in Rome, built to drain the marsh. The Cloaca Maxima is traditionally said to have been built during the middle of the 6th century by the Tarquin Kings. The work must have been incredibly difficult as it was said that Tarquinius Superbus crucified the bodies of workers who had committed suicide as a warning against others- the simple fact that suicide was deemed preferable to the work should be unsettling enough.
Nevertheless, the construction of the Cloaca Maxima drained the marshy areas. It likely followed the path of a stream already in place, because the sewers followed an irregular course. The sewers were constructed to flow through the public ways, partially underground, with an open channel in the forum. Due to the fire of 386 BCE, or possibly because of building activities, the sewers were changed to go underneath private buildings. It would most likely still have had an open channel in the forum during the second century BCE. But it would have been widened and vaulted with stone by the end of that century. Strabo explains that some areas of the sewers were big enough for a “wagon loaded with hay” to pass through.
Pliny the Elder wrote about the Cloaca Maxima’s incredible durability and he was right. Resisting the force of the water, not caving in despite heavy traffic and transportation above it, resisting earthquakes, it had remained strong for over seven hundred years by the time Pliny was writing. In other words, this is one though cloaca. It is even said that during the Imperial period, city waste was pushed into the Tiber River, approximately 45,000 kg every day.
It is fitting that the Romans became well-known for their amazing engineering feats, as it was this ingenuity that made their unenviable location the center of European culture and history for a long time.
Text: Cindy Levesque. MENAM Archaeology. Copyright 2023.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Further Reading
Ashby, Thomas. "Rome." The Town Planning Review (Liverpool University Press) 10, no. 1 (Jan 1923): 43-52.
Boethius, Axel. Etruscan and Early Roman Architecture. Penguin Books, 1978.
Boethius, Axel, and J. B. Ward-Perkins. Etruscan and Roman Architecture. Penguin Books, 1970.
Gowers, Emily. "The Anatomy of Rome from Capitol to Cloaca." The Journal of Roman Studies (Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies) 85 (1995): 23-32.
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