They were (according to what I’ve read) the lifeline of the city at the time. Were they heavily guarded according to history or not?
They were guarded quite aquaductly.
Zing !
You have to remember, for the total length of an aquaduct, most of it was underground. For Rome itself, the majority of its aquaducts only rose above ground level close to Rome itself. The only reason they came above ground was to provide sufficient head to service large areas in the city itself. Underground conduits were just cheaper and safer to construct.
Furthermore, most of Rome’s aquaducts travelled dozens of kilometers to reach the city. It was impossible to guard the entire length. Rome’s second aquaduct, the Anio Vetus, was at least 64 km long and nearly completely underground. Roman engineers didn’t construct a raised aquaduct until after it had pacified the Italian peninsula and expelled Hannibal. A raised aquaduct was an obvious target for a beseiging enemy. Underground conduits could remain concealed to an enemy. Later in the history of Rome, there were instances of the underground conduits being employeed by enemies attempting to sneak into Rome.
(I will be spending three days in Rome in May. One of those days will be spent travelling around looking at old aquaduct remains.)
Quite guarded. Try asking an aqueduct about its personal life…
In olden times, the ability of a couple of nutballs to do a lot of damage quickly was pretty well limited to starting a fire. No gunpowder, computer viruses, no airliners. A team of guys with picks and shovels would need hours to zap a waterway. They could easily be detected by the locals in that time.
After taking advantage of my Amazing Linguistic Powers to google “Acueducto de Segovia” (which I remember from my visit to said town as the longest in Spain), the information found indicates that it brings in water from 17km away, about 10 miles.
The visible part, a multi-storied bridge over 100m long, is only a tiny part of the waterworks, which provided water to the town until well into the XX century. There were wells in the town itself (the Nacionales under siege in the Alcázar got cut off from outside water but survived thanks to one well and an incredible amount of cojones, or maybe it was just stubborness) but the aqueduct was the main source of water. Setting up guards along 17km, of which more than 16 are underground, sounds like it’s a lot more work than it’s worth, really.
Isn’t that the one the locals claims is on the 50(?) euro note?
I knew the Romans were decadent, but that’s my idea of public works! 
I don’t think they were guarded the whole length – aqueducts were long. The tall portions (like those leading into Rome, or “bridge” segments like the Pont du Gard in France) were very solidly built. It’s hard to imagine anything short of an army or organized large gand doing any damage in those pre-explosive days.
An interesting “take” on the Aqueducts is Three Hands in the Fountain, one of Lindsay Davis’ Marcus Didio Falco novels set in ancient Rome. As the title suggests, someone keeps putting body parts in the aqueducts. Davis depicts the aqueducts as unguarded. I don’t kbnow if she has positive information on this point, but it has the ring of truth.
Forgot the Link:
Guarded from what? By the time they built aqueducts, the territory was pretty much pacified.
Not completely true. Both the Aqua Appia and Anio Vetus were built far before the peninsula was safe from enemies. The Aqua Appia was built around 312 BCE, at a time when Rome was still threatened by the neighboring Samnites. This first aqueduct was built completely subterranean, possibily because of either unknown/new engineering techniques or the danger of damage from hostile forces. The second of Rome’s aqueducts was built in the 270’s BCE and was endangered throughout the Punic Wars. The remainer of Rome’s aqueducts, however, were built when Rome was the hegemonic power and pretty much safe from a horde of roaming vandals.
Heh.
From barbarians maybe, the ones that would inevitably destroy the aqueducts, causing the majority of the city to vanish over night.
When I first saw this question, I also thought of Lindsay Davis, but did not have the courage to post on such flimsy evidence. Thanks for being less intimidated.
My memory is that she said that there were sewermen who knew the system, which certainly chimes with the experience of my uncle in London in the 1930s when he was writing a series of books and visited the sites. A classic quote that he could not publish was that an old sewerman said ‘you can always tell the turds from Buck House as they are much fatter and richer than the rest’.
Now Falconio also did a (fictional) stint around Pompeii, and the guarding of the water system came up there.
I also remember a slightly weak Hammond Innes book centred around an ‘oasis’ that had water channels that were impossible to guard.
Nigerian oil and petroleam pipelines come to mind.
Another is when someone encountered an oil pipeline in somewhere like Kazakhstan, and a troop of heavily armed horsemen materialized from the nearby forest. It turned out that they generally sneaked around watching any activity.
The figures in the Euro notes are supposed to be bridges. I’ve just looked at a 50 and if that’s the Aqueduct I’m a rabbit, but hey, there’s blind people in Segovia same as everywhere…
The five could be, though.
There are no specific buildings on the Euro notes. There are bridges and doorways on the bills, but simply to represent the various architectural styles and periods which have been part of European culture for the last millennia; it was intentionally avoided to put specific buildings on the currency. Cite.
But you wouldn’t have to take out the aqueduct to cripple the city. Blocking it with boulders, or tossing dead horses and sheep into it, or having your men use it as a latrine, could all have a drastic effect.