Did the Romans have any security for their water supply? I mean, what was to stop someone from just walking up or climbing up and dumping poison or other toxins into it? No guards watching over it or anything? Or was it pretty much an honor system and not much to worry about?
I seriously doubt that they had any sort of security. The aqueducts were LONG, and the Roman army had others things to do besides watching the water.
It would take, I suspect, a lot of poison to seriously affect the water supply. Even dead animals falling into it wouldn’t have a huge effect if the flow was high.
Lindsay Davis has a fictional treatment of the Roman water supply in her novel Three Hands in the Fountain. She usually researches pretty well, but I don’t know how heavily researched this one was. The relative neglect of the water system rings true, though. It gives the impression that someone was keeping an eye on it, but not a terrifically vigilant eye, since they weren’t funded very well.
YES!* Not an active security force which daily marched the length of the aqueduct, but a maintenance force which regularly ensured the proper flow of the aqueduct. Remember, these were huge capital investments and essential pieces of state infrastructure. The failure of an aqueduct would produce riots and make a city uninhabitable within days. They were obviously maintained and guarded, and those who were caught connecting illegal lines to the aqueduct fined heavily. Roman’s had other things to do than watch water, obviously, but somebody had to watch the water otherwise the entire civilization would have quickly evaporated.
The Empire’s aqueducts were managed directly from Rome. Each aqueduct would have an curator or aquarius who would have been appointed from Rome. That curator would in turn hire local hands to help him with the regular maintenance of the line. Everything from chipping away the lime that would build up on the walls of the aqueduct to clearing out the sediment pools which ran down the length of the line. It would have been a full-time job.
- Although I have no direct source to back me up in this, I am rather certain that the maintenance of the aqueducts depended heavily upon the competence of leadership in Rome. The better the leader and the bureaucracy, the better the maintenance.
See Frontinus for a Classical interpretation of Roman aqueducts. Or see Trevor Hodge for a modern evaluation of how Roman aqueducts work.
I’m sure the aqueducts had maintenance, but that’s very different from having a security force watch out for malefactors, which is what the OP is asking about.
The OP’s question seems a bit anachronistic, since it transposes today’s terror hysteria to ancient times. There was no such thing as international organized terrorism back then.
I see an aggressor might get advantages from poisoning the water supply of a city under siege, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that this was actually done; but a city under siege would have more problems, such as food supply, to care for, not only worry about the safety of the aquaeducts.
During peacetime, or even during war in so far as the cities far away from the empire’s borders were concerned, the situation was different. I don’t see why anybody should have an interest in poisoning the water supply of a Roman city under these circumstances. It certainly wouldn’t have been easy enough for someone to do “just for the fun of it” - the water channels in the aquaeducts were covered with stone or lead plates (yes, lead - I know it’s not ideal to use this metal for anything which comes into contact with potable water, but the Romans didn’t), and I assume it would have been rather difficult to break one of these up and uncover the water channel.
What toxins or poisons would be available in that era, and how effective would they be in a water system? I’d imagine that they already had to contend with things like cholera, so what is a little bit of poison in the water (assuming the poision would be relatively weak) going to hurt?
I was implying that they most certainly did have a security force; its manifestation, however, taking the form of a maintenance crew.
I’m sorry – Security and Maintenance seem like two very different things to me.
Are there any Roman acquaducts in Britain?
This is actually a fabulous article on Roman knowledge of poisons: http://academic.sun.ac.za/as/journals/akro/Akro45/cil-ret2.pdf
To answer your question on effectiveness, though, they probably wouldn’t have used a chemical toxin or poison, but a biological one, like leaving corpses in the water supply at some point. Chemicals would almost certainly become too diluted to have an effect.
Yes, but not as many as in continental Europe.
Just to clarify, the water supplied by the aqueducts in large cities like Rome was not “immediately” available for public use. Rather, it was diverted into three gigantic reservoirs inside the city. One supplied water to the public supply points–the lacus - “pools” and salientes - roughly “fountains”, the second was used for the public baths, and the third for private households who paid a tax for running water in the home.
Regarding maintenance crews, the water tax paid for a contingent of 240 slaves, and the emperor supplied another 400-500; these workers maintained the 250 miles of the nine aqueducts feeding the city (two more were added in the later empire). Aside from skilled positions like stonemasons and pipe-tappers, most of the workforce spent their time literally walking, inspecting and performing routine maintenance (e.g. cleaning out mineral deposits in the channel) on the system; Frontinus himself visited every section of the system and left detailed map-notes in his manual.
Attempts to surreptitiously poison Rome’s water supply, then, would require an incredible amount of co-ordination over a short period of time, and this doesn’t even consider the efficacy of such poisons as were known to the Romans. One might think placing the city under siege would make it easier to poison the supply (or simply cut it off), but there is one other factor to consider: The amount of water collected by the aqueducts at Rome was enormous. I have a reference here that states “a conservative estimate comes out at about 680,000-900,000 cubic meters per day”, which is somewhere in the 200-million gallon range in a city of a few million at its peak.
Clearly there was little fear of water shortages so long as the system was properly maintained. I mean, if you’re diverting a third of your supply for public baths, how big a problem would it be if the water was stopped for a few days?