The Power of Water
By: Baylee Carpenter, Thomas Hubbard, and David Olson
The ancient myth goes that Hera, wife of Jupiter the king of gods, caused Hercules to go insane because she was angry with him. In result of this insanity, he killed his own wife and children. Feeling quite penitent for his heinous actions after the madness left him, he went to the Oracle of Delphi and inquired what he must do for recompense. Hence the oracle sent him Eurystheus, the king of Tiryns and Mycenae, who gave him twelve labors over the course of twelve years. Perhaps one of the most well-known labors was the cleaning of King Augeas’ stables which housed thousands of cattle and thus were famous for their immense filth.
Hercules, who had to clean the stables in one day, came up with a clever plan. He dug two trenches that lead from the stable’s doors to two rivers which flowed nearby. He then rerouted the rivers through the stables washing them completely clean. Although this tale of the Augeas stable cleaning is merely a myth, there is a parallel story, involving the Colosseum, which is true.
The Colosseum held games that would last for weeks on end with an estimated crowd of up to 80,000 people. Imagine a football stadium filled up with fans all watching the sport they love, except the sport shown in the Colosseum probably wouldn’t be allowed at a modern stadium. The Colosseum was not just a place a war games. It was also a center of recreation; cooking meals, gambling, and parties were a common pastime in the Colosseum. As you can imagine, 80,000 people partying for weeks straight created an abundance of trash. The Emperor wanted to make sure that the games were enjoyable for the spectators. Therefore, the Colosseum was designed with an advanced water system that allowed the Romans to watch the games in comfort. The engineers were tasked with a similar situation to Hercules, since they had to clean up an unimaginable amount of waste in very little time. Similarly to Hercules, the engineers harnessed the power of a river to clean the entire Colosseum. They built into the Colosseum was a series of pipes running throughout the amphitheater that would be used to clean the building after the games were over. These pipes would flood the entire building with water from the top and then the water would flow down the levels of the arena, flushing the waste into the drains at the base of the arena carrying all the unwanted debris and eventually feed into a drainage system.
In addition to keeping the Colosseum clean, one of the features that needed to be built into the Colosseum was drinking fountains, no one wants to sit in a hot, crowded stadium without access to a drink. It is hard to tell exactly how the engineers of the Colosseum met this requirement since a large portion of the original arena was dismantled during the middle ages. However, there has been evidence suggesting that over 100 drinking fountains were set up throughout the amphitheater (mostly concentrated around the area where experts believe the wealthy Romans would watch the games).
Similarly, the Colosseum would have required many toilets to make the experience enjoyable for spectators. While none of the original toilets stand, evidence of large community toilets have been found in the Colosseum that were connected to huge drains underneath the Colosseum that were all connected to a large drainage system that surrounded the amphitheater that then lead to Cloaca Maxima, the main sewage of ancient Rome.
A massive amount of water was necessary to make all of these features work correctly. This amount of water was provided by the Aqua Claudia, an aqueduct finished in 54 AD by Emperor Claudius. This massive aqueduct ran approximately 43 miles and provided water at a rate of roughly 600 gallons per second (meaning it’d take about 18 minutes for this aqueduct to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool). A portion of this great aqueduct still stands near Circus Maximus. We got the opportunity to visit it and imagine the power that this aqueduct once had.
However, the aqueducts were not just used to facilitate war games. Aqueducts were constructed all throughout the Roman Empire and provided its people with an advanced sewage and water system that had never been seen to this scale. Some aqueducts even supplied water to industrial sites, usually via an open channel cut into the ground. High volumes of water were used in a basic form of hydraulic mining where the water was used to expose metal ore by washing away the metal containing rock. This was a huge innovation that forever changed the technology of mining. It also allowed the Romans to mine metals like no other civilization before them, which can be seen through Roman weapons, art, and currency.
The twelve labors of Hercules are synonymous for a momentous, seemingly impossible task. The Roman engineers performed an equally momentous task, by constructing massive aqueducts throughout the empire. This supplied all of Rome with water, not only giving its citizens the access to running water, but also fueling the empire’s massive need of resources. Consequently, Rome could never have flourished into a vast and powerful empire if it were not for its aqueducts.
