The Romans developed sophisticated methods for managing hygiene, including aqueducts for moving water from one place to another, sewers for removing used water from baths and runoff from walkways and roads, and public and private latrines. Through the archeological record, graffiti, sanitation-related paintings, and literature, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow explores this little-known world of bathrooms and sewers, offering unique insights into Roman sanitation, engineering, urban planning and development, hygiene, and public health. Focusing on the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia, and Rome, Koloski-Ostrow's work challenges common perceptions of Romans' social customs, beliefs about health, tolerance for filth in their cities, and attitudes toward privacy. In charting the complex history of sanitary customs from the late republic to the early empire, Koloski-Ostrow reveals the origins of waste removal technologies and their implications for urban health, past and present.

Water played an important part of ancient Roman life, from providing necessary drinking water, supplying bath complexes, to flowing in large-scale public fountains. The Roman culture of water was seen throughout the Roman Empire, although it was certainly not monolithic and it could come in a variety of scales and forms, based on climatic and social conditions of different areas. This article seeks to define ‘water culture’ in Roman society by examining literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, while understanding modern trends in scholarship related to the study of Roman water. The culture of water can be demonstrated through expressions of power, aesthetics, and spectacle. Further there was a shared experience of water in the empire that could be expressed through religion, landscape, and water’s role in cultures of consumption and pleasure.

Kleijn, G. de The Water Supply of Ancient Rome. City Area, Water, and Population. 2001 The Aqua Appia (312 BC) was the first of the eleven aqueducts leading to Rome to be built in antiquity. Time and again, the volume of water brought into the city was increased through the construction of new aqueducts. Rome’s population and the extent of its built-up area also changed over time. This study examines how data derived from our knowledge of the urban water supply in antiquity may help answering questions about the urban social fabric and topography. DMAHA 22 (2001), 365 p. Cloth. - 68.00 EURO, ISBN: 9050632688

Explores the water system that made ancient Rome possible

Offering a wide and expansive new treatment of the role water played in the lives of people across the Roman world, papers consider ports and their lighthouses; water engineering, whether for canals in the north-west provinces, or for the digging of wells for drinking water; baths for swimming; and spas.

Figuring in myth, religion, law, the military, commerce, and transportation, rivers were at the heart of Rome's increasing exploitation of the environment of the Mediterranean world. In Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome, Brian Campbell explores the role and influence of rivers and their surrounding landscape on the society and culture of the Roman Empire. Examining artistic representations of rivers, related architecture, and the work of ancient geographers and topographers, as well as writers who describe rivers, Campbell reveals how Romans defined the geographical areas they conquered and how geography and natural surroundings related to their society and activities. In addition, he illuminates the prominence and value of rivers in the control and expansion of the Roman Empire--through the legal regulation of riverine activities, the exploitation of rivers in military tactics, and the use of rivers as routes of communication and movement. Campbell shows how a technological understanding of--and even mastery over--the forces of the river helped Rome rise to its central place in the ancient world.

A major contribution to one of the central themes in social theory, this book integrates multiple case studies of the relationship between water control and social organization. Substantial in empirical detail and featuring powerful theoretical extensions, Scarborough's analysis encompasses early Harappan society in South Asia, highland Mexico, the Maya lowlands, north-central Sri Lanka, the prehistoric American Southwest, and Bronze Age Greece. This book is the first longitudinal study to consider water management worldwide since Karl Wittfogel put forth his "hydraulic societies" hypothesis nearly two generations ago, and it draws together the diverse debates that seminal work inspired. In so doing, Scarborough offers new models for cross-cultural analysis and prepares the ground for new examinations of power, centralization, and the economy.

The Edges of the Roman World is a volume consisting of seventeen papers dealing with different approaches to cultural changes that occurred in the context of Roman imperial politics. Papers are mainly focused on societies on the fringes, both social and geographical, and their response to Roman Imperialism. This volume is not a textbook, but rather a collection of different approaches which address the same problem of Roman Imperialism in local contexts. The volume is greatly inspired by the first “Imperialism and Identities at the Edges of the Roman World” conference, held at the Petnica Science Center in 2012.

"How did Roman waterworks work? How were the aqueducts planned and built? What happened to the water before it got into the aqueduct conduit and after it left it, in catchment, urban distribution and drainage? What were the hydraulics and engineering involved? And what was hydraulic technology like throughout the provinces, far from the often-studied system of metropolitan Rome? In a comprehensive study that ranges through the Roman aqueducts of France, Germany, Spain, North Africa, Turkey and Israel, Professor Hodge introduces us to these often neglected aspects of what the Romans themselves would certainly boast of as one of the greatest glories of their civilisation. Although often technically oriented, the book is aimed at non-engineers (there is a chapter on basic hydraulics, and an appendix on the use of formulae), and historians of society and the economy are not overlooked. Above all, the book looks on aqueducts as functioning machines rather than as static archaeological monuments." -- Provided by publisher

This book presents the legislation that formed the basis of Roman law - The Laws of the Twelve Tables. These laws, formally promulgated in 449 BC, consolidated earlier traditions and established enduring rights and duties of Roman citizens. The Tables were created in response to agitation by the plebeian class, who had previously been excluded from the higher benefits of the Republic. Despite previously being unwritten and exclusively interpreted by upper-class priests, the Tables became highly regarded and formed the basis of Roman law for a thousand years. This comprehensive sequence of definitions of private rights and procedures, although highly specific and diverse, provided a foundation for the enduring legal system of the Roman Empire.