Old Roman Lead and Terra-cotta Pipe
The quantity of water supplied to Rome compared favorably with the per capita allowance of water provided at the present time for the principal cities of the United States, and was far in excess of the water supplied at the present time to British and European cities. According to Clemens Herschel, however, Rome, with a population of 1,000,000 people, had a daily water supply of only 32,000,000 U. S. gallons. In estimating the quantity of water brought to the city by the system of aqueducts, Mr. Herschel makes due allowance for and deducts what he thinks might be lost by leakage, theft, water supplied to artificial lakes for sea fights, and also assumes that a certain percentage of the channels at all times were cut out of service for repairs. He makes no allowance, however, for water obtained from different sources, such as wells, springs and the Tiber River, from which, no doubt, many of the inhabitants obtained their entire supply of water. Indeed, in the year 35 B. C., M. Agrippa, as the head of the water supply system of Rome, in addition to repairing the Aqua Julia and Marcia aqueduct, supplied the city with 700 wells and 150 springs.
There is no reason to believe that conditions in Rome were different from those existing to-day in our large cities, and it is more than probable that the poor people of Rome were but scantily supplied with water from the aqueducts. The supply obtained by them from ground sources should therefore be added to that supplied by the aqueducts, and it would then be found, as most writers assert, that the per capita daily supply of water to Rome was equal to about 100 U. S. gallons.
Such enormous quantities of water could not be poured daily into a limited area without material and physical injury resulting if provision were not made to dispose of the surplus. Hence it was that a system of drains was evolved in Rome, which, while not the first in point of time, nevertheless were the only ones known to have been constructed by the ancients, until within a comparatively recent date ruins of sewerage systems were unearthed in Bismya, an ancient Symerian or pre-Babylonian city.
