SECTION H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 
PRACTICAL ENGINEERING IN 
ANCIENT ROME. 
ADDRESS BY 
THOMAS ASHBY, D.Lrrr., F.S.A., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
THE subject of the present paper might better have been stated as 
‘Practical Engineering in Ancient Italy.’ For it is not my mtention, on 
the one hand, to confine myself to the city of Rome itself, or even to its 
immediate environs ; nor, on the other hand, shall I attempt to overstep 
the limits of time at my disposal nor the bounds of my own personal 
experience, and attempt to give you a general survey of the manifesta- 
tions of the Roman genius throughout the Roman world in its triumph 
over obstacles of a material nature. And, when [ use the word genius, it 
is certainly more than a coincidence that the Italian terms for the 
engineering branch of the Italian Army—our Royal Engineers—or for the 
body of civil engineers are respectively ‘ genio militare’ and ‘ genio 
civile.’ In fact, I remember many years ago how an eminent soldier and 
archeologist, General Borgatti, to whom we owe the restoration of the 
Mausoleum of Hadrian—Castel 8. Angelo—to its pristine form, was 
billed to lecture on what he had accomplished, and Maggiore nel Genio— 
his then rank—was translated, for the benefit of the British tourist, as 
“Genius Major,’ instead of ‘ Major, R.E.’ But this is by the way. 
Nor have I time to dwell as much as I might wish upon the importance 
of all these wonderful works in the development of the Roman sway over 
the ancient world. Whatever be our views on Roman Art—and, personally, 
I am one of its admirers—we shall not deny to the Romans achievements 
of supreme importance in the material sphere, for which both their con- 
temporaries and posterity must be everlastingly grateful to them. 
What appealed most of all to those who saw Rome in her prime were 
the aqueducts, the roads, and the drainage system. 
In regard to the last, Rome is described as a city suspended above a 
network of navigable sewers ; and Agrippa, when he was zedile, in 33 B.c., 
is said to have traversed them in a boat and emerged at the Tiber. Pliny 
the younger, more than a century later, expressed his admiration of the — 
way in which, after 700 years, they offered a firm resistance to the rush 
of storm-water which passed through them, to the fall of buildings above | 
them, and to earthquakes ; and he calls them opus omnium dictu maximum ; 
and nearly 400 years later, Cassiodorus, in the reign of Theodoric, wrote 
of Rome: ‘What city can rival thy lofty buildings, when even thy 
lowest depths are beyond compare?’ And even so, the system was not 
as perfect as it might have been. 
Livy tells us that, as originally constructed, the drains ran under land 
which belonged to'the State, but that in the rebuilding of Rome, after — 
