H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 137 
and as I saw it myself in the winter of 1902, when for a fortnight it lay 
under a somewhat unsavoury mixture of river water and sewage. This 
did not happen even in the great flood of 1915, when the whole of the 
plain between the low hills near Ponte Galera—where the mouth of the 
Tiber was in days long ago—and the present mouth was flooded, and the 
old coastline, followed by the railway to Pisa, was once more lapped by 
the waves. 
The Cloaca Maxima is a drain of considerable size, having an average 
measurement of 14 ft. high by 11 ft. wide—we are told that a haycart 
could be driven through it—while the other two principal sewers of ancient 
Rome are rather smaller. One of them started near the ‘nymphaeum ’ 
of the gardens of Sallust, an interesting ruin which still exists in the 
centre of the modern Piazza Sallustio, ran in more or less a straight line 
down the Via 8. Nicolo da Tolentino and the Via del Tritone to Monte 
Citorio; there it turned at right angles, and ran due south under the 
Pantheon to the Tiber. 
A little to the east of the Teatro Argentina it was joined by a branch 
from the western slopes of the Quirinal, and either to the main stream 
or to its tributary belonged the name Petronia Amnis, its source being the 
Cati Fons. The other is the Cloaca of the Circus Maximus, which we have 
already mentioned ; it drained the valley between the Esquiline and the 
Caelian hills, and the marsh later occupied by Nero’s lake and, then by 
the Colosseum, and found its way into the Tiber only about fifty yards 
below the Cloaca Maxima. 
Both these drains were built, like the Cloaca Maxima, of large 
rectangular blocks of stone, with a vaulted roof of the same material ; 
and some of the minor drains were built in the same way, while others 
were covered with a flat block of stone, or with two slabs inclined to form 
a gable. This last shape, with the gable formed of large flat tiles, was that 
adopted in the brick-faced concrete sewers of imperial times, which vary 
in width from 2 to 4 ft. and in height from 6 to 9 ft. 
Notwithstanding their splendid construction, which still bids defiance 
to the lapse of time, Lanciani is undoubtedly right in maintaining that 
the Roman Cloacae have been overpraised. The modern sanitary engineer 
cannot approve of their use for carrying off sewage and rain-water together. 
Such contrivances as traps and syphons being unknown, the openings 
for the reception of the latter served to let out the effluvia from the former. 
Still more dangerous was the direct admission of sewage into the Tiber, 
which must have been odoriferous in the extreme when the water was 
low ; while in times of flood the drains were dammed back, as was the 
case even in 1902. 
No, Roman ideas of sanitation, though advanced for their day, were 
‘not always perfect; their latrines were only regularly flushed when it 
rained, and their invariable juxtaposition with the kitchen in Pompeian 
houses shocks our modern ideas of hygiene, though it might not have 
_ troubled our great-great-grandfathers so much as ourselves. Was there 
- not a hot controversy in the sixteenth century as to whether the Tiber 
water was not better suited to the pontifical digestion than the Aqua 
Virgo, the modern Acqua di Trevi, perhaps the purest as it is certainly 
the most palatable drinking-water in the world ; and did not Clement VIT 
and Paul III, two of the splendour-loving Popes of the Renaissance, take 
