Collection 09 · Open · also tagged prices · slavery · maps
Technology and Infrastructure
Discharge rates tabulated by nozzle size, the specific fraud committed by the water men, hoists and odometers and a steam turbine built as a toy, and a mountain in Spain undermined and brought down by released water with the workers still described.
Frontinus is a retiring commissioner's handover document — complete, operational, and written by someone plainly annoyed. That is a voice a reader can hear immediately without knowing anything about Rome.
What is in it
Each strip is the places that work names, in the order it names themHerodotus goes to Egypt and writes down everything: why the Nile floods, how a body is embalmed and what each grade of embalming costs, what the priests would and would not tell him, and a king-list running back ten thousand years. The founding document of curiosity about other people.
Cranes, hoists, water-screws, force-pumps, water-organs, an odometer that drops a pebble into a bronze bowl for every Roman mile, and then the siege engines. The one surviving classical account of how ancient machines were actually built, by an engineer who had built them and who keeps telling you which parts break.
Egypt and North Africa described for readers who would never go: the Nile from Ethiopia to the Delta, Alexandria quarter by quarter, then west along the coast to Carthage. Strabo is correcting earlier geographers as much as reporting, and says so.
The places are the one thing here with no machine judgement in them. Every count above is of Pleiades gazetteer records opened and checked by a person, and the map on each passage draws from the same records. Named is not the same as visited, and a place that could not be verified gets no dot rather than a guessed one — which is why some works with a great many place names in them show very few, and why a work with none shows nothing at all rather than an empty frame.
Still to come
Proposed, not present — none of this is on the site yetVitruvius 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10 · Frontinus De Aquaeductu · Hero Pneumatics · Pliny NH 33–37 · Cato 14–15, 18–22 · Strabo 5.3.8 · Diodorus 3.12–14 · Res Gestae 19–21