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The Aqua Appia
Roman roads and aqueducts have had as much to do with their growth and success as any other aspect of their empire. The Aqua Appia was the first test of Roman engineering and as the first product of Roman aquatic engineering, and is quite primitive and unsophisticated in comparison to Rome's ten other aqueducts. The Appia was built in 312 B.C. by the co-censors Gaius Plautius and Appius Cladius Grassus. Despite its primitive construction, the Appia was kept in use into the era of Augustus Caesar through regular maintenance, renovations, and even an expansion. Not much of the original technical evidence exists today and there is little material evidence left to analyze. Much of the technical evidence of the Rome's first aqueduct comes from Sextus Julius Frontinus who was appointed as water commissioner and who recorded the technical, and some historical, details of the Appia about one hundred years after its completion.
As Frontinus explains in his book ''The Aqueducts of Rome'', "For four hundred and forty-one years from the foundation of the City, the Romans were satidfied with the use of such waters as the drew from the Tiber, from wells, or from springs...But there now run into the City: the Appian aqueduct, Old Anio, Marcia, Tepula, Julia, Virgo, Alsietina, which is also called Augusta, Claudia, New Anio" (Frontinus 4). Rome's first aqueduct was in response to the growing of the city and the population. A growing population has raised the possibilities that Rome went through a prolonged drought and that it was facing major sanitary issues thus affecting their existing water supplies. What ever inspired Plautius and Appius to put Roman engineering to the test, nevertheless, Rome was ready. For this reason, Raffaelo Fabretti, one of the first to excavate the Appia, characterizes it as "The first fruits of Rome's Foresight and greatness" (Deman 22)
== Before the Aqua Appia ==
Although there were no formal Roman predecessors for the Aqua Appia, there were plenty of examples that existed in the Greek and Etruscan world. Greek influence came from their use of terracota pipes that were laid along the bottom of a channel or a large tunnel. This technique relates to the Roman technique in that it uses a water channel within a larger tunnel. The difference between the two is the fact that the Romans began to favor masonry conduits rather than the terracotta pipes which were generally used by the Greeks throughout the history of their aqueducts. A. Trevor Hodge, in his book "Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply", mentions the possibility that the Roman's could have been indirectly influenced by the Iranian qanat which is a tunnel driven into a hillside to tap an aquiferous stratum deep inside it.〔Hodge, p.20〕 It is believed that the Etruscan water channel system, the ''cuniculi'' is a form of the qanat and Hodge asserts that since the Romans had contact with the Etruscans and openly adopted other aspects of their culture they could have been implementing techniques and skills that were originally of Eastern descent. Etruscan water channels are also generally believed to have a great amount of influence on the Roman Aqua Appia. Their expertise in underground tunneling served the function of draining water rather than supplying water. Nevertheless, undoubtedly the Romans gained much practical knowledge in underground water channeling from the Etruscans. "After all, the earliest aqueduct at Rome, The Aqua Appia, was itself entirely underground and in engineering if not in purpose of function, can have differed little from an Etruscan ''cuniculis'' 〔Hodge p. 47.〕
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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