Archive | 2019
Technology of Building
Abstract
“Just compare the vast array of indispensable structures carrying so much water with the idle pyramids [of the Egyptians], or the famous but useless monuments of the Greeks!” ( De Aq .1.16). With these enthusiastic words, Sextus Julius Frontinus, the water commissioner of Rome in the early second century, provides poetic endorsement to the widely held view that Romans had far more interest in solving the practical needs of its citizens than creating aesthetically pleasing, but functionally useless, artistic monuments ().