Library builder

The accession of Nero to supreme power marked the beginning of a somber period for Rome.[228] Civil war followed his assassination in 68 AD, then came the too-short reigns of Vespasianus and Titus. After a promising start, Domitian becomes morbidly suspi­cious, and sheds the blood of those near to him and his collaborators only to […]

The Cretan, Greek, and later the Hellenistic aqueducts primarily use terra-cotta pipes. The Romans, following the Etruscan heritage, build their aqueducts as masonry canals, usual­ly rectangular in section, and covered over by a vault or stone slabs. The aqueducts are fit­ted with openings at regular intervals (from tens to hundreds of meters apart) to facilitate […]

Water is at the very top of the scale of values of Roman civilization. Water “not only services and satisfies the needs of the public, but also satisfies their pleasures.”[213] Numerous public fountains flow constantly in the city of Rome. Some individual users are granted a special concession for drawing water. Under the Republic this […]

Carthage is defeated in 202 BC, at the end of the Punic wars. This leaves Rome with­out a rival in the western Mediterranean, so she immediately begins her expansion toward Greece and the Orient. This evolution is inexorable, despite some temporary set­backs due to resistance such as that of the king of the Pontus, Mithridate […]

The Etruscan hydraulic heritage and the beginnings of Rome Civilization does not truly begin to develop in the western Mediterranean until the begin­ning of the 8th century BC. This begins according to the legend when the Phoenicians, led by Elissa, princess of Tyr, found Carthage on the Tunisian coast. Then the Greeks establish colonies in […]

The legend that attributes the arson of the Library of Alexandria to Julius Caesar is ques­tioned today. We have seen clearly, to the contrary, that the intellectual movement of Alexandria knew a second fruitful period under the Roman Empire. In this period, it is a procurator supra museum et ad Alexandrina Biblioteca, named by the […]

There is another branch of fluid mechanics that sees some early development in this peri­od: this is the knowledge of blood circulation. Whereas it was believed that the arteries contained only air prior to this period, Galien of Pergamon (129 — 200? AD)[202] is the first to describe arterial circulation and to study seriously the […]

Before Heron, no correct notion of the discharge of a canal, pipe, or river had been cor­rectly formulated. Indeed, the notion of velocity was essentially unknown in Greek mechanics. The quantity of water delivered by an aqueduct or canal was quantified uniquely by a measure of the flow area. It was Heron who formulated for […]

The contributions of Heron of Alexandria belong for the most part to the continuum of work of Ctesibios and Philon of Byzantium. It was believed for quite some time that he lived in the 1st century BC. Now, Heron, in his work Dioptra, describes how to estimate the distance between Rome and Alexandria through observation […]

Antigonus, the old one-eyed general of Alexandria, sought to solidify its domain in the Near East, between the domains of Ptolemy in Egypt and that of Seleucos in Mesopotamia. He coveted the wealth of the semi-nomad “barbarians” who frequented the routes of caravans carrying spices, myrrh, and incense from Maryab in Arabia Felix, to the […]