Ancient Rome

This post will encompass travels from Wednesday and Thursday but since they are both ancient Roman ruins I thought they would go nicely together. I am not an engineer but I have to say that those Romans were quite impressive in their ability to build, to kill people, and to move water!

Prior to picking up the car in Nimes, we decided to go explore and see the Roman Arena there. It is a well-preserved arena (the best in France) and there was a terrific audioguide - Ryan felt like he was inside his show, Spartacus!

The arena was built around 80 AD and held about 24,000 people. Nimes was the largest city in the Western Roman Empire and was a very important stop on the way between Rome and Spain. The arena has four tiers of seats and a series of tunnels and exits (called vomitories) so that the upper class people who sat down low never had to rub shoulders with the poor people up top. The floor was covered in sand, which was turned over throughout the day, to sop up the blood. The rich guy in town would host a spectacle that would last all day. The first events were often animals fighting - pigs, bulls, bears and lions. Next would be some hunting competitions. Just before lunch they would feed prisoners to lions or other wild animals (according to the audioguide most people found this disgusting and would leave to buy food from the vendors. After lunch would be the gladiator fights. The audio guide cleared up some common misconceptions regarding this sport. It was really more like boxing - competitors were volunteers who sought money and glory and went to special training schools. There were various "levels" of gladiator that wore different costumes and had different weapons - none of which were designed to really kill - they were pretty blunt. The newbies would fight in the morning and lead up to the main event between two well-known fighters. Fighters were not allowed to deliver blows that would kill - your objective was to perhaps injure and definitely tire out your opponent. Several matches would occur at one time in the ring. There were referees primarily there to make sure that the men were actually fighting and they were not conspiring to bring about a certain outcome. At the end one man would give up out of shear exhaustion and then the guy who was hosting the event would pass judgment. 90% of the time the gladiator was "let go" because if he was killed, the host would have to pay a very large sum of money to the training school for "offing" one of their guys.

Interestingly, Nimes is the birthplace of denim which was invented by the Protestant middle class in the 18th century. It was known as serge and was for work clothes and was dyed blue and worn by the fisherman of Genoa. Levi Strauss began importing it for jeans after a trial of tent cloth failed and it got its name "denim" as an abbreviation of "de Nimes" which means from Nimes.

Our next stop was the Pont du Gard (Bridge over the River Gard) which is a bridge in a Roman aqueduct that carried water from a fresh water spring in Uzes (or near Uzes) to the all important city of Nimes. In Ancient Rome water was life - it provided comfort, pleasure, aesthetics, and hygiene. Take, for instance this row of Roman toilets pictured to the right. I have sat on many nastier toilets while en france...

Construction on the aqueduct started in about 19 B.C and took 15 years to construct. Even though Uzes and Nimes are only about 12 miles as the crow flies, Roman engineers picked a course of about 30 miles that allowed them to use much of the natural landscape to construct the aqueduct. About 90% of it is underground in tunnels (much like a modern day sewer). The grade had to be within certain standards to make sure that the water would flow (downhill) but not so steep as to allow overflow or quick degradation of the aqueduct. The chamber that carried water was 4 ft wide and 6 ft deep and lined with waterproof mortar that carried water for over 400 years! Water went from source to Nimes in 24 hours and dropped about 40 feet in the process (about 1 inch every 350 feet). This structure is the second highest remaining Roman structure at 160 ft high (only 6 ft shorter than the Roman Coliseum) and originally spanned 1100 feet but is now only 790 feet after the collapse of 12 arches. The main arch is the largest ever built at 80 feet. Just pondering the engineering of the arch structure itself is pretty amazing - the entire structure requires no mortar but the simple fact of gravity and the force exerted by the inverted keystone that keeps the structure aloft. I think the Greeks invented the arch but the Romans definitely exploited its use. Normally you can walk across the top but that area is closed for the winter so we were only able to walk across a road that is level with the first level (which has only been there since 1743 - ca c'est trop nouvelle!)

The thing that is nuts to me, aside from the engineering feats, is the fact that the water that came to Nimes was funneled into a holding tank and then distributed throughout the town in a pressurized water system. There were cisterns and public fountains and the private homes of the rich had running water! They used lead pipes and bronze faucets. This system provided about 100 gallons of water per second and they built systems like this throughout the Empire. In Rome, aqueducts supplied about 1,000 liters of water per person per day which is much more than we consume in daily life now.

Sorry to bore you with history - we just have nothing even close to this old in the US and it is fascinating to me!!!