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curator aquarum

The Roman office in charge of the city's aqueducts, held from AD 97 by Frontinus, whose working handbook survives.
Civilization
Rome
Period
c. AD 97

Curator aquarum, keeper of the waters, was the Roman office responsible for the city's aqueducts: their maintenance, their water rights and their workforce. The post was a senior imperial appointment. Sextus Julius Frontinus, consul and general, took it up under Nerva in AD 97 and did something no other Roman administrator did so well: he wrote the job down. His De aquaeductu, a working handbook of Rome's water service, survives entire.

The office ran a real bureaucracy: two standing crews totaling roughly seven hundred men, work orders prepared the day before, a daily record of work completed, and shutdown rules for channel repairs that read like a modern utility's maintenance notice. Never in summer, when the city's demand peaked.

The men those rules governed have their own episode, and the title they wore on their tombstones has its own entry: aquarii.

See the job lived

The Aquarii: Ancient Rome's Aqueduct Cleaning Crew
Rome · c. AD 97

The Men Who Scraped an Empire's Water Clean

Rome's nine aqueducts ran on gravity and never stopped growing stone inside — so the city kept permanent crews, hundreds strong, whose endless job was to scrape it out again

Sources

  1. Frontinus, De aquaeductu urbis Romae, Book I (R. H. Rodgers translation)
  2. Frontinus, De aquaeductu urbis Romae, Book II — the familiae (116–118), work rules (117), channel deposits and the shutdown rules (121–123)
  3. O. F. Robinson, Ancient Rome: City Planning and Administration (Routledge, 1992) — the water administration and its personnel