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Frontinus on the Water Supply of Rome

The Author, the Manuscripts

As with most ancient authors, not that much is known of Frontinus, and the Loeb edition's introductory material, by Charles Bennett, is about as good as one can get. It also includes a fairly detailed discussion of the authorship of both the De Aquis and the Strategemata.

The manuscripts of Frontinus are covered separately by the same author.

Text and Translations on LacusCurtius

The Latin text used is that published by Loeb in 1925, in the public domain. It is that of Clemens Herschel with minor changes.

There are two English translations of the text onsite:

by Charles E. Bennett in the Loeb edition, 1925.

It is now in the public domain pursuant to the 1978 revision of the U. S. Copyright Code, since the copyright was not renewed at the appropriate time, which would have been in 1952 or 1953. (Details here on the copyright law involved.)

by Robert H. Rodgers, 2003.

Kindly provided to this site by Prof. Barbara Saylor Rodgers, it remains nonetheless © Robert H. Rodgers 2003. It is now widely considered the better translation.

I also looked at the translation by Clemens Herschel, Dana Estes and Company (Boston), 1899; but it was superseded by Bennett's work, which in fact incorporated a good deal of it.

Latin Text	English Translations
Latin Text	Bennett (1925)	Rodgers (2003)
Liber I	Book I	Book I
Liber II	Book II	Book II

Apparatus

The apparatus criticus for the De Aquis is quite simple, since the work has come down to us thru a single medieval manuscript, to the text of which Renaissance and later scholars have made emendations.

The Latin text includes several signs in addition to our standard Roman letters. For a few years I had to render them by tiny drawings, but now happily Unicode has caught up with me, and the great majority of people online with Unicode. So the following arithmetical symbols used in the manuscript can be searched for just like our commoner characters. On the other hand, they're not so easy to enter from a keyboard; I list them here, so you can copy them to the find box of your browser window:

∞	an alternate symbol for mille, thousand.
𐆑	¹⁄₁₂ (an uncia or ounce)	This is not a dash or a hyphen.
𐆐	²⁄₁₂	This is not an equal-sign.
𐆒	¹⁄₂₄ (a semuncia)	This is not a pound-sign.
∴	³⁄₁₂
℈	¹⁄₂₈₈ (a scripulum = ¹⁄₂₄ of an uncia)	This is not the same as the Russian letter of similar appearance.

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