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Minor Economic Points Of Empire...


Kathleenb

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One secondary source I have mentions the "free poor" building the first aqueduct built by Augustus. Was that typical for the later aqueducts? What about other public buildings?

 

The public baths charged fees for their use - I've read the fees were small/reasonable. Were those fees used to pay for the original building, or only the ongoing operational expenses?

 

Just curious...

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One secondary source I have mentions the "free poor" building the first aqueduct built by Augustus. Was that typical for the later aqueducts? What about other public buildings?

 

The public baths charged fees for their use - I've read the fees were small/reasonable. Were those fees used to pay for the original building, or only the ongoing operational expenses?

 

Just curious...

 

The big and most famous baths in Rome were given to the city by emperors or other major figures (e.g. Agrippa). They were therefore built out of private funds (the original source of those funds? That's a more complicated question!) and any fees for bathers must have been intended to pay running costs.

 

There were also privately operated baths -- Martial mentions them in his poems. I've put one of the poems, with a shortened translation, on my Latin blog this morning -- here it is --

 

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dalby/ephemeris/blog.html#101

 

Baths like these, I suppose, must have been run on a commercial basis. Incidentally, the 'raw Virgo' and the 'Marcia' mentioned in this poem are the cold water supplied to the baths by these two named aqueducts.

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