We are hardly out of a long winter and already parts of the country are celebrating the traditional Festival of the Summer Water-Shortage, in which the god Hôspipês and his divine consort Sprinkla are ritually banished from the earth for six months, to be gloriously resurrected in the autumn. All very Demeter and Persephone. Strange that the Romans never had this problem. But then they had a superb aqueduct system for delivering water to far distant places.
An aqueduct serving Constantinople, 75 miles long as the crow flies, is in fact 155 miles with all the twists and turns. Rome was served by 11 aqueducts, totalling over 300 miles in length, delivering some 1.2 million cubic metres of water a day to its million or so inhabitants. Bridges channelled the water over valleys (the longest being the Pont du Gard at nearly 300 yards) and tunnels through hills (the Valle Barberini runs for one and a half miles).
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