No city in the world possesses the history Rome has contained within its walls. Perhaps most amazing about Rome are the amount of ruins that are still to be discovered, buried deep beneath the city. Several times, as a class, we were able to go underground and view such ruins, which was truly an eye opening experience. As we walked through amazing buildings full of marble and gold, statues adorning kings, tombs holding popes, it became quite clear that it took thousands and thousands of workers to make these things possible, but exactly how many remained a question.
It is with this question in mind that my partner and I read an article entitled "Manpower Needs for the Public Works Programs of the Julio-Claudian Emperor's." This article attempts to answer the questions of how much work it took to build certain structures in Rome, such as the Pantheon and aqueducts. Using a complicated formula which assigns manpower units to the buildings we are able to see which projects were most time consuming (note: all of the projects looked at in this research were from 29 BC to 68 AD). Surprisingly, it became clear to the researchers that the constant maintenance and repair of the aqueducts was the most time consuming project (costing over 8000 manpower units (most temples cost on average 100 manpower units)). Overall, the authors had to make many assumptions in order to achieve the manpower unit calculation, but they do so quite successfully and convincingly.
Rome, with all it has, is quite overwhelming, but definitely a place I will return to (in fact I'll be there in four days!).
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