DEAR SIR, - Nothing can be more agreeable to the eyes of a
stranger, especially in the heats of summer, than the great
number of public fountains that appear in every part of Rome,
embellished with all the ornaments of sculpture, and pouring
forth prodigious quantities of cool, delicious water, brought in
aqueducts from different lakes, rivers, and sources, at a
considerable distance from the city. These works are the remains
of the munificence and industry of the antient Romans, who were
extremely delicate in the article of water: but, however, great
applause is also due to those beneficent popes who have been at
the expence of restoring and repairing those noble channels of
health, pleasure, and convenience. This great plenty of water,
nevertheless, has not induced the Romans to be cleanly. Their
streets, and even their palaces, are disgraced with filth. The
noble Piazza Navona, is adorned with three or four fountains, one
of which is perhaps the most magnificent in Europe, and all of
them discharge vast streams of water: but, notwithstanding this
provision, the piazza is almost as dirty, as West Smithfield,
where the cattle are sold in London. The corridores, arcades, and
even staircases of their most elegant palaces, are depositories
of nastiness, and indeed in summer smell as strong as spirit of
hartshorn. I have a great notion that their ancestors were not
much more cleanly. If we consider that the city and suburbs of
Rome, in the reign of Claudius, contained about seven millions of
inhabitants, a number equal at least to the sum total of all the
souls in England; that great part of antient Rome was allotted to
temples, porticos, basilicae, theatres, thermae, circi, public
and private walks and gardens, where very few, if any, of this
great number lodged; that by far the greater part of those
inhabitants were slaves and poor people, who did not enjoy the
conveniencies of life; and that the use of linen was scarce
known; we must naturally conclude they were strangely crouded
together, and that in general they were a very frowzy generation.
That they were crouded together appears from the height of their
houses, which the poet Rutilius compared to towers made for
scaling heaven. In order to remedy this inconvenience, Augustus
Caesar published a decree, that for the future no houses should
be built above seventy feet high, which, at a moderate
computation, might make six stories. But what seems to prove,
beyond all dispute, that the antient Romans were dirty creatures,
are these two particulars. Vespasian laid a tax upon urine and
ordure, on pretence of being at a great expence in clearing the
streets from such nuisances; an imposition which amounted to about
fourteen pence a year for every individual; and when Heliogabalus
ordered all the cobwebs of the city and suburbs to be collected,
they were found to weigh ten thousand pounds. This was intended
as a demonstration of the great number of inhabitants; but it was
a proof of their dirt, rather than of their populosity.
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