INTRODUCTION

I SEX. JVLIVS FRONTINVS

Obscurity veils the origins and early career of Julius Frontinus.¹ As praetor urbanus he convened the Senate on 1 January in the year 70 CE, but he soon yielded the post to Domitian (Tac. Hist. IV.39.1–2). A suffect consulship followed soon thereafter, probably in 73.² His birth can with reasonable certainty be set in the later years of Tiberius’ reign. In all likelihood he came from  Narbonese Gaul.³ He may have spent his early years as an equestrian officer, perhaps with military service in the Parthian campaigns of the late 50s, perhaps as procurator in Spain and/or Africa in the 60s. His behaviour in the political events of the year 69 is entirely unclear. Syme suggests that Galba adlected him into the Senate for swift adherence to his cause, but rapid promotion under Vespasian might point in a different direction.⁴

   Between praetorship and consulship he may have held a military command (presumably as legatus legionis), if he was on the scene of the Rhineland revolt and received the surrender of the Lingones (Str. IV.3.14).⁵ After the consulship he was almost immediately appointed legatus Augusti pro praetore for Britain, whither he went as successor to Petillius Cerialis in 74 and where he remained until the arrival of Agricola in 77 or 78.⁶ Tacitus’ biography of the successor (Agr. 17.2) describes Frontinus’ command only briefly: subiit sustinuitque molem Iulius Frontinus, vir magnus quantum licebat, validamque et pugnacem Silurum gentem armis subegit, super virtutem hostium locorum quoque difficultates eluctatus. His achievements in Britain may have earnt for him the triumphalia ornamenta.⁷

   References in the Strategemata (I.1.8, 3.10, II.11.7) suggest that Frontinus was personally acquainted with Domitian’s campaigns in Germany in 83, and it is probably to this period that one should assign a dedicatory inscription from Vetera (CIL 13.8624). Whether Frontinus held the governorship of Germania inferior is not clear; he may have been legatus legionis or comes of the emperor.⁸ At the appropriate stage he received the proconsulship of Asia, long regarded (with that of Africa) as the pinnacle of a senatorial career. Coins from Smyrna with the legend ἀνθυπάτου ροντίνου have long been known,⁹ and a recently studied inscription from Hierapolis in Phrygia (modern Pamukkale) attests him in that office.¹⁰ His tenure can now with reasonable certainty be fixed to 84/85.¹¹ The grand gates that bear his name had largely been completed under his predecessor.¹²

   During the later years of Domitian’s reign Frontinus seems to have played no major role in public life. There is not a shred of evidence, however, to suggest that he was in disgrace, or that he had deliberately chosen to maintain a distance from Domitian. Quite the contrary: it is to the later years of Domitian that Pliny refers in speaking of Corellius Rufus (cos. 78) and Frontinus as prominent statesmen: Ep. V.1.5 quos tunc civitas nostra spectatissimos habuit.¹³ In this period Frontinus may first have turned to literary activities, an amusement somewhat traditional for the senatorial class. The poet Martial writes of having spent time in his company at Anxur (Tarracina), where the two friends enjoyed the leisure of letters (Mart. X.58 doctas tecum celebrare vacabat/Pieridas).¹⁴ Aelian writes of having consulted him on military matters, and Pliny discussed legal topics with him in the early 90s.¹⁵ The literary treatises (which must surely be dated to these years) look to be products of a contented retirement. A theoretical work on military tactics, highly praised in Antiquity, has not survived.¹⁶ His Strategemata reveal their author’s antiquarian bent; like his gromatical writings,¹⁷ they were ‘safely apolitical’.¹⁸

   With the reign of Nerva comes the final and most impressive stage of Frontinus’ career. In 97 he accepted the post of curator aquarum (Aq. 1 and 102.17), and in the same year he served on a senatorial commission looking for economies (Pliny, Pan. 62.2).¹⁹ He held a second (suffect) consulship in February 98, with Trajan as colleague.²⁰ His son-in-law Sosius Senecio was consul ordinarius in 99. And, a year later, Frontinus himself was marked with the signal honour of a third consulship,²¹ this time ordinarius and again with Trajan as his colleague. That this honour was not in fact unique only underscores the remarkable status which Frontinus enjoyed. In 98 and 100 Julius Ursus also received second and third consulships, both times in immediate succession to Frontinus.²² Pliny in his Panegyric (61.5, 7) mentions these iterated honours (the first by Nerva, the second by Trajan): duos pariter tertio consulatu, duos collegii tui sanctitate decorasti. Theirs was a praemium – Pliny is unambiguous – for eximia in toga merita, by which he means that they had stood behind Trajan: utriusque cura, utriusque vigilantia obstrictus es (Pan. 60.6). Ursus was Frontinus’ junior by roughly a decade, but his marriage to Hadrian’s sister reveals a special relationship to the princeps. We know of no similar relationship linking Frontinus to Trajan, but one might well have existed. Syme is probably safe in his speculation that Frontinus might have been acquainted with Trajan’s father;²³ and there is little doubt that the third consulship was a reward for his part in approving – we should perhaps say arranging – the elevation of Trajan as Nerva’s heir and successor.²⁴

   Frontinus’ death can be fixed in 103/104 by Pliny’s succession to his place in the College of Augurs (Ep. IV.8.3).²⁵ His daughter was married to Q. Sosius Senecio (cos. ord. 99, suff. 107); further descendants appear in later inscriptions.²⁶

   The spectacular sunset of Frontinus’ life was the product of a combination of political circumstances. For others this era had a radiance of dawn, caught for posterity in the artistic penstrokes of panegyric and propaganda: these are the fellow senators who call Frontinus vir magnus, princeps vir. But it is Frontinus himself who invites us to see his career as one of long and sincere devotion to public duty. Personal satisfaction prompted his seemingly un-Roman request²⁷ that admirers dispense entirely with a tombstone:²⁸ impensa monumenti supervacua est; memoria nostri durabit, si vita meruimus.²⁹ This is not modesty. It is rather the proud statement of a man confident of the place awaiting him in the fields of Elysium; there he will join those [qui] sui memores alios fecere merendo.³⁰

II THE DE AQVAEDVCTV

Its date

This booklet – in its present form – cannot have been completed until sometime early in the year 98. Frontinus’ appointment as curator aquarum took effect in 97 (102.17).³¹ His first task was to discover what the office entailed: primum ac potissimum existimo . . . nosse quod suscepi (1). Study of his curatorial responsibilities and a personal review of the water-system will have taken some time. He speaks, for example, of monitoring conditions during the summer months (9.8, 74.3). The text we have was completed only after Nerva’s death in January 98: that prince is twice styled divus (102.4 and 118.3).³² Short of Frontinus’ death (103/104), a terminus ante quem cannot be fixed. But the content and form of the work itself are wholly consistent with the view that Frontinus prepared it for circulation at no long interval after Nerva’s death. He rehearses detailed instances of unhappy practices he has detected, and he mentions reforms introduced as well as plans undertaken but not yet complete.³³ The work thus seems to reflect what the curator has learnt from (and accomplished in) something like a year’s experience.

   The date of composition cannot be entirely separated from the question of Frontinus’ term as curator. The post had originally been given to eminent men of some seniority and was an appointment for life; in later practice curators had been younger consulars serving shorter terms as part of the senatorial cursus (102.1n.). Exactly what had been the pattern just prior to Frontinus’ appointment is unfortunately not at all clear (102.17n.). Some have supposed that Frontinus kept the office until his death – a view that might be supported by the sense of traditionalism represented in his approach to the office and the projected ideal of intimate and continuing cooperation between princeps and curator. Others have argued that the office could not be held simultaneously with a consulship and that Frontinus’ term as curator must therefore have come to an end when he assumed the fasces for a second time in February of 98.³⁴

   If Frontinus relinquished his curatorship at the time of his second consulship, he might naturally have taken this opportunity to pass on to a successor his collection of data, freshly updated, along with a catalogue of reforms already set in motion and initiatives projected for the future. We could then interpret the words in his prologue (2.3) to mean: ‘I made some notes for my own benefit, starting at the beginning of my term, and these will now perhaps be useful to my successor.’ It is scarcely credible, however, that Frontinus’ term as curator ended early in 98. Nerva had more important things on his mind than to replace, after so short a term, an official who was dutifully and effectively addressing important problems of urban administration (even if the major aims of reform were successfully under way) – merely to avoid the overlap with a suffect consulship of very limited duration. Add the fact of Nerva’s death and Trajan’s absence (until sometime in 99), and it becomes altogether easier to suppose that Frontinus continued as curator at least until his third consulship (100) or even until his death.³⁵ Nor can I see any drawback to supposing that he gave this booklet its present form while continuing in office. On the one hand, his statement ‘This will be useful to me’ (2.3) is better taken as rhetorical liberty (with its author still in office) than as rhetorical fiction (from the pen of one who has already retired). On the other hand, his closing words (130) give no hint at all that it will be someone other than himself who will uphold the trust of the curatorial office.³⁶

   Let us be satisfied with dating the literary form of the De Aquaeductu as it stands to sometime in 98, after Nerva’s death and with Trajan not yet come to Rome. Frontinus in this period, during his second consulship and in the months that followed, was among the small circle of senatorial leaders in whose hands lay control of the state’s constitutional helm. Not only did he retain the office of curator aquarum, but he was simultaneously one of the emperor’s vice-gerents at Rome.

Its content and form

In his prologue to the De Aquaeductu³⁷ Frontinus refers to this work as a commentarius, and explains its genesis as a collection of material made primarily for self-instruction and personal reference (2.2–3). Let us look first at what the booklet contains and then at how it fits the definition of a commentarius.

   The contents fall readily into two categories. The first embraces the matters that Frontinus outlines later in his prologue (3.1–2), while the second category could be called ‘editorial remarks’, Frontinus’ commentary, as it were, on the data he has collected. These comments are indeed so extensive that the rhetorical modesty of the prologue (2.3) comes very near to embarrassing untruth. ‘For his own benefit’ Frontinus hardly needed to record the delinquencies he had observed and the reforms he had made in the course of his initial months in office. These, plainly, were included for the edification of some other audience.

   In the ‘table of contents’ of chapter 3 Frontinus promises the following material (in parentheses are the chapter references to the work itself ):

For much of this material, most indeed of the first two categories, a modern writer would have chosen a tabular format. The information thus collected all served an administrative aim. Frontinus recognised its potential usefulness and the importance of having it readily to hand.³⁹ It is primarily to this material that he refers when he states that he has collected information in commentarium quem pro formula administrationis respicere possem (2.2).⁴⁰

   Not explicitly announced in the prologue are those portions of the work which represent Frontinus’ critical review of the data he has collected and his administrative analysis of the system he has undertaken to superintend. This is nowhere more noticeable than in his exhaustive scrutiny of the official figures for the quantity of available water (64–76) and in his optimistic account of projected improvements (87–93).⁴¹ But comments of an explanatory or editorial nature are not limited to such obvious addenda. They occur throughout the work, combined for the most part so harmoniously⁴² that, were it not for Frontinus’ explicit statements in the prologue, one would suspect that the booklet was indeed composed post experimenta et usum (2.3).

   We find, then, in our text of the De Aquaeductu both data and interpretive matter, either or both of which are accepted as normal for the contents of a commentarius. ‘A commentarius could be a published composition in the plain style, or lack polish altogether: there was no firm tradition, as for the major genres of prose. The subject matter and the author’s personality, rather than rules of genre, determined the character and quality of the writing.’⁴³ Goodyear’s definition, which he applies to Frontinus, is a good one, but more can be said. In a strict sense, the term commentarius describes a text that accompanies and explains something. So in the present work chapters 5–15 are the text to which Frontinus could refer for details as he and others interpreted the maps or diagrams that he tells us he had prepared (17).⁴⁴ Or chapters 39–63 are an official listing of the calibres authorised for delivery-pipes. Speaking more generally, commentarius was the term applied to notes and records of many sorts, some of which might remain in the form of data such as lists or compendia, while others might be incorporated into a quasi-archival series or be polished for wider circulation. Thus, on the one hand, we have Caesar’s commentarii, while on the other we know of commentarii of individual magistrates and priests which formed the libri ‘records’ of magistracies and priesthoods.⁴⁵ An example from the present work: Frontinus speaks of the commentarii ‘records’ of Agrippa (90.3), which, beginning with Augustus, had  apparently been maintained and supplemented up to his own day and to which he refers as the commentarii principum (31.2, 64.1, 109.1).⁴⁶ Agrippa kept many records besides those of his water-management cares, and upon such materials as these no doubt he drew in composing a commemoratio of his aedileship, whether or not that was part of a larger autobiography.⁴⁷ In short, with no clear distinction required, the term commentarius could embrace both data and interpretive matter. This is precisely what Frontinus’ booklet contains. But such a combination is not the rule for a commentarius and, given the rather abstruse subject-matter of water-conduits and water-rights, oversight and upkeep, the De Aquaeductu is in fact unique as a specimen of Roman literature, and even perhaps of the ancient world as a whole.