Portable Engines in Roman Houses.

311

Chap. 7.]

Their frequency induced Augustus to institute a body of watchmen toguard against them, and, from the following lines of Juvenal , it appearsthat wealthy patricians had servants to watch their houses during the night:

With buekets ranged the ready servants stand,

Alert at midnight by their lords’ command. Sat. xiv.

As every calamity that befalls mankind is converted by some men totheir own advantage, so the numerous fires in Rome led to the detestablepractice of speculating on the distresses they occasioned. Titus Crassus,the consul, who, from his opulence was surnamed the Rieh, gleaned hisimmense wealth, according to Plutarch “ from war and from fires ; hemade it a part of his business to buy houses that were on fire, and othersthat joined upon them, which he oommonly got at a low price on accountof the fear and distress of the owners about the event.” But the avariceof Crassus, as is the case with thousands of other men, led to his ruin.With the hope of enlarging his possessions, he selected the province ofSyria for his government, or rather for his extortion, because it seemed topromise him an inexhaustible souree of wealth: but by a retributive Provi-dence his army was överthrown by the Parthians , whom he attempted tosubdue, and who cut off his head, and in reference to his passion for goldfused a quantity of that metal and poured it down his throat.

Among other precautions for preventing fires from spreading that wereadopted in Rome on rebuilding the city, was one requiring every citizento keep in his house “ a maehine for extmguishing fire.” What these ma-chines were is not quite certain, whether buekets, mops, hooks, syringesor portable pumps. That they were the last is supposed to be provedby a passage in the writings of Ulpian, a celebrated lawyer and secretaryto the Emperor Alexander Severus , wherein he enumerates the thingsthat belonged to a house when it was sold, such as we name fixtures,and among them he mentions siphones employed in extmguishing fires.Beckman thinks the leaden pipes which conveyed water into the housesfor domestic purposes might be intended ; but they would hardly havebeen designated as above, merely because the water conveyed throughthem was occasionally used to put out fires. This was not their chief use,but an incidental one. That they were pumps or real fire-engines wasthe opinion of Alexander ab Alexandro, a learned lawyer of the 15thCentury; an opinion not only rendered probable by the terms used andthe necessity of such implements for the security of the upper stories,which neither public engines nor streams from the aqueducts could reach,but also from the apparent fact, that syringes or portable pumps have al-ways been kept (to a greater or less extent) in dwellings from Romantimes. And a sufficient reason why they should generally be sold withthe houses, might be found in their dimensions being regulated accordingto those of the buildings for which they were designed.

The population of Rome was so great that the area of the city couldnot furnish sites sufficient for the houses ; and hence (as Yitruvius has ob-served, B. ii, cap. 8) the height of the walls was increased in Order tomultiply the number of stories-—‘ for want of room on the earth the build-ings were extended towards the heavens.’ Portable fire-engines weretherefore particularly requisite, in Order promptly to extinguish fires ontheir first appearance, whether in the upper or lower floors. In the lattercase, when this was not done, the people in the higher stories would becut off from relief and the means of escape. Were some of our six andseven story buildings in the narrow Streets, densely filled with humanbeings, and a raging fire suddenly to burst out on the ground floors, the