This barbarian interruption of these accustomed and hitherto unfailing streams, cutting off not only the luxuries of the baths, and of the fountains in all their daily and hourly uses for domestic purposes, in the gardens and the pools, necessarily changed at once the whole internal economy and arrangements of the city. Perhaps, among the causes which mark the final decay and fall of Rome, few exercised really greater influence than the Gothic destruction of the aqueducts.

* Front., p. 201 Stuart, art. Aqutducta.

t Vide Fabretti de Aquis and Aquiduc, dig. ii. Burgess, vol. ij., p. 336.

} Procopius, de bello. Gothico. lib. 1., chap. 15.

PRELIMINARY ESSAY. 35

There does not remain, so far as we have been able to discover, any memorial of the cost of these magnificent erections nor of the periods respectively occupied for their construction nor of the nature ot the labor employed upon them.

Of the Anio Vetus, Frontinus merely relates, that it was built from the spoils taken from Pyrrhus and of the Marcia, he says, the Senate appropriated by decree. " Sestertium mille octingenties," equal in our money to $3,240,000. But whether this sum sufficed to complete the undertaking, or whether slaves or the soldiers were employed on such works }

does not appear. Concerning all the other aqueducts, we are left without any indication of their cost, or of the time employed on them.*

The regulations under which these works were, and the laws for their protection, are more known to us.