Free Conspiracies of Rome by Richard Blake Page A

Reconquest, the aqueducts had all been cut. Some had been patched up afterwards. But most remained cut. The baths and the fountains were now all dry. The ponds that remained had become stinking, pestilential sewers.
        I had seen how the aqueducts were cut on the last stretch of the Aurelian Way. For several miles, this is joined by the route of an aqueduct built by Trajan. About a mile from the city, the top level of arches had been smashed away, and the continual gush of water that still came down from the hills had made the surrounding land into a marsh. Projecting from the rippled mud were the usual ruins – only there were so many of these, it was apparent that the city had once extended far beyond the walls.
        Inside the walls, the city was falling into or was already in ruins. The great public buildings mostly remained. These were built of stone or massive brick arches. They had been stripped of their ornaments. The very marble facing had been pulled off the lower walls, leaving exposed courses of brickwork, with regular notches where the marble had once been attached. Here and there, too high easily to reach, massive bronze decorations showed something of what the old effect must have been. Below that, all was mean and bare. Every dozen yards or so, I saw plinths half-buried in the rubbish. The bronze statues advertised by the lush flattery of the inscriptions were all gone.
        But, so long as the roofs were sound, the main structures survived. They were still surviving when I was last there, hobbling out of the emperor’s reach with a price on my head. Probably they will always be there. The less solid structures were already collapsing, though. We rode down streets of apparently magnificent buildings that towered seven or eight storeys above the ground. But I could see daylight through the bare upper windows, where roofs and floors had fallen in. Sometimes, only the façade stood up, the rest having collapsed upon itself. Sometimes, the façades themselves had collapsed forward into the street.
        Most of the side streets were choked with rubble. In the main streets down which we passed, rubble had usually been piled back against the walls, where it lay covered in grass and rubbish. Mostly, the middle parts of the streets were clear, and we directed our horses over radically worn but still serviceable paving stones. Occasionally, though, what had originally been a wide avenue was now so constricted that we had to dismount and lead the horses over little hills of broken masonry. We did this by what had once been a junction of five wide streets. A colossal statue of some god or emperor had collapsed on itself, and the body parts had been left where they fell, to be gradually buried under the accumulating rubbish of half a century.
        Everywhere was the smell of damp brickdust and rotting filth. I could have shut my eyes and sworn I was back in Richborough. Here, as back home, pigs snuffed around for sustenance. Little clouds of steam swirled on the ground as the sun gained in power. Those streets reminded me of nothing so much as rows of blackened, broken teeth, the occasional soundness only emphasised the neighbouring decay.
        We passed through whole districts of silent, built-up desolation. In ancient times, I am told, there had been over a million inhabitants. Now, the decline of power and trade and the ravages of war and plague had reduced the population to around thirty thousand.
        Of course, this was a larger population than I had ever seen. I doubt if Canterbury – when I first arrived there – had more than five hundred people. But it’s all a matter of proportion. Canterbury was small enough to bustle even with five hundred people – the main street was often so crowded, you had to take your turn to get down it. Thirty thousand people in a city built to house a million produced an effect of almost total desertion.
        Every now and again, my gaze was drawn upwards by a