The Roman Builders

The Romans weren’t content just to stay in their little city of Rome. The bigger the city got, the more land the Romans wanted. And the best way to get land was to take it from other towns and tribes.

Now that Rome ruled all of Italy, the Romans needed to be able to travel easily from one end of the peninsula to the others. So they began to build roads.

Most roads in the ancient world were rough, muddy tracks filled with holes and blocked by rocks and fallen trees. But the Romans built roads that were easy to travel on. First, they dug a wide ditch and filled the ditch with sand. Then they poured small stones on top of the sand. Next, they poured concrete over top of the stones. Finally, they laid wide, smooth paving stones on top of the concrete. Along the road, the Romans put up stone pillars and carved on them the distance between towns. A traveler on a Roman road could look at these mile stones and know exactly how much farther he had to go!

The Romans became famous for their beautiful roads. The most famous of all Roman roads was called the Appian Way. It led from Rome to several large Roman cities in Italy. The Appian Way can still be used today. Roman roads were so well built that they lasted for hundreds of years. Today, many roads in Italy still follow the tracks of the old Roman roads.

The Romans were the first ancient people to use concrete. They discovered that if they mixed volcanic ash, water, and lime, the soupy mixture would dry as hard as stone. They used this concrete to cement large stones together into buildings and roads. The Romans built whole apartment buildings out of concrete. Some of these ancient apartment buildings were five stories high.

Unfortunately, some of the apartment buildings weren’t very well built—and they collapsed, sometimes killing the people who lived inside. Others were slums, without any water or toilets. Whole families lived in one room. They dumped their waste out the windows into the streets.

As the Roman cities grew larger and larger, the people who lived in them needed more and more fresh water. So the Romans designed special channels for water, called aqueducts. The aqueducts were like narrow stone bridges with water pipes that ran across the top of them. Through these aqueducts, the Romans could bring water into the cities from springs thirty miles away.

The Romans needed water for drinking and cooking, but also for taking baths. Baths were very important to the ancient Romans! Most of them took a bath every day. But they didn’t bathe in a bathtub, like you do. Instead, they went to the public baths, which were more like swimming pools. People gathered at the public baths to get clean. They rubbed soap made from animal fat on their skin, and then scraped themselves clean with special curved blades. Then they could swim in cold or hot water, brought in by the aqueducts.

Today, the ruins of Roman roads, buildings, baths, and aqueducts can still be found in the places where the Romans lived—even though they were built more than two thousand years ago.