Marius's Canal
About
Marius set his legions digging this channel over the winter of 103-102 BCE, routing shipping around the silt-choked mouths of the Rhone. The finished cut ran about 16 Roman miles from the river to the Gulf of Fos, giving grain and wine fleets a dependable path to the sea. Massilia later received the canal as a gift and taxed its traffic for two centuries of steady revenue. Strabo, Pliny, and Plutarch all mention the waterway, and archaeologists have traced its silted course beneath the modern port of Fos-sur-Mer.
What happened here
Cut to shorten a journey, to bypass a river mouth that silts, or to drain ground that floods. Digging is done by soldiers or by contracted labour in seasons when the water is low, and the spoil is banked along the sides to make a towpath. Barges are hauled by men or oxen, moving grain, stone, timber and wine at a fraction of the cost of the same distance by road. Sluices control the level where the canal meets a tidal river. Maintenance is endless — silt, weed and collapsed banks — and a canal that is not dredged returns to marsh within a generation. Towns along it grow fast, and the tolls charged at each end are worth having.
Sources
Nearby
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