Nicomedia Canal Project
About
Pliny proposed cutting an 18-mile canal from Lake Sophon, today's Lake Sapanca, down to the sea at Nicomedia, hoping to cut the cost of hauling marble, timber, and produce into the city. Locals told him the lake sat 40 cubits above sea level, so he asked Trajan to send a surveyor before digging began. Trajan told him to borrow an engineer from Calpurnius Macer, governor of Lower Moesia. No ancient source records the canal being dug, and no trace of it survives, so it is marked unbuilt here.
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.
In ancient writing
- Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 10.41
Proposes a canal from Lake Sophon to the sea to ease transport of stone, timber, and produce to Nicomedia, and asks for a leveling engineer.
- Trajan, Epistulae (replies) 10.42
Directs Pliny to request a surveyor from Calpurnius Macer, governor of Lower Moesia.
Sources
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