Nero's Canal, Baiae
About
After the fire of Rome in 64 CE, Nero ordered a navigable canal dug from Lake Avernus near Baiae to the Tiber at Ostia, some 260 kilometers meant to spare grain fleets the open sea. Tacitus and Suetonius record the project's ambition and its ruinous cost in forced labor. Only a short stretch near Avernus was ever cut before Nero's death in 68 CE ended the scheme. In 117 CE the abandoned trench near Baiae still scarred the ground, unfinished and never completed as a canal.
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
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →