Civil Engineering
As a complex system involving high volumes of water circulation and wide variations in termperature and water delivery methods, the Baths posed substantial technological challenges not just on the scale of individual buildings but also in terms of urban planning. Architects had to divert extra water into the city of Rome from the aqua Marcia aqueduct.1 Water was then stored in a large cistern beneath the Piazza dei Cinquecento. The Baths of Caracalla used a similar system of drawing water directly from an aqueduct and storing it in a cistern.
The high visibility and audacity of this project underlined the size and intention of Maximian's gesture in dedicating the Baths to Diocletian, whose reputation (along with his own, as the dedicator and as a fellow Tetrarch) the Baths amplified and concretized.
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1. Amanda Claridge, Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 393.