Rhetoric and Nymphaea in the Roman Empire

Abstract

It is pleasant to contemplate the genesis of monumental nymphaea, the huge, highly decorated public fountains that appeared in western Asia Minor in the late first century AD, spread through Asia Minor and into the Levant in the second, and from the early third century are found in Rome and North Africa. The argument here is that such fountains are a result and symptom of a change in élite education, consequent upon the canonization by teachers of rhetoric of a formula for praising cities as if they were persons, a formula that in turn influenced how civic benefactors and members of city councils imagined their cities. The challenge presented by praising cities according to this somewhat contrived prescription exaggerated the importance that the rhetorically educated civic ruling strata attributed to civic water-supply, and thus those in receipt of such education began to build structures, and compete with each other and other cities in building structures, that boasted the abundance of their city’s water.