Archaeology of Fire Safety Measures – The Fire Stations of the Roman Empire
From Ctesibius pump to the first Fire Brigade in History in the city of Rome, with around 7,000 firefighters, also in antique times fire has been a concern for people living in cities and towns
Fire protection services have been organized in most cities around the world since the late 1700s. In a limited number of cities there is evidence of earlier organizations, in some cases dating back to the Middle Ages. However, there are much older evidences of the interest in solutions for the protection of materials, buildings and fire rescue services, dating back even more than 2000 years.
The Ctesibius Water Pump and the Egyptian Flame Retardants
Ctesibius, a Greek mathematician and engineer was probably born in Alexandria around 300 B.C. The hydraulic pump he invented is often cited as a fire-fighting apparatus. Although from our research we have found no scientific references confirming that the Ctesibius water pump was developed or used in subsequent decades for firefighting purposes, we celebrate its brilliance because the Ctesibius water pump was a remarkable achievement in several respects, including the firefighting applications.
One area of fire prevention that is reflected in archaeological research is research into the fire safety of fabrics. In fact, it is not widely known that flame retardants for fabrics have been the subject of attention since very ancient times.
Such substances are able to improve the behavior of a fabric when exposed to a flame or a high-temperature heat source
According the book “Flame Retardants for Textile Materials” (Asim Kumar Roy Chowdhury, CRC Press, 2020) “Flame retardant materials were first produced around 400 BC”. In 450 BC, in Egypt alum was used to reduce the flammability of wood, while 200 years later the Romans, to improve wood behaviour in case of fire, used a mixture of alum and vinegar.
Another aspect of the scientific citations concerning the archeology of firefighting services concerns the era of ancient Egypt. In this case, although the presence of firefighters in ancient Egypt is mentioned in several websites, we have not found any scientific references to support this statement.
The Roman Empire Fire Service
In the early years of the Roman Empire, an organized service of professional firefighters was established to limit the damage of the frequent fires triggered by flame lamps and fueled by the wooden structures of homes in the city of Rome. The city was severely exposed to the risk of fire which was very high at the time due to the widespread diffusion of wooden houses and buildings and the use of flames for heating and to illuminate houses and streets.
The service was structured into several Cohortes Vigilum, a special body responsible for surveillance, especially fire prevention. It was established in 6 AD. by Emperor Augustus with approximately 7,000 firefighters, divided into different operational areas (Regiones) operating at night with road surveillance tasks for fire prevention and public safety. Seven barracks, each for one of the seven cohorts are known. The service was deployed by barracks, known as castra, and by the excubitoria, or smaller barracks. Two buildings that date back more than eleven hundred years ago are, linked to this service are still visibile.
In addition to military equipment, the Vigili had simple tools such as lamps, for night patrol services, buckets, brooms, siphones (a sort of fire hydrant with leather pipes, for fighting fire), axes, crampons, hoes, saws, poles, ladders and ropes, as well as some “centones” (wet blankets used to smother flames).
Our translation from Italian of the Italian National Fire Service website (www.vigilfuoco.it) of the Cohortes Vigilum remains:
The “vigiles” were a body established in 6 AD. by Emperor Augustus in Rome with the task of monitoring both the streets during the night and to protect the city from fires, which were quite frequent given the conspicuous use of wooden infrastructures (such as stairs, galleries etc… ) and open flames used mainly to power skylights.
At the date of the foundation of the corps the number of vigilantes was 600, then it was expanded to seven thousand men. It should also be kept in mind that the houses in the “insulas” built of wood were practically contiguous. Any fires would therefore quickly spread from house to house. The intervention of the vigilantes was only effective if it managed to be timely, which was far from easy (even then!) considering the traffic of carts and people through the narrow alleys, as in the populous Suburra at the foot of the Esquiline, Viminale and Quirinale hills .
We must consider that the area to be monitored was the entire city and included 423 neighborhoods with over 147,000 buildings, where more than one million inhabitants lived. The equipment consisted of simple tools such as axes, crampons, hoes, saws, poles, ladders and ropes, then there were “centones”, wet blankets used to suffocate the flames or “siphones”, a sort of fire hydrant with leather pipes.
The official name of the corps was “Militia Vigilum”, which later became “Cohortes Vigilum”. Their motto was “Ubi dolor ibi vigiles” (Where there is pain there are vigilantes). The vigiles were organized into seven cohorts and each cohort was divided into seven centuries, as the name suggests, each comprising a hundred men at the head of which was the centurion. The vigiles corps was directed by the “praefectus vigilum”, the prefect of the brigade.
Augustus had divided Rome into 14 regions. Each cohort therefore competed with two of the 14 regions. In one of them the statio, i.e. the barracks, was placed, in the other a detachment or guard post called “excubitorium“.
The oldest findings of places where these services were carried out are found in Rome and its immediate vicinity, with two stations dating back to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.
In the Trastevere district of Rome, eight meters below the road surface, the excubitorium, or detachment of the VII Cohort police in today’s street of the same name, is still visible. It is a building converted into a Fire Brigade barracks in the 2nd century. d. C. with a beautiful arched door framed by Corinthian pillars and surmounted by a brick tympanum.
The complex, at least two floors high, was characterized by a porticoed courtyard (A in the map above), onto which the firemen’s rooms and the wash-house fountains opened (B). On the rear side there was a chapel for the imperial cult (C), built in monumental form at the beginning of the 3rd century AD. The corner room, a latrine (D), was embellished with a shrine dedicated to Fortun.
The Fire Station closest to the center of Rome is one of the excubitoria and is known as “Excubitorium VII Cohort” (Barracks of the seventh Group of the Firefighters). It depended by the “Septima Cohort Vigilum” in the Region XIV (Transtiberim).
The remains of the building are located 8 meters below street level (due to the rise in street level over the centuries) and a large hall, a hexagonal fountain basin, a rectangular exedra and some rooms are visible. One of the most notable finds is a graffiti with the phrase “lassum sum successorem date“, that is, “I’m tired, lift me up”.
The oldest remains of a fire station, however, are the seaside area of Ostia, within the Archaeological Park of Ostia Antica, a few kilometers west of Rome. Here, Roma City administration built imposing barracks where around 320 firefighters worked to protect the then strategic port of Ostia, the gateway to river navigation to Rome. The barracks was built at the end of the 1st century AD. The barracks hosted a stable cohort of firefighters-policemen. The structure visible today dates back to the transformation of the Hadrianic era (first half of the 2nd century AD), which affected the entire neighborhood. The complex was at least two floors high, had a porticoed courtyard around which all the services necessary for a modern fire station were located.
Urban-scale Fire Protection of Rome after the 64 AC Fire
After the 64 A.C. fire, the rebuilding took place in many parts of Rome along wide straight streets and blocks of limited height, with vast internal courtyards and porticoes in front of the facades, which the Emperor Nero would have promised to pay for at his own expense.
The rebuilding would therefore have taken place in the rest of the city along wide straight streets and blocks of limited height, with vast internal courtyards and porticoes in front of the facades, which Nero would have promised to pay for at his own expense (sed dimensis vicorum ordinibus et latis viarum spatiis cohibitaque aedificiorum altitudine ac patefactis areis additisque porticibus, quae frontem insularum protegeren).
The historian Tacitus in his writings cites some urban planning rules established by Nero on the characteristics of the buildings. They could not have common walls and in some parts the wooden structure had to be built in specific stones considered fireproof (aedificiaque ipsa certa sui parte sine trabibus saxo Gabino Albanove solidarentur, quod is lapis ignibus impervius est).
As management rules, owners had to ensure that everything necessary to put out fires was always ready and, to ensure greater availability of the water brought by the aqueducts, abusive uses by private individuals were combated.
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