ABSTRACT
The management and use of water resources are not features specific to the Byzantine city – whatever this expression could mean – but are rather an element of continuity with the urban water culture inherited from classical Antiquity. The Byzantine water culture was decidedly less monolithic: the Roman legacy of water use culture and its related structures were ideally managed not only in continuity but also through adaptations and pragmatic solutions; the common need to have good quality water – and the willingness to display such a resource – was translated into water-related structures of varying degrees of scale and complexity all over the empire. The Byzantine cities inherited water structures, ideology and material culture from the Greco-Roman tradition. According to J. Pickett, this legacy had some limits, namely: the ideological value of the city's control over the spring waters; the high maintenance costs of the aqueducts; the total dependence of cities on aqueducts.
