ἄριστον μέν ὕδωρ: An Examination of the Public Waterworks in Athens in the Early 5thC BCE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the design and social impact of waterways in Athens in the early 5thC BCE. While the Athenian political landscape transitioned from a series of tyrannies to democracy at the end of the Archaic period (ca. 650-480 BCE), the archaeological record also shows widespread innovation in the development of public water systems, particularly in sanitation and water supply. A movement away from buildings constructed by the Athenian tyrants facilitated the development of the Classical Agora and the creation of new public-use spaces and structures, like the Southeast Fountain House and the Great Drain in the Agora. The fountain has long been identified with the famous Peisistratid Enneakrounos (“Nine Spouts”) fountain, but through investigation into the arguments of J.M. Camp and Jessica Paga, I propose that a later date ca. 500 BCE is more suitable for the historical and archaeological context of the fountain. 
 I investigate several Athenian waterworks built/maintained during the late Archaic period to the Classical period (~500-323 BCE): the Great Drain in the Agora, the Southeast Fountain House, the Klepsydra fountain, and the Asklepieion on the Akropolis. The works of Hippocrates, Thucydides, and—to a lesser extent—Pausanias, inform my examination of the implications of the construction of these waterworks and the development of democracy in the 5th century. These waterways show a dedicated shift from the private use of water and tyrannical building works, to a new, fully public and communal mode of engagement with the city and its resources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".