Cynthia Jordan Bannon's study is a welcome contribution to the growing corpus of books that are ever more effectively pulling Roman law into the centre of Roman social and cultural studies. As a vital human resource, water must be shared and in this book B. presents how the Romans (in the private sector) managed this challenge. She casts her net broadly for evidence, utilizing archaeological, literary and legal sources to study the period from the mid-Republic into the early Empire. The reader comes away from the book a bit surprised that servitudes could be so interesting (full kudos to B.) and feeling far better informed and more aware of what certainly was an extremely important daily concern for all who lived beyond the walls of communities throughout Italy.

B.'s book appears in the series Law and Society in the Ancient World, which seeks ‘innovative approaches to ancient legal studies that bring new perspectives to legal topics as well as to broader questions concerning the impact of law on commercial, political, and cultural practices in the ancient world’. The series also emphasizes ‘interdisciplinary approaches to law and society’. Fittingly, at the book's outset B. states that two questions drive her inquiry: ‘How did rural landowners use legal institutions to secure an adequate supply of water, and how did economic, social, and environmental interests shape the development of water rights?’ (1). B. successfully shows that between the mid-Republic and early Empire, ‘Roman landowners developed flexible legal institutions that served their interest in maintaining local, privately owned water supplies on their rural land’ (46).

Ch. 1 considers the ‘strategies that Romans adopted to manage privately owned water supplies’ (43). Using archaeological evidence from regions surrounding Rome, B. briefly discusses the different ways water was harnessed and utilized, then presents various water-sharing arrangements, including schedules attached to servitudes, to show how landowners were managing competition for water. Ch. 2 examines the social contexts that shaped and supported the law of servitudes. B. shows, through examination of legal cases, how landowners used servitudes to spell out the terms of their co-operation and also how the jurists balanced the rights of neighbours when their interests in the local water supply caused disputes. In the final section B. considers a legal dispute over water involving T. Statilius Taurus and two situations in which an élite landowner negotiated about water with less powerful neighbours — one involved Cicero, the other a man named Vegetus. Ch. 3 examines how the creation of rustic servitudes (which included water) was dependent on the need to serve a ‘useful’ function for the estate. Of particular interest to B. is how the jurists struggled with defining what ‘useful’ meant — was it useful only if it created self-sufficiency for a farm? Or could commercial farming also be included under that term? Over time, legal approaches looked more at market concerns, and landowners approached their water rights with heightened awareness of the attendant economic value. Ch. 4 presents the rules that governed the transfer of servitudes when land was sold. B. also analyses how the law of sale was adapted to take account of private water rights when land was sold. The chapter closes with an extended discussion of the famous lawsuit of G. Sergius Orata about a servitude on property at Baiae that he purchased from Marius Gratidianus.

Two appendices follow. The first is a collection of passages from Cato's de Agricultura, the de Re Rustica of both Varro and Columella, and Pliny's Naturalis Historia. The passages are arranged topically with brief descriptions of their respective contents. The second appendix is a geographically arranged list of identified fishponds. B. states that the list incorporates J. Higginbotham's ‘Gazetteer of Fishponds in Roman Italy’, along with a few other sites he missed in his work as well as others published after his work.

Set alongside its strengths, this book's drawbacks are very minor. The text is virtually free of typographical errors. (There does appear to be a slight problem in producing the proper form of the name of a spring's owner in the translation of CIL 9.4791 (p. 72).) As for content, occasionally the reader feels that the obvious is being stated and perhaps less would be preferable. That said, an author should err on the side of overstatement. One very simple issue that is not explained adequately for this reviewer is how landowners' claims that water was needed for the daily household activities factored into their legal claims for water access. Much is made about water for crops and animals but what about for clothes washing, cleaning, bathing, etc.? Even if those individual or aggregate amounts are seen as too small for a viable argument, the point should still be made. And finally, on several occasions B. apologizes for the length of a primary legal document that she includes. But absolutely no apologies are necessary — the documents are fascinating and complicated and the book would be far less effective without them.

Using water as the focus, B. presents an engaging social study of suburban and rural agriculture within Italy, elucidating the very human issues and concerns that created the law of servitudes.