Told in Stone Explores Roman Megaprojects That Failed: Tiber Rerouting, Corinth Canal, Waldgirmes

In a video for his YouTube channel Told in Stone, historian Garrett Ryan examines three grand Roman infrastructure schemes that were never completed, despite the empire's engineering feats like the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the Pont du Gard. The Tiber River, prone to annual floods in antiquity, prompted Julius Caesar to propose rerouting it around Rome or through a tunnel beneath the city, but his assassination in 44 BC halted the plan; Augustus later dredged the channel and Tiberius diverted tributaries, with only nineteenth-century embankments finally controlling the floods. The Isthmus of Corinth offered a safer route for ships sailing to Greece, and both Julius Caesar and Caligula considered digging a canal, but Nero alone began the project before his death stopped work; the canal was not completed until the nineteenth century. In central Germany near modern Waldgirmes, Romans founded a city in 4 BC with a street grid, aqueduct-fed pipes, and a forum featuring a gilded equestrian statue of Augustus, intended as a capital for Germania; it was abandoned after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest about a decade later, its buildings burned and the statue's head thrown down a well, where it was found nineteen centuries later. The video, featured on Open Culture, draws parallels to contemporary American infrastructure challenges.