in the household, an officer who arranged on the table the dishes of a king or nobleman.

SEWER is also a passage or gutter made to carry water into the sea or a river, and thereby to preserve the land from inundations and other annoyances.

Common SEWERS, in Rome, were executed at a great expense. It was proposed that they should be of sufficient dimensions to admit a waggon loaded with hay. When these common sewers came to be obstructed, or out of repair, under the republic, the censors contracted to pay a thousand talents, or about £193,000, for clearing and repairing them. They were again in disrepair at the accession of Augustus Caesar, and the reinstating of them is mentioned among the great works of Agrippa. He is said to have turned the course of seven rivers into these subterraneous passages, to have made them navigable, and to have actually passed in barges under the streets and buildings of Rome. These works are still supposed to remain; but as they exceed the power and resources of the present city to keep them in repair, they are quite concealed, except at one or two places. They were, in the midst of the Roman greatness, and still are, reckoned among the wonders of the world; and yet they are said to have been works of the elder Tarquin, a prince whose territory did not extend in any direction above sixteen miles; and, on this supposition, they must have been made to accommodate a city that was calculated chiefly for the reception of cattle, herdsmen, and banditti. Rude nations sometimes execute works of great magnificence, as fortresses and temples, for the purposes of war and superstition; but seldom palaces, and still more seldom works of mere convenience and cleanliness, in which, for the most part, they are long defective. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to question the authority of tradition in respect to this singular monument of antiquity, which so greatly exceeds what the best accommodated city of modern Europe could undertake for its own convenience. And as those works are still entire, and may continue so for thousands of years, it may be suspected that they were even prior to the settlement of Romulus, and may have been the remains of a more ancient city, on the ruins of which the followers of Romulus settled, as the Arabs now encamp on the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbeck. Livy owns, that the common sewers were not accommodated to the plan of Rome as it was laid out in his time; they were carried in directions across the streets, and passed under buildings of the greatest antiquity. This derangement, indeed, he imputes to the hasty rebuilding of the city after its destruction by the Gauls; but haste, it is probable, would have determined the people to build on their old foundations, or at least not to change them so much as to cross the direction of former streets.