Lost Roads of the Roman Empire

A massive digitization project has nearly doubled the known extent of the first continent-scale road network

- BY TOM BRUGHMANS | MAPS BY DANIEL P. HUFFMAN Tom Brughmans is an associate professor of classical archaeology at Aarhus University in Denmark. His research focuses on studying material culture to understand how people in the Roman Empire were connected. Brughmans is co-director of https://itiner-e.org

ON A RECENT VISIT to Rome I walked along the Via Appia (also called the Appian Way), past the presumed house of Stoic philosopher Seneca, and felt transported in time. Constructed starting in 312 B.C.E. to carry troops southeast toward Capua and, eventually, the port city of Brindisi in the heel of Italy’s boot, the Via Appia is the oldest and best-known road of the Roman Empire.

Scholars have long regarded it as the quintessential Roman road: a straight highway extending as far as the eye can see, paved with slabs of volcanic stone, lined with pointy cypress trees and, of course, connecting to Rome. It is amazing to know that Romans walked here more than 2,300 years ago. No wonder this marvel of ancient engineering—long stretches of which remain remarkably intact today—is known as the Queen of Long-Distance Roads.

But iconic as it is, the Via Appia is not the archetype researchers have assumed it to be. My colleagues and I have produced a new map of Roman roads that, for the first time, reveals their locations at high resolution in a single, open resource. What we found revolutionized our view of the road system that undergirded this superpower of the ancient world.

Historians and archaeologists have been studying Roman roads for centuries. In that time, they have found remnants of the roads themselves, crumbling milestones, and historical texts about major connections between settlements. But efforts to plot the roads based on these piecemeal sources yielded a low-resolution map of the Empire with approximate locations rather than precise ones.

Knowing the location of Roman roads matters for understanding how the Empire conquered and pacified new territories and transported food to keep its people alive. Their development meant that for the first time in history, an area the size of the European Union was covered by a network that allowed the flow of people, goods, ideas and disease from Egypt to Germany, Spain to Turkey.