ALL ROADS LEAD TO BYZANTIUM.

"Ancient Rome Built 190,000 Miles Of Roads And Researchers Just Traced Them All."

Reuters reports researchers just mapped the network of roads that Romans connected across Europe to parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa to better understand the world's first continental travel route, and find out if all roads do indeed lead to Rome. It turns out they don't.

The study published earlier this week mapped out the roads into what the Roman network could have looked like at the peak of the empire's power, sometime between the 2nd to 4th centuries AD. That network of main roads and little countryside paths didn't centralize in Rome, though. Tom Brughmans, classical archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and one of the leads on the project, told Reuters that, "...when we consider all movement within the entire Italian peninsula, we were shocked to discover that the most central road actually follows the opposite Adriatic coastline, bypassing Rome altogether."

The roads of the empire actually met in Constantinople, or Istanbul, Turkey, as it is known today. There the city was more centrally located, as it bordered both Europe and Asia along the Bosporus Strait, where ancient ferries were known to easily traverse between the two continents.

That finding should be no more surprising than, say, the railroads converging at Chicago. A via triumphalis such as the Appian Way might be a useful setting for a procession Ottorino Respighi could set to music, or perhaps as a place to display the suffering carcasses of rebels, as in Spartacus.

The day-to-day business of moving grain or whatever trade goods there were, long before steam and machinery, would be better served by, well, roads that simplify the movement of those goods.

Roman engineers of the time were limited to straight roads thanks to tools like the groma, an ancient surveying tool that was good for straight lines and angles, but not so good at seeing around curves. The lay of the land also played a big part in how the roads were placed, as the Romans couldn't really build through the mountains. If there were a mountain or valley path, the road could follow a switchback or zig-zag pattern, connecting straight road to straight road on its way up or down. Blasting a mountain apart, or even trying to cut through it, wasn't really an option. They also avoided steep slopes to make it easier to traverse by foot or for pulling a cart.

Building a road some two thousand plus years ago wasn't entirely far off from what we use to build roads today, either. Far more rudimentary, materials consisted of lime, cement, gravel, crushed stone and paving stones. History states that many of these roads remained in use beyond the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, and the Byzantine Empire's fall in 1453 AD, and remained a crucial part of European travel and communications until the development of the railroad system in the 1800s and the highway system in the 20th century. Much of the highway system traversed in Europe today was found to have been built along these ancient roadways, some of which are still intact today.

Well, why not?  A road useful for foot commuters two millennia ago would be as useful for a foot commuter, or perhaps someone riding a bicycle, a Vespa scooter (are those still a thing?) or a Fiat.  As the academic essay, in Nature, notes, "Roman road density correlates with major modern roads."

The complementarity of roads and the river and littoral routes is a topic for future research.  "The importance of riverine and maritime mobility should be highlighted for most transport over long distances, for which Rome is highly centrally located in the empire. Future work should combine this road dataset with navigable rivers and sea connections and alternative modes of transport (e.g. horse courier, ox cart, pack animal), to identify the structure of the multimodal Roman transport system, which will reveal a much higher centrality of regions central in the Mediterranean (such as Italy, Greece, and Tunisia) and especially of major Mediterranean port."