Roads on Ancient Rome

Mapping 186,000 Miles of Roman Roads Shows Rome Was Never the Empire's Main Hub

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 20 BC Augustus set up a gilded marker in the Forum, the Milliarium Aureum (the Golden Milestone), to show where every road in the empire began. Two thousand years later we still say all roads lead to Rome. A new study says the empire’s own road map disagrees.

The paper, published in Nature Communications on 15 September, is the first to look at the whole Roman road system at once. The team, from Aarhus University, Queen Mary University of London, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and several other European institutions, worked from Itiner-e, the open digital atlas of ancient roads released last year. It holds close to 300,000 kilometres of road, about 186,000 miles, running from Britain and Morocco to Syria and Arabia.

Roman Bridges: Engineering the Known World

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Romans built bridges the way they built everything: systematically, durably, and in sufficient quantity that their combined effect transformed the physical landscape of three continents. More than 900 Roman bridges have been identified by archaeologists, ranging from small rural crossings to major river spans, and approximately 700 of these survive in some form. The number is less remarkable than the durability: bridges that have been carrying traffic — first Roman, then medieval, then modern — for two thousand years represent an engineering achievement that no subsequent civilization has equaled in pure longevity. Several Roman bridges in active use today are the oldest functioning bridges in the world.

The Roads That Built an Empire

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Rome did not conquer its empire and then build roads to administer it. The roads and the conquest advanced together, each enabling the other in a feedback loop that eventually produced the most extensive road network the ancient world had ever seen. At its peak, the Roman road system covered somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 kilometers, of which roughly 80,000 kilometers were stone-paved primary roads capable of moving legions, supplies, and official communications at speeds that would not be matched in Europe until the nineteenth century.