Researchers Have Analyzed the Roman Empire’s 190,000-Mile Network of Roads. Turns Out, Not All of Them Led to Rome

But according to new research published in Nature Communications, the ancient Roman Empire’s sprawling highways weren’t as connected to the Eternal City, or quite as sophisticated, as that saying and other commonly held notions about them suggest. We still walk Roman roads in the region today? These are widely held assumptions, even among academics,” Tom Brughmans, one of the study’s co-authors and an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, tells New Scientist’s James Urquhart.

Such claims have prevented historians from interrogating the Roman road system, Brughmans tells the London Times’ Rhys Blakely. For their recent study, the researchers analyzed topographical data and historical context to make judgments about that network. They aimed to gauge the ancient roads’ straightness and composition, which cities they connected and whether they remain in use.

They concluded that the Romans built straight roads where the landscape allowed, that their major roads are “moderately positively correlated” with modern highways and that other Roman cities were better connected than the Eternal City. In 20 B.C., Augustus, ancient Rome’s first emperor, erected the Milliarium Aureum, or Golden Milestone, in the Roman Forum. The gilded monument served as a symbolic marker for the starting point of all roads in the vast empire.

It was commissioned by the statesman Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 B.C.E. and triggered a steady increase of road construction, which further ramped up when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire in 27 B.C.E. Emperors began conquering and annexing foreign lands, from modern-day Turkey to Britain (the Roman provinces Galatia and Britannia, respectively). To promote trade and travel within and between them, leaders ordered legionaries to build roads.

In fact, the Roman Empire’s eastern capital, Byzantium—modern-day Istanbul—was much more connected to the wider realm than Rome. As for the roads’ engineering and composition, the researchers determined that Roman roads weren’t as “straight” as reputed. Although Romans “favored straight routes where possible,” they didn’t always carve the most direct route between points A and B, Adam Pažout, the study’s lead author and an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says in a statement from Queen Mary University of London.

"The study shows that Roman engineers adapted road construction to the landscape,” Pažout explains. They determined how Europeans traveled for a long time, well after the Roman Empire’s fall in the fifth century C.E., and their impact is indeed observable in modern road maps. As Pažout tells , Roman roads were used to facilitate continental communications through the medieval period, until the advent of 19th-century railroads and 20th-century highways, some of which eventually followed earlier Roman paths.