I come from Chicago. Around here, we like to say that there are two
seasons: winter, and road construction. Every spring, orange cones appear along
the highways, the lanes narrow, and big yellow machines set to work. They grind up the asphalt
and batter down the curbs, and lay down endless loads of gravel and concrete. When their work is
done, the highway’s a thing of beauty – for a few months. Then a new crop of cracks and bumps and
potholes sprouts, and the cycle begins again. Although most of America’s interstate highways
are only 50 or 60 years old, virtually all of them have been rebuilt multiple times,
and some – like those around Chicago – have to be almost constantly patched and resurfaced.
When you compare the Roman roads, whose huge paving stones and elegant bridges seem untouched
by millennia of wear and tear, it’s hard not to think that our modern methods are lacking.
American expressways and Roman roads, of course, were built with fundamentally different materials
for fundamentally different purposes. But if nothing else, comparison has the effect
of accentuating the scale and achievements of the Roman road network. By the second century,
there were well over 50,000 miles (that is, 80,000 kilometers) of Roman roads, radiating out from the
golden milestone in the Forum to every corner of the Empire. Conduits of trade, instruments of
rule, monuments to the imperial order, they ran in uncompromising lines through every terrain.
Roman roads skirted the burning edge of the Sahara, where sand drifted among the milestones.
They ran through the marshes of northern Europe, suspended on wooden pilings
over seas of mud. They cut through the heart of the Alps, grooved and banked to
prevent wagons from hurling over icy cliffs. Perhaps the best sense of the network’s scale
comes from the so-called Peutinger Map, a medieval copy of a late Roman atlas.
Though distorted to fit a narrow scroll, the map is remarkably detailed,
featuring regions, peoples, and some 2,700 places, all connected by the red lines of the Roman roads.
The distances between towns are carefully marked, as are the waystations along the highways.
The Roman roads were equally impressive on the ground. Designed by legionary surveyors and
engineers, and often built by detachments of troops, they were marvels of practical
engineering. The most familiar method of constructing them, used for the great
highways of central Italy, began with digging the roadbed down to a firm layer of subsoil.
This trench was then filled with compacted layers of rubble and gravel, and capped with a pavement
of local stone, which was crowned to shed water and wedged in place with curb blocks.
There was always, however, a great deal of regional variation.
Outside cities, roads were often surfaced with gravel or packed dirt instead of paving
stones. In deserts, they might be little more than a simple track cleared of rocks.
In swamps, on the other hand, they were supported with an intricate underpinning
of beams and pilings. On the approaches to large cities and in the most hazardous mountain passes,
ruts were sometimes carved into the pavement to control traffic and prevent accidents.
The highways of Roman Italy were paved to a width of 14 Roman feet (that is,
a little more than 4 meters), and often flanked by gravel paths for riders and pedestrians. Tall
milestones stood along the shoulder, inscribed with the name and titles of the reigning emperor
and the distance to the nearest town or landmark. Every few miles, a clump of trees might mark an
inn or country shrine. And when tombs began to appear on the roadside, a city was never far away.
The Roman road network was designed, first and foremost, for military use.
Soldiers built the roads, guarded their strategic points, and used them constantly.
In fact, the whole design of the roads, with their undeviating lines and long straight slopes,
was shaped by a single aim: allowing infantry to march as quickly as possible from point to point.
The roads were used, however, by all kinds of traffic. We might imagine a farmer and his mule
bringing a load of vegetables to market, a woman walking to visit her mother in the next village,
a wealthy man in a litter being carried to a fashionable healing sanctuary, a shepherd herding
his flock along the roadside, and occasionally – galloping along the bridle paths – a rider of the
imperial post, the Roman Empire’s swiftest and most secure way of sending messages.
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Back on the road. Many aspects of the Roman highways seem modern. They had waysides. They
had highway police. They had tolls. And they were characterized by feats of civil
engineering that would not be excelled until the nineteenth century. Take, for example,
the Roman road to the St. Bernard Passes of the Alps, which sprang over mountain chasms, drove
through boulder-strewn slopes, and culminated in a spectacular rock cut more than 220 m long.
The Roman roads were served by thousands of bridges.
Hundreds of these have survived to the present, and a remarkable number
still carry traffic. One of the most impressive, pictured in this video kindly sent by YouTuber
unOrdinaryWorld, is located in Merida, Spain, the Roman Emerita Augusta.
At 790 meters, this is the longest extant Roman bridge. It was used by traffic until 1991.
Other bridges were even more impressive. The Bridge of Augustus at Narni,
for example, was up to 33 m high, and featured a central arch 32 m wide. It seems to have stood
more or less intact until the Middle Ages, when it was partly leveled by earthquakes.
The Romans also carved road tunnels through dangerous mountain terrain.
Perhaps the most famous example is in the Furlo Pass, where a tunnel 40 m long and wide enough
for two lanes of wagon traffic carried the Via Flaminia through a high ridge.
The tunnel was used by cars until the 1980’s. Perhaps most awe-inspiring section of the entire
Roman road network was located on what is now the border of Serbia and Romania,
where the Danube rushes through the rugged gorge called the Iron Gates.
Just below the Gates, Trajan erected the greatest of all Roman bridges, a kilometer-long leviathan
supported by 20 immense piers. Upstream, Trajan’s engineers hacked a highway
through the riverside cliffs, suspending part of the roadbed over the water on enormous beams.
Roman roads were designed to carry the traffic of their day – riders, wagons, and (above all)
marching soldiers – in any weather. They were meant to be both convenience and symbol, and
served both purposes well. The sheer durability of the system, with its hundreds of still
functioning bridges, is incredible. But the Roman roads, like any roads, were far from immortal.
Milestones record numerous repairs and reconstructions of the major roads.
The inscriptions sometimes mention damage caused by heavy rain or flash floods,
but the most common causes given for repair are age and wear. The famous
Via Appia, which ran from Rome to Brundisium, was repaired many times over the centuries,
and repeatedly improved with new bridges and viaducts. One inscription notes
the resurfacing of a worn-out section of limestone paving with hard-wearing basalt.
Despite the awesome longevity of their bridges, most Roman roads vanished during the Middle
Ages, their paving stones buried or were pulled up for reuse, their grassy beds and half-filled
ditches running uncannily straight to nowhere. Yet in the early modern period, when European
engineers began to build new highways, they consciously imitated the Roman roads,
sometimes to the point of trying to reconstruct an ancient road network. The pioneering road-building
methods of John McAdam, likewise, were partly inspired by Roman techniques.
Modern expressways, however, are very different beasts from Roman roads. First and foremost,
they’re designed to carry motor vehicles, which are not only heavier than horse-drawn carts,
but also far faster and much more numerous. In terms of sheer stress, a busy section of
American highway probably takes more punishment in a single day than most Roman roads did in a year.
Modern roads are engineered to handle those enormous stresses without being prohibitively
expensive to build. In practice, that means a lot of reinforced concrete and asphalt. Though highly
effective, and cost-effective, these materials begin to break down fairly quickly under heavy
traffic. In this sense, and in the sense that even most expressway bridges in America are designed to
last only a half-century or so, modern highways really are less durable than the Roman roads.
All this means, of course, is that modern highways serve a different purpose from their
ancient predecessors. The Roman roads weren’t better engineered; they’re just products of
construction methods perfectly tailored to the traffic and terrain of the ancient Mediterranean.
The fact that ancient and modern highways aren’t directly comparable,
however, does nothing to diminish the achievement of the roads
that were one of the greatest products and most enduring legacies of the Roman peace.
If you enjoyed this video, please consider supporting toldinstone on Patreon. You might also
enjoy my book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants. Thanks for watching.