History of Roman Roads

The vision the ancients had of their world was quite different from the one their descendants do. According to the classical vision, the idea of knowing something different was simply not appealing. The fact of searching for or wanting to know something unknown, even when they knew it existed was just unusual.

Strabo, who considered himself a real “geographer” and was interested only in that Earth he knew the exact language for, reprimanded Eratosthenes for describing the Earth as any other celestial body. A perfectly suitable, refined expression to mean that, supposing there was something beyond the “world”, i.e., beyond that part of the world Strabo lived in, he was absolutely not interested in learning it. Moreover, in a way, Rome regarded itself as the only State in the world whose emperors had never bothered to appoint ministers of foreign affairs. Except for some philosophers, as the abovementioned case of Eratosthenes, this was the typical approach adopted by both the Roman and the Greek world.

To get a clearer idea, let the generals of Alexander III of Macedonia be our example: since they assumed that the conquest of Minor Asia, Syria and Egypt actually allowed them the control of the whole “world”, they could not really understand why their young, stubborn king insisted in continuing his campaigns on “no man’s lands” like landlocked territories, places without a civilization, with no temples or culture. What attraction could such desolated lands as Media, Parthia, and Bactriana ever exert to the ancient Greeks? Places where, at best, the human presence had been represented by shepherds from time to time.

After clarifying the ancients’ vision of the world, we need to wonder what “their world” was like, or better, in practical terms, what the Roman empire was like between the 1st and the 3rd c. a.C. in order to have a better understanding of the development of roads and tracks into a network. We may well say it covered a huge space, approximately 5 million km2, the territory today occupied by thirty nations, well beyond the borders of current Europe.

Irrespective of individual attitudes and any personal sympathy towards Middle East politics, when we, Europeans, consider the reference frame of our civilization, we cannot deny it is a “continental” reality, with some possible openings to the Atlantic.

Nowadays, we perceive the Mediterranean sea as a border. It is common sense that another civilization thrives beyond that, indeed a very attractive and charming one, but we are aware it is a completely different world, just as China, India or Guatemala are. In ancient times, though, the Mediterranean sea was nothing but the Romans’ lake – the Empire coincided with the Mediterranean basin, the so called Mare Nostrum. On the contrary, the Imperial border, the “limes”, was marked by the Rhine and the Danube. Now at the core of modern Europe, those great rivers were seen by the Romans as the outposts of the civilization. While other eastern provinces, like Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia may seem to us faraway, exotic lands, they were militarily and culturally incorporated into the Empire, extending as far as the African deserts. The Roman officers and miles were actually more likely to be at ease in Mesopotamia than they were in the freezing northern plains. Yet, that feeling was quite common in the ancient world culture. The “World” of Roman legionaries corresponded to the Mediterranean basin, as it had already been true for Greek rowers.

Such a divergent spatial and geographical vision between us and the ancients is evident from the comparison between the map showing Roman roads and the synoptic chart of the improvement works to be carried out on the trans-European transport network.