Do all roads really lead to Rome? New analysis reveals

A new analysis of the road network in the Roman Empire debunks the long-standing myth that “all roads lead to Rome,” as it shows that other important cities, such as Constantinople (now Istanbul), were more central to the road network. “When we look at all land transportation in the entire Roman Empire, we find one route that is the most central through the empire itself, and this route does not pass through Rome,” explained Tom Brugmans, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Culture and Society at Aarhus University in Denmark and one of the co-authors of the new analysis, which was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.

At the height of its expansion in 117 AD, the Roman Empire extended from Britain to the outskirts of the Sahara Desert, and included parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, over an area of ​​approximately 5.5 million square kilometers. Rome was located at the political and economic heart of the empire, but its geographical location made it more central to navigation in the Mediterranean than to the land road network.

“The Italian peninsula is only a prominent land extension within the Mediterranean, so the most central route would have been through the North African coast, then heading east through present-day Turkey and cities like Antioch and Ankara, then passing through Constantinople, before turning toward Rome via Milan,” Brueggemans said. In the year 324, the Roman Emperor Constantine I moved the capital of the empire, for strategic and economic reasons, from Rome to Constantinople, which had until then been known as Byzantium, so it is not surprising that the city was prominent in the road network.

Brugmans and colleagues' analysis is based on a digital atlas of the Roman road network, Itiner-e, published last year and available online. The atlas was compiled based on historical sources, excavation reports, satellite images, and previous data sets, and includes about 300,000 kilometers of roads.

However, the location of only 2.7% of these roads is known with certainty, while about 90% of the map is known with less precision, and about 7% are purely speculative. In the new analysis, which took into account factors such as the elevation, direction and slope of roads, the researchers also looked at other common assumptions about Roman roads.

They showed that these roads were not as straight as is usually thought, and that some important modern roads actually follow the paths of ancient Roman roads, while many other roads, even if described as “Roman,” do not. The origin of the myth: The proverb, “All roads lead to Rome,” dates back to the Middle Ages.

It appeared in writing for the first time in 1175, by the French poet Alain de L’Isle, who wrote in Latin the phrase “Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam,” meaning: “A thousand roads lead people to Rome throughout the ages.” The importance of the road network was clear to the Romans.

In the year 20 BC, Emperor Augustus placed the “Golden Mile” monument in the Roman Forum as a symbolic point from which the main roads in the empire departed. It is believed that this landmark contributed to the emergence of the legend, although the modern meaning of the phrase “all roads lead to Rome” is not literal, but rather indicates that there were different ways to reach the same goal or result.

“It's a medieval proverb, not an antiquity, and it expresses the symbolic centrality of this huge capital to a continent-wide empire,” Brueggemans said. He added: “Rome was located at the crossroads of major sea routes, and was the seat of government, so it was definitely a central city.

But the inaccurate part is talking about land roads.” He continued: “Perhaps what reinforced this myth was the existence of a system of main roads that the emperors used to manage regions and exchange information, similar to a communications network, and Rome was depicted as the center of that main network of roads.

It is remarkable how this proverb persists even though it is demonstrably false.” The researchers also investigated the validity of the belief that Roman roads were uniformly straight, noting that this assumption holds a grain of truth, and there are indeed surviving examples of straight Roman roads such as the Via Appia in Rome, but the Romans had to deal with different terrain and technical limitations.

Where the terrain allowed, the Romans built straight roads, especially in low-lying areas such as Western Europe and North Africa. However, even these roads were not as straight as modern roads, mostly due to engineering limitations.

"We have also demonstrated a surprising degree of continuity between Roman roads and major modern roads," Brugmans added. "It is quite extraordinary that such ancient infrastructure is still visible today, defining the way people interact in the modern era."

An example of this is the Via Augusta, which extends about 1,600 kilometers, from present-day Cadiz, in southern Spain, to the Pyrenees in France. In the Spanish city of Tarragona, the old road passes through a triumphal arch called the "Arc of Pera", while a modern road is located alongside it.

This arrangement demonstrates one way in which ancient Roman paths have survived, Brugmans said, as larger, modern, paved roads run roughly along the ancient route. In other cases, people can still walk on ancient Roman roads, such as the Via Appia, which retains some of the original volcanic stones skillfully paved by the Romans.

However, most of the ancient road network has disappeared or been buried over the centuries. Also, not all roads called Roman are Roman, according to Brugmans.

He said: "Everywhere in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, there are roads with names that indicate that they are Roman... but a large number of them are not Roman roads."

He added: "This shows how entrenched the idea is that the Romans left a huge impact on infrastructure, as people assume that if we see a straight, impressive, relatively ancient road, it must be Roman, although that is not true everywhere." Francesca Fulminanti, a senior researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved in the new analysis, said that the results of the study are striking, but rather than turning previous assumptions on their head, they confirm and prove mathematically things that have previously been generally described.

She added that road network data is not completely accurate in all areas, but this problem does not detract from the results, as it is common in large-scale projects of this type. Mathematical proof Brugmans also pointed out that although the Romans built many roads, they inherited some from the territories they conquered, meaning that their control over the structure of the network was rather limited.

The researchers behind the analysis said that their work is not finished yet, and that they plan to add river and sea routes to the network in the future. Bond, an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the study, said the research findings are important because they provide a deeper understanding of the Roman road system, along with reusable data to improve future models.

Bond added that the analysis also allows some myths to be corrected. Bond noted that these results were made possible thanks to the work of previous summit projects that created maps of the ancient world before “Itiner-e,” and contributed to “paving the way within this field.”