Not All Roads Led to Rome, a New Roman Road Map Shows
“All roads lead to Rome” is one of the oldest sayings in the Western world. A new map of the Roman road system says the Romans built it differently.
Researchers mapped 299,171 kilometers of Roman roads, roughly 186,000 miles, across the empire at its territorial peak in 117 C.E. Smithsonian magazine describes the network as nearly 190,000 miles. The team, co-directed by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and connected to the Itiner-e project, published its analysis in Nature Communications under the title “Network science reveals the structure and lasting impact of the Roman road system.”
Rome was not the hub
The researchers turned the map into a network graph and ranked places by how central they were to overland travel by foot or cart. Antioch, Ancyra (modern Ankara), Byzantium (modern Istanbul) and Corinth all ranked ahead of Rome. Byzantium stood out because it linked the European and Asian sides of the network across the Bosporus and the Dardanelles.
Even inside Italy, Rome did not sit on the single most important road segment. Historian Tom Brughmans, who worked on the map, said people assume Rome sat at the center of a spider’s web of roads, “and that’s simply not true.”
Who the roads did favor
Provincial capitals show up as hubs. Twenty-four of the empire’s 45 provincial capitals sat along roads in the top fifth for empire-wide overland connectivity, so planners did not pick those cities at random. The study also found that Roman roads tended to run straight where the terrain allowed, though less straight than modern roads, and that Roman road density lines up with major modern roads.
A caveat about power
The finding is about overland connectivity, not political power. Experts quoted by Fox News argue that Rome stayed the empire’s center of power, and Brughmans himself said the proverb is medieval in origin and should not be read literally. The authors also note that their dataset is the most detailed so far but not complete.