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Did all roads really lead to Rome?

2022-07-28 19:14:12Histori SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Did all roads really lead to Rome?
Did all roads really lead to Rome?

By Benjamin Plackett – Livescience

At the height of its power, the Roman Empire possessed a road network that stretched from Gibraltar to the marshes of Mesopotamia. As the old popular expression says "All roads lead to Rome". But was it really so?

The answer is not so easy as saying "yes" or "no" without any hesitation. It's a bit more complicated than that. In 2015, 3 researchers from "Moovel Lab", a team of German urban planning experts, cast a uniform grid of nearly 500,000 points on a map of Europe.

Did all roads really lead to Rome?

These points did not represent ancient or modern cities, but were simply random places from which a journey to the imperial capital might once have started. The team then used an algorithm to calculate the best route to Rome, using modern roads from each of those starting points.

Their results showed a mesmerizing network of roads that actually led to Rome, and along the way they also connected other major cities such as London, Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) and Paris, which were also part of the ancient empire.

News of this type of map went viral. But in fact that experiment did not prove that all roads lead to Rome. If the researchers had done the same thing, but instead of Rome they had calculated the routes from which Berlin or Moscow could be reached most quickly from the same 500,000 points, the map would show a series of equally things that led to those cities.

"Our study did not answer the question of whether all roads really lead to Rome. It was an exploration of 99 percent of that question," says Filip Shmit, one of the group's experts. However, that experiment still tells us something about the durability of Roman roads.

Most of Europe's road infrastructure is still designed to connect major cities with the Italian capital, potentially a legacy of the former empire. Other researchers have also found this to be true.

The map, created by Moovel Lab, looked at the best way to get to Rome using modern roads. "We've used computer modeling to see the most likely or most logical routes connecting two given points, and then we compare that to our knowledge of Roman roads to see if they're similar," Cezar says.

Parsero-Ubina, a landscape archaeologist at the Institute of Heritage Sciences in Madrid, Spain.

"Today's roads are often the same in most cases as those of the past," he adds.

So many of Europe's multi-lane highways are the descendants of Roman roads. However, this has changed in recent years, emphasizes Ubina. "Today, new highways avoid populated areas to save money in the expropriation process. This means that some highways today do not follow the trajectory of the old Roman roads", he underlines.

And this brings us to the question at hand: What was the logic of the Romans in building roads?

Did all roads really lead to Rome? "It depends on the importance of the road. The logic of how an ancient empire operated is not that different from a modern country. The Romans were not so different from us, they were just trying to minimize the roads to save time", says Ubino.

Main roads were straight lines whenever the geographical landscape permitted, and they connected important cities with other important cities. These routes were only possible after a country had been properly annexed by the Romans and all military opposition had been submitted, otherwise it would have been unsafe to travel on such routes.

In the early days after the conquest of a province, when the barbarians (non-Romans) were still resisting the invasion, the Romans would use the safest routes that traversed less densely forested or mountainous areas. Meanwhile, when peace prevailed in an annexed province, these roads formed a vital link to expedite trade and keep the frontline army well supplied with troops and food supplies.

Did all roads really lead to Rome?

At its height, the roads of the Roman Empire crossed the continents, to connect important cities and towns with its capital. "The main roads connected important places, and so in one way or another, they all ended or began in Rome. But it's not like you had to go through Rome when traveling from London to Paris, just because the network allowed it," Ubina emphasizes.

These main roads were designed for the movement of wheeled carts and animals. So they were much more sophisticated than the muddy paths.

“They were built with different layers as well as rock, and finally with large slabs of stone on top. They were not flat, but cube-shaped to allow proper drainage.

Then came other secondary roads that were not paved. They connected more cities and towns, rather than providing any sort of route to Rome. So all Roman roads led to Rome? Not exactly, but the most important ones eventually got you there. The premise of the question may be wrong anyway, because most people going to Rome did not follow the land routes.

The connection by sea was much more useful because it was faster and cheaper. For example, if you wanted to travel from western Iberia to Rome, then you would probably get on a ship and not on a horse or carriage," concludes Ubina.

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