ANCIENT ROMAN ROADS

The Romans built thousands of miles of wonderful roads, to connect every part of the empire back to Rome. Up until about a hundred years ago, people were still using these roads, as roads! In recent years, instead of building new roads, modern engineers simply covered many of the old Roman roads with a coat of asphalt. The Romans did a wonderful job building roads!

To help people find their way, while traveling these roads, the Romans more or less invented the milestone which grew increasingly wordy, and increasingly tall, to be easily readable from a vehicle. Some are 6 feet tall. The milestone usually gave the mileage to the nearest large city, sometimes to an intermediate place as well; and the date and perhaps who paid for the road.

There seems to have been no formal traffic code, including what side of the road to drive on; but there were various laws about what you could and could not do on a given type and location of road, and when you could do it. Roads were considerably less crowded, and much less travel than today. The real danger on a road was ambush by highway robbers: which shows that a travelling vehicle could be alone on any given stretch of road.










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