Study challenges “All roads lead to Rome” saying

Researchers in Denmark analyzed nearly 190,000 miles of Roman roads across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa to understand how the empire’s road network functioned.

Tom Brughmans at Aarhus University led a team that created a new map of the Roman road system and discovered that Rome wasn’t the sole central hub for travel.

Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul in Turkey, became a more important center for overland routes after Emperor Constantine moved the imperial capital there in the fourth century A.D. because of its location connecting Europe and Asia. The team found the well-known saying, “All roads lead to Rome,” which originated centuries after the empire fell, doesn’t fully represent the reality of Roman travel.

While Rome remained the center of political and military power, with a population of roughly one million, the study showed that roads in Roman Britain did not lead to Rome. Taco Terpstra, a professor at Northwestern University, explained that Constantinople was a small town called Byzantium before becoming the empire’s capital. He also noted that while the roads were remarkably straight for the time, they were initially built for military movement before serving economic purposes.

Terpstra emphasized that sea travel was the primary way to move goods throughout the empire, as it was more affordable than land routes.