All Roads Lead to Rome

Jake G Is my title clickbatey? Well if you were expecting a remake of the song "Take me home, country roads," by John Denver then yes. Am I going to stop making cheesy jokes with Roman roads? No. To be fair, there is an argument to be made that Ostian roads took people home. Ostia was and still is the port town of Rome. Many people and resources have departed from their journey on the sea by stepping onto a road in Ostia to begin their final leg of their journey to Rome. I find the notion of travelling merchants or legionnaires arriving by ship from the end of a long campaign on the fringes of the empire to be a pretty sight. Oh, the stories that people must have told at the taverns along the streets of Ostia after concluding their sea voyages. A street of Ostia. By Jake G Take a moment to look at how well this road appears to be preserved. This is the same road that would have been subject to Rome's 70 million units of grain each year that were transported from the mills...

By Jake G Something that I have been contemplating about nearly every time I see an ancient Roman road is whether or not the roads from back home would even still have a semblance of being a road after 2000 years without repair.  Every time my hypothesis is a resounding no. Modern asphalt versus ancient Roman cobblestone. The cobblestone is just too solid here. When I was working on a paving crew I used to hear about how ancient Greece had asphalt. I never really looked into these claims nor did I take the word from my site supervisor to be scholarly. However, something that I can now say with certainty is that the Greeks and Romans both had access to asphalt according to an article "Nursing Mothers in Greek and Roman Medicine" by Julie Laskaris (459). I know exactly what you're thinking right now because I'm thinking the exact same thing... Nothing strikes up the thought of paved asphalt roads quite like the thought of nursing babies right? Yeah, that definitely stru...

  Out of the 16 students eagerly walking through the market of Trajan only one of them was looking towards the ground at the road, that was me.... Hi. It was June 12th, and I was yet to present about Trajan's column that awaited me beyond the gates of the market. Did I also mention that I was sick with a nasty cold? It was a day full of pre-performance anxiety and snot. Something that the roads of Trajan's market and I had in common that day is that we both looked battered and weathered.  Photo of the roads in Trajan's market. Jake G. As you can see, the pavement has cracks on the solid pieces of stone themselves. Regardless, this is still remarkably durable to last 1918 years since their construction began in 106CE (Julian Bennett, 148). Trajan's market was one of the grand public buildings constructed in his forum after the second Dacian war. This was due to the vast amount of wealth he took as the spoils of war and put it to use to ensure that his wars with Dacia wer...

An amateur road nerd's impressions of Herculaneum's streets  Jake Graham Herculaneum was the next location that my class got to visit. I remember being eager to compare these streets with those of Pompeii right away.  I noticed that there were no crossing stones that designated a place to cross in Herculaneum. If I recall correctly, our professor stated that those stones were more so for people to cross over the streams of waste that may have been washed down the street. I guess that would make sense with the fact that Pompeii had a larger population than Herculaneum. Scholarship sets the population of Pompeii around 15,000 prior to the eruption of Vesuvius (Miko Flohr, 54). Herculaneum is said to have been a town of roughly 5000 people (Luigi and Lorsenso Capasso, 1826). I wonder if the size difference of these ancient towns is the actual reason for this difference in road construction. I mean 5000 people can still produce a lot of excrement that needs flushing through the ro...

 An amateur road nerd's impression of the roads of Pompeii Jake Graham. The second day of the Roman history study abroad trip led our class to the ancient site of Pompeii. The sight of ancient dwellings and public spaces such as the amphitheater and the forum were mesmerizing. However, I couldn't help but notice that the thing that connected all of these wonderful places within Pompeii together was being overlooked by nearly all tourists who passed by me. Infact these people were stepping, running, jumping, and spilling water bottles on it!  What is this archaeological masterpiece that I'm referring to you might wonder? It is the roads of Pompeii itself. The thing that I find fascinating is the fact that these roads are nearly 2000 years old and still serve a purpose for Pompeii to this day through modern tourism. These same roads that facilitated the hustle and bustle of a city full of Romans is still facilitating the swarms of tourists who flood the streets daily. To me t...