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Posted on 10/06/2026 5:29:23 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Augustus, ancient Rome's first emperor, placed a gilded monument called the Milliarium Aureum, or Golden Milestone, in the Roman Forum in 20 BC to mark the symbolic starting point for all roads in the sprawling empire. These roads indeed were the backbone of the world's first continental-scale transportation system.
Now, researchers have conducted a detailed structural analysis of the empire's road network, spanning roughly 190,000 miles (300,000 km) of routes crisscrossing Europe, the Middle East and North Africa...
The researchers also documented a correlation in many regions between the old Roman roads and modern highways...
Some roads were very durable, constructed with a combination of materials including crushed stone, lime cement, gravel and paving stones. Traffic consisted mostly of people walking and riding on animals including horses, donkeys, mules and camels, as well as pack animals and animal-drawn carts and carriages.
Road distances from Rome were measured from the Milliarium Aureum.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
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A street in Ostia, the ancient seaport of Rome, Italy, at the mouth of the river Tiber, is pictured in this photograph released on September 14, 2026.Tom Brughmans/Handout via Reuters
Thanks for the link!
“Traffic consisted mostly of people walking and riding on animals including horses, donkeys, mules and camels, as well as pack animals and animal-drawn carts and carriages.”
No F1 race cars? No 18 wheelers? No Fiats? How can that be?
When we were in Spain in December, 1965, we drove on a highway that was very likely built by the Romans.
Litters were mostly in the city, while chariots were on the highways and in provincial towns like Pompeii, where there were stepping stones for peds to avoid the runoff and animal, uh, waste in the streets. The spacing is more or less consistent to permit the passage of carts and chariots.
https://www.world-archaeology.com/features/crosstown-traffic-driving-streets-pompeii/
In 1966, I saw plenty of Fiats and Alfa Romeos while fighting traffic jams on the Via Salaria, one of Europe's oldest highways, in Rome.
Roman structures have endured pretty well in Spain. Besides the roads, there’s a lighthouse and a number of bridges with various levels of preservation.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=roman-era+bridge+in+spain
https://www.torredeherculesacoruna.com/torre/es
My response was that the Great Commission to, "...go and make disciples of all nations..." was given to humans. Not to Christ, but to His followers, and as such God's word was meant to be spread by human means. This was not possible until there was some semblance of a Pax Romana and its accompanying infrastructure. So to answer the question, God sent his son as soon as it was feasible for us to accomplish His intended purposes.
Certainly it would have been far easier to wait until the jet age and/or information age. But God didn't wait to send His son and His Gospel until it was easy to spread it to all nations, but only until it was possible.
(a separate topic is probably no warranted for this one)How This Movie Erased Rome for 36 Years | 8:01
wolfcrow | 469K subscribers | 148,039 views | October 5, 2026
YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.
I was standing near a Roman road in the Old City in Jerusalem one time and there was a group of Toyrist walking on it. The Israelis had left the cobblestones exposed, so it was hard to walk on it. One of them asked me “Who the hell built this road?” I told him The Romans fid, 2000 years ago. They sure don’t last long, do they?
Prior to 1990, there were two surviving stone streets up on the Belknap Hill neighborhood of Grand Rapids MI. I took my first car up one of those to visit someone, and it was slow going, probably better to have had four-wheel and/or offroad vehicle.
It goes a long way in explaining why these roads became legiondary.
Here in America we celebrate old roads like the cobblestone streets in the North-East, brick streets as found in some towns in the Mid-West, and 90 year-old discontinued highways out West like Route 66.
Wow. “The Fall of Rome” — the most epic movie we’ve never heard of! That looks fantastic. I can’t believe it was a box office flop. And never released in 2.6:1 aspect ratio. How sad.
bkmk for later study
• Mechanical Odometer: Documented by the architect Vitruvius (and sometimes attributed to Archimedes), the Romans mounted a gear-driven system to a cart or chariot wheel. As the cart moved, a toothed gear turned after a set number of wheel revolutions (400 revolutions of a 12.5-foot wheel) to equal 5,000 feet [the Roman mile].
• Pebble Dropper: Each time a full Roman mile was completed, the internal gear mechanism released a small stone or pebble into a bronze container. Surveyors or drivers simply counted the stones in the bucket to calculate the exact distance traveled.
I live very rural - that’s pretty much what our ‘roadways’ still look like today, LOL!
How did the Romans manage to screw things up for themselves? For Pete’s Sake! They invented:
Arches!
Sewers and Sanitation!
Roads!
Aqueducts!
Numerals!
Surgery!
Newspapers!
It must’ve been Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll that eventually sidelined them. ;)
😁
When we lived in Brindisi walking the Appian Way inland from the harbor was great fun.
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