For instance, Via Appia (Appian Way), which connected Rome to the port of Brundisium in southern Italy, was more than 300 miles (500 kilometers) long, and sizable parts of it were straight. Another Roman road, Stane Street in southern England, was built to connect London to Chichester. Much of the road, which stretches roughly 57 miles (92 km), is straight. The Middle East also had straight Roman roads, including a coastal avenue from Antioch, Turkey, to what is now Gaza.
In some instances, the Romans built on top of older roads that existed before they conquered an area. Their "road network incorporated older roads from a broad range of different societies and polities," Marion Kruse, an associate professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, told Live Science in an email.
"Three instruments were used consistently by Roman road builders: the dioptra, the groma, and the chorobatus [or chorobates]," Adriana Panaite, a researcher at the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology in Romania who has studied Roman roads extensively, told Live Science in an email.
Sign up for our newsletter(Image credit: Marilyn Perkins / Future)While the dioptra is known from ancient texts, no example of it has ever been found in an archaeological dig, according to M.J.T. Lewis, who was a historian at the University of Hull in the U.K. In his book "Surveying Instruments of Greece and Rome" (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Lewis noted that the design of the dioptra varied considerably. The different designs tended to include a stand and a disc-shaped base with a tube-shaped sighting instrument attached. An ancient surveyor could look through the tube and see a distant object without extraneous light interfering, allowing for a better view.
But the most important tool Roman surveyors used was the groma, Joseph Lewis, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who has conducted extensive research on Roman roads, told Live Science in an email. The "groma was the principal tool of the mensor — the land surveyor — when planning long, straight alignments," he noted. "These alignments were then often used when constructing roads across gentle terrain."
A cross section of a Roman road. (Image credit: DEA PICTURE LIBRARY via Getty Images)Multiple Roman surveyors could use the weights on their poles to ensure any road they were building was going in the right direction.
However, the techniques used to build roads throughout the Roman Empire probably varied somewhat, meaning experts "should be cautious about assuming that there was a single 'Roman' technique for road building," Kruse said. He noted that the Roman Empire covered a vast area and lasted for a long period of time.
Not all roads were straight
One reason for the variation in Roman roads was likely the diversity of the laborers who built them. "In all likelihood, road-building work was done by a mix of soldiers, slaves — especially prisoners — and free locals called upon to help as part of a 'corvee' obligation imposed by their local community on Rome's instructions," Richard Talbert, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Live Science in an email. But paid laborers were probably used for some skilled tasks, such as building bridges, Talbert said.
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"We believe that the Romans preferred relatively straight roads in places where there was very little friction offered by the topography," such as flatland areas, Brughmans said. But in areas with more difficult terrain, such as mountainous regions, the roads would often not run straight.
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