All Roads Lead To...
May. 28th, 2012 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenA fun little toy I found the other day:
http://orbis.stanford.edu
Essentially, it’s a route planner of the Roman Empire. You plug in two locations, and it gives you a route, and you can select what sort of transport your traveller would have access too – on foot, ox cart, horseback travel, or whatever. It tells you how long it would take, and a rough idea of the cost of the journey in denarii.
One thing it really illustrates is the importance of the Mediterranean to the Roman world – we’ve come to think of seas and oceans as barriers to empires, but by looking at the actual travel times, it becomes obvious that Alexandria and Carthage are practically next-door neighbours to Rome compared to inland Europe. And Londinium is completely out in the boondocks – it’s fairly obvious when looking at the distances this way why the Romans never pushed on to Scotland or Ireland. They were already well beyond reasonable administrative distances from Rome in the first place…
http://orbis.stanford.edu
Essentially, it’s a route planner of the Roman Empire. You plug in two locations, and it gives you a route, and you can select what sort of transport your traveller would have access too – on foot, ox cart, horseback travel, or whatever. It tells you how long it would take, and a rough idea of the cost of the journey in denarii.
One thing it really illustrates is the importance of the Mediterranean to the Roman world – we’ve come to think of seas and oceans as barriers to empires, but by looking at the actual travel times, it becomes obvious that Alexandria and Carthage are practically next-door neighbours to Rome compared to inland Europe. And Londinium is completely out in the boondocks – it’s fairly obvious when looking at the distances this way why the Romans never pushed on to Scotland or Ireland. They were already well beyond reasonable administrative distances from Rome in the first place…