Evidence item

The consistently high centrality of provincial capitals and main roads suggests that the development of the network involved complex, system-level decision-making. Rome itself was not the dominant hub of the Empire’s land transport network, and the late antique capital Byzantium was more central to empire-wide land mobility. The researchers found that the Roman road network still has a measurable relationship with modern transport infrastructure nearly 2,000 years later, though this relationship is uneven. Roman and modern roads show a moderate correlation across the former empire overall, but the strength of this relationship varies considerably from place to place.