How Ancient Romans Traveled Without Maps

In an age when many of us could hard­ly make our way to an unfa­mil­iar gro­cery store with­out rely­ing on a GPS nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem, we might well won­der how the Romans could estab­lish and sus­tain their mighty empire with­out so much as a prop­er map. That’s the ques­tion addressed by the His­to­ria Mil­i­tum video above, “How Did Ancient Peo­ple Trav­el With­out Maps?” Or more to the point, how did they trav­el with­out scaled maps — that is, ones “in which the map’s dis­tances were pro­por­tion­al to their actu­al size in the real world,” like almost all those we con­sult on our screens today?

The sur­viv­ing maps from the ancient Roman world tend not to take great pains adher­ing to true geog­ra­phy. Yet as the Roman Empire expand­ed, lay­ing roads across three con­ti­nents, more and more Romans engaged in long-dis­tance trav­el, and for the most part seem to have arrived at their intend­ed des­ti­na­tions.

To do so, they used not maps per se but “itin­er­aries,” which tex­tu­al­ly list­ed towns and cities along the way and the dis­tance between them. By the fourth cen­tu­ry, “all main Roman roads along with 225 stop­ping sta­tions were com­piled in a doc­u­ment called the Itin­er­ar­i­um Antoni­ni, the Itin­er­ary of Emper­or Anto­nius Pius.”

This high­ly prac­ti­cal doc­u­ment includes most­ly roads that “passed through large cities, which pro­vid­ed bet­ter facil­i­ties for hous­ing, shop­ping, bathing, and oth­er trav­el­er needs.” With this infor­ma­tion, “a trav­el­er could copy the spe­cif­ic dis­tances and sta­tions they need­ed to reach their des­ti­na­tion.” Still today, some sev­en­teen cen­turies lat­er, “most peo­ple would­n’t use a paper scaled map for trav­el, but would instead break their jour­ney down into a list of sub­way sta­tions, bus stops, and inter­sec­tions.” And if you were to attempt to dri­ve across Europe, mak­ing a mod­ern-day Roman Empire road trip, you’d almost cer­tain­ly rely on the dis­tances and points of inter­est pro­vid­ed by the syn­the­sized voice read­ing aloud from the vast Itin­er­ar­i­um Antoni­ni of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

The Largest Ear­ly Map of the World Gets Assem­bled for the First Time: See the Huge, Detailed & Fan­tas­ti­cal World Map from 1587

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Down­load 131,000 His­toric Maps from the Huge David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.