The Great Colonnaded Street of Antioch
About
A shop-lined colonnade running roughly 3 kilometers straight through the city, 27 meters wide and financed in part by Herod the Great and the emperor Tiberius — one of the very first monumental colonnaded streets built anywhere in the Roman world. The earthquake of 13 December 115 CE tore long stretches of it apart, and Trajan himself, wintering in Antioch for the Parthian campaign, barely escaped the collapsing city. On 11 August 117 CE it stood only provisionally patched, its full rebuild still years away.
What happened here
The surface is cambered, drained on both sides, and built to be repaired rather than to last forever. Milestones give the distance to the nearest town and the name of the emperor who last paid for resurfacing. Traffic is mostly feet and hooves; wheeled freight is slow and heavy and, in some towns, banned during daylight. Official messengers use the state relay and change horses at posting stations set roughly a day apart, which is what makes the empire governable. Everyone else walks about twenty miles a day and stops at an inn of doubtful quality. Tombs, shrines and roadside bars line the approaches to any town. Bandits are a real risk on quiet stretches and the army patrols the worst of them.
Sources
Nearby
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Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →