Diagonal Road through Serdica
About
Trajan's engineers paved this stretch of the Singidunum-to-Byzantium highway with stone during the Dacian Wars of 101-106 CE to move legions north through the Balkans. Serdica's promotion to municipium in 106 CE rode on the same military logistics this road carried. It ran straight through the city as its main east-west artery and was still Serdica's principal thoroughfare on the day Trajan died in 117 CE.
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
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 →