Travel like it's 0 AD. Plan and travel your next road trip along the old Roman road network. As if they had Google Maps.
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/07/02/ancient-romes-version-of-google-maps-how-long-to-reach-the-beach
https://omnesviae.org/
A digital tool lets users explore the Roman Empire's road network and, using historical data, estimate how long journeys between cities took 2,000 years ago.
A Dutch engineer has reconstructed, with the help of academic sources and ancient cartography, the road map that linked up the Roman Empire. The result, accessible from any browser, including on mobile phones, allows users to plot routes between cities of Antiquity and find out how many days the journey would have taken on foot or on horseback.
The tool is called OmnesViae and is based mainly on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a medieval copy of a Roman map that depicted the cursus publicus, the Empire's official road network.
As the western part of that document has been lost, the data for that area come from the Antonine Itinerary, another record from the Roman era. Behind the project is René Voorburg (source in Spanish), who drew on the work of historian Richard Talbert on the Tabula and on the location data from the Pleiades Project. The code and database are open access and can be consulted on Codeberg.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday July 06, @06:36PM (13 children)
Seems if you want to travel like 0AD, you are restricted to walking and horse drawn carriage? Forget about traveling across oceans.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Monday July 06, @06:51PM
You have to wait about 1000 years or so before we find you. Then another almost 500 years before Columbus discovers you. Which puts that whole 250 year celebration into perspective.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Samantha Wright on Monday July 06, @07:15PM (3 children)
Good news. There was no 0 AD. The Romans used inclusive counting [wikipedia.org], so the AD/BC labelling (which was only devised centuries later) goes straight from 1 BC to 1 AD. Astronomers using the Julian calendar will use year zero to make the math simpler when looking at ancient historical events (thus year -10 is actually 11 BCE) but that's about the only time it comes up.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 07, @03:42PM (2 children)
Somehow the wikipedia article avoids naming it non-algebraic counting or non-integer counting but that's how I've heard it described.
You calculate the age of something by (finish or current year) - (start or birth year) = age in years. Works fine if both years are this century.
If a kid was born in -2 aka 2 BC and you ask the kid how old he is in +3 aka 3 AD, thats +3 - (-2) = 5 hmm wait a minute that's not correct. The kid was one year old in -1, two years old in +1, three years old in +2, and four years old in +3. So the kid is actually 4 years old, that formula doesn't work if you cross zero. So that's aggravating. Hence "non-algebraic counting".
IIRC (which is about 50/50) this was a "trivial" example from an abstract algebra lecture of the concept where the seemingly very uncontroversial formula for age doesn't actually work over some sets of numbers all the time, like integers with a missing zero.
Also the Romans (well, the western ones) did not do the AD/BC thing. Some monk invented the idea in the 5th century AD (probably much earlier, but thats the earliest evidence) and Bede (the venerable one) and Charlemagne wildly popularized that terminology. Before then legal documents dates were written in the form of "In the sixth year of the reign of our lord and savior President Trump..." and after Charlemagne they chilled that down a lot with ""In the 2026th year of the reign of our lord and savior Jesus Christ..." to chill down the politics a bit back in the day, and that got abbreviated to 2026 A.D. or 2026 AD, or just 2026.
Some antichristian entryist types (the stereotypical usual suspects) like to push "CE/BCE" naming. Which is pretty weak "ha ha look how cool I am for trying to unperson some religious leader I hate, oh I bet they're impressed by me now"... naaah we're not LOL, not at all.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday July 07, @04:24PM
Bede was a dude. Just sayin.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Samantha Wright on Tuesday July 07, @10:11PM
It's called inclusive counting because it most commonly comes up in relation to the calculating the day of the year. Romans typically identified the current date as the number of days to the next significant event. For example, today is the Nones of July (Nonae Julii), but yesterday was a.d. II Non. Jul., i.e. the second day before the end of the Nones. The problem you describe with calculating ages only emerged, as you say, in late Antiquity; by then inclusive counting had been used for dates in Rome for some twelve centuries.
Moreover, the habit of inclusive counting isn't really even about dates: it affects quantities measured in natural numbers ("How many people came to your party?" "10, me and 9 others") and is arguably the expected development for any society that develops to a certain point without a term or concept for zero. In these contexts, negative values are absurd, so there is no incentive to concoct a maximally generalist term that addresses the one very niche problem of dates spanning the BC/AD divide. You should not trouble yourself to devise one!
As for the term "Common Era..." well, I happened to get into a discussion with an historian on this topic a year or two ago, so let me recall what came of it.
Common Era, rendered in Latin as Vulgaris aera, was current in the early 18th century among astronomers to distinguish the everyday calendar from the specialized astrological calendars they were using. For example, Johannes Kepler contrasts it with an Apollonian Era based on the movement of the sky. (Kepler stood at the crossroads between post-Renaissance astrology and what we now call astronomy; he was very reluctant to consult the stars to predict the future, but made a boatload doing it.) This is a rhetorical flourish that was not initially meant to displace the A.D. nomenclature, merely emphasize its everyday relevance to the affairs of people. (At the time, I speculated that Kepler, who was of mixed Protestant-Catholic ancestry, might have intended the term "common" to be unifying, i.e., "guys, we here in 1715 all share this calendar, let us be friends" but the historian pointed out swiftly that this is not a connotation of vulgaris, which, moreso than the English word "vulgar," means "worldly.")
Later, Jewish writers took up the term and formalized it into the CE/BCE initialisms we know today, sometimes expanding it as "Current Era" or simply leaving out the suffix when avoidable. The first clear cases of this are in the 19th century. This was done because "Anno Domini" literally means "year of Lord", with the standard reading of "the year of the Lord," which since time immemorial was understood to mean "the year of our Lord." Very reasonably, these Jewish writers did not want to constantly be writing about how Christ was their Lord every time they had to clarify a date. Your remarks about "trying to unperson a religious leader I hate" is quite backward—the original term is extremely loaded, arguably even an oath, and it would literally be a violation of their faith to use it.
Since then, Some authors have found a compromise by calling it the "Christian Era" (still keeping the BCE/CE initialism) which allows them to acknowledge that it is a Christian calendar, therefore quite specifically not erasing its religious origin, while still not endorsing the embedded propagandistic message. I am fond of this personally, as it relinquishes the chauvinism of defaults, which is a defect of the Common or Current Era term; globally, many other calendars are widely used. Interestingly however it is not the only Christian calendar in use; in Eastern Orthodoxy one might still encounter "O.S." (old style) dates using the pre-Gregorian Julian calendar (as opposed to "N.S." (new style) Gregorian dates) or anno Mundi dates, measured from Genesis, in which case the year is currently A.M. 7534 (although amusingly there is also a Jewish A.M. system, based on a different reckoning, which has the current year as 5786.) 'Calendar' on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] lists numerous other systems.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday July 06, @09:19PM (5 children)
They were medium grade sea travelers. Not maritime empire like the Athenians but they certainly shipped a lot of stuff in boats. About 40 years later they were invading Britain using boats, that ability didn't come out of nowhere.
Around 75 BC, young Julius Caesar got ransomed by pirates in the Aegean and was pretty mad about it so he told them after he got ransomed and released, he'd come back with a fleet and crucify them all. They're all like "ha ha OK bro whatever". And he promptly got ransomed, raised a fleet, came back, killed them all. Was Plutarch making this up? Honestly probably not he was pretty straight up. Then again, young Julius was acting without the support of the local governor he went full on bloodthirsty A-Team yet his infinite number of enemies never seemed to complain about it. And Caesar was pretty generous to his former enemies later in life which also makes the story kind of BS. Yeah IIRC this was literally an essay question in an ancient history class a lifetime ago. I'm inclined to think he did it, just based on personality. Its a very Julius Caesar type of thing to do. Anyway the point of the story isn't that it was shocking the Caesar raised a fleet that wiped out a pirate fleet, but that he killed them all without exactly asking the local governor's permission. Even at that point, he had enough power he didn't have to ask a mere governor.
Then you read something like "Heart of Darkness" by Conrad like 1800 years later and wonder how inspired he was WRT the whole "heads on spears" thing by stories about Caesar. Probably Conrad was at least familiar with Plutarch's version of the Caesar's pirate buddies story.
Later on Pompey wiped out "all" the pirates, supposedly the Romans did not find this much of a challenge.
They made big cargo ships, some pretty huge, so they at least kind of knew what they were doing. Roman's dind't consider a ship unusually noteworthy until it was over 500 tons or so, figure maybe 200 feet long. Christopher Columbus's ships were pretty small in comparison like 100 tons so its kind of surprising that at least officially nobody ever loaded up and sailed west until they hit the Americas. They certainly could have done it, pretty easily compared to Columbus's struggles. If the Nina made it there and back a couple times I'm sure the Romains could have.
So yeah, the Romans did a lot of sea travel, but they weren't like Athenians or an early version of the British Naval Empire.
(Score: 4, Informative) by driverless on Tuesday July 07, @01:32AM (2 children)
"Heart of Darkness" was inspired by Leopold II of Belgium, not Caesar. One of the biggest genocidal killers of the 20th century (quite a feat given the competition), and the person for whom the term "crimes against humanity" was invented.
There are monuments to him all over Belgium.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Samantha Wright on Tuesday July 07, @02:07AM
(As Wikipedia is only too keen to note [wikipedia.org], "crimes against humanity" was originally coined to describe American slavery. The same person, George Washington Williams, later applied it to the Congo Free State, after which it caught on. Unlike the pushback in the post-Reconstruction South, there was nobody to dispute, resist, or offend (by circulating) remarks made against Leopold II, at least not in his immediate vicinity.)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 07, @03:21PM
Kind of agree? However:
"Leopold ran the Congo, which he never personally visited" So no, there's no Caesar vibes in Leopold's story. Caesar was very hands on, none of this "never personally visited" stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium [wikipedia.org]
Conrad personally sailed in the Congo so he was aware as an author and inspired but the book IIRC didn't involve anyone Leopold-like.
The irony of Leopold and "crimes against humanity" and all that is its intended to be an attack on one race with the intention of picking one fall guy at the top as the sole problem. However the actual atrocity was multicultural and proves inhumanity comes not from the leader at the top but from 50 layers of middlemen, further and further away, all willing to go "just a little further than the next layer was willing to go" and some sort of exponential function of 50 management layers of "eh not much worse than my boss intended" does indeed result in a system oriented mostly toward atrocities even if leadership was not interested in that kind of stuff.
Its a characteristic of humanity no matter if its a modern company or roman empire or persian empire, you get enough layers of middlemen involved and its collapse and pillage and civil war and war crimes time. Always, across ALL cultures. And the middlemen always propagandizes each situation as the fault is solely the fall guy at the top who's conveniently dead and please don't notice this is repeated endlessly as a system design supported by all middlemen across all cultures always assuming they're not the ones who will suffer, this time, and after all they're only going a little further than their boss intended.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @01:54AM (1 child)
Columbus's ships were more seaworthy than Roman ships and he had far better navigation tools (dead reckoning using sand-based hourglasses and magnetic compass).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 07, @03:52PM
Possibly?
There's a pretty severe reverse suvivorship bias where we know all about the nina pinta and santa maria because they didn't sink, at least immediately, but we mostly know the most about Roman boats from the ones that sank.
It's not just construction quality, size has a seaworthiness all its own.
I think if they took an English channel ship out west they would have made it. If they took a nile-only grain hauler, that probably wouldn't have made it, but why they'd sail it from upriver nile to the Americas is a mystery when they'd be better off sailing from the coast of France or Spain to reach the Americas.
In a way I think the Romans were stuck because they couldn't think of any reason to go to the Americas. They were not exactly lacking for mostly undeveloped land right nearby, no need to sail to the end of the earth for yet another tribe living on undeveloped and uninteresting land. Without Europe being overcrowded there's not much motivation to sail for weeks to see "pretty much the same thing except inconveniently far away".
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Tuesday July 07, @01:36AM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Tuesday July 07, @12:25PM
Sea voyages following coastlines are entirely possible. Ancient civilisations did have navies [wikipedia.org] and commercial shipping [wikipedia.org].
The spread of humans to Oceania also required sea travel [wikipedia.org], 50,000-70,000 years ago, and 6,000 years ago.
In many places, up to early modern times with the invention of railways, travel by sea around a coastline was faster than travelling inland.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 06, @07:57PM (2 children)
Of course the stories about how Route 66 from Chicago to LA has been fragmented are well worn...
Around here we have "King's Highway" which was a Native American footpath when the British acquired Florida from Spain (1763) - by 1765 the limeys got busy and started building up the road, and maintained portions of it are still in use today.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Whoever on Monday July 06, @11:37PM (1 child)
And the SF Bay area has "El Camino Real" or "The Royal Road".
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday July 07, @01:35AM
Although it's more of a bignum than a real.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @08:06PM
This is clearly not the case: I tried links, dillo, netsurf and arachne and the website was not accessible from any of these browsers.
(Score: 2, Funny) by DadaDoofy on Monday July 06, @08:11PM (3 children)
AD? You insensitive religionist clod!
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @09:39PM (1 child)
As opposed to?
Seems like pretty common terminology.
(Score: 1) by DadaDoofy on Tuesday July 07, @05:10PM
Have you been hiding under a rock?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by jb on Tuesday July 07, @09:04AM
Just pretend that the "D" in "AD" stands for damae (instead of the usual domini). That way "AD" expands to anno damae, meaning "the year of the deer". Mmm, vension...