Hadrian's Roads

The Roman emperor Hadrian (r. AD 118-135) inherited an empire which the conquests of his predecessor Trajan had brought to its greatest extent, stretching from Hadrian's Wall in the north to the deserts of Egypt in the south, and from the breezy coasts of Lusitania in the west to the rugged mountains of Armenia in the east. This vast area was interconnected by a complex network of roads, whose structural sophistication rendered them an unsung wonder of the ancient world. The fruit of colossal infrastructure projects, they allowed Rome to expand from a city-state into an immense empire, dominating one-sixth of the earth, and controlling a population of some 60 million people. Hadrian's Roads begins with a scene-setting profile of Hadrian and his empire, describing how the road system knitted together its constituent parts. Thereafter, the reader is offered a choice of twenty-five different road journeys through which to explore the towns, cities, temples, theatres and other landmarks of the Roman world of the first century AD, and to revel in the wealth of facts, stories and anecdotes associated with people and places along these routes. Hadrian himself was a restlessly inquisitive intellectual, and an inveterate traveller of the roads and sea-lanes of this imperium. The itineraries allow the reader to travel some of the routes followed by Hadrian himself. But they do much more than guide the reader along the second-century AD tourist trail: each road-based chapter reveals and explains a particular facet of life under the Empire, be it trade or provincial government; military campaigning or religious observance; leisure pursuits or food and drink. Hadrian's Roads is a rigorously researched and exquisitely finished portrait of the shape and contours of the Roman imperial polity: a luxury tour, led by an expert guide, of one of the world's great empires at a moment in time that coincides with its supreme political power and most refulgent glory.