Mapquest for the Roman Empire

[Kolytsin]

Stolen from The Economist.

London to Rome, on horseback

May 24th 2012, 17:20 by A.B.

MANY are the tools designed to help travellers decide on the best way to reach B from A. Search engines allow you to order results by ticket price, number of connections, journey duration and carbon-dioxide emissions. What you can't usually do, though, is stipulate that you would prefer to travel by ox cart or rapid military march. That's because the modern travel-booking tool is a lot less fun than a new creation from a team of historians and IT specialists at Stanford University.

ORBIS is an interactive map of the Roman Empire as it was around 200AD. The "geospatial network model" includes 751 sites, 84,631 km (52,587 miles) of road or track, and 28,272 km of navigable rivers and canals—not to mention 900 sea routes. Among its various capabilities, it allows users to work out how long it would have taken and how much it would have cost to travel from any given point in the empire to any other, given a particular mode of transport, time of year and proposed route. It's a bit like a Roman routeRANK.

For example, a London-based merchant heading bravely to Rome on horseback in April would have spent almost 22 days travelling. The suggested quickest route actually seems rather lengthy, involving sailing down the Channel and the Bay of Biscay, then cutting eastwards by river and road across the south of France to the Mediterranean, and thence by sea to Rome. But riding all the way through Europe would actually take 13 days longer. Only with a horse relay (and rather a lot more denarii) does the land route become faster; such a trip takes less than nine days.

This example only scrapes the surface of what ORBIS offers. It's well worth having a play.

http://orbis.stanford.edu/

Luguvallium to Circesium would set you back 2250 denarii (1 denarii of bread was around the daily wage for an unskilled laborer).  Rome to Alexandria is much cheaper at 350 denarii.  I wonder if they would charge 5x more on weekends or last minute bookings?

[The Larch]

It was really fucking expensive to travel at that time as an individual, no wonder people didn't really move around if it wasn't for the army...

[Valmy]

Do I really want to move around a Severan Roman Empire? 

[garbon]

Poor starting move - positing things that have already been posted.
Good starting move - re-posting cool things.

[alfred russel]

It was really fucking expensive to travel at that time as an individual, no wonder people didn't really move around if it wasn't for the army...

Do you think the prices are accurate? It don't understand where the costs would come from. There seems to have been a large amount of internal trade of agricultural products within the empire--I have to think this would have been prevented if transportation costs were so massive.

[Valmy]

Do you think the prices are accurate? It don't understand where the costs would come from. There seems to have been a large amount of internal trade of agricultural products within the empire--I have to think this would have been prevented if transportation costs were so massive.

You would think so...but actually no.  Food prices were very high, hence why the poor needed assistance to buy bread, so even at those costs food was usually a money maker.  It was that way right up until the 19th century and if you think it was expensive during the Roman Empire you should have seen the costs during the Middle Ages...yet it was still profitable.

[alfred russel]

Do you think the prices are accurate? It don't understand where the costs would come from. There seems to have been a large amount of internal trade of agricultural products within the empire--I have to think this would have been prevented if transportation costs were so massive.

You would think so...but actually no.  Food prices were very high, hence why the poor needed assistance to buy bread, so even at those costs food was usually a money maker.  It was that way right up until the 19th century and if you think it was expensive during the Roman Empire you should have seen the costs during the Middle Ages...yet it was still profitable.

What makes me skeptical is my understanding (which could be wrong) is that in the Roman Empire agriculture became very specialized by region. Little wheat was produced in Italy, as it came from North Africa and Sicily. There were massive olive oil imports from Iberia. Italy itself specialized in grapes and wine. These changes took place once trade opened up: they could grow wheat in Italy. Presumably it was just more cost effective to grow it elsewhere and move it in.

Also, if labor was very cheap, that should mean that transportation equipment was reasonably cheap (ships, wagons, etc--though I think wagons may have not been able to pass on some roads). During wars it certainly seems that there were a lot of ships out there.

I wonder if the costs aren't extreme because we mostly have records of the super rich. For example, flying private across the US may cost $25k (estimated, I don't know for sure). If those are most of the records that survive, future views will be quite distorted.

[HVC]

i imagine if your business was food transport you'd have the labour, transports, and depots at your employ so the travel costs for you would be cheaper. But for a traveler themselves the costs would be high.

[alfred russel]

Lets look at it from another perspective. Latin started out as a language spoken around Rome. It relatively quickly supplanted the native languages in Iberia, Gaul, Dacia and other provinces to the extent the languages in those regions are decendants of Latin. That isn't absolute proof that a lot of people were moving around, but it is hard to imagine happening otherwise.

[Admiral Yi]

Lets look at it from another perspective. Latin started out as a language spoken around Rome. It relatively quickly supplanted the native languages in Iberia, Gaul, Dacia and other provinces to the extent the languages in those regions are decendants of Latin. That isn't absolute proof that a lot of people were moving around, but it is hard to imagine happening otherwise.

Peter North's thesis is that the language spread quickly because mastery of it was a prerequisite for acceptance into the aristocracy and for lucrative jobs with the imperial bureaucracy.

[Ed Anger]

Lets look at it from another perspective. Latin started out as a language spoken around Rome. It relatively quickly supplanted the native languages in Iberia, Gaul, Dacia and other provinces to the extent the languages in those regions are decendants of Latin. That isn't absolute proof that a lot of people were moving around, but it is hard to imagine happening otherwise.

Peter North's thesis is that the language spread quickly because mastery of it was a prerequisite for acceptance into the aristocracy and for lucrative jobs with the imperial bureaucracy.

That dude is talented.

I had to do the joke.

[alfred russel]

Lets look at it from another perspective. Latin started out as a language spoken around Rome. It relatively quickly supplanted the native languages in Iberia, Gaul, Dacia and other provinces to the extent the languages in those regions are decendants of Latin. That isn't absolute proof that a lot of people were moving around, but it is hard to imagine happening otherwise.

Peter North's thesis is that the language spread quickly because mastery of it was a prerequisite for acceptance into the aristocracy and for lucrative jobs with the imperial bureaucracy.

I'm not familiar with his thesis, and the search I just did got results unrelated to ancient history. 

[alfred russel]

So I tried a series of expanded searches to see if I could read Yi's referenced thesis.

Peter North Rome : apparently he did a porn video with an actress named Rome, lots of results there
Peter North Latin : Latin pulled up "Latina", and Peter North apparently did a lot of videos with Latinas
Peter North Language: the top result was the porn actor website which had a language option on the page

Yi, can you link me directly to more information on the thesis? On the one hand I'm worried that if I continue searching on my own my wife or daughter will find the search string and thinking I'm looking at porn, but on the other I know that they would probably be more upset by my explanation that I'm spending a Friday night trying to find information on the spread of Latin through the Roman Empire.

[Admiral Yi]

I'm lousy with names.  Northgate? 

[Crazy_Ivan80]

quite a lot of roads weren't present on the map that's accessible.