Did 'all roads lead to Rome'? New study finds other cities in the empire were better connected.

“All roads lead to Rome” survives because it compresses imperial power into an unforgettable image. Digital mapping now makes it possible to test the infrastructure behind that image rather than treating a proverb as geography. The result matters beyond Roman trivia: political capitals, economic hubs, and transportation centers do not necessarily occupy the same point in a network.nnThe Itiner-e project maps nearly 186,000 miles of roads and allows researchers to calculate how cities connected movement across the empire. Antioch, Ancyra, Byzantium, and Corinth surpassed Rome on the land network. The most important intermediary route ran along North Africa and the Levant, passed Antioch and Ankara, crossed at Constantinople, then continued through the Po Valley and Milan into France. Its logic followed continental movement rather than ceremonial importance.nnGeography explains much of Rome’s result. Italy forms an appendage to the wider road system, and Rome sits midway down that peninsula; researchers even found the peninsula’s most central route along the opposite Adriatic coast. Corinth linked the Peloponnese to the rest of Greece, while Ancyra served movement across Anatolia. Infrastructure serves flows across a territory, not merely the symbolic center from which power is announced. Definitions shape discoveries. The article wisely leaves room for a different conclusion once sea and river routes are included. Rome’s Mediterranean position and its port connections may restore some of the centrality that land-only analysis removes.nnWe picked this for readers of history, archaeology, maps, and network science because it shows how a familiar claim changes when the unit of measurement becomes explicit. It neither diminishes Rome’s influence nor lets its prestige predetermine the answer. The satisfying surprise is methodological: before asking which city was central, we must decide what kind of movement counts—and what other historical certainties might shift when a different network is finally mapped?