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The Roman roads were essential for the growth of the Roman Empire, by enabling the Romans to move armies, trade goods, and communicate news. At its peak, the Roman road system spanned 53,819 miles (85,004 km) and contained about 372 links. more...

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For military, commercial, and political reasons, the Romans, became adept at constructing roads, which they called viae. They were always intended primarily as carriage roads, the means of carrying material from one location to another. These long highways were very important in maintaining both the stability and expansion of the empire. The legions made good time on them, and some are still used millennia later on. In late Antiquity these roads played an important part in Roman military reverses by offering avenues of invasion to the barbarians.

Most Roman roads were named after the censor who ordered their construction or reconstruction. The same person often served afterwards as consul, but the road name is dated to his term as censor. If the road was older than the office of censor or was of unknown origin, it took the name of its destination or of the region through which it mainly passed. A road was renamed if the censor ordered major work on it, such as paving, repaving or rerouting.

Terminology

The Romans' roads were called viae (plural of the singular term via) in Latin. The word is related to the English way (Old English weg) and weigh, (OE wegan, "to lift up, carry, bear, move, convey"; cf. "weigh anchor", where the sense is simply "lift up"). The Indo-European root, *wegh-, with a palatal gh (as the ch in German ich), becomes *wegh- with a guttural g (as ch in German ach) in the centum languages, including Latin. It basically means "to move or convey" (vehicle, from Latin vehere, "to carry, bring, drive" has the same root, as have the English words wain and wa(g)gon ).

The Roman road systems

Types of roads

Roman roads vary from simple corduroy roads to paved roads using deep roadbeds of tamped rubble as an underlying layer to ensure that they kept dry, as the water would flow out from between the stones and fragments of rubble, instead of becoming mud in clay soils.

The laws of the Twelve Tables, dated to approximately 450 BC, specify that a road shall be 2.45 m (8 ft) wide where straight and 4.90 m (16 ft) where curved. The tables command Romans to build roads and give wayfarers the right to pass over private land where the road is in disrepair. Building roads that would not need frequent repair therefore became an ideological objective.

Roman law defined the right to use a road as a servitus, or claim. The jus eundi ("right of going") established a claim to use an iter, or footpath, across private land; the ius agendi ("right of driving"), an actus, or carriage track. A via combined both types of servitutes, provided it was of the proper width, which was determined by an arbiter. The default width was the latitudo legitima of 2.4 m (8 ft). In these rather dry laws we can see the prevalence of the public domain over the private, which characterized the republic.

Read more at Wikipedia.org