Antonine Itinerary compiles official route lists

Some Roman information took the form of stone; some took the form of lists. The Itinerarium Antonini Augusti, compiled in the 3rd century CE, is the latter: a register of routes with station names and distances for officials and travelers. It reads like a ledger that knows the world from Aricia to Narbo to Thessalonica as a chain of mansiones and mutationes [8][17].

The entries are spare. A route might begin at Rome, pass Aricia, Forum Appii, Terracina, Fundi, Formiae, Minturnae, and Capua on the Appia; or run from Narbo to Nemausus and beyond on the Domitia; or cross from Dyrrhachium through Thessalonica on the Egnatia. Each segment lists miles; each station is a place to plan around. The sound of the book is the quiet scratch of a stylus, but behind it clatter wheels and tramp hooves [8].

The Itinerary synced three worlds. On the ground, milestones matched its numbers; in law, Digest remedies ensured those miles remained traversable; in administration, curatores and contractors maintained the stations it named. The document’s authority lay in that alignment. A courier leaving Rome knew how the counts should run; a magistrate reading in Narbo could verify his progress by carved stone outside the city gates [9][10][12].

Its scope also implies scale. One does not compile route lists without a vast network beneath. The Itinerary is a paper mirror for the 120,000‑km public road system summarized by later historians and a forebear to the schematic map tradition preserved in the Tabula Peutingeriana. ORBIS’ conversions of these lines into time and cost echo the logic of the Itinerary’s miles [14][16][17].

Three places frame its use. The Forum Romanum, where orders began; the customs posts near Narbo, where ledgers closed; and Thessalonica’s harbor, where road and sea met. The color of the pages may have been pale parchment, but the lines they held were Rome’s empire in motion [7][8][17].