Legal provisions govern repairs and access to public roads

Roads last when someone must repair them. Roman jurists understood this, and across centuries—late Republic into Late Antiquity—the law provided remedies tied to public movement. Later compiled in Justinian’s Digest, Book 43 set out titles for public places and ways, including De via publica et itinere publico reficiendo: on repairing public roads [9].

The legal texture was practical. Interdicts like ne quid in loco publico vel itinere fiat forbade private actions that harmed public places or ways. If a merchant in Fundi spilled building materials onto the Appia’s carriageway, a magistrate could compel removal. If a landowner near Terracina blocked a ditch that protected the agger, neighbors and officials had standing to act. Law turned the hum of everyday use—a thousand iron rims and hooves—into a protected public good [9].

Administration and law intersected. Curatores viarum and ex‑praetors near Rome, empowered under Augustus, now had textual tools to enforce obligations. Contractors could be compelled to finish works to specification; adjacent proprietors could be assessed for frontage duties on viae vicinales as agrimensores outlined. The bronze letters on milestones—refecit, reparavit—were both records and warnings: someone paid; someone was watching [3][10][12].

The legal regime had geography. In Latium, it protected the Appia’s first 17 km, where transport met funerary architecture and aqueduct arches; in Gaul, it curbed encroachments on the Domitia’s verges; in Britain, it supported the same epigraphic habit that recorded repairs by imperial agents near Eboracum and Deva. The color of enforcement was not a cloak but ink on tablets and chisel marks on stone; the sound not a trumpet but a clerk’s voice reading an interdict [12][13][22].

By the 4th century, when the Tabula Peutingeriana’s tradition schematized the network and the Bordeaux pilgrim listed stations to Jerusalem, the legal spine ensured the roads those documents assumed still functioned. A law without a ditch cleared is a dead letter; a cleared ditch without law soon refills with debris. Rome’s genius lay in binding the two [7][9][17].