The capital, the provinces, the frontier, and the roads and sea lanes that made the Mediterranean one world.
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Every year great merchantmen carried the grain of Egypt and Africa across the sea to Ostia to feed the million mouths of Rome — the annona, the free grain dole that kept the capital fed and quiet.
Alexandria → Carthage → Ostia → Rome
The paved roads that ran north-west from Rome up the Italian peninsula and across the Alps to the cities of Gaul and Spain, carrying legions, officials, and the imperial post to the western provinces.
Rome → Mediolanum → Lugdunum → Massilia → Tarraco
The chain of legionary fortresses and roads along Britain and the Rhine — the limes that marked the empire's northern edge, where soldiers watched the forests of the free Germanic peoples beyond.
Londinium → Colonia Agrippina → Mediolanum
The overland route through the great cities of the Greek East to the Syrian frontier, where Roman armies marched against Parthia and Persia and where the caravan wealth of Asia entered the empire.
Byzantium → Ephesus → Antioch → Jerusalem
The busy sea road across the Ionian and Aegean that carried Roman students, officials, and marble to the old cultural capitals of Greece — the route by which the empire kept school with the classical past.
Rome → Corinth → Athens → Ephesus
The city that ruled the world: a million people fed by grain fleets and aqueducts, ringed by forums, baths, and the Colosseum, from which every road was measured and every province governed.
The chief city of Roman Gaul (modern Lyon) at the meeting of the Rhône and Saône, seat of the provincial assembly and the imperial mint, and birthplace of two emperors.
Rome's old rival, razed and then refounded as the capital of the African province and its second city in the west — the granary whose wheat, with Egypt's, fed the capital.
The greatest city of the eastern empire after Rome, the port through which Egypt's grain sailed to feed the capital, and still the intellectual heart of the Mediterranean with its Library and Museum.
The old Greek city on the Bosporus that Constantine refounded as Constantinople, the 'New Rome' — a fortress capital commanding the straits between Europe and Asia and the grain route from the Black Sea.
The third city of the empire and the base for its eastern wars against Parthia and Persia, where the caravan trade of the Silk Road met the Mediterranean and where followers of Christ were first called Christians.
The seaport at the mouth of the Tiber and the throat through which Rome breathed: the grain of Egypt and Africa, the oil of Spain, and the marble of the world were unloaded here for the capital.
The great city of the Po plain (modern Milan) that became an imperial residence in the crisis years, closer to the northern frontiers than distant Rome — and where Constantine issued his edict of toleration.
The old Greek colony at the mouth of the Rhône (modern Marseille), a wealthy port and a famous school of rhetoric that funnelled the trade of the Gaulish interior into the Roman world.
The capital of Roman Britain founded on the Thames, a bustling trade port at the empire's rainy north-western edge, rebuilt in stone after Boudica's revolt burned it to the ground.
Under Rome a revered university town where the sons of the elite came to study philosophy and rhetoric — a living museum of the classical past that Rome cherished even as it ruled it.
The capital of the province of Asia and one of the empire's largest cities, its marble streets, great theatre, and library of Celsus rising around the ancient Temple of Artemis.
A prosperous provincial town on the bay of Naples, its wine and villas frozen in ash by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE — the fullest surviving portrait of ordinary Roman life.
The capital of Hispania Tarraconensis (modern Tarragona), a favoured imperial residence, exporting the wine, oil, and silver that made Roman Spain one of the empire's richest lands.
The Roman colony on the Rhine (modern Cologne) and a key garrison of the German frontier, where the legions watched the great river that marked the empire's edge against the free tribes beyond.
A magnificent African port on the Libyan coast, home city of the emperor Septimius Severus, who lavished it with a new forum and basilica — an olive-oil boomtown at the empire's southern shore.
Refounded as a Roman colony and the capital of the province of Achaea, a rich trade city astride the isthmus and an early centre of Christianity addressed in Paul's letters.
The holy city of Judaea, its great Temple destroyed in the revolt of 70 CE and the city itself refounded as a Roman colony — the crucible from which Christianity spread across the empire.