The Antonine Itinerary is a Roman register of stations and the distances between them along the roads of the Empire. It is a list, not a map, and it helps researchers identify Roman roads and the places they linked.
Key takeaways
- The Antonine Itinerary lists stations and distances along roads, measured in Roman miles.
- Its British section, the Iter Britanniarum, has been called the road map of Roman Britain.
- Itiner-e treats a place in an ancient itinerary as one of the signs of a main road.
- A listed route gives the places and distances, not the exact line on the ground.
What the Antonine Itinerary is
The Antonine Itinerary (Itinerarium Antonini Augusti) is an itinerarium, a register of the stations and distances along various roads of the Roman Empire [1]. It seems to be based on official documents and perhaps in part on a survey made under Augustus. Because few records of this kind survive, it is a valuable one [1].
Almost nothing is known about who compiled it or why. The title seems to credit the patronage of the second century emperor Antoninus Pius, but the surviving editions seem to trace back to an original made towards the end of the reign of Diocletian in the early fourth century [1]. The oldest manuscripts date from the seventh to tenth centuries AD [1].
It is organised as a series of routes. Each one names the stops in order and gives the distance between them in Roman miles. A Roman mile was 1,000 Roman paces, which Wikipedia puts at 1,479 metres [1].
The British routes
The British section is known as the Iter Britanniarum and can be described as the road map of Roman Britain. It contains 15 itineraries for different parts of the island [1]. One of them, Iter XIII, runs from Isca Silurum to Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) and gives the total as 109 Roman miles, with stops such as Burrio (Usk) and Blestio (Monmouth) along the way [1]. The identification of places is partly uncertain, and the text itself has gaps and copying errors [1].
Because it gives places and distances but not coordinates, the itinerary tells you which places were joined, not exactly where the road ran. Turning it into a line on a modern map means matching places to sites and then following archaeology and the landscape [3].
An example from our data
Itiner-e used ancient itineraries, chiefly this one and the Tabula Peutingeriana, to identify roads, and counts a place in an itinerary as one of three signs of a main road [2]. Our data does not mark which segments rest on it, so we cannot show you the itinerary as a layer.
You can see the kind of road it describes in Britain. Watling Street is 352 km long in 58 segments and links 16 Roman places in our data. Ermine Street is 421 km and links 14. In both, the lines are almost wholly conjectured (98.7% and 98.8%).
The thing people get wrong
Because it is called an itinerary, people sometimes treat it as an exact record of Roman roads and their routes. It is a list that has been copied by hand for centuries, with some errors and uncertain place names [1]. It supports the existence of a route; it does not fix the line.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Antonine Itinerary a map?
No. It is a written list of stops and distances. People have later drawn the routes it describes as maps.
Which emperor was it written for?
The title points to Antoninus, but the surviving editions seem to go back to an original from near the end of the reign of Diocletian, and almost nothing is known of its author.
Does the map show where the Antonine Itinerary routes are?
Not as a separate layer. We show the Itiner-e road lines, which used the itinerary as one source.
Sources
- Antonine Itinerary, Wikipedia.
- Itiner-e: A high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire, Scientific Data (Brughmans et al., 2025).
- Roman roads in Britannia, Wikipedia.
- Every figure from our own map is worked out from the datasets on the data sources page (checked against Itiner-e version 2024 1.3).