a list of villages, towns, cities, and mail stations of the Roman Empire, with the distances between them. They were constructed according to basic concepts formulated by Greek cartographers such as Agrippa and Ptolemy, and they were frequently used by private and official travelers. In Rome the road system began from the Golden Milestone in the Roman Forum.

The only surviving map is the Peutinger Table, a 13th-century copy of a Roman world map. The 4th-century “Antonine Itinerary,” one of the few remaining manuals, provides lists of several thousand geographic names of the entire empire, with estimates of the intervening distances. It has provided the basis for reconstructing the system of Roman roads. The “Ravenna Cosmography,” probably of the 7th century, itemizes islands of the Atlantic and places and rivers of Asia, Africa, and Europe.