The Antonine Itinerary (Latin: Antonini Itinerarium) is a register of the stations and distances along the various roads of the Roman empire, containing directions how to get from one Roman settlement to another. According to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, the Antonini Itinerarium is seemingly based on official documents, probably of the survey organized by Julius Caesar, and carried out under Augustus. Due to the scarcity of other extant sources of this type of information, it is a very valuable source. Nothing is known with certainty as to the date or author. It is considered probable that the date of the original edition was the beginning of the 3rd century, while that which we possess is to be assigned to the time of Diocletian. Although traditionally ascribed to the patronage of Antoninus Augustus, if the author or promoter of the work is one of the emperors, it is most likely to be Antoninus Caracalla.^[1]

[edit] Iter Britanniarum

The British section is known as the Iter Britanniarum, and can be described as the 'Road Map' of Roman Britain. There are 15 such itineraries in the document.

The itinerary measures distances in Roman miles, where 1,000 Roman paces equals one Roman mile. A Roman pace was two steps, left plus right. Roman paces were not everywhere the same, and conversion to modern units is imprecise, but 1 Roman mile approximately equals 4,690 feet, or 1430 m.

Examples[link]

Below is the original Latin for route 13^[2] followed by a translation with a possible (but not necessarily authoritative) name for the modern site.^[3] A transcriber omitted an entry, so that the total number of paces does not equal the sum of paces between locations.

Below is the original Latin for route 14^[4] followed by a translation with a possible (but not necessarily authoritative) name for the modern site.^[3]

A confounding factor[link]

De Situ Britanniae (made available ca. 1749, published 1757) was a forgery that provided much spurious information on Roman Britain, including "itineraries" that overlapped the legitimate Antonine Itineraries, sometimes with contradicting information. Its authenticity was not seriously challenged until 1845, and it was still an authority up to the late nineteenth century. By then, its false information had infected almost every telling of ancient British history, even working its way into the Ordnance Survey maps,^[5] as General Roy and his successors believed it to be a legitimate source of information, on a par with the Antonine Itineraries. While it was no longer cited when its authenticity became indefensible, it was also not systematically rooted out of past and present works.

Some authors such as Thomas Reynolds, without challenging the authenticity of the forgery, took care to note its discrepancies and challenge the quality of its information.^[6][7] This was not always so, even after the forgery was debunked.

Hispania[link]

Hispania roads

For most Roman roads in Spain, see ^[8]. Its editor Gonzalo Arias (who died in 2008) also wrote Grammar in the Antonine Itinerary: a challenge to British archaeologists (available in only a few libraries) explaining how some of the distance anomalies in the British section of the Antonine Itinerary resulted from loss of Latin grammatical endings that marked junctions heading towards places, as distinct from the places themselves.

This section requires expansion.

See also[link]

• List of Roman place names in Britain
• Roman roads in Britain

Citations[link]

Bibliography[link]

External links[link]

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Antonini Itinerarium.

• The Antonine Itinerary: Iter Britanniarum - The British Section
• Analysis of the Itinerary
• Itinerarium Antonini Augusti (the Balkanic roads) at SOLTDM.COM
• Roman Roads in Britain