ABSTRACT
Roads were important to Strabo. The standard Greek expression for 'road', hodos, occurs more than 500 times in his Geography. If roads were important for the statesman and the strategist, they were no less important for the ancient geographer, who relied on road-books as his principal source for land distances. Road-books or itineraries were the standard form of travel guide in the ancient world, and a few of these have been preserved. Road-books did not always give the distances in stadia, the unit of distance preferred by Strabo; they used other units of distance, typically the Roman mile and occasionally Egyptian schoenus, raising problem of conversion into stadia. By his own admission, Strabo's travels had never taken him further westward than the region around Populonia, and all he has to tell us about the western provinces is derived from others. Strabo does not show much interest in road construction as such, or in challenges facing Roman road commissioners and engineers.
