Roman Roads and Platform Teams

Roman Roads and Platform TeamsOn funding things whose value arrives late, uninvited, and in someone else's budgetIn 312 BC, a Roman censor named Appius Claudius spent public money on a road to Capua. The justification was a war. Move legions south faster than the Samnites can regroup, hold the ground, end the campaign. It was a sound justification. It worked. And it explains almost nothing about why we are still talking about the Via Appia twenty-three centuries later. The road carried soldiers for a few decades. It then carried grain, wine, olive oil, tax collectors, magistrates, imperial couriers, a prisoner from Tarsus on his way to trial in Rome, plague, pilgrims, popes, Grand Tourists with sketchbooks, and eventually tourists in rented hatchbacks looking for parking. The empire that funded it fell over. The road did not. Something like eighty thousand kilometres of paved trunk route, and several times that in lesser roads, went on doing useful work for a millennium after the…