Appius Claudius Would Have Recognized Robert Moses Immediately

In 312 BC, a Roman official named Appius Claudius Caecus did something that powerful infrastructure builders have done in every civilization since: he decided that the path of a road would be determined by politics, ambition, and the logic of centralized power—and that local objections were, at best, a procedural inconvenience. The road he built, the Via Appia, stretched 132 miles from Rome to Capua and became the spine of an empire. It also generated a level of political controversy that would feel entirely familiar to anyone who lived through the construction of the American Interstate Highway System in the mid-twentieth century.

History is the only lab that never closes. And the Appian Way is one of its most instructive experiments.

The Man Who Builds the Road Controls the Country

Appius Claudius Caecus was a censor, a Roman magistrate responsible for public works and the moral accounting of the state. The censorship was not, in theory, a position designed to reshape the physical world. Appius reshaped it anyway. He leveraged his office to fund and direct the construction of a road that served Rome's military needs, yes, but that also happened to run directly through territory where his political allies held land and commercial interests. The towns that sat conveniently on the route prospered. The towns that did not were quietly left behind.

Advance the calendar roughly 2,260 years. Robert Moses, who never held elected office but who controlled a labyrinthine network of New York public authorities, made infrastructure decisions with the same sovereign confidence. His highways bisected neighborhoods, demolished communities, and routed traffic in ways that consistently favored certain populations and punished others. When the Cross Bronx Expressway was plotted in the 1950s, alternative alignments existed that would have displaced far fewer residents. Moses chose the route he chose. The communities in its path were not consulted in any meaningful sense. They were informed.

Neither man was operating outside the rules of his system. Both were operating at the outermost edge of what those systems permitted, and both understood that infrastructure is never neutral. A road is a political document written in asphalt and stone.

Which Towns Get Left Behind

One of the most consistent grievances in the Roman historical record concerns the communities that the Appian Way bypassed. Ancient towns that had prospered along older, meandering trade routes suddenly found themselves a half-day's walk from the new road. Commerce migrated. Populations followed. Some of those communities never recovered.

The Interstate Highway System replicated this dynamic with almost mechanical precision. When Interstate 40 was routed through the Texas Panhandle in the 1970s, it bypassed the town of Shamrock by a comfortable margin. Shamrock had been a genuine destination on Route 66, the kind of place where travelers stopped, ate, slept, and spent money. The interstate did not eliminate Shamrock. It simply made it optional, and optional, in the economics of American road travel, is functionally terminal. Dozens of Route 66 towns experienced the same quiet sentence.

The political arguments made against these routing decisions in the 1950s and 1960s—that federal planners were prioritizing speed and military logistics over community survival, that local knowledge was being discarded in favor of bureaucratic efficiency—are preserved in congressional testimony that reads, in spirit, almost identically to the complaints lodged by Italian municipal leaders against Roman road policy. The specific vocabulary differs. The underlying human psychology does not.

The Land Seizure Problem

Rome had a legal mechanism called ager publicus, public land, which the state could direct toward infrastructure projects with limited compensation to affected private parties. The practical application of this principle, particularly under aggressive builders like Appius Claudius, generated lawsuits, political feuds, and at least one documented assassination attempt.

The American equivalent is eminent domain, the government's constitutional authority to seize private property for public use upon payment of just compensation. The phrase "just compensation" has been litigated so extensively that it has become its own branch of American legal culture. When the Interstate Highway System was under construction, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 provided the funding framework, but it left land acquisition to individual states—a decision that produced wildly inconsistent outcomes and, in several cases, outright seizure of property from communities with insufficient political power to resist.

The specific parallels are striking. Roman landowners along the Appian Way's corridor complained that valuations were conducted by officials with conflicts of interest. American property owners along proposed interstate routes made the same complaint to their congressional representatives, often with documentation to support it. The bureaucratic machinery differed. The human experience of watching your land absorbed by a state project that was not designed with your welfare in mind was, across twenty-three centuries, essentially identical.

The Accusation of Cronyism

Appius Claudius Caecus did not escape his censorship without accusations that the road's route had been influenced by his personal relationships and financial entanglements. Roman historians, writing generations later, preserved enough of the controversy to make the outlines clear. The men who supplied materials for the road's construction were not strangers to the censor. The contractors who managed its construction were not selected through a process that anyone could credibly call competitive.

The Interstate Highway System's construction history contains so many documented instances of bid-rigging, contractor favoritism, and politically motivated routing decisions that the Justice Department eventually conducted one of the largest antitrust investigations in American history, resulting in guilty pleas from more than forty highway construction companies in the 1980s. The mechanisms of corruption evolved considerably between 312 BC and 1982 AD. The basic human impulse—to use a massive public works project as a vehicle for private enrichment—did not evolve at all.

What the Road Tells Us

The Appian Way still exists. You can walk sections of it today, outside Rome, along the Via Appia Antica, where the original basalt stones remain in place and the landscape retains enough of its ancient character to make the exercise genuinely disorienting. Standing on that surface, it is not difficult to understand why Appius Claudius was willing to absorb enormous political costs to build it. Roads of that quality, built to last centuries, are expressions of a particular kind of ambition—the ambition to organize the physical world according to a vision that outlasts any individual administration.

Robert Moses had the same ambition. So did Dwight Eisenhower, whose Federal Aid Highway Act was partly motivated by his memory of the military's disastrous struggle to move equipment across the American interior during World War I, and partly by his observation of Germany's Autobahn during World War II. The Interstate Highway System was, among other things, a national security project dressed in civilian clothing—exactly as the Appian Way had been a military road dressed in the language of commerce and connectivity.

The places where these roads were built, and the places they deliberately avoided, are a record of who held power at the moment of construction and whose interests were considered expendable. That record is still legible. It is written into the landscape of the American countryside, into the struggling main streets of bypassed towns, and into the urban neighborhoods that were cut in half to make room for elevated expressways that primarily served commuters passing through.

Appius Claudius and Robert Moses would have understood each other without an interpreter. They were solving the same problem, with the same tools, under the same political pressures, and making the same kinds of enemies. The only difference is the distance of history, which makes it easier to see one of them clearly.