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Dacia, AD 108

How long is a step?

Ask a Roman soldier and he answers with his body: five feet laid end to end, from one print of the same foot to the next. His pace measured roads from Rome to Dacia. His mile is gone; his word stayed.

One Roman pace: 1.48 m.

The basalt stones of the Via Appia road, worn by two thousand years of steps
The Via Appia, the road that has counted more thousands of paces than any other in history. Every stone here was once measured by foot.Photo: Flavia Verona, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The soldier as a measuring instrument

The Romans needed no tape measure while they had soldiers. The foot, pes, ran to about 29.6 cm. Two and a half feet made the single step, gradus, of 74 cm. And the double pace, passus, counted from one heel-strike to the next print of the same foot, gathered five feet: 1.48 m.

On the march, every hundred double paces were called out loud. At a thousand paces, the road earned a stone marker: mille passuum, a thousand paces, or 1,480 m. The whole empire was divided into slices of a thousand soldier's paces each.

Three footprints with Roman measures Three prints: the single step gradus of 74 cm between the first two, the double pace passus of 1.48 m between the first and third, and the sole length pes of 29.6 cm. gradus · 74 cm passus · 1.48 m pes · 29.6 cm
Three prints left on the road: two single steps add up to one double pace. The soldier counted double paces, because the right foot struck the ground once per passus.

Pace out your mile

Set the length of your own step and see how many of your steps fit into the Roman mile.

The Roman mile is 1,480 m. At 75 cm a step, you walk it in 1,973 steps.

Ten thousand paces, set in stone

At Aiton, near Cluj, a stone pillar once counted distance in soldier's paces. The milestone, found in 1758 by the teacher Mihály Szathmári Pap, had been raised in AD 108 on Trajan's orders, on the road between Potaissa and Napoca. Its last letters say everything: M·P·X, milia passuum decem, ten thousand paces, 14.8 km.

The road had been built by the first cohort of Spaniards, cohors I Flavia Ulpia Hispanorum, a unit a thousand strong. The inscription is the first written record of the names Potaissa and Napoca, today's Turda and Cluj. Theodor Mommsen entered the text into the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, volume III, as number 1627.

The original is lost; we know it from a 1758 drawing, copied in 1773 by the historian Johann Seivert into a manuscript kept at Cluj. Today, copies of the stone stand in the Aiton schoolyard and in front of the Turda post office, raised in 1993.

Imp · Caesar · Nerva · Traianus · Aug · Ger · Dacicus
fecit · per · coh · I · Fl · Ulp · Hispan · mil · c · R · eq
a · Potaissa · Napocae
M · P · X

The Aiton milestone, CIL III 1627, in shortened form: Trajan built the road through the first cohort of Spaniards, from Potaissa toward Napoca, ten thousand paces.
The 1758 drawing of the inscription on the Aiton milestone
The 1758 drawing of the inscription, the only record of the lost original.Drawing by Mihály Szathmári Pap, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
The copy of the Aiton milestone, erected at Turda in 1993
The Turda copy, in front of the post office, erected in 1993 after the 1758 drawing.Photo: CristianChirita, Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Where
Aiton, Cluj county; copies at the Aiton school and at Turda
When
AD 108, two years after the conquest of Dacia
Number
CIL III 1627
Distance
M·P·X: ten thousand paces, 14.8 km

The mile of paces lasted two thousand years. It lost to the metre: on 15 September 1864, Alexandru Ioan Cuza signed the law adopting the metric system in Romania, defended in parliament by Mihail Kogălniceanu. The kilometre has counted distances ever since, and the Aiton stone stands as a monument to the older way of measuring.

What stayed in the language

The mile is gone, but the pace stayed. Three descendants of passus are still heard in Romanian, beside one old measure and one lost mile.

  1. passuspas

    survived into Romanian

    Latin passus gave Romanian pas directly. Two thousand years on, the word still measures the distance between two heels, though nobody counts it in Roman feet any more.

  2. pasa păși

    survived into Romanian

    From pas came the verb a păși, to step, to walk. The sayings a păși cu dreptul and a păși cu stângul, to start on the right or wrong foot, keep the old link between walking and luck.

  3. passera pasa

    returned through French

    The verb a pasa, heard on the sports field, is a modern borrowing from French passer, which itself descends from late Latin passare. Same blood, another road: it left Latin and came back through Paris.

  4. passuspas mare

    an old measure, a new sum

    The old Romanian measures knew the pas mic, of four palms, and the pas mare, of six palms. Reckoning the stânjen at about two metres, the great pace comes out at about a metre and a half: one passus. The match is approximate, because the stânjen varied from one land to another.

  5. mille passuum—

    lost

    The mile of a thousand paces never took root in Romanian. Long distances are counted in kilometres today, inherited from the metric law of 1864. The milestones stand mute.

Sources

The Roman measures are the standard ones: the foot of 29.6 cm, the pace of five feet, the mile of a thousand paces. The etymologies follow the dictionaries on dexonline. The inscription rendering is a literal reading after the CIL text.