As a fan of STNG – that’s Star Trek: Next Generation – I know by heart the opening remarks by Captain Jean Luc Picard

Five centuries ago, on October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus thought he had boldly gone where no one had gone before and landed on the shores of an island at a place he called ‘San Salvador’, now thought to be one of the Bahamas (2).

Many Americans and Europeans still mistakenly attribute to him the ‘discovery of the Americas’. Of course this is arrant nonsense because there were already people living on the islands when he arrived, not to mention also on the mainland of North and South America. The ‘discovery’ of the New World by Europeans can be traced back almost a thousand years of recorded history. Further, Christopher Columbus (the Anglicization of the Latin Christophorus Columbus, in modern Italian, Cristoforo Colombo and in Spanish as Cristóbal Colón) was not going where "where no one has gone before". As Rodney Broome reminds us in his fascinating book Terra Incognita, Europeans were constantly crossing the Atlantic. There is a legend about an Irish monk reaching America; archaeological remains prove the Vikings settled in Greenland and northeastern Canada; Portuguese sailors claimed to have visited the Caribbean in 1424; Basques reached Newfoundland in the late 1400s; a Dane claimed he discovered it in 1472; and John Cabot, a fisherman from Bristol, England visited the mainland many times since approximately 1480. Even the Chinese lay claims to have ‘discovered’ America in  1421, before Columbus.

Another misconception is that Christopher Columbus was solely responsible for the ‘discovery’. While he was captain of the Santa Maria, he was in fact the ‘co-discoverer’. As the modern citizens of Palos in Spain are keen to point, his navigator was Martin Alonzo Pinzón (3). Pinzón was part-owner of the Niña and Pinta, the other two ships in the flotilla. Martin Alonzo Pinzón was captain of the Pinta and the brother of Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, who was pilot of the Niña. Without Martin or Vicente, Christopher would likely not have assembled the ships he needed, neither the crew nor been able to navigate his route west.

Unlike Picard and the USS Enterprise, Columbus and his three vessels had set out to find places that were very well known: China and India. Traders knew these nations well by travelling to them by land. But it was slow and expensive. Columbus and the Pinzón brothers were trying to reach the riches of the Orient by the fastest route, which was then believed to be way of the west, by sea. It would have been true too had they not first bumped into the Americas, which according to maps and globes of the day, should not have been there. It is a reminder of just how imperfect the knowledge our ancestors had of our world (4). In fact, for the largest time in recorded history, much of the world has lain unknown - or at least unknown to Europeans.

In the course of researching my novel, which is set in Europe of 1^st century BCE and follows Rome’s wars of conquest, I was struck by just how murky was the understanding of the lands laying beyond the empire’s borders. As Robin Lane Fox notes, the Romans did not have a clear idea of the frontiers of their empire (5). Various attempts were made to draw maps of the world by Greek geographers. One of the most celebrated maps in Antiquity was the so-called orbis terrarum of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, completed in 20CE, which hung on a wall of the Portico of Vipsania in Rome. Record of it comes down to us from Pliny the Elder, who could not believe that Agrippa "who was very careful and diligent in the field" allowed it to contain errors in the calculation of the distances of its provinces in Spain (6). Although copies of this world map were distributed across the empire, none survive. Reconstructions of it derive from Mediaeval world maps, which are supposedly based on ancient originals. Agrippa’s orbis terrarum appears to have been conceived to show

So convinced were the Romans that their city was at the centre of the world, that in 20 B.C., as part of his program of road building, Augustus placed a gilded milestone (Milliarum aureum) near the great public monuments of the Forum Romanum (8).

In ‘civilised’ Europe there was always great curiosity about the lands and peoples that lay beyond the known world, as the encyclopaedias of Pliny the Elder or the geographies of Strabo and Ptolemy show. These writers assembled snippets of information from a variety of sources and displines – astronomy, economics, zoology, even mythology – to supplement their own observations and measurements. An important source of first-hand information was the travelogues of explorers. Perhaps the ancient world’s most famous explorer was Pytheas the Greek.

In his fascinating book on Pytheas, Barry Cunliffe quotes modern explorer Vilhjalmur Steffanson who wrote in his 1942 book Ultima Thule

Around 320BCE Pytheas published his book Peri Tou Okeanou, translated as ‘On The Ocean’. Now lost to us, parts survive through the writings of other geographers who quoted Pytheas in their own books. 'On The Ocean' described a voyage from Massilia (modern Marseilles) to the northern shores of Europe to find the sources of amber, gold, tin and other commodities of interest to traders in his seaport city. In attempting to retrace Pytheas’ voyage, Cunliffe deduced that the Massaliot had traversed France by land and river to where Bordeaux now stands, and thence by sea to sail around the British Isles, stopping in Cornwall and elsewhere, as far as Iceland; and on his return visited Jutland, possibly even Heligoland, before returning via the coast of modern Netherlands, Belgium and France. For large parts of his journey it seems that he hitched rides aboard boats and ships of traders who visited these lands to buy the precious commodities direct from their suppliers. In the years following his return to Massalia, copies of his book reached Athens and Alexandria and influenced the leading historians and geographers of his day.

The comparisons between Columbus and Pytheas are fascinating. Both were driven by commercial objectives – the Genoan to find a route to the Indies, the Massaliot to find the sources of prized commodities. Both wrote of their voyages. Both died in relative obscurity – hardly anyone attended the funeral of Columbus, and we know nothing of Pytheas’ later years and death. More importantly, in different ways, their explorations put regions unknown to most Europeans of their day ‘on the map’ and, by demystifying these lands, opened up them to settlement and exploitation by outsiders. Whether it was a good or bad thing to expose indigenous peoples and their cultures to foreign invasion is still the subject of debate. Yet, whether it is to find the source of amber, a western sea route to China or to land on Mars to find evidence of life, the need "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations" is central to what it is to be human.

As Picard would say, "Engage!"

Rodney Broome, Terra Incognita: The True Story of How America Got Its Name, Educare Press, Seattle, 2001

Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, Walker and Company, New York, 2001,2002

Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian, Allen Lane, London, 2005

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STNG
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Alonzo_Pinz%C3%B3n and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palos_de_la_Frontera
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maps
5. Fox, p485
6. Pliny The Elder, Naturalis Historiae (Natural History), III, 17: Baeticae longitudo nunc a Castulonis oppidi fine Gadix CCL et a Murgi maritima ora XXV p. amplior, latitudo a Carteia Anam ora CCXXXIIII p. Agrippam quidem in tanta viri diligentia praeterque in hoc opere cura, cum orbem terrarum orbi spectandum propositurus esset, errasse quis credat et cum eo Divum Augustum? is namque conplexam eum porticum ex destinatione et commentariis M. Agrippae a sorore eius inchoatam peregit. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Pliny_the_Elder/3*.html#17
7. http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/AncientWebPages/118mono.html
8. http://vitruviidearchitectura.blogspot.com/2006/10/marcus-vipsanius-agrippa.html. For a detailed explanation of a geometrical explanation of the orbis terrarum, see http://www.arqweb.com/vitrum/orbis.asp
9. Cunliffe, p172

I don’t remember many jokes and this is one of the few I do. It goes like this. Why do robbers steal from banks? Coz that’s where the money is! Boom, boom!

To the people queuing outside branches of Northern Rock in England eager to get at their money this last week, it was no joke. Pictures of nervous savers made front-page news in the British press and on TV on both sides of the Atlantic (1). Commentators noted that nothing like it had been seen since the days of the Weimar Republic. In the seven days following the onset of panic on Wednesday September 12, an estimated £4 billion had been withdrawn by savers while the bank’s shares had collapsed 80% from its high at the start of the year (2).

I am a saver myself with Northern Rock having a tracker online account. While the Java applet that has to run to allow access to the account online can be flakey depending on the computer I use, overall it has not been a problem. Last Friday night, however, that all changed. Only after dozens of attempts to log in, and that late into the night, did I finally manage – with great relief – to transfer money to my checking account in readiness to pay contractors for work they had done. It was deeply worrying not to be able to get access to my cash. I refrained, however, from closing the account outright, especially after hearing the Chancellor of the Exchequer guarantee savers’ funds.

Northern Rock plc was formed from the de-mutualisation of the member-owned building society of same name. The bank was formed in 1965 from the merger of Northern Counties Permanent Building Society (established in 1850) and Rock Building Society (established in 1865) (3). Like credit unions in the US, building societies in the UK are considered 'safe as houses'. How it came to becoming the subject of a bank run – and the role of the Bank of England and Financial Services Authority played in it – will be the subject of study for years to come (4). Writing in the Financial Times, Gillian Tett commented

So, while the financial winds were fair (holders of sub-prime mortgages paid their lenders, banks lent money to each other), all was well. Once they turned (sub-prime mortgage holders defaulted, banks ceased to lend money to each other), the financial ship could quickly run aground.

In researching the subject for this blog, I was struck by the way in which professionals in the work of banking and finance were apparently taken by surprise by the events and how seemingly unable they were to overcome skepticism of the ordinary passbook holding saver. When fear replaces confidence, the banking system can quickly fail. Indeed, former Federal Alan Greenspan, promoting his new book The Age of Turbulence this week, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph said

So to be a good forecaster does it pay to be a worrier too? Maybe so. Of course, in divining the future, forecasters often look backwards into history and extrapolate the trend line forwards, such as using a Monte Carlo analysis. Readers of this blog will know that my angle is to find parallels in our Roman past. My surprise was to find the ancient world grappling with similar issues.

While the Roman world was not as industrial or technologically advanced as our own, however, it had a sophisticated economy based on agriculture, small-scale manufacturing and international trade. Scholars continue to debate whether it was the equivalent of a modern day third world country or better, but Peter Temin , the eminent economist, has ventured to say that the financial institutions for arranging loans in the Roman Empire were superior to France’s in the 18^th century (7).

Peter Temin, Elisha Gray II Professor of Economics at MIT, and author of Lessons from the Great Depression, documents that sophisticated financial intermediaries – bankers (argentarii) and brokers (proxenetae) – pooled funds effectively across the Roman economy. These intermediaries pooled funds from individuals, private banks, merchants and temples with endowments, which they lent at interest for all manner of purposes. Surviving records of loan contracts, other written accounts and lawsuits, attest to lending practices, bank branching, loan transfers and lending activities of temple endowments and local governments (8).

Whereas we are accustomed today to using paper and electronic money, minted coins "constituted the only organized system of monetary instruments", writes Jean Andreau and Janet Lloyd in the introduction to their landmark tome Banking and Business in the Roman World. "That does not mean", add the authors,

(As a collector of Roman coins, I can attest to how inconvenient it would have been to carry a bunch of brass sestertii or silver denarii around).

Interest rates were paid on most banked deposits (though apparently not all) and charged on loans and cash advances. Roman sources make many references that interest rates were typically below 12 percent (1 percent per month – imagine your credit card company charging you an APR at that rate!) and variable; but could also go above 12 percent. It is also reported that prohibitions against higher rates were evaded in the late Republic by transferring the loans to foreigners who were not subject to rate restrictions. (Evading regulations by going "offshore" is nothing new, apparently).

Bankers were not averse to risk. Indeed, every time a Roman merchant ship set off from port, there was a risk the ship and its cargo might return empty – or not at all. They also understood that rewards that could flow from taking calculated risks. To set out the obligations of both lender and borrower and to agree procedures for disputes, loan contracts were signed. The so-called Muziris Papyrus appears to have been drawn up between merchants and bankers based in Alexandria, Egypt and the outpost trading in pepper, spices and beryl in Muchiri (Muziris), India (9). For example, the supplementary agreement spells out what happens if the borrower does not pay off his loan "on the date for repayment specified in the loan agreements at Muziris".

Finance markets have their ups and downs, and the Romans even had their own version of the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famous orator and advocate, commented on the credit crunch occurring in his own times:

Words the CEO of Northern Rock and the head of the Bank of England might care to reflect on and learn from.

Just don’t bank on it.

Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, Penguin Press, 2007

Jean Andreau, Janet Lloyd, Banking and Business in the Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 1999

1. "Vultures ready for Magpies' sponsor Northern Rock" by Philip Aldrick, The Daily Telegraph, September 18, 2007 (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/09/18/ccbanks118.xml)
2. "Northern Rock shares fall again", September 19, 2007 (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7002128.stm)
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Rock
4. "Ten lessons we can learn from the Rock that rolled downhill" by Jeff Randall, The Daily Telegraph, September 19, 2007 (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/09/19/ccjeff119.xml)
5. "Regulators rethink bank rules" by Gillian Tett, Financial Times, September 19 2007 (see http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ba2f6e16-66d4-11dc-a218-0000779fd2ac.html )
6. Interview with Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan by Edmund Conway, Economics Editor of The Daily Telegraph in his offices in Washington DC, September 17, 2007 (see transcript at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/exclusions/hubpages/greenspan/greenspanTHISONELIVE.xml )
7. Peter Temin, Financial Intermediation in the Early Roman Empire, in The Journal of Economic History (2004), 64: 705-733, Cambridge University Press (see http://www-histecon.kings.cam.ac.uk/docs/temin.pdf )
8. Ulrike Malmendier, Law and Finance "at the Origin" Prepared for the Journal of Economic Literature (see http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/cromer/e211_sp07/malmendier.pdf )
9. L. Casson, New Light on Maritime Loans: P. Vindob G 40822, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 84 (1990) 195–206 (see http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/ifa/zpe/downloads/1990/084pdf/084195.pdf ). The site of Muziris appears to have been located along India’s southwest coast in the modern day state of Kerala (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4970452.stm)

This time last week I was standing amongst the groundlings in Shakespeare’s Globe in London. It is one of the great playhouses of the world and it draws me, without fail, each year. The Globe is as authentic a reconstruction of the Elizabethan playhouse of the same name as can be made in modern times (1). This three-storey structure, built of timber and thatch truly is a "wooden O". Inside the stage building projects into the open space and, on account of this design, the audience – especially those who stand on the ground, hence, groundlings – enjoy a deeper level of intimacy of relationship than in any proscenum arch theatre.

My summer vacation would not be complete without attending a performance at The Globe of a play by the ‘great bard’. Except that the play I was watching this time was not by William Shakespeare, but a contemporary American writer. The playwright was Eric Schlosser, author of best-sellers Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness (2). Like the bard, however, he wrote a ‘history play’.

We The People dramatized the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia during four months of the summer of 1787. This might seem like a dull subject for a three-hour-ten-minute play – especially to an audience of 700 standing, paying members of the public. But the marketing blurb from The Globe actually made it sound quite exciting:

I confess I should have known the story since I have been to Philadelphia and visited Independence Hall, formerly the Pennsylvania State House, just a few years ago (4). I had listened to the National Parks Service guide tell the story moving amongst the tables covered with green felt cloths, but clearly I had not grasped its full significance. Eric Schlosser can feel pleased that this member of the audience finally got it.

Unlike the citizens of 1787 America for whom the deliberations of the convention were secret, the modern audience of We The People were treated to a fascinating exposé of the arguments of representatives who took part. It was fascinating to watch and contrast Ben Franklin, George Washington and the other members of the group that had anguished over the issue of independence in the 1770s and the resulting Declaration; with the younger upstarts James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Edmund Randolph, who came prepared with their visions of a new America.

Too often these men, known collectively to Americans as ‘The Founding Fathers’ are pertrayed as demi-gods, great men for sure, but distant, not like you and me. The men portrayed by Schlosser, drawing on original source material, were believable, human characters with foibles, fears and humour. As Gore Vidal relays in Inventing a Nation, Washington did not even want to attend the meeting in Philadelphia, having already given a promise to join former officers who had served under him during the War of Independence, called the Society of the Cincinnati (after the Roman dictator Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (5)). Yet he understood the cost of failure, and attended. Schlosser’s Washington, played by John Stahl, convincingly showed this episode in the great man’s life.

What impresses me about the story of the creation of the Republic of the United States of America was the degree to which, in creating the vision of their country, the authors of the Constitution had studied the Classical writers – Polybius, Cicero, Livy and others – to identify the best practices of the ancient Roman Republic – and the pitfalls to avoid in creating one in the New World. The work of The Founding Fathers, as a composition of compromises, was, for the most part well done (the omission of the abolition of slavery was shameful). It has endured these last two hundred and more years and, with subsequent Amendments and The Bill of Rights, the Constitution has served its citizens well.

We The People plays for just fourteen performances at Shakespeare’s Globe until October 6. Don’t miss it.

Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Yale University Press, 2003

1. http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schlosser
3. http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/theatre/annualtheatreseason/wethepeople/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Convention
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Hall_(United_States)
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnatus

The American public has been learning a lot about bridges this week. The catastrophic collapse of the I-35W bridge that crossed the Mississippi to Minneapolis brought home to the man in the street just how bad the condition our national infrastructure is in. Since then, the editors and correspondents of the nation's daily papers and nightly news broadcasts have been asking the questions 'why did it happen?' and 'could it happen in our town?'

The bridge that fell down was a steel 'Arch Deck Truss Bridge' spanning 1,907 feet. A key feature of the design was a single 485 arch, erected 64 feet above the river. It was used to avoid putting piers in the river, which might interfere with traffic on Old Man River. The bridge was 108 feet wide, with room enough for 8 lanes, providing a crossing for 140,000 vehicles daily. It was opened in 1967 and, apparently, regularly inspected (1). As a regular visitor to Minnesota myself, I've driven over the bridge several times and, like most of my fellow drivers there, taken it completely for granted.

The dramatic event of August 1, 2007 has sent the federal and state administrations into overdrive, commissioning emergency inspections of the condition of other bridges nationwide,

While it appeared it was a unique tragedy, those with longer memories knew otherwise. As USAToday reported:

So what went wrong in Minnesota? At this point, no-one knows with any certainty, though theories abound. Evening TV newscast hosts have interviewed experts who gave their best guesses (4). Experts? What about those experts? One of my colleagues reminded me recently of the definition of an expert - "'X' is an unknown quantity, and a 'spurt' is a drip under pressure". I've also heard the definition "any man from out of town with a PowerPoint presentation".

The credibility of the experts whose opinions have been acted upon have already been called into question. As the BBC reported

In the defence of these experts, successive surveys of the nation's bridges by them had highlighted a variety of deficiencies. Not just in Minnesota, but every state has interstate highway bridges that government appointed inspectors have deemed structurally deficient. The term 'deficient' means a bridge's deck, main structure or foundation were deemed to be in poor condition or worse owing to deterioration or damage of some kind. (6).

For example, in 2003,

Some 70,000 bridges are deemed deficient in the USA. According to the The Road Improvement Project, 2005 survey, of the 6,211 bridges in my home state of Texas, just 1% were deemed deficient. (Great job TxDoT!). Compare the Lone Star State to, say, New York state, which has 2,090 bridges and 16% of them were deemed deficient. Or Rhode Island with a mere 123 bridges, but 24% classified as deficient (8). It's a very mixed picture. Clear is that it is a national problem, an expensive one to fix and one we have been putting off for too long.

Hardly have journalists finished commending the citizens of the state for their legendary trait of Minnesota nice, but already the finger pointing has begun. The local Twin Cities' newspaper Pioneer Press reported:

And:

As commentators reflect on the causes of the catastrophe, we have been reminded of the circumstances under which the I-34W bridge and others like it, were built. The 'I' in I-34 stands for Interstate, which informs us that that it was conceived as part of The Interstate Highway System. The idea for this goes back to 1921 but it did not get the go-ahead until

The entire system, as of 2004, had a total length of 46,837 miles (75,376 km).

It was a fantastic achievement. It has been estimated that the US completed its interstate system in one-fourteenth the time the Romans took to connect their Empire with roads. OK, not an entirely fair comparison. American engineers did have mechanised diggers, tunnel drilling equipment and high tech surveying tools.

Is there anything the Romans can tell us about road bridges and their upkeep? Actually yes, there is. If there's anything they are famous for, it's roads and bridges. To put the achievement in context,

One estimate is that there were 2,000 bridges in the Roman Empire (13). Some bridges were made entirely of stone or in combination with, concrete, bricks and mortar, while others had stone and concrete footings but wooden superstructures (14).

The longest road bridge the Romans ever built was the one erected over Danube for Emperor Trajan (98-117CE).

It was the expression of centuries of accumulated expertise in civil and military engineering using only natural materials and human labour, supplemented by animals:

The Romans recognised the crucial importance of maintenance of bridges and highway infrastructure. Indeed, Sextus Julius Frontinus, Manager of Aqueducts at Rome, who wrote de Aquibus urbis Romae, the only surviving manual on Rome's water infrastructure, commented on the importance of the upkeep of aqueducts. He described it as his "chief function" (17). That was in 98CE.

In the City of Rome (urbs Romae), so important was the construction, repair and maintenance of bridges that there was a full-time appointed official, the pontifex maximus, 'chief of bridges', who was also an important religious priest (18). Indeed, this religious aspect of the still endures today in the title 'Pontiff', the alternative name for the Pope.

How did they pay for new construction, repair and maintenance? Financing road and bridge building was a Roman government responsibility. During the Imperial Period, it was the army (exercitus) that built the roads that penetrated into newly conquered territories, but when the army moved on and towns were founded, their care passed into civilians hands.

It would be a mistake to think that any Roman citizen could use the roads and bridges free of charge. Tolls were a common feature of a Roman traveller's life, especially at bridges. Often they were collected at the city gate (20).

The blending of public and private money to fund projects offers a viable solution for the modern day:

The fabulous M4 Severn Bridge that I drive over from England on my visits to Wales is managed and operated by Severn River Crossing PLC, a non-quoted public company. As of January 2007, the toll is £5.10 for a car, increasing to £15.30 for a heavy goods vehicle (22). The older mile-long M48 Bridge, which opened in 1966 and is still operational, is undergoing repairs right now to the tune of £20 million (23). It follows a UK Highways Agency study costing £3 million and completed in 2006. The culprit identified there was corrosion in the suspension cables (24). Note that maintenance on the bridges is active and ongoing.

So to the rebuilding of Minneapolis' I-35W bridge. According to The Pioneer Press

Of course, he's an expert so he should know. But consider general Julius Caesar. He built not one but two bridges over the Rhine in the 50s BCE. With 40,000 pairs of hands at his disposal, the bridge took a mere 10 days to construct using local timber (26). That 10 days likely included cutting down the trees and preparing the timbers. Eighteen days later he ordered it taken down.

Because he could.

Then there was that bridge that Apollodorus designed and built for Trajan. It took just two years, between 103-105CE:

(and that without the use of Caterpillar dozers, diggers or skidders (28)).

Diverting the Mississippi may not be needed to build the new bridge in the twenty first century - after all, it's going to be less than 2,000 feet long. But its construction nevertheless poses considerable engineering challenges.

The greater problem is what to do about the 700 other 'Arch Deck Truss Bridges' in the USA, many identified as deficient. In that regard, the Romans do have an important lesson for us (29). That is to make the upkeep of bridges a matter of national importance and fund it accordingly. But don't delay. As Frontinus might have said, "Tempus fugit!"

Frontinus, Stratagems and Aqueducts (Sex. Julius Frontinus, de Aquis urbis Romae), Loeb Classical Library, translated by C.E. Bennett (1925)

1. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-02-bridge-cover_N.htm
2. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-02-bridge-cover_N.htm
3. http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070803/cm_usatoday/abridgeinamericajustshouldntfalldown
4. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1649423,00.html?cnn=yes and http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/02/bridge.infrastructure/index.html for examples
5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6930822.stm
6. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-02-bridge-cover_N.htm
7. http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070803/cm_usatoday/abridgeinamericajustshouldntfalldown
8. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-02-bridge-cover_N.htm
9. http://www.twincities.com/collapse/ci_6541268
10. http://www.twincities.com/collapse/ci_6541267
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads
13. Michael Guillen in Where Did It Come From? Ancient Rome:The Mobile Society which aired on History Channel International on August 4, 2007
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_bridges
15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan's_bridge
16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan's_bridge
17. Frontinus, de Aquis urbis Romae, I, 17
18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifex_maximus
19. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads
20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads
21. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-02-bridge-cover_N.htm
22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severn_bridge
23. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/6927852.stm
24. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/gloucestershire/6425649.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6929777.stm which states that in the UK, there are 17,000 road bridges on its motorways and A-roads, but none are of the Arch Deck Truss design
25. http://www.twincities.com/allheadlines/ci_6545466?nclick_check=1
26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar's_Rhine_bridges
27. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan's_bridge
28. To see what a skidder looks like, see http://www.cat.com/cda/layout?m=37840&x=7
29. The so-called Ponte di Tiberio in Rimini, Italy still carries traffic to this day. It was completed in 21CE. For pictures of this 5-arched bridge made of Istria-stone, see http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Europe/Italy/Emilia_Romagna/Rimini-144910/Things_To_Do-Rimini-Tiberios_bridge-BR-1.html The oldest still standing Roman bridge is the Pons Aemilius in Rome, completed in 142BCE, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pons_Aemilius