in Britain; run along the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates; and cover, as with a network, the interior provinces of the Empire. A road map of the empire reveals that it was generally laced with a dense network of prepared viae. Beyond its borders there were no paved roads; however, it can be supposed that footpaths and dirt roads allowed some transport. There were, for instance, some pre-Roman ancient trackways in Britain, such as the Ridgeway and the Icknield Way. Laws and traditions The Laws of the Twelve Tables, dated to about 450 BC, required that any public road (Latin via) be 8 Roman feet (perhaps about 2.37 m) wide where straight and twice that width where curved. These were probably the minimum widths for a via; in the later Republic, widths of around 12 Roman feet were common for public roads in rural regions, permitting the passing of two carts of standard (4 foot) width without interference to pedestrian traffic. Actual practices varied from this standard. The Tables command Romans to build public roads and give wayfarers the right to pass over private land where the road is in disrepair. Building roads that would not need frequent repair therefore became an ideological objective , as well as building them as straight as practicable to construct the shortest possible roads, and thus save on material. Roman law defined the right to use a road as a servitus, or liability. The ius eundi ("right of going") established a claim to use an iter, or footpath, across private land; the ius agendi ("right of driving"), an actus, or carriage track. A via combined both types of servitutes, provided it was of the proper width, which was determined by an arbiter. The default width was the latitudo legitima of 8 feet. Roman law and tradition forbade the use of vehicles in urban areas, except in certain cases. Married women and government officials on business could ride. The Lex Iulia Municipalis restricted commercial carts to night-time access in the city within the walls and within a mile outside the walls. Types Roman roads varied from simple corduroy roads to paved roads using deep roadbeds of tamped rubble as an underlying layer to ensure that they kept dry, as the water would flow out from between the stones and fragments of rubble, instead of becoming mud in clay soils. According to Ulpian, there were