Appius Claudius Caecus

Appius Claudius Caecus built the first Roman road and the first Roman aqueduct, and stopped the peace with Pyrrhus by having himself carried into the senate house blind and in extreme old age. He is not the decemvir of the same name who appears in the Verginia story; that man belongs to the mid-fifth century and this one to the late fourth. As censor from 312 BC he held the office for longer than the law allowed and used it to do things censors were not expected to do. The Via Appia ran south towards Capua and eventually Brundisium, and it is the reason Roman armies could move faster than the peoples they were fighting; the Aqua Appia brought water into the city underground. He enrolled the sons of freedmen in the senate, redistributed the landless across all the tribes rather than confining them to four, and had the legal calendar and the forms of legal actions published by his secretary - all of which took from the priestly and patrician families a monopoly on knowing when a case could be brought and how. He is the first Roman whose own words survive in any form, in fragments of a collection of maxims. When Cineas brought terms after Heraclea in 280 BC he was long blind and had withdrawn from public life, and he came back to say that Rome did not negotiate with an enemy on Italian soil. The senate refused, and Pyrrhus won two more battles and lost the war. His censorship is the earliest Roman magistracy about which anything like a policy can be reconstructed rather than guessed at. The road still runs, and long stretches of the original basalt paving survive south of Rome. The aqueduct fed the city for centuries. Later Claudii traded on his name, which is part of why the gens produced so many Appii and why the historical record is so easy to confuse.

• Lived: 340 BCE – 273 BCE
• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: politician