Terminus History: What Happens When A Road Ends

Today in Tedium: What does it mean for a road to end? Particularly, a big, imposing one that represents an essential connection for millions of people across an entire country? Often, major highways take up massive numbers of lanes, and become both the primary path and bottleneck through which people travel. But that’s usually in the middle. Often the terminus of a big road, no matter how important or influential it is, can be anticlimactic in nature. One that comes to mind for me is the end of Interstate 64, a road that starts near the St. Louis area and goes all the way to Virginia, where it absolutely dominates the Hampton Roads area. But then, somewhere in Chesapeake, it just stops at a spot called the Bowers Hill Interchange, where it splits off into three separate interstates: Interstate 264, which goes to the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, and Interstate 664, which leads back to I-64. For a road that represents so much to an area, it feels like a tire slowly leaking air. It’s not like the end of a TV show, which might hit you with all the fireworks it has to offer. Often, it just ends. What else is it supposed to do? Today’s Tedium talks terminus. — Ernie @ Tedium

3,254

The length, in miles, of the longest numbered highway in the United States, U.S. Route 20, which more or less runs continuously between Boston and Newport, Oregon, minus a section that goes through Yellowstone National Park, which is unnumbered. It wasn’t always the longest; U.S. Route 6 used to be longer, but most of its roads in California were renamed in the 1960s. (On the other hand, if you’re a purist, U.S. 6 is the longest continuous highway, at 3,199 miles.) Both U.S. 6 and U.S. 20 are longer than the longest freeway, Interstate 90.

We don’t think much of them now, but the Romans were obsessed with the terminus, as highlighted by these statues, which are intended as borders. (Wikimedia Commons)The God of Boundaries: The word “terminus” has a hell of an origin story<br>So, that point I made about the terminus being a surprisingly boring part of the federal highway system? Turns out that the term itself came from a not-so-boring place.<br>See, terminus is the Latin term for “boundary marker,” and that term eventually inspired a Roman god who would protect boundaries from all wrongdoing. What did that look like? Let’s refer to an Encyclopaedia Brittanica entry from 1911:<br>Terminus, in Roman mythology, the god of boundaries, the protector of the limits both of private property and of the public territory of Rome. He was represented by a stone or post, set up in the ground with the following religious ceremonies. A trench was dug, in which a fire was lighted; a victim was sacrificed, and its blood poured into the trench; the body, upon which incense and fruits, honey and wine were thrown, was then cast into the fire. When it was entirely consumed, the boundary stone, which had been previously anointed and crowned with garlands, was placed upon the hot ashes and fixed in the ground. Anyone who removed a boundary stone was accursed and might be slain with impunity; a fine was afterwards substituted for the death penalty.

Put another way: They took their boundary markers pretty seriously, largely thanks to Numa Pompilius, the Roman king (active from 715 to 672 B.C.) who is responsible for, among many other things, the Roman calendar. Also on his list of things he offered—the idea that there was a God named Terminus worth celebrating.<br>There was probably a deeper motive behind making boundaries something that needed a God, admittedly. According to Plutarch’s The Parallel Lives, Numa’s goal was to encourage peace:<br>He was also the first, they say, to build temples to Faith and Terminus; and he taught the Romans their most solemn oath by Faith, which they still continue to use. Terminus signifies boundary, and to this god they make public and private sacrifices where their fields are set off by boundaries; of living victims nowadays, but anciently the sacrifice was a bloodless one, since Numa reasoned that the god of boundaries was a guardian of peace and a witness of just dealing, and should therefore be clear from slaughter.

(Call it Roman-era soft power or something.)<br>Party at the terminus, everyone’s invited. (The Feast Before the Altar of Terminus/Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione/Harvard Art Museum/Public Domain)The result is that these boundary stones had more weight to them than the road signs that end our long highways. In fact, they even had a festival on, of all days, the 23rd of February. As the Roman poet Ovid wrote of the celebration:<br>When night has passed, let the god whose marker separates fields be celebrated with the customary honors. Terminus—be you a stone, or a stump buried in a field—you too have divine authority from ancient times. You are crowned by two owners on opposite sides; two garlands and two libations are offered to you. An altar is built for you: here a rustic...