Roman Roads and Platform TeamsOn funding things whose value arrives late, uninvited, and in someone else's budgetIn 312 BC, a Roman censor named Appius Claudius spent public money on a road to Capua. The justification was a war. Move legions south faster than the Samnites can regroup, hold the ground, end the campaign. It was a sound justification. It worked. And it explains almost nothing about why we are still talking about the Via Appia twenty-three centuries later. The road carried soldiers for a few decades. It then carried grain, wine, olive oil, tax collectors, magistrates, imperial couriers, a prisoner...