Roman Feet to Meters (pes to m)

1 Roman foot equals 0.296 meters exactly.

1 Roman foot = 0.296 meters

How to convert Roman feet to meters

To convert Roman feet to meters, multiply the number of Roman feet by 0.296. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 3.378378378 (rounded).

meters = Roman feet × 0.296

Example: 10 Roman feet = 2.96 meters.

Approximate value. Standards for the Roman foot varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.

About these units

Roman Foot (pes)

Ancient RomanHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)Approximate value

The basic Roman unit of length, about 29.6 cm (11.65 in). Surviving rulers vary by a few millimeters, so values differ slightly between sources.

Latin pes, the word for the human foot, named the basic length of Roman building, surveying and road making. The accepted modern value is about 296 mm, and the figure used here is 296 mm. Surviving evidence does not agree to the millimeter. In 1639 the English scholar John Greaves compared monuments and objects in Rome and got 295 mm from a statue of Cossutius, 296 mm from the tomb of Statilius, and 301 mm from a congius vessel of Vespasian. William Smith later gave about 295.9 mm.

The foot could be divided into 12 unciae, or inches, or into 16 digiti, or fingers, a split borrowed from the Greek pous. Larger units were built from it, including the cubit at one and a half feet, the pace at five feet and the mile at 5,000 feet. A longer provincial foot, the pes Drusianus, measured roughly 333 to 335 mm. The English foot, about 304.8 mm, is close to the Roman one but about 3 percent longer.

1 Roman foot = 0.296 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Pes (unit); Wikipedia: Ancient Roman units of measurement

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.

The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.

The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.

Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre

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