Roman Miles to Meters (mp to m)

1 Roman mile equals 1,480 meters exactly.

1 Roman mile = 1,480 meters

How to convert Roman miles to meters

To convert Roman miles to meters, multiply the number of Roman miles by 1,480. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.0006756756757 (rounded).

meters = Roman miles × 1,480

Example: 10 Roman miles = 14,800 meters.

Approximate value. Standards for the Roman mile 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 Mile (mp)

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

'A thousand paces' (mille passus): 5,000 Roman feet, about 1.48 km. The word 'mile' comes from it, and Roman roads were marked with milestones at this interval.

Latin speakers called it mille passus, a thousand paces, usually abbreviated m.p. A pace was counted each time the same foot struck the ground, so it spanned two steps and was reckoned at five Roman feet, which made the mile 5,000 feet. The English word mile descends from the shortened form of the Latin phrase, through Old English mil.

The length rests on the Roman foot, and that foot is not fixed precisely. Modern estimates of the mile cluster near 1,480 m, one empirical figure being about 1,479 m, and this is the figure used here. Marcus Agrippa's standard foot of around 29 BC is credited with indirectly standardizing it, but measured surviving feet vary by a few millimetres, which shifts the mile by metres.

Stone markers stood at every mile along the empire's paved roads, measured out from the Golden Milestone in the Forum. Eight Roman stadia made a mile, and in Greek-speaking provinces it was rendered as the milion. At roughly 0.92 of an international mile, it survives in the name of the modern mile, though later European miles drifted to very different lengths.

1 Roman mile = 1,480 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Roman mile; Wikipedia: 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

Related conversions

See all length units.