Silv. 4. 3, the last poem addressed to Domitian in the Silvae, celebrates the emperor's building of a new road, the Via Domitiana. By branching off the Via Appia at Sinuessa, this road formed a significant shortcut for travellers journeying between Rome and Naples. The Romans put road building on a par with triumphal success. It was an amazing technological achievement; it was a civic act that brought social and economic benefit to Rome's citizens; above all, the building of roads created the Empire by imposing on foreign, often inhospitable territory a visible sign of Roman mastery over both nature and alien peoples. As Nicolet comments, ‘the ineluctable necessities of conquest and government are to understand (or to believe that one understands) the physical space that one occupies or that one hopes to dominate, to overcome the obstacle of distance and to establish regular contact with the peoples and their territories’. Road building linked Rome to the world and the world to Rome – as indeed, an inscription from the Via Domitiana attests. Erected by the citizens of Puteoli, and then erased but still legible after Domitian's assassination, it expresses thanks to the emperor for moving them closer to Rome.