Felix Caelus

"The ground won't let you. You want a road that's fairly even and doesn't wash away in the winter, so the good routes have to wind through passes and around mountains, hills, marshes... even when you've got good engineers working on them. Some of the roads round here are ancient. The Legion builds better ones, and they actually are pretty straight in my province. It takes trained craftsmen, though, and a lot of labour."

Knowing the bare bones about this stuff is just one odd side-effect of his upbringing.