TRAVEL

IN THE
ANCIENT
WORLD
Lionel Casson
BOSTON
PUBLIC
TRAVEL
IN THE
ANCIENT
WORLD
TRAVEL
IN THE
ANCIENT
WORLD
Lionel Casson

HAKKERT
TORONTO
First published in 1974

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights

are reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of
private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under
the Copyright Act, 1956, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mech-
anical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be
addressed to the publishers.

(C) George Allen & Unwin Ltd 1974

isbn 0-88866-542-3

Library of Congress Catalog Card No 73 91249

Hakkert
554 Spadina Crescent
Toronto, Canada M5S 2J9

Printed in Great Britain

in 12 point Fournier
by Unwin Brothers Limited
The Gresham Press
Old Woking Surrey
AUTHOR’S PREFACE

This book is the first full-scale treatment, in any language, of

travel in the ancient world.
Chronologically it goes from the voyages recorded in
Egyptian inscriptions of Old Kingdom times to the Christian
pilgrimages of the fourth to the sixth centuries a.d. Topically
it covers all the major aspects: the motives for travel, parti-
cularly those other than trade and government business; the
mechanics of travel on land and sea; inns, bars, restaurants,
and other facilities available to the traveller; above all, the
nature of ancient tourism — the standard itineraries, the
favoured sites and sights, museums, guides, guidebooks,
tourist behaviour.
The Roman Imperial period, for which our information is

fullest, was dealt with comprehensively by Ludwig Friedlander

‘

in the sections on Verkehrweseri and Die Reisen der

‘
Touristeri
in his magisterial Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms.
However, the last edition dates back to 1922, and the inter-
vening years have not only increased our knowledge in all

respects but altered significant data on which Friedlander had

to rely. For periods other than the Roman Imperial, there is
no comprehensive work available, not even an out-of-date
one. More or less useful studies of certain aspects may be
found scattered in miscellaneous books and periodicals, but
by no means of all. The mechanics of travel by sea, souvenirs,
tourists’ mail —
these and a number of other topics have
hitherto received nothing beyond casual mention.
I have written with both the student of the ancient world

and the general reader in mind. On behalf of the latter I have

included brief historical introductions to the various periods
dealt with and have avoided spangling the pages with footnote
IO author’s preface
numbers. However, since our knowledge of antiquity is so
imperfect that the authority for the statements we make is as

important as the statements themselves, following the text I

have provided complete documentation, citing wherever

possible standard works that give the relevant literary,

archeological, epigraphic, papyrological, and numismatic

sources, and, where not, the sources themselves.
Place-names always present a problem. I have sometimes
used ancient forms, sometimes modem. My guiding principle
has been ease of recognition. Consequently I speak of Milan
and Lyons rather than Mediolanum and Lugdunum, of Nicaea
and Sidon rather than Iznik and Saida. When there was little
to choose between the two, I favoured the ancient (e.g. Tibur
over Tivoli, Puteoli over Pozzuoli).
My greatest debt is, as ever, to my wife, who gave her
invariable multi-faceted assistance, from pointing an unerringly
critical finger at parts that needed rewriting to patiently typing
draftupon draft of the manuscript. I owe particular thanks
to Bluma Trell, whose expert knowledge of the Roman East
put me on many a fruitful trail. Others, too, have given me
—
welcome help Blanche Brown with questions of art history,
Annalina and Mario Levi with the Roman imperial post,
Naphtali Lewis with papyrological points, Arthur Schiller
with matters involving ancient law, Richard Scheuer and Joy
Ungerleider with Holy Land travel. Ernest Nash, Director of
the Fototeca Unione American Academy in Rome,
at the
gave me his customary knowledgeable assistance in choosing
and obtaining illustrations, and Moshe Dothan, Assistant
Director of Israel’s Department of Antiquities and Museums,
kindly supplied the photograph for Figure 20a.
CONTENTS

Author’s Preface page 9

PART ONE: THE NEAR EAST AND GREECE

1 In the Beginning: 3000-1200 b.c. 21

2 In the Beginning: 1200-500 b.c. 44

3 Expanding Horizons 58

4 Trade and Travel in Classical Greek Times

(500-300 b.c.) 65

5 The First Travel Writer 95

part two: travel in roman times
6 One World 115

7 A Miscellany of Travellers 128

8 On Holiday 138

9 On the Sea 149

10 Roman Roads 163
11 On the Road 176
12 Inns and Restaurants 197
13 Mail 219

part three: tourists and touring in

ROMAN TIMES
14 The Sights to See 229
15 Museums 238
16 The Itinerary 253
17 Sightseeing 262
18 Baedeker of the Ancient World 292
19 To the Holy Lands 300
12 CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations 330
Notes 334
Index 368
ILLUSTRATIONS

facing page

1 Greek cart drawn by a pair of mules. Detail of a vase painting of 32

the sixth century b.c. (British Museum B17.) After JHS 1 (1880)
plate vii.

2 Greek coins in international use in the fifth century b.c. (B. 33

Head, Guide to the Principal Coins of the Greeks , IIAi and 7,
IIB31.) Photo: courtesy of the British Museum.
3 Greek horseman. Vase painting of c. 500 b.c. (Munich, Museum 33
antiker Kleinkunst 2620.) Photo: German Archeological
Institute, Rome.
4 Covered wagon. Relief on an Etruscan sarcophagus of the fourth 64
century Museo Nazionale, Tarquinia. Photo: Gabinetto
b.c. in the

Fotografico Nazionale, Rome.

5 Roman seaside villas. Wall paintings of the first century a.d. 65

from Stabiae and Pompeii. Photo: German Archeological
Institute, Rome.
6 Roman merchantman entering port. Relief of the early third 128
century a.d. found at Portus, Rome’s harbour, and now in the

Torlonia Museum, Rome. Photo: Gabinetto Fotografico

Nazionale, Rome.

7 Roman road in Syria. Photo: German Archeological Institute, 128

Rome.
8 Roman midway between
road in the Alps at Donnaz, roughly 129
Turin and Aosta, Photo: Fototeca Unione, Rome.
9 Bridge at Nami, about fifty miles north of Rome, built by 129
Augustus. Photo: Fototeca Unione, Rome.
10 Milestone from the extension of the Appian Way from Benevento 160
to Brindisi, erected a.d. 108. Photo of a cast in the Museo della
Civile Romana, Rome (the original is in the Museo Comunale
of Barletta).
11 Roman wagon. Early second century a.d. Detail of a mosaic at 160
Ostia. Photo: Alinari.
14 ILLUSTRATIONS
12 Roman covered wagon. Relief on a gravestone in the Church of 161

Maria Saal near Klagenfurt. Photo: Fototeca Unione, Rome.

13 Courier of the Roman cursus publicus. Relief on a gravestone in 161

the Belgrade Museum. Photo: German Archeological Institute,

Rome.
14 Detail of the Tabula Peutingeriana showing the area around 224
Rome. Photo: Fototeca Unione, Rome.
15 Travellers arriving at a country inn. Relief from a Christian 225
sarcophagus in the Museo Nazionale, Rome. Photo: Fototeca
Unione, Rome.
16 Travellers in a restaurant at the port of Rome. Relief of the 225
third century a.d. from the Isola Sacra, Ostia. Photo: Fototeca
Unione, Rome.
17 A snack-bar at Herculaneum. First century a.d. 256
18 Sketch of the arrangement of art on display in a Roman temple. 257
After Hesperia 14 (1945) 268.

19 Drawings of the pictures on glass vials sold as tourist souvenirs 320

at Baiaeand Puteoli. After Archeology 20 (1967) 213.
20 Pilgrim souvenirs, (a) Clay flask with picture of the Annuncia- 321
tion. In the collection of the Israel Department of Antiquities
and Museums. Photo: courtesy of the department. (
b) Clay
flask with picture of St Menas. In the collection of the Museo
del Campo Santo Teutonico, Vatican City. Photo: German
Archeological Institute, Rome.

MAPS

1 The Near and Far East

2 The Mediterranean and Black Seas

3 The Eastern Mediterranean

4 Africa and Western Europe
 ORKNEY IS

X 0 R T H--4
SEA
i V:’JHel|0o|and

CORNWALL
.Land's. End?*?

BAY O F).
. :R 'l.S'.C A;T

‘Cape Spartel'

Aswani
.Herne I

Cape Verde
SUDAN

Mt Kakulima Lake Tana >.

Sherboro Sot
CAMEROONS ETHIOPIA
SIERSAiLE
Mt Cameroon ,.«v
Capa'PaJnias F'.: O F
I NE A'

ZANZIBAR

MILES.
500
 PART ONE

THE NEAR EAST

AND GREECE
 —

In the Beginning:
3000-1200 B.C.

Men built the first clusters of cities in the lands between the
Tigris and the Euphrates and put together the first unified
nation along the banks of the Nile. Inevitably the new pattern
of life brought in its wake new patterns of movement. Now
couriers began to shuttle from centre to centre, officials to
move about their spheres of responsibility, traders to make the
circuit of the markets, throngs to drain out of the countryside
and flood into holy spots on festival days.

At must have been fairly limited

the outset, such travel
down or along the three great rivers, in and about the hills and
valleys and plains of Syria and Palestine, along their coasts.
The horizon expanded dramatically not long after 3000 b.c.,
when shipwrights learned to design vessels able to go relatively
safely and comfortably over open water. These hauled cargoes
across the eastern Mediterranean between Egypt and the
Levant, up and down the Red Sea between Egypt and Arabia,
over the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean between Mesopotamia
and the northwest shores of India.
We do not know exactly who pioneered the building of
seagoing craft. It could well have been the Egyptians since,
gathered along an eminently navigable river, they turned to
the water very early in their civilized existence. ‘When the
Nile overflows the countryside . . .
,’ writes Herodotus, ‘the
22 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
whole of Egypt becomes a sea, and only the towns stick out
above the surface of the water. When this happens, people
use boats right in the middle of the land and not just along the
course of the river. Anyone going from Naucratis to Memphis
sails right by the pyramids.’ He is reporting what he saw

during a visit about 450 b.c., but he could have written the
same words had he been there two and a half millennia earlier.
The Nile and its tributaries and canals always offered the
Egyptians the easiest and quickest way to go anywhere, and
in certain areas, such as the marshes of the delta, just about the
only way. Egyptians were even able to sail upstream, since the
prevailing wind blows from the north. By the first half
luckily
of the fourth millennium b.c., they were travelling about in
canoes and rafts made of bundles of reeds of the papyrus plant
that grew in profusion along the banks, the famous bulrushes
in which the baby Moses was left. By 2700 b.c., they were
using sturdy rivercraft of wood. Half a century later we hear
of a flotilla of forty ships that crossed from the Lebanese coast
to the mouth of the Nile.
Mesopotamia has two great rivers, but neither was as useful
as the Nile; though both are navigable, there is no convenient
prevailing wind to waft craft upriver. By the third millen-
nium b.c. small wooden riverboats were in common use;
when it was time to return from a downstream voyage, they
inched their way against the current at the end of a towline
pulled by a file of hauliers. Armenian rivermen, who started
out in the far north and hence had a long way back, facilitated
matters by using light rafts buoyed by numerous inflated
skins; as Herodotus tells it, each raft had ‘aboard a live
donkey, the larger ones several. After arriving at Babylon and
disposing of the cargo, the frames of the boat . . . they auction
off, load the hides on the donkeys, and walk back to Armenia’.
The buoyed raft, as it happens, was well suited for negotiating
the rapids that occur where the Tigris cuts through the
mountains of Kurdistan; if it struck a rock, the most it

suffered was a few punctures, which could be repaired in a

 IN THE BEGINNING: 3OOO-I2OO B.C. 23

few moments. In the calm lower reaches the Mesopotamians

favoured large round coracles, particularly for ferrying from
bank to bank. These, made of patches of leather sewn about a
framework of branches, were big enough to carry chariots,
even heavy loads of building stone.
Where water transport was not possible, as in Palestine and
Syria, which have few navigable streams, travellers at first
either walked, or rode donkeys. From about 3000 b.c. on,
vehicles were available. The earliest examples are attested
among the Sumerians, the gifted people of northern Mesopo-
tamia who honour of so many
share with the Egyptians the
pioneering contributions to civilization. They are heavy
wagons with a box-like body borne on four solid wheels and
drawn by teams either of oxen or onagers, a type of wild ass.
Some remains dating about 2500 b.c. have been excavated, and
these all belong to wagons that were quite small, the bodies
only twenty inches or so broad and the wheels twenty to
forty inches in diameter. This may have been the size that
onagers pulled, since any larger wagon of so massive a style
would be too much for them; indeed, pictures of the age more
often than not show the beasts hitched in teams of four rather
than just two. The two-wheeled cart seems to have made its
debut slightly later than the wagon; it also was a massive
affair fitted with solid wheels Around 2300 b.c. the horse was

introduced into the Near East as a draught-animal, and within

a few centuries a lighter type of cart, drawn by horses or mules,
came into being, a fast and handy conveyance for kings,
princes, high dignitaries, and the like.

And then, about 1600 b.c., kings and princes and dignitaries
had a new instrument put at their disposal — the chariot. The
chariot was horse-drawn cart designed for use in
in effect a
warfare. Its size and weight consequently had to be kept to an
absolute minimum, and since it was solely a nobleman’s
weapon, expense was no object in achieving this end. By the
first half of the second millennium, carpenters had learned the
technique of using heat to bend wood. This enabled them to
 —

24 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

replace the ponderous disc wheels of an earlier day with wheels
made of spokes — usually there are four, sometimes six
running to a rim of curved, carefully joined felloes, and to
replace the cart’s heavy all-wood body with one made of a
curved wooden frame overlaid with a covering of hides or
wicker. A chariot found in the tomb of Tutankhamen (1352-
1344 b.c.) even has a featherweight floor of interlaced leather
thongs. So light were chariots that Homer’s hero, Diomed,
as he is about to steal one from the enemy, ponders whether
to haul it or just pick it up and carry it. The new invention
enjoyed worldwide popularity. Within two or three centuries
after its appearance in the Near East, it had penetrated west-
ward to Greece, Crete, and northern Europe, and eastward to
India and China.
The Near East knew only one type of harness and used it
indiscriminately on massive wagons and cockleshell chariots,
the yoke. Every vehicle had, extending from the centre of its
front side, a draught-pole with a horizontal crossbar near the
outer end. The arrangement was obviously designed for
hitching a team of oxen, with one animal on either side of the
and the crossbar, the yoke, sitting on their shoulders.
pole,
When onagers and horses entered the ranks of draught
animals, no accommodation was made for them: they were
unimaginatively used in pairs in the same harness. However,
since they lack the prominent shoulders of an ox, they had to
be bound to the yoke by a band passed over the breast
(cf. Fig. 1). As they threw themselves into the pull, this
pressed against the windpipe and impeded any effort to use
their full strength. Wherever the chariot wandered, it took
this inefficient harness with it, northward into Europe, east-
ward as far as China. The Greeks and Romans, as we shall see

(18 1 below), did very little to remedy the situation. The Far
East, it so happens, did develop a harness suitable for horses,
but adopted it only fitfully and sparingly. One proper way to
hitch a horse to a vehicle is between shafts (cf. Fig. n), and
several bronze models of light gig-like carts with what appear
 IN THE BEGINNING: 3OOO-I2OO B.C. 25

to be shafts have turned up in archeological sites in India that

date around the beginning of the second millennium b.c. Even

if these are, indeed, examples of shafts, none other are attested
China of the fourth century b.c.
until over 1,500 years later, in
At this late date the Chinese became the first people to appre-
ciate fully the value of shafts; they adopted them as the
standard system, giving up the yoke that they had borrowed
from the West and had been using up to then.
Covered wagons date from at least 2500 b.c., to judge from
some clay models that have been found. Fitted with an arched
canopy, they resemble the famous Conestoga wagon of the
nineteenth century and no doubt, like it, served to transport
families with their worldly possessions. The pharaoh who
employed Joseph could very well have had such vehicles in
mind when he instructed him to tel! his brothers to take
‘wagons out of the land of Egypt for your little ones, and for
your wives, and . .
.
your father’, in order to bring them all
from Canaan to Egypt.
Able-bodied travellers generally eschewed conveyances and
went by foot or, if they could afford it, by donkeyback. They
never went by horseback, for the art of riding a horse lay
many centuries in the future (51 below). Litters for some
reason are not mentioned until quite late, but they surely were
known in earlier times.

A walker or animal needs only a track. A vehicle needs a road,

and this could well have been one of the major reasons why
traders did not regularly go about in carts or wagons: in this
early age there were not many routes that could take wheeled
traffic. In a Sumerian hymn attributed to Shulgi, king of Ur

from about 2100 to 2050 b.c., he boasts that he went from

—
Nippur to Ur a distance of some 100 miles and back in a —
single day despite on the return lap. If there
a fierce hailstorm
is a kernel of truth behind his words it is that he made a fast

trip between the two cities, and this implies the existence of a

carriage road. There surely was one, and a good one at that,
26 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
between Babylon and Larsa in the days of Hammurabi, ruler
of the Babylonian empire from 1792 to 1750 b.c. In a letter to
an official at Larsa he orders certain personnel to be sent to
him as fast as possible, specifying that they are to 'travel day
and night and so get to Babylon within two days’. The two
cities are about 120 miles apart; if we allow from thirty-six to

forty-eight hours, means he was counting on an average

it

speed of i\ to 3J miles per hour, and this is almost as good as

travellers in mule-drawn carts did on the highly touted
Roman roads two millennia later (188-9 below). The 'way of
the land of the Philistines’ which the Israelites so carefully
avoided during the Exodus, the route that, running along the
coast from the mouth of the Nile up to Tyre and Sidon and
Beirut and beyond (cf. 190-1 below), served as the main link
between Egypt and the Levant, was also able to take
wheeled traffic, at least for most of the way. Joseph’s wagons
no doubt followed it when they brought his family to
Egypt-
Yet even the finest of these highways offered but a bare
minimum. Paving was almost non-existent. The Hittites, the
powerful people who dominated Asia Minor from c. 1800 to
1200 b.c. thanks in good part to their finely developed chariot
corps, paved the mile ahd a third that lay between their capital
and a nearby sanctuary to sustain the weight of the heavily
loaded wagons they used in processions on festal days, but
their war chariots rolled over the countryside on dirt roads.

Bridges too were a rarity; there were practically none in

Egypt and Mesopotamia, where flooding posed a well-nigh
insoluble problem for contemporary engineers. Vehicles either
forded or were carried across on ferries, an operation that at
times could involve dismantling them in order to squeeze
them aboard some modest-sized reed boat or coracle. Then
there was the question of maintenance. 'I enlarged the foot-
paths, straightened the highways of the land,’ claims Shulgi
in the hymn that tells of his lightning-like ride. But not every
Mesopotamian monarch was a Shulgi, and there must have been
 IN THE BEGINNING: 3OOO-I2OO B.C. 27

long periods when nobody bothered to 'straighten’ the

roads.
Things seem to have been somewhat better on the island of
Crete, where the impressive civilization of the Minoans
flourished from 2000 to 1500 b.c., and in the Greek peninsula,
where the equally impressive Mycenaean civilization flourished
from 1600 to 1200. Both peoples went in for extensive road-
building. On Crete archeologists have traced the remains of a
highway from a port on the south coast north to the
that ran
capital at Cnossus ; it was two lanes wide all the way, averaging

13 feet in breadth, it was strengthened where needed by

terracing walls of hewn stone, and a monumental viaduct also
of hewn stone carried it for the final stretch to the palace at
Cnossus. In Greece roads dating from Mycenaean times have
been identified not only around Mycenae itself but at Pylos,

in Boeotia, even southern Thessaly. Usually they were one-

lane, but some, with an average width of feet, were for
two-way traffic. Bridges and culverts kept them passable
during the rainy season, and at the approaches to towns they
might even have a bit of paving; there is a stretch, for example,
leading up to the Lion Gate at Mycenae. All in all, Greece in
the thirteenth century b.c. probably had a better system of
roads than it did in the third.
The concern for roads among the Mycenaeans very likely
stems from their fondness for chariot riding. In the Near East
the chariot served only for war or hunting. The Mycenaean
gentry seem to have added a third use — travel. A wall-painting
found at Tiryns, one of their great centres, depicts an elegant
chariot with crimson body, white trim, yellow wheels, white
draught-pole wrapped with black thongs and red reins. In it

is shown not a driver accompanied by a warrior or hunter but

a pair of ladies going for a ride; the stylized background
reveals it is a ride in the country. The obvious conclusion is

that the nobility used their chariots for getting about —and
they could hardly have done much getting about in these
light vehicles without fairly decent roads.
 : .

28 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

So much for the w ays and means of travel in its infancy. Let
r

us turn to the people who did the travelling.

In Egypt it was above all men of the government. By
3200 b.c. the valley of the Nile from the First Cataract north-
ward to the coast was under the sway of a single ruler. From
the capital at Memphis, just below the apex of the delta, the
pharaoh sent his administrators and agents and messengers
up and down the river. In the sacred precinct of Osiris at
Abydos, for example, where every Egyptian yearned to
leave a memorial, excavators have found any number belong-
ing to officials who had set them up when they happened to
pass through on some government assignment. ‘I reached
Elephantine [at the First Cataract]’, reads one left by a chamber-
lain of Amenemhet II (1929-1895 b.c.), ‘as I had been ordered

. .I returned by the route I took out [i.e. sailed back down

.

the river]. I moored at Abydos. I left my name in the place of

the god Osiris.’ The pharaoh’s men not only shuttled up and
down the river but plodded across the eastern desert to Sinai
where, from at least 3000 b.c., the Egyptians were mining
copper and extracting turquoise; there must have been a
stream of work gangs, pack donkeys, porters, officials, and
the like going back and forth over the wastes. At times
Egypt’s representatives ventured beyond the nation’s frontiers,
northward into the Levant or southward into the Sudan.
A prince Harkhuf, for example, who lived sometime between
2300 and 2200 b.c., made three trips to the Sudan, as we learn
from a short autobiography he had carved upon his tomb.
The first was

to open up the way to this country. I did it in seven months

and brought back from it all kinds of good and rare presents
. .His Majesty sent me a second time ... I set forth [from
.

the First Cataract] and returned ... in the space of eight

. . .

months. I returned and brought presents from this country

in very great quantity His Majesty sent me a third time
. . . . .

I returned with 300 asses loaded with incense, ebony, oil,

 IN THE BEGINNING.* 3OOO-I2OO B.C. 29

leopard skins, elephant tusks, boomerangs, and all good

products.

He had been, it would appear, in charge of a series of trade

missions.
Harkhuf did not himself penetrate darkest Africa; he went
no further than between the Second and Third Cataract. Here
there must have been a trading post, the end of a caravan trail
that ran to the highlands and jungle to the south. A few
centuries later, by 2000 b.c., the Egyptians learned to bypass
the land routes, and the middlemen these inevitably involved,
by turning to the water and sending ships down the Red Sea
directly to the shores of Ethiopia and perhaps even Somalia.
In Mesopotamia too there was much moving about of
government personnel. It started somewhat later than in
Egypt. The Sumerians, who were the earliest civilized people
there, went in for individual city-sized states rather than a
unified nation, and it was not until after 2700 b.c. or so that
the powerful among these began to taste the joys of subjuga-
ting neighbours. Various aggressive rulers put together
sizeable empires, and by the twenty-first century b.c. the
official traffic between a capital and its was heavy
subject cities
enough to justify the creation of a government-run communi-
cations service (35-6 below).

In early Egypt commerce was in the hands of the pharaoh;

business trips, like Harkhuf’s, were just another form of
official travel. Traders from other lands did on occasion make
their way into the valley of the Nile, such as the group of
Levantines leading loaded donkeys that we see on a painting
in a tomb of the twentieth century b.c. The Egyptians, not the
most modest of peoples, refer to them as official foreign
representatives and to their goods as tribute, but it is more
than likely that they were private merchants on the road for
their own profit.

In Mesopotamia private enterprise flourished mightily.

30 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Caravans were a common sight on the roads, loaded rivercraft
on the streams. ‘Thirty years ago’, runs a letter written about
2000 b.c. by two business partners in Assur to a trio of custo-
mers whose account was in arrears, ‘you left the city of Assur.
You have never made a deposit since, and we have not
recovered one shekel of silver from you, but we have never
made you feel bad about this. Our tablets have been going to
you with caravan after caravan, but no report from you has
ever come here.’ Assur was in northern Iraq and the addressees
lived in a town in the heart of eastern Anatolia; caravans went
to and fro frequently enough to provide an informal postal
service.
Letters such as this and other records of business life,

written on clay tablets, which if undisturbed can last for

centuries,have been recovered by the thousands from the soil
of Mesopotamia. They reveal not only the extent of the com-
mercial traffic of the time but its sophistication. Caravan
tradersworked on credit, using money or goods entrusted to
them by a merchant-banker, usually on some sort of profit-
sharing basis. The keeping of careful records was mandatory,
and a body of law grew up to take care of the various con-
tingencies that might arise. From the famous law code of
Hammurabi we learn any traders who lost their goods
that
through enemy attack —
presumably either the king’s enemies
or just highway robbers —
did not have to repay, but if they
returned without making a profit they had to give the banker
double what had been advanced; apparently not to come back
with a profit was either a flagrant breach of contract or prima
facie evidence of fraud. Those who dealt in ship cargoes also
worked on credit but without any profit-sharing. The banker
extended an ordinary interest-bearing loan, the borrower kept
all was spared all the risks; even if
the profits, and the banker
the vessel went down, he was still entitled to his principal
plus interest. The network of overseas trade was impressively
widespread: from the second half of the third millennium,
ships made their way down the Arabian Gulf to Saudi Arabia
 IN THE BEGINNING: 3OOO-I2OO B.C. 31

and along the coasts of Iran and Afghanistan as far as the

northwest coast of India.
Government couriers, officials with their entourages, traders
with their and bales of goods these are the people one
jars —
saw on the roads and rivers day in and day out. But at certain
times of year all this was dwarfed to insignificance by the mass
influx of worshippers to a sacred spot on the occasion of its
deity’s festival. In Egypt, where religion outstripped all other
interests and where a convenient river made travelling any-
where in the country relatively easy, such events set vast

throngs in motion. Herodotus, describing what surely had

been going on for thousands of years before his day, reports
that :

the Egyptians meet to celebrate festivals not once a year but

a number of times. The biggest and most popular is at

Bubastis . . . ,
the next at Busiris . . . ,
the third at Sais . . . ,

the fourth at Heliopolis . . . ,

the fifth at Buto . . . ,
the sixth
at Papremis . . . When they gather at Bubastis this is what
happens. They go men and women
there on the river,

together, a big crowd of each in each boat. As they sail, some

of the women keep clicking castanets and some of the men
playing on the pipes, and the rest, both men and women,
sing and beat time with their hands. Whenever they pass a
town they bring their craft close inshore and do as follows:
some of the women keep on as I have just described, but
others scream and make fun of the women in the town, still
others dance, and still others stand up and expose themselves.
They carry on this way at every town along the river. And
when they arrive at Bubastis, they celebrate the occasion with
great sacrifices, and more wine is consumed at this one
festival than during the whole rest of the year. According

to the locals, up to seven hundred thousand people gather

there, including men and women but not children.

The attendance figure Herodotus was given is no doubt

exaggerated but, however much we discount it, we are still
32 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
left with an enormous number of people on the move at one
time.
And lastly, from about 1500 b.c. on, we can discern in
Egypt sure signs of tourism, of travel for simple curiosity or
pleasure. It appears there and not in Mesopotamia because the
Nile valley is blessed with an abundance of good building stone
which the pharaohs began to employ for their grandiose
tombs and temples as early as 2700 b.c. As a result, Egyptians
of later ages found themselves living in a veritable museum,
surrounded by structures of hoary antiquity. In the great days
of the New Kingdom, from 1600 to 1200 b.c., when Thutmose
and Akhenaton and Ramses and other such renowned figures
held the throne, the step pyramid of Djoser at Sakkarah, the
Sphinx at Gizeh, the three great pyramids at Gizeh, the
pyramid complex at Abusir, and the like, were already over a
thousand years old. On their walls we find messages left by
people who had made a special trip to see these impressive
witnesses to the might of their past. Each monument was a
hallowed spot, so the visitors always spent some moments in
prayer, yet their prime motivation was curiosity or dis-
interested enjoyment, not religion. ‘Hadnakhte, scribe of the
one such message, dated 1244 b.c., on the wall
treasury’, reads
of a chapel connected with Djoser’s pyramid, ‘. came to . .

make an excursion and amuse himself on the west of Memphis,

together with his brother, Panakhti, scribe of the Vizier’.
From a wall of the chapel to the goddess Sekhmet in the
pyramid complex at Abusir we learn that in 1261 b.c. a scribe
named Ptah-Emwe and and perhaps
his father, also a scribe,
a third scribe ‘came to contemplate the shadow of the pyramids
after having been to present offerings to Sekhmet’. They were
tourists no less than the sightseer of today who, at some
famous cathedral, takes time to make an offering of a candle.
Scribes were such regular visitors to these monuments that
they even worked out a formula to record their presence, and,
since they were an unimaginative and conservative lot, kept
using it with little variation for hundreds of years. ‘Scribe
i Greek cart drawn by a pair of mules. Sixtli century b.c. Note the
wheels, a primitive type of spoked wheel.
2 Greek coins used internationally in the fifth century b.c.: Athenian
silver decadrachm with olive branch, owl, and the first three letters
of

the name Athena; electrum stater of Cyzicus with two golden eagles;
gold Persian daric with darius holding a bow and spear.

Greek horseman in travelling garb with broad-brimmed hat ( petasos )

3
and short cloak ( chlamys ). C. 500 b.c.
 IN THE BEGINNING: 3OOO-I2OO B.C. 33

So-and-So,’ it goes, ‘of the clever fingers came to see the

temple of the blessed King So-and-So.’ One example, written
sometime pyramid
in the thirteenth century B.c. in Djoser’s
complex, adds that it was done ‘in the view of the whole body
of the School of . . . —
The Nine’ in other words, a school for
scribes conducted a visit en masse like the groups of school-
,

children we see today making the rounds of sights.

These repetitive simple-minded inscriptions attest not only
the existence of the tourist but also that some of the charac-
teristic features of his behaviour were established very early in
his career. The chief reason for the messages seems to have
been the age-old urge to leave one’s name in a place one has
been to, to leave one’s calling card as it were. They are not
formally chiselled on the stone but either hastily written with
paint and a brush or scratched in with a sharp point of some
kind; the latter method was so common that the technical
term we give to such scribblings is graffiti, Italian for ‘scratch-
ings’. Some visitors could not be bothered with the whole
formula; they got right to the heart of the matter and put
down just their names: ‘The scribe Pennewet’, ‘The scribe
Wia’, and so on. If most of the signers are scribes, this is only
to be expected; they were the ones who knew how to write.
Despite the smug reference to their ‘clever fingers’, i.e. their
skill, their performance was often from perfect so much
far —
so that one member of the profession was moved to indite an
irate blast on a wall of the chapel in Djoser’s complex:

The scribe of clever fingers came, a clever scribe without his

equal among any men of Memphis, the scribe Amenemhet.
I say: Explain to me these words [presumably some illiterate

graffiti he saw]. My heart is sick when I see the work of their

hands ... It is like the work of a woman who has no mind;

would that we had someone who could have denounced
them before ever they entered in to see the Temple. I have
seen a scandal; they are no scribes such as Thoth [patron god
of scribes] has enlightened.
B
34 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Another characteristic of tourist behaviour that appears in
these early days is the drive to bring home mementoes, typical
or exotic, from places one has visited. Harkhuf, the envoy who
was sent by the pharaoh to carry out trading missions in the
Sudan (28 above), on the return from his fourth and last

mission acquired as a present for his ruler the African souvenir

par excellence , a pygmy trained in native dances. It was an
inspired choice because, when he sent a message ahead to
announce what he had with him, the pharaoh went into a
dither of excitement at the news. 'Hurry/ he wrote back, 'and
bring with you this dwarf Get stalwart men who will be
. . .

around him on the deck, beware that he does not fall into the
water. Also get stalwart men to pass the night around him in
his tent. Make inspection ten times in the night/
Not only do souvenirs go back to these earliest days of
travel but so does the buying of bargains or specialties abroad
to satisfy requests from friends or relatives. Here is a letter
that a certain Uzalum received sometime around 1800 b.c.
from Adad-abum, either a young friend or, if the word 'father’
is meant literally, a grown son; Adad-abum was probably in

Eshnunna, just north of Baghdad, and Uzalum away in one of

its subject cities:

I have never before written to you for something precious I

wanted. But if you want to be like a father to me, get me a

fine string full of beads, to be worn around the head. Seal it

with your seal and give it to the carrier of this tablet so that
he can bring it to me. If you have none at hand, dig it out of
the ground wherever (such objects) are (found) and send it
to me. I want it very much; do not withhold it from me. In
this I will see whether you love me as a real father does. Of

course, establish its price for me, write it down, and send me
the tablet. The young man who is coming to you must not
see the string of beads. Seal it (in a package) and give it to
him. He must not see the string, the one to be worn around
the head, which you are sending. It should be full (of beads)
 ! :

IN THE BEGINNING: 3OOO-I2OO B.C. 35

and should be beautiful. If I see it and dislike (?) it, I shall

send it back
Also send the cloak, of which I spoke to you.

When a holiday throng of Egyptians descended on Busiris or

any of the other sites that Herodotus lists, they found no
formal facilities for their food and lodging. Like the hundreds
of thousands who congregate today for festivals of rock music,
they slept in the open and fed themselves as best they could,
leaving the locals to clean up after them.
At the other end of the scale w ere
r
those on government
assignment, who had everything provided for them. In the
pharaoh’s answer to Harkhuf’s message about the pygmy, he
reminds his envoy that ‘commands have been sent to the Chief
of the New Towns ... to command that sustenance be taken
from him in every store-city and every temple, without stint’.

In other words, Harkhuf and his entourage were to be cared

for at temples and government depots along the way. Pre-
sumably this was the standard procedure in Egypt for all who
were travelling on official business. In Mesopotamia, some
cities even had a fully organized government post. Shulgi in

his hymn asserts

I enlarged the footpaths, straightened the highways of

the land,
I made secure travel, built there ‘big houses’,
Planted gardens alongside of them, established
resting-places,
Settled there friendly folk,
(So that) who comes from below, who come from above,
Might refresh themselves in its cool,
The wayfarer who travels the highway at night,
Might find refuge there like in a well-built city.

In plain language, he established along the highways fortified

whose raison d'etre was the maintenance of sizeable
settlements
—
government hostels rather attractive ones, if we can take
36 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
him at his word. They were to serve all passersby, the high,
who would certainly be largely official travellers,
and the low,
for the most part probably traders. He may have instituted
the same kind of service we find in operation at Lagash about
this time, one that ensured efficient movement of her admini-
strators, couriers, and army personnel between the capital and
the subject cities, most of which were 100 to 250 miles away
and one even more than 400. Each man’s travel orders included
an issue of food rations, which were enough to carry the
recipient just one day’s march; at the end of this he pre-
sumably found himself at a government hostel where he put
up for the night and received food for the next day on the
road. The amount and quality of the rations went according
to rank: administrators, for example, ate distinctly better and
more than ordinary dispatch riders. The men travelled on foot
except for the very highest officials, whose allowance included
fodder for animals ; it is very likely that they got fresh mounts
as well at each stage.
None of Mesopotamian hostels have survived. The
these
earliest hostel of which we have remains is in Crete, where it

was erected some time around 1500 b.c. It was a small elegant
structure placed alongside the highway from the south coast
just at its approach to the palace at Cnossus; travellers, after

the long ride across the island, would have refreshed them-
selves here before entering the palace. On the lowest level are
rooms with the remains of storage jars and bins for grain;
these must have been connected with the kitchen. On a higher
level was a handsome loggia, about eighteen by twelve feet
overall, decorated just under the ceiling with a gaily painted
frieze depicting flowers and birds. This could have been a
dining-room. Alongside was an equally handsome little
it

pavilion enclosing a pool for washing the feet. The pool was
roughly six feet by four feet six inches in size, deep enough
for Minoans (who were quite small, perhaps averaging five
foot four in height) to take a hip-bath in, and surrounded by a
fine paving of smooth stone slabs. Just beyond was a room in
 —

IN THE BEGINNING: 3OOO-12OO B.C. 37

which bath-tubs were found; this must have been where the
guests took a complete scrub.
To judge from Shulgi’s words, at some of the roadside
least

government hostels in Mesopotamia welcomed casual non-

official travellers. In town they put up at the local inn, for

private hospitality seems to have played no great role in these

parts. Mesopotamian public houses go back to at least the first

half of the third millennium b.c., but supplying beds for

strangers was more or less incidental, since their chief business
was supplying drinks and women. The tavern-keepers them-
selves were mostly women; barmaid and madame must be the
second and third oldest female professions. Drinks were date-
palm wine and barley beer, and there were strict regulations
against watering them; in Hammurabi’s code the punishment
for watering beer, neatly fitting the crime, was death by
drowning. Decent people did not patronize taverns. A lady
who had retired from the priesthood, for example, if caught
entering one, was burned alive; the assumption was that she
was going there to fornicate. A requirement that tavern-
keepers on pain of death should report all customers who
were felons indicates the general level of the clientele; it was
not particularly savoury. Neither were the surroundings. A
document of the first half of the second millennium b.c. states:
‘If a man urinates in the tavern in the presence of his wife, he
will not prosper ... He should sprinkle his urine to the right
and the left of the door jambs of the tavern and he will
prosper.’
The government hostels were in a sense part of a primitive
postal system: they helped expedite authorized couriers on
way. Such couriers, however, carried only official mail
their
or whatever else they might be persuaded or bribed into
slipping into the government pouch. Non-official mail went
the way it was to go throughout ancient times in the hands o:
:

whatever traveller came along who was headed in the right

direction. The businessmen in Assyria who corresponded with
associates in Asia Minor (cf. 30 above) entrusted their letters
38 TRAVEL IN tHE ANCIENT WORLD
to the caravans that shuttled between the two localities. The
letter quoted earlier requesting a traveller to send back a string
of beads (34 above) refers to ‘the young man who is coming
to you’; the ‘young man’ may have been a fellow townsman
who by good luck was starting on a round trip to where the
addressee was staying and so was able to carry the letter down
and the purchase back. A man of Larsa who, c. 2000 b.c.,

wrote to his sister, closed by saying, T am now sending you

a man (who travels overland) with the sacred barge of the god
Adad. Send me by him one hundred locusts and food worth
one-sixth of a shekel of silver.’Here again the letter-carrier
seems to be someone who happened to be making a round
trip to where the addressee lived.

Overland was both hard and dangerous. It

travel in this age
meant following roads that were often mere donkey tracks. It
meant fording streams or, if the traveller was fortunate enough
to find a ferry in operation, waiting for the ferryman. Above
all, it meant plodding along wind or rain, any of
in sun or
which can be punishing in the Near East. Here is an Egyptian
official, the pharaoh’s seal-bearer, on the subject; he was sent

on a mission across the desert to Sinai (cf. 28 above) in the

year 1830 b.c. or so and left an inscription there that is

eloquent :

This land was reached in the third month of the second

season, although it was not at all the season for coming to
thismining area [indeed it was not; the time was close to the
beginning of June]. This seal-bearer . . . says to the officials
who may come to this mining area at this season: Let not
your faces flag because of it ... I came from Egypt with my
face flagging. It was difficult, in my experience, to find the
skin for it, when the land was burning hot, the highland was
in summer, and the mountains branded a blistered skin.

Even worse than the hardships were the dangers, above all

brigandage. It was so widespread that Hammurabi’s code, as

 IN THE BEGINNING: 3OOO-I2OO B.C. 39

mentioned above, excused a trader from repaying a loan if his

goods had been stolen. One of Hammurabi’s ways of meeting
the problem was to throw the burden on the local authorities :

he ruled that they were to compensate any victim of highway

robbery in their territories. When law and order broke down
was well-nigh hopeless. ‘Men sit in the bushes’,
the situation
moaned an Egyptian writing between 2200 and 2100 b.c., a
period of crisis in the valley of the Nile, ‘until the benighted
traveller comes, in order to plunder his load. The robber is a
possessor of riches.’ Shulgi’s words glorifying his road-
building (35 above) emphasize the protection he supplied, and
one of the impressive features of Crete’s road between Cnossus
and the south coast is a series of fortified posts for highway

Sometime around 1130 b.c. or so, an Egyptian priest named

Wenamon compiled a report of a business trip he had taken.
By an almost miraculous stroke of fortune a copy has survived,
a tattered roll of papyrus that a group of Egyptian peasants
came upon one day when looking for fuel. It is the earliest
detailed account of a voyage in existence, and its bald, intensely
personal narrative suddenly turns a light on in the darkness,
enables us to get some feeling of what it was like to travel
twelve centuries before the birth of Christ.
Wenamon was attached to the temple of Amon at Thebes
in upper Egypt. The high priest there selected him to under-
take the journey to Lebanon to purchase a load of its famous
cedar, needed for building the ceremonial barge used in the
annual festival. Wenamon’s first move was to make his way
down to the delta, pay his respects to the local ruler there, and
enlist his aid. He presented a letter of introduction from the
high priest, his credentials or passport as it were, and was
received graciously. Passage was arranged for him on a vessel
bound for Syria, and, on 20 April, fifteen days after leaving
Thebes, the ship raised anchor, sailed down to the river’s
40 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
mouth, and, as Wenamon puts it, ‘embarked on the great
Syrian sea’.

So far things had gone very well, and at the first port of call
it seemed that Wenamon’ s luck would hold out. His vessel

put in at the town of Dor, a little to the south of Carmel,

where a tribe of sea raiders called the Tjeker had established a
colony less than a century earlier. The local ruler, Beder,
hastened to dispatch to the newly arrived envoy ‘fifty loaves
of bread, a jar of wine, and a joint of beef’. Wenamon, who, as
the narrative makes clear, held a glowing opinion of his own
importance, took the gifts in gracious stride as being no more
nor less than his due. This was the last time luck was to smile
on him; his very next words reveal a horrendous misfortune.
As he tells it in his businessman’s language, ‘A man of my
ship made off, having stolen one vessel of gold amounting to
five dehen [about i -2 lbs], four vessels of silver amounting to
twenty dehen a sack of
,
silver — eleven dehen. Total of what he
stole: five dehen of gold, thirty-one dehen [about 7*5 lbs] of
silver.’ Every cent the poor fellow had been carrying was gone,
his travel allowance as well as the cash he had been given to
pay for the lumber.
Wenamon did about the only thing he could, under the
circumstances. ‘In the morning I got up,’ he reports, ‘and
went to the place where the prince was and said, “I have been
robbed in your harbour and since you are prince of this land
you should start an investigation to look for my silver.”
’

Beder was not one to be taken in by such bluff. At the same

time he was decent enough to offer to help. ‘I don’t care how
important a person you are,’ he replied, ‘I refuse to recognize
the complaint that you have just lodged. If it had been a thief
who belonged to my land who went on your boat and stole
your silver, I would have paid it to you from my treasury until
—
they had found this thief of yours whoever he may be. Now
about the thief who robbed you he belongs to you! He —
belongs to your ship! Spend a few days here visiting me, so
that I may look for him.’
 IN THE BEGINNING: 3OOO-12OO B.C. 41

After nine days of visitingWenamon got impatient. At this

point the papyrus is tattered, and we can only try to guess
from scraps of sentences just what happened. Wenamon left
Dor, continued on his way, and somewhere between Tyre and
Byblus, perhaps in the port of Sidon, he solved his desperate
problem by a desperate remedy: he carried out a bit of robbery
on his own. He held up some Tjeker and took thirty deben of
silver from them. The papyrus is still mutilated at this point,

but the sequel shows that something of this sort happened. He

had no qualms: his money had been stolen in a Tjeker harbour,
5

and this was Tjeker money. ‘I am taking your silver he told ,

his victims, ‘and it will stay with me until you find mine or
the thief who stole it. Even though you did not steal, I am
5
taking it .

If Wenamon thought that his troubles were now over, he

could not have been more wrong. The moment he dropped
anchor in the harbour of Byblus, where he intended to buy
the lumber, the harbour-master met him with a short but
unambiguous message from Zakar-Baal, the ruling prince:
‘Get out of my harbour
5

The most reasonable explanation

!

for the unexpected order is that the Tjekers had sent a wanted-
for-theft message ahead to Byblus and, since they were his
neighbours on the south and had a reputation as formidable
sea raiders, the prince was not anxious any trouble with
to start
them. A man of Wenamon’s stamp, however, who had just
pulled himself out of a hole by a successful piece of hold-up
work, was not going to let a little thing like this stop him.
For twenty-nine days he hung around the harbour, even
though each morning the harbour-master duly reported with
the same message. Zakar-Baal, curiously enough, went no
further than this. He had to stay on the right side of touchy
neighbours, but at the same time he did not want to lose a
profitable sale if he could help So he chose this interesting
it.

expedient of issuing an order and doing nothing to back it up.

Finally the prince granted the poor envoy an interview —
and Wenamon found himself up against a tough negotiator.
B*
42 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Since the stolen money fell far short of covering the cost of
the timber, Zakar-Baal made him send back to Egypt for a
cargo of goods to make up the difference. It took eight
months for the shipment to arrive and the timber to be cut
and hauled and loaded. At long last Wenamon received
clearance to leave with his precious purchase —and that very
morning, as if sent by the gods of retribution, eleven Tjeker
warships sailed into the harbour to demand justice for the
thirty deben of silver that had been stolen from them a year ago.
At this point, Wenamon tells us, he sat down on the beach and
cried.
Zakar-Baal was on the spot. He had an obligation to
Wenamon —but same time he had no intention of getting
at the

on the wrong side of the Tjekers. His solution was a highly

original compromise. ‘I cannot arrest a messenger of Amon in
my territory/ he told the Tjekers, ‘but let me send him off and
then you go after him to arrest him.’ In other words, Wenamon
was to shove off somewhat ahead of his enemies, was to have,
as it were, a sporting chance. He no doubt had his own ideas
of how sporting a chance a vessel chartered for hauling timber
had against a crack squadron of sea raiders.
The next portion of the narrative is tantalizingly bald. 'He
loadedme on board/ Wenamon writes, 'he sent me away. The
wind drove me to the land of Alashiya’ (Cyprus or the coast
of Asia Minor to its north). This wind,which took him in a
direction almost opposite to what he wanted, must have been
one of the southeasterly gales that are common along the
Syrian coast. Wenamon probably considered it just another
to add to his list of tribulations, but actually it very likely
proved his salvation: the Tjekers, either because their ships
were too light or because they thought the gale would save
them the job, apparently did not bother to give chase.
When the vessel landed, unquestionably a good deal the
worse for wear, a group of natives promptly descended upon
it and hustled Wenamon off to kill him. Their villages had

very likely suffered their share of pirate raids, and this would
 IN THE BEGINNING: 3000-1200 B.C. 43

be looked upon as a welcome opportunity to square accounts.

At this point, however, Wenamon’s luck finally changed. He
pushed his way to the palace of the Queen and ‘found her just

as she was going from one of her houses and entering into
another. I greeted her. I asked the people who stood around
her, “Isn’t there one of you who understands Egyptian?”
Someone answered, “I understand it.” I said to him, “Say to
your mistress
”— but the speech is unimportant and probably
’

represents what, years later at his desk in Thebes, he reckoned

he ought to have said rather than what a soaked and exhausted
and frightened wayfarer actually did say. The important point
is that the queen listened. ‘She had the people called and, as
they stood before her,’ writes Wenamon, ‘she said to me,
“Spend the night
— ”
and here the papyrus abruptly breaks
’

off. These are the last words we have from this extraordinary

writer. We do not know —

and probably never will, unless by
another miracle the rest of the document is discovered how —
he got back home or whether the timber arrived safely. We
only know that he did get back, or else the report would never
have been written.
 2

In the Beginning:
1200-500 B.C.

Sometime around 1200 b c the world of the eastern Medi-

. .

terranean underwent a profound change. Hordes of invaders

of obscure origin, the ‘Sea Peoples’ as historians call them,
slowly but inexorably swept over it, leaving ruin in their wake.
When the dust of their devastations died down, the Bronze
Age was at an end, the Iron Age had begun, and a new cast
had taken up the key roles in the drama of ancient history.
The Egyptians managed to beat off the attackers at their
very doorstep, the mouth of the Nile, but the effort, along
with other factors, exhausted what little energy they had left.

They soon lapsed into a long twilight of living in the past that
was and make it the prime tourist
to fossilize their country
attraction of ancient times. In Asia Minor the newcomers
smashed the power of the Hittites. Syria and Palestine, which
hitherto had been more or less divided between Egyptian and
Hittite spheres of interest, were now left leaderless, and this
enabled a number of relatively minor peoples, Canaanites and
Israelitesand Phoenicians, to make their presence felt. In
Mesopotamia the end of the turmoil brought to the fore a
nation that was soon to put together the greatest empire the
Near East had ever seen, the Assyrians. The change, however,
that in the long run most effected the course of history took
place in the peninsula of Greece.
 IN THE BEGINNING.* HOODOO B.C. 45

Since the attackers came from the north, it stood directly in

their path. As they overran it, they came upon the still-

flourishing Mycenaeans, those Bronze Age Greeks who from

about 1500 b.c. dominated the trade of the eastern Medi-
terranean 27 above), whose kings dwelt in great palaces,
(cf.

ran extensive bureaucracies, and had themselves buried in

grand style. The invasion stamped out this civilization so
thoroughly that Greece went into eclipse, to live through a
dark age lasting three or four centuries. When the curtain of
obscurity finally parts it is to reveal the ancestors of the
superbly gifted people we know from history.
In the beginning this new race of Greeks led a poor and
primitive life, a far cry from that of their predecessors, the
wealthy and highly organized Mycenaeans. The great kings of
those times were now reduced to the status of local chieftains
little more powerful than the aristocracy surrounding them,
the impressive towns with their royal palaces to mere villages
where nobles and peasants alike lived on farms. Cheaper and
more durable iron weapons and tools substitute for bronze.
This is the age that appears in Homer’s poems, particularly
the Odyssey Though he purports to sing of Agamemnon and
.

Nestor and other rich and great lords of the pre-invasion days,
though he includes in his story many of the features of their
civilization — war-chariots, costly armour, precious gifts of
gold and silver — the basic setting is by and large a time not
too far removed from his own century, the end of the eighth
or beginning of the seventh b.c.
In this world travel by sea is still most expeditious way
the
of getting from place to place. But the great maritime powers
of the previous millennium —Minoans, Mycenaeans, Egyptians
—have now all been replaced by a new nation of traders, the
Phoenicians. From about iioob.c. they monopolized the
Mediterranean for some four hundred years until the Greeks
learned the ways of the sea well enough to challenge them
successfully. Solomon (c. 965-922 b.c.) used Phoenician
sailors to carry on trade with India, reopening lines of com-
46 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
merce that had existed a thousand years before (30-1 above).
A little over a century later Phoenician seamen, working ever
further westward, founded a colony at Carthage, and event-
ually passed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic
to plant one at Cadiz. By 600 b.c. they had circumnavigated
Africa (61 below). 'Phoenicians, famed for their ships, came
into port,’ says Odysseus’ swineherd as he embarks on the
tale of how he became a slave, 'greedy rascals with thousands
of trinkets in their black ship.’ He was a child at the time,
son of the local king; the new arrivals, ready for illegitimate
as well as legitimate business, lured him aboard, carried him
away, and sold him off to Laertes, Odysseus’ father.

In Homer’s verses there is much talk of travel, both on sea

and land, but only the de luxe travel of kings and princes. The
Phaeacians, inhabitants of a kind of maritime Shangri-La, take
Odysseus home to Ithaca in a crack fifty-oared galley and let
him stretch out to sleep on the afterdeck, sharing the space
with the ship’s officers. When Odysseus’ son Telemachus sets
forth to find out what happened to his long absent father, he
has a twenty-oared galley at his command; on the way out
he shares the afterdeck with Athena, on the way back with a
refugee prince he had befriended.
On land Homer’s heroes do their travelling in chariots.
Telemachus goes by chariot from Pylos to Sparta, Helen’s
daughter from Sparta all the way to Phthia, the birthplace of
Achilles in Thessaly. In the dark age the chariot had become
almost obsolete among the Greeks, surviving only for racing.
These journeys, then, are anachronisms, reminiscences of
Mycenaean times when nobles and their ladies went about the
countryside in such conveyances (27 above). They are
legendary as well the : would have involved two days
first trip

of steady riding over mountainous country, and the second

still more; even the Mycenaeans did not have carriage roads

between the places involved, and there certainly were none in the
dark age, or for that matter, throughout most of Greek history.
 IN THE BEGINNING.* I2OO-50O B.C. 47

Transport was chiefly by pack-animal, particularly mules.

Where the terrain permitted, wheeled vehicles were used;
thus Priam hauled the ransom for Hector’s corpse across the
plainbetween Troy and the Greek camp in a ‘handsome new-
made well-wheeled mule-drawn wagon’, and in the Phaeacians’
idyllic island, Scheria, Nausicaa carried the family wash to the
riverside in a mule-drawn wagon’. Homer
‘well-wheeled
happens to mention only four-wheeled wagons, but the two-
wheeled cart surely was known.
The accommodations enjoyed by the heroes were no less
luxurious than their modes of travel. For they put up at each
other’s houses, where they were handsomely wined and dined
and sent off loaded down with gifts. Telemachus, after a stay
with Menelaus and Helen at Sparta, left with a silver bowl and
a robe woven by Helen’s own fair hands. His hosts had once
been guests themselves of the King and Queen of Thebes in
Egypt; on their departure the King presented Menelaus with
two silver tubs, two tripods, and ten pieces of gold, and the
Queen gave Helen a gold distaff and a silver basket with
gold-plated edges for holding wool. There was a price to be
paid for all this: when an erstwhile host returned a visit, he
expected the same level of hospitality and gifts of equal value.
The gold and silver things that Homer talks about so freely
are again anachronisms, luxuries that the long departed
Mycenaeans had enjoyed. We get a glimpse of the true state of
affairs at this time when he where people went to
describes
sleep. A chieftain of the dark age occupied a simple farmhouse

that had room only for his family; at nightfall he and his wife
would go off to their bedchamber, but his guests, no matter
how distinguished, would bed down under an open porch
that runs along the front of the building.
Entree to the house of some important local involved more
than just food and shelter — itmeant that the visitor had the
strong arm of his host to shield him from a small community’s
instinctive distrust and fear of strangers. Otherwise, in this
age which knew no central authority, his sole protection was
48 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
people’s respect for religion, their willingness to abide by
heaven’s law, which clearly and unambiguously enjoined
hospitality. 'Stranger,’ says Odysseus’ swineherd to the beggar
that he does not know is his master in disguise,
e
it is not right
for me someone worse than you
to scorn a stranger, even if
should come along. For both strangers and beggars all come
from Zeus.’ Homer was well aware that not everybody was so
gratifyingly obedient to god’s will. He gives the other side of
the picture in Odysseus’ contretemps with the Cyclopes, who
'pay no heed to aegis-bearing Zeus and the blessed gods’ and
view unexpected guests as just so much food for supper.

Homer rarely sings of everyday folk. Only in his report of

Odysseus’ vicissitudes when masquerading as a beggar is
there a hint of what might befall the anonymous traveller.
Odysseus’ first encounter in was with his swine-
this guise

herd, who, as a godfearing man, honoured the laws of

hospitality. In his own home he did not do as well. 'You’re
out of your mind, stranger,’ sneers one of Penelope’s maids
when he on staying in the main hall and tending the
insisted
lights, 'why don’t you go to the smith’s or the town loggia to

sleep?’ If nobody took a stranger in, the most he could hope

for was room to bed down under a public loggia or, even
better, in the local smithy, where the warmth from the forge
would keep off the night chill.
Similar conditions existed at this time in parts of the Near
East as well, as we learn from the early books of the Old
Testament, which, roughly speaking, are more or less con-
temporary with Homer. The two angels sent to Sodom
incognito to test the populace would have spent the night in
the town square, had not Lot insisted that they come to his
house. Lot, being no native of the place, had decent manners;
the townspeople, 'wicked and sinners before the Lord exceed-
ingly’, when they got wind of the presence of strangers,
besieged the house in a body, and only divine intervention
prevented violence. A chapter in the Book of Judges relates a
 IN THE BEGINNING: I2OO-5OO B.C. 49

similar incident. A Levite, who was bringing a concubine from

her city back to his home, found himself at nightfall in Gibeah,
inhabited by members of the tribe of Benjamin. Since no one
offered hospitality, he camped in the town square until
eventually an old man —
as in Lot’s case no native of the
—
town came along and took him in. During dinner a lawless
gang descended upon the house and began to threaten ; he was
able to buy them off only by giving them the concubine to
abuse. As the chapter points out at the outset, this happened
‘when there was no king in Israel’, i.e. when the land, like
Homer’s Greece, lacked a strong central authority. At such
times there was too little traffic to justify the existence of
inns, and travellers had to depend on haphazard private
hospitality and trust to luck they would escape being molested.
Men went on foot and alone, as Jacob did when he paid his
visit to Laban. The well-to-do, particularly when travelling
with women, might take along servants and donkeys the : man
and concubine in the incident reported in Judges were wealthy
enough to travel this way, as was the Shunammite woman
befriended by Elisha. Kings and princes rode mules. Chariots
were strictly for war; they are never spoken of in connection
with travel, even though in places there were roads they might
have used. The Philistines, for example, when returning the
ark which they had captured, transported from Ekron by a
it

wagon or cart drawn by cows which, heading under divine

guidance straight for Bethshemesh, ‘went along the highway’.

While David and Solomon were building a small and ephem-

eral kingdom in Palestine, off to the northeast in the middle
reaches of the Tigris the Assyrians were laying the foundations
of a vast empire. It lasted almost three centuries, from about
900 to 612 b.c., when Cyaxares’ Medes joined a reinvigorated
Babylon to destroy the capital at Nineveh so thoroughly that
some two hundred years later Xenophon’s Greeks passed the
ruins with no idea of what they were seeing.
What made the Assyrians great was their instinct for
50 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
discipline and organization; they were the Romans of their
age. It enabled them to create a military force that conquered
and held most of the Near East and a bureaucracy that admin-
istered what had been conquered with ruthless efficiency. To
permit the troops to move
any direction and to
swiftly in
facilitate rapid communication between the capital and the

surrounding territories, Assyria’s rulers laid down a network

of roads.
C

I took my chariots’, says Tiglath-Pileser I, describing

a campaign he made in 1115 b.c. deep into the rocky terrain of
Kurdistan, ‘and my warriors, and over the steep mountains
and through . . . wearisome paths I hewed a way with pickaxes
of bronze, and I made passable a road for the passage of my
chariot and my troops.’ Assyrian military roads were no mere
tracks. They had accommodate not only the Assyrian
to
chariots, specially heavy affairs borne on eight-spoked wheels
and carrying up to four men, but also the Assyrian battering
rams, which look like primitive tanks and were so ponderous
they sometimes were fitted with three pairs of wheels.
The main routes were carefully kept up, were marked with
road signs at given distances, and every six miles or so there
was a guard postwhich offered not only protection but the
opportunity to communicate with the next down the line by
means of fire signals. Along roads through desert, there were
wells and small forts at appropriate intervals. As in the previous
age (26 above), road surfaces were never more than packed
dirt, paving being reserved for the approaches to temples or
sanctuaries that had to take processional vehicles on festival

days. In these stretches, the roadbuilders reveal a technique

almost the match of the Romans. A processional way at

Babylon dating about 600 b.c. has a foundation layer of bricks

set in asphalt, and upon this a surface of heavy limestone slabs,

each a little over forty-one inches square, with the joints

between them sealed with asphalt. Work of this quality was
expensive; even the treasuries of Assyria and Babylon could
afford little of it.

The same was true of permanent bridges in stone. They were

 —
IN THE BEGINNING: I2OO-50O B.C. 51

put up only where absolutely essential, as across the Euphrates

at Babylon, the span, erected most probably in the time of
Nebuchadnezzar (605-562 b.c.), that Herodotus so admired.
Seven piers still stand, or at least their brick cores, since
originally they were sheathed in stone. Each is about sixty-nine
feet long and twenty-nine and a half feet wide. Herodotus

describes how the engineers diverted the course of the river

to put them up; since cements that would set in water were
not known until Roman times, this was the only way it could
have been done. Removable planks spanned the distance
between making the structure into a drawbridge
piers,

although Herodotus has a more picturesque explanation, that

the planks were taken up every night to prevent people on
either side from crossing over to rob each other.
Assyria’s roads were used regularly by the king’s messengers
as well as the army, for the palace maintained an efficient

government post. It included a network of ‘officials for the

forwarding of the royal correspondence’, stationed in key
centres — in other words, postmasters to supervise the move-
ment of couriers and mail. The written documents dug up in
Assyria include a number of hand-lists giving the names of
places along a given route and the distances between them.
These probably were in the first instance for military use, but
could well have been issued to couriers also. They are the fore-
runners of the itineraria of the Romans (186 below), the travel
guide in its most primitive form.

During the years when the Assyrian star was rising men
finally learned to ride horses.

The horse, as we have seen (23 above), started its career as

a draught animal, first donkeys or mules to
substituting for
pull ordinary carts and wagons and then coming into its own
as the draught animal for that most prized form of cart, the
chariot. This promotion took place about 1600 b.c. However,
the further promotion to riding animal was delayed for over
half a millennium longer. Refugees might faute de mieux leap
52 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
on an available team, servants ride strays back to the stable,
or horse thieves make
getaway on their loot (when Odysseus
a
and Diomed took Rhesus’ famed steeds from under the noses
of the Trojans, Odysseus ‘mounted the horses, then whipped
them, and eagerly the pair flew toward the hollow ships’), but
these were all exceptional cases. An Egyptian relief shows
Amenhotep III (1398-1361 b.c.) in his chariot and — it is his
captives who ignominiously sit astride the horses.
Then, shortly before the beginning of the first millen-
nium b.c., mounted warriors start making an
pictures of
appearance. The art of riding most likely arose among the
nomads of the steppe lands, in South Russia and Asia Minor
and Iran, and from there moved on into the surrounding areas.
Its reception was cordial but reserved: the chariot continued

to be the preferred military weapon for many years, as we can

tell from the Bible’s account of the fighting between Philistines

and Israelites or from the reliefs illustrating the Assyrian army

in action. By 875 b.c. or so, the Assyrians had unbent suffi-

ciently to add cavalry, although they still remained as devoted

as ever to their chariots. Subsequent armies turned increasingly
to cavalry until, by the fifth century b.c., the chariot had
become obsolete for all military intents and purposes
in the West (it lasted a good deal longer in the Far
East).
From the outset through most of ancient times, riders
made do with a minimum of equipment. They guided their
horses with a simple snaffle bit and rode either bareback or on
a horsecloth or simple pad (Fig. 3). Spurs do not appear until
the fifth century b.c., the stirrup and nailed horseshoe not
until more than a thousand years after that (181 below).
As draught-animals horses had served almost exclusively
for warfare. They were somewhat more widely used as riding
animals, but not much. Expensive to buy and maintain, they
were for cavalrymen, government dispatch carriers, or
wealthy sportsmen. Ancient travellers preferred to go on
donkeyback or to be pulled by mules.
 IN THE BEGINNING: I2OO-500 B.C. 53

The Medes had made a spectacular entrance onto the stage of

Near Eastern history with the destruction of Assyria’s capital
in 612 b.c. Half a century later Cyrus the Great of Persia

(559-530 b.c.) knit them together with his own people to

form an empire even more impressive than the Assyrians’.
His successor but one, Darius the Great (521-486 b.c.), con-
solidated Cyrus’s conquests and perfected the loose but
effective machinery of government that enabled the Persians
to rule successfully a conglomerate of subject lands stretching
from Iran to Egypt.
One secret of their success was swift and sure communica-
tion between the capital and the most distant centres. To
effect this, the Persians took over the network of roads and
the government post that the Assyrians had built up and
expanded and refined both. Their so-called ‘royal road’,
maintained primarily for government couriers but open to all,
ran from Sardis, near the east coast of the Mediterranean, some
1600 miles to Susa, the Persian capital, not far from the head
of the Persian Gulf. There were rest houses and inns for
royalty or other notables at fixed intervals of about ten to
fifteen miles depending upon the terrain, forts at strategic
points, ferries for crossing water. Ordinary wayfarers could
average some eighteen miles a day on it, and traverse the
whole in three months. The Persian dispatch service, efficiently
organized into stages, probably did it in one-fifth the time.
The mounts were supplied by the king, the riders formed an
and the administrative head of the service was one
elite unit,

of the government’s high dignitaries. Herodotus, though he

never saw the men in action and had to depend on hearsay,
was tremendously impressed. He reports:

There is nothing on earth faster than these couriers. The

service is a Persian invention, and it goes like this, according
to what I was told. Men and horses are stationed a day’s
travel apart, a man and a horse for each of the days needed
to cover the journey. These men neither snow nor rain nor
54 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
heat nor gloom of night stay from the swiftest possible
completion of their appointed stage. The first man, having
covered his, hands the dispatches to the second, the second
to the third, and so on, the dispatches going from one to the
other through the whole line.

The roads the couriers raced over were built to take wheeled
traffic no less than horses and pack-animals. As a matter of
fact, they were able to accommodate a particularly demanding
vehicle much favoured by the Persians, a de luxe four-wheeled
closed carriage. The Greeks called it a harmamaxa 'chariot- ,
.

5
wagon ,
combined the grace and speed of a chariot
since it

with the capacity of a wagon. The Persian elite used it for,

among other things, shuttling their harems about; it had a
roof and sides that could be closed in by curtains, thereby
discreetly screening the occupants from view. Aristophanes,
satirizing the Athenian diplomats who tried to justify their
high salaries by big talk of hardships, introduces an envoy to
Persia who complains: 'Well, first we had to cross the plains.
Itwas exhausting. There we were, travelling in harmamaxai ,

lying at our ease, shaded by awnings. We had a terrible time.

5

The harmamaxa that outdid all harmamaxai was the one that
was specially built, taking two years in the making, to bring
Alexander’s body from Babylon, where he had died, to his
tomb at Alexandria. It was in the form of a colonnaded Greek
temple, was roofed with scales of gold, was gorgeously decor-
ated, and —
unique among ancient conveyances had some —
form of shock absorber (cf. 350 below). No less than sixty-four
mules were needed to haul it. The road from Mesopotamia to
Egypt at the time, no question about it, must have been first
class.

Perhaps the most notable contribution to travel made by this

road-conscious nation was in an area where there were no

roads at all. For the Persians, if they did not inaugurate the
cross-desert camel caravan, are at the least responsible for its

key role in the trade of the Near East.

 IN THE BEGINNING: HOO-5OO B.C. 55

One must be careful, in tracing the use of the camel, to

distinguish between the two-hu iped or Bactrian camel and
the one-humped, the dromedary. The
woolly and hence first is

fitted for colder temperatures, climbs mountains with ease,

and serves exclusively as a pack-animal. The second thrives in

hot weather, is useless in the mountains, and serves as often
for riding and fighting as for transport. They arose in different
regions and followed different paths in history.
The two-humped camel originated in Central Asia, was
domesticated by at least 2000 b.c., and was in use by that time
as far west as Persia. made its way still further
From there it

into Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. The Assyrians, always in

the forefront when it came to transport, seem to have been
responsible for bringing it to Mesopotamia, perhaps about the
beginning of the first millennium b.c.

The history of the dromedary ismore complicated and

presents something of a puzzle. It probably was first tamed
and bred in Arabia. Figurines of dromedaries dating from
3000 b.c. or even before have been found in Egypt, so the
animal was known there in very early times — yet Egyptian
records reveal no evidence whatsoever of camels as beasts of
burden until thousands of years later. The Israelites must have
known the dromedary back in the days of the Patriarchs,
1800 b.c. or so, for it is mentioned in Genesis; yet, since they
viewed it as ‘unclean’, they obviously held it in scant regard.
The Babylonians knew it at least as early as the fourteenth
century b.c., but their regular pack-animal remained the
donkey practically all through their history. One solution to
the puzzle is to assume that the dromedary found favour as
early as 3000 b.c. among desert peoples living on the periphery
of the civilized world, who presumably used it not only for
transport, riding, and fighting, but for its milk, wool, hide,
and dung, even as today. This would explain how Egyptians,
Israelites, Babylonians, and all others who were in contact
with such peoples were familiar with the animal; not living
amid desert conditions, however, they had no compelling
56 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
reason to adopt Eventua^y the dromedary was introduced
it.

into Mesopotamia by Assy a in the ninth century b.c. or

r

perhaps even earlier. After number of campaigns waged

1

against camel-riding peoples, the Assyrian army recognized

its value and began to include baggage trains.
it in their
The dromedary had thus been promoted to an adjunct to
the military. But it still did not rank as a standard beast of
burden. This came about when the Persians created their
great empire. It brought into being an unprecedented political
arrangement: for the first time in history, all of the Near East
was in the hands of a single well-organized and powerful state.

Hitherto transport from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean

5
had taken a wide arc to avoid crossing the no-man s-land of
the Syrian desert. Now, without toll barriers and with a
government strong enough to keep desert maurauders in hand
and rich enough to plant and maintain a series of watering
points, a short-cut across the desert was suddenly feasible.
The Persians had learned from the Assyrians the use of the
dromedary for transport, its peculiar value in the desert had
been common knowledge for thousands of years, so it was a
natural choice as pack-animal for the new route. The camel
caravan was launched on its long career.

The year 500 b.c., to use a convenient round number, marks

the moment when the Near East, so long the focus of ancient
history, yielded precedence to the west, to the Greeks and
Romans.
By this time, the general lineaments of ancient travel had
been fixed. On the sea, sailings of merchant craft offered
communication between the major ports of the eastern Medi-
terranean. On land, key centres were linked by carriage roads,
the best of which might boast bridges and ferries, road-signs,
way-stations, guard-posts. The technique of paving had been
developed although still sparingly used. Travellers had their
choice of wagons, carts, donkeys, horses, or camels. Along
 IN THE BEGINNING: I2OO-50O B.C. 57

major routes there were inns, and in towns, inns and taverns.
And, among the regular users of the sea-lanes and roads, the
official and commercial travellers, we begin to catch a glimpse
of the traveller for travel’s sake, the tourist.
 3

Expanding Horizons

In 500 b.c., Darius the Great’s Persia bestrode the ancient

world like a Colossus. He had welded the once great nations of
the Near East, Lydia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, into one far-
flung empire. The long arm of his power reached out to control
the Greek cities on the west coast of Asia Minor. Only some
pocket-sized states in Greece itself lay outside his grasp. When
one of them, Athens, dared to challenge him, he decided to
include these too in the Persian embrace. The result was the
celebrated pair of wars fought in 490 and 480-79 b.c. in which
the Greeks, to their own and Persia’s astonishment, defeated
their gigantic enemy and thereby moved into the forefront of
ancient history.
Persia had built and run a vast sprawling empire. To
the Greeks bigness was anathema. They preferred to live
as they had for centuries, in cities which were at the same time
independent states, each, no matter how small, with its own
constitution, courts, military establishment, coinage, and other
appurtenances of autonomy. There never was a unified nation
that called itself ‘Greece’. There was Athens, Sparta, Corinth,
Thebes, and so on. These were the largest; the others varied
in size down to mere villages. When Athens reached its heyday
in the second half of the fifth century b.c., it put together what
we refer to as an empire, but this was not at all an organized
whole like the Persian ; it was a federation of city-states which
remained city-states as before but paid tribute to Athens and
submitted to her foreign policy.
 EXPANDING HORIZONS 59

The world that the Greeks moved about in stretched from

the eastern shores of the Black Sea to as far west as Marseilles.
It would have stretched still further, had it not been for the
Phoenicians, or rather Carthage, the colony planted by them
on the coast of Tunisia which eventually grew more powerful
than the motherland. The close-fisted traders of Carthage had
early taken over both shores of the western Mediterranean,
and wanted no competitors. In 535 B.c. and during the follow-
ing decades the Greeks who had founded Marseilles fought
several desperate naval battles with Carthage, but all they
gained was the right to stay where they were; the Carthaginians
were able to cordon off the waters between the coasts of Spain
and Morocco and bolt the gates of Gibraltar.
From Marseilles eastward, however, the seas were open,
and they were ploughed by a multitude of freighters, Car-
thaginian, Phoenician, Egyptian, above all, Greek. Ships plied
regularly between Marseilles and ports in Sicily and southern
Italy, and from there one could get any number of sailings to
Greece or Asia Minor. From Athens or Corinth in Greece
trade routes reached out southward to the Levant and Egypt,
eastward to Asia Minor, northward to the Hellespont, the
Bosporus, and even beyond into the Black Sea, along its

southern shore right up to the eastern end, along the northern

as far as the Crimea. Travellers who wanted to push still

further east could follow the fine roads maintained by Persia

(53 above) to Mesopotamia or even into Persia itself. Travellers

who sailed from Greece to Egypt could continue up the Nile
to the First Cataract.

Homer had known only part of the Mediterranean, to the west

no further than Sicily, to the east no further than the Helles-
pont; for the regions beyond he is reduced to tales of lotus-
eaters and Cyclopes and other marvels. By the fifth century
b.c. educated or well-travelled Greeks knew the whole of the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and had a fair idea of the
size and outlines. Thanks to the information gained before
60 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Carthage barred strangers, they knew that the western gate
was the Strait of Gibraltar and that there was a vast ocean
beyond; they had even heard of the British Isles. But their
knowledge did not penetrate very deeply inland; the hinter-
land was, for them as for Homer, largely terra incognita They .

were vague about just where the people they called Celts
and they thought the Danube rose in the Pyrenees.
lived,
Towards the northeast, they had some solid facts about the
Scythian tribes of south Russia and the region they inhabited,
and they were aware that the Caspian was an inland sea, but
at this point their information petered out. For Russia north
of the Black Sea coast, Herodotus repeats rumours —though
with his good sense he refuses to believe them —of men with
goat feet, men who sleep six months of the year, griffins, and
the like. Still further north he reports the existence of cannibals
and of people who believe in werewolves and, beyond them,
of snowy desert.
Travel through Persia had acquainted the Greeks with Asia
as far east as the Indus valley (West Pakistan). Darius, upon
annexing the valley in 515 b.c., sent an expedition down the
Indus river to the Indian Ocean; from there his men coasted
westward past the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the south
shore of Arabia to enter the Red Sea and end their voyage
somewhere near Suez. Reports of the accomplishment brought
this part of the world within the bounds of Greek geographical

knowledge, but just barely. Herodotus, for example, knows

about the groves of incense trees in Arabia, but he thinks that
cassia —cinnamon bark—comes from there, not realizing that,
like the tendercinnamon sticks or shoots, it originated in India
and further east and that Arabia was just serving as middle-
man for the traffic in both. And he adds lurid details of flying
snakes that guard the incense trees, of bat-like creatures in
the marshes where cassia was thought to grow, of how
cinnamon is obtained from birds who carry off the sticks to
build nests with. He knows about India’s vast polyglot
populations, about bamboo, about the primitive Dravidians,
 1

EXPANDING HORIZONS 6

but he tells stories of Indian cannibal tribes who kill and eat
the sick and aged and of Indian ants that are bigger than foxes
and mine gold. Of what lay east of India he had no notion;
he thought there was nothing but endless inhospitable desert.
China, in other words, was totally beyond his ken.
By the fifth century b.c., then, the Greeks’ knowledge of
Asia included Arabia and the lands eastward as far as the Indus
valley. For Africa, on the other hand, they had not improved
much upon Homer. Herodotus has some details about the
desert of the Sudan, but he speculates vainly on where the
Nile rose, and to him, as to all before him, the ‘Ethiopians’
were still a race of supermen (no below). The Greeks knew
that Africa is surrounded by water. Indeed, if we can believe
a tale that Herodotus picked up in Egypt, the Phoenicians
succeeded in circumnavigating the continent some time around
600 b.c. Here is what he says (with modern equivalents
substituted for his geographical names) :

Africa, exceptwhere it borders Asia, is clearly surrounded

by water. Necho, Pharaoh of Egypt, was the first we know
of to demonstrate this. When he finished digging out the
canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, he sent out a naval
expedition manned by Phoenicians, instructing them to come
home by way of the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean
and in that fashion get back to Egypt. So, setting out from
theRed Sea, the Phoenicians sailed into the Indian Ocean.
Each autumn they put in at whatever point of Africa they
happened to be sailing by, sowed the soil, stayed there until
harvest time, reaped the grain, and went on; so that two
years passed, and it was not until the third that they rounded
the Pillars of Hercules and made it back to Egypt. And they
reported things which others can believe if they want but I

cannot, namely, that in sailing around Africa they had the

sun on the right side.

Hundreds of pages have been written about this bald para-

graph, debating the truth of the story, questioning whether
 2

6 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

such a tremendous had actually been accomplished. On
feat
one point most agree: a voyage such as Herodotus describes
was There is no reason why a crew of Phoenicians
feasible.

could not have carried it out in the span of time and in the way
he said they did. Even if the sceptics are right and Necho’s
ships did not make it all round Africa, some sort of expedi-
tion must have been launched and, to judge from Herodotus’
details about crops sown en route, a carefully planned one at
that. What is must have pushed beyond the tropic to
more, it

a point where the crew was able to note they had the sun on
the right side, that is to their north as they worked southwest
and west. The very item Herodotus singles out for disbelief
is the most convincing element in his account.

About a century and a half later, there was a second attempt

to sail around Africa, this time the other way, from west to
east, and there is no doubt whatsoever that it was a failure. The

leader reported that he got far enough to see ‘a race of dwarfs

who wore clothes of palm leaves’ and then came to a spot where
‘the ship stopped and just could not go any further’. It sounds
as if he had managed to sail below the Sahara as far as Senegal
or even Guinea, where he perhaps saw Bushmen living further
north at that time than they do today, and then ran into the
calms and hostile current of the Gulf of Guinea or the com-
bination of adverse winds and current beyond. As a matter of
fact, wind and current make the circumnavigation of Africa

from east to west, as Necho’s expedition did it, far easier;

although a number of ancient mariners later tried it the other
way, they Vasco da Gama at the very end of the
all failed.

fifteenth century was the first to perform the feat.

These two ventures were small-scale voyages of exploration
launched probably to blaze the way for new trade routes.
Around 500 b.c. or a few decades later, a grandiose expedition
passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, bent on setting up
colonies on Africa’s west coast. It is the one voyage of dis-
covery made by the ancients that we know of first hand, for
we have the exact words of a report submitted by the com-
 EXPANDING HORIZONS 63

mander, Hanno of Carthage. He had it inscribed in bronze

and set up in his home town, and years later an inquisitive
Greek made a copy which has come down to us.
‘The Carthaginians commissioned Hanno to sail past the
Pillars of Hercules and to found cities of the Libyphoenicians
[Phoenicians residing in Africa], He set sail with sixty vessels
of fifty oars and a multitude of men and women to the number
5

of thirty thousand, and provisions and other equipment. So

begins Hanno’s report, a document of less than 650 words
which, over the centuries, has provoked several hundred
thousand of explanation, comment, and argument.
Hanno had clear sailing at the beginning, and so do we:
was through the Straits of Gibraltar and southwest
his first leg
along the Moroccan shore, where he kept anchoring to set
down prospective colonists. At the mouth of the Draa river
he made friends with a local tribe of nomads, probably
Bedouins, and, since they were familiar with the coast further
south, took some along as guides and interpreters. Soon after,
the expedition reached a large river with two mouths that was
‘deep and wide and infested with crocodiles and hippopotami’.
The first river along the coast that would satisfy such a
description is the Senegal, just north of Cape Verde. Next
they came to a great gulf and then, after passing a tall mountain,
a second gulf with an island in it where they saw men and
5
women ‘with hairy bodies and managed to capture three
females. The guides called them gorillas, but Hanno’s men
could hardly have taken alive what we call by that name, even
females; chimpanzees or baboons are more likely. At this
point they ran out of provisions and turned back.
How far did Hanno get? The conservatives, who are
probably right, hold that he never went past Sierra Leone,
that he stopped short of the calms and scorching heat of the
Gulf of Guinea. The first gulf, then, would be Bissagos Bay
in Portuguese Guinea, the mountain Mt Kakulima (admittedly
rather low to qualify for the distinction of ‘tall’), the second
gulf Sherbro Sound in Sierra Leone. The radicals carry him
64 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
all the way to Cameroon or even Gaboon, identifying the
river as the Niger and the mountain as Mt Cameroon, the
highest peak in West Africa. So far as the history of travel is

concerned, the argument is academic. The voyage, though

one of the ancient world’s great achievements in exploration,
had precious little effect: it did not bring West Africa into
the orbit of ancient civilization, it did not even bring lasting
geographical knowledge. Claudius Ptolemy, who in the second
century a.d. composed the definitive geography of the ancient
world, shows the very coast that the Carthaginians colonized
trending in the wrong from the
direction, trending southeast
Straits of Gibraltar instead of southwest. The truth was not
to be known again until the days of Henry the Navigator.
4 Etruscan covered wagon drawn by a team of horses. Fourth century b.c,
5 Wall-paintings from Stabiae and Pompeii illustrating seaside villas

built about the Bay of Naples. First century a.d.

 4

Trade and Travel in

Classical Greek Times
(500-300 B.C.)

When the centre of gravity of the ancient world moved west-

ward from Near East to Greece, the Mediter-
Persia and the
ranean assumed the role it was to play thereafter as the means
par excellence for the travel and trade of Greece and Rome.
The majority of the Greek city-states are found along its
coasts, they cluster about its shores ‘like frogs on a pond’, as
Plato put it. Though there were some important Greek
settlements inland, those that achieved wealth, such as Athens,
Corinth, Syracuse, Miletus, and so on, were all seaports. It
was inevitable: a Greek oil dealer who, every summer, trans-
ported two or three thousand five-gallon jars weighing some
100 pounds each to a market hundreds of miles away, was
able to load them all into a single ship of only moderate
size —
but he would have needed an endless file of donkeys
or oxcarts to carry them overland. Until the coming of the
railroad, the water was the only feasible medium for heavy
transport and the most convenient for long distance travel.
And so Greek traders were to be found shuttling back and
forth the length and breadth of the Mediterran 1. You saw

them in south Russian ports dickering for grain tc ;ed Athens, .

on the docks of the Piraeus picking up olive oil to ship to

c
66 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Greek colonists along the Black Sea, putting into Beirut for
ship timber cut from the cedars of Lebanon, negotiating at
Miletus on the Asia Minor coast for fine woollen fabrics that
brought two to three times the purchase price in shops at
Athens or Syracuse. The vessels they used averaged some ioo
feet in length with a carrying capacity of around ioo tons.
There were, of course, others much bigger, up to at least
500 tons, and others much smaller, for short coastal runs. The
hulls were given comfortable, well-rounded lines, and the rig
was no towering spread of canvas but a single low and broad
—
squaresail the ships were made, in other words, for capacity
and safety, not speed. Near the stern there generally rose a
small deckhouse which enclosed a few cabins. These were for
the captain and the owner of the craft or the merchant who
had chartered it. A cabin was nothing very elaborate, just a
few square feet of space that offered a place to sleep, but it
served to keep the occupants out of the rain or cold or heat.
The servants who accompanied them, as well as any others
who had booked passage, slept on deck. On coastal craft too
small to boast a deckhouse, a merchant probably shared the
deck with all Aboard a big ship or small, he brought
the others.
his own food with him, had his servants wait their turn to
cook it in the ship’s galley, and ate it on the open deck without
any ceremony. He might fare better when it came to drink,
if he had seen to it that several amphoras —
big clay jars of —
his favourite vintage were carefully stowed away in the cool
damp sand carried as ballast deep in the hold. When his craft

made port, his first act was to rush to the temple of Poseidon,
conveniently located right at the dockside, and offer thanks-
giving for a safe crossing (cf. Fig. 6).

Provided one had luck with the weather, by sea could

travel

be no unpleasant experience. Once a voyager had bought food

and drink and stored it and his gear aboard, no further effort
was required: the ship was his inn, and wind or oars did the
work.
 TRADE AND TRAVEL 67

Travel by land in this age, on the other hand, was strenuous.

It usually meant going by foot. People travelling light took
along only a slave or two to serve as
and carry the valet
baggage, sacks stuffed with clothes, bedding, and provisions.
More elaborate entourages included a goodly number of
servants and pack animals for the gear. With rare exceptions,
these were donkeys or mules; horses, as we observed before
(52 above), were for racing, hunting, or the army. The
animals would have a sheepskin or goatskin thrown over
their backs to prevent chafe and, upon this, a wood-frame
packsaddle often fitted with panniers. Those who could
afford it sometimes took donkeys or mules for riding as well.
The Greeks looked down on the litter or sedan-chair; it

smacked of ostentation, they felt, and condoned its use only

in the case of invalids or women. Demosthenes, for example,
caused eyebrows to raise when he was seen in one going
from Athens to the Peiraeus.
Where the roads permitted, people might take conveyances,
especially when there were women in the party. The standard
passenger vehicle was a small open cart, holding no more than
four persons, with a light body made of boards or plaited
withes; a pair of mules or donkeys drew it (Fig. i). For
long journeys there were carts covered with the traditional
arched canopy (cf. Fig. 4). Before the fifth century b.c. the
spoked wheel was not nearly as common as one made in a
distinctive fashion with a single massive crossbar running the
diameter and two lighter bars, set like chords in each semi-
circle, intersecting the crossbar at right angles (Fig. 1). This
kind of wheel is pretty clearly a lightweight descendant of the
massive solid wheel of primitive times (23 above); though
still not as light as a spoked wheel, it had the advantage of

being easier to make, probably not requiring the skill of a

professional wheelwright. As might be expected, it is found in a
good many places besides Greece, in Macedonia, Cyprus, Italy,
and Etruria. In the fifth century b.c. the spoked wheel, which
was stronger as well as lighter, eventually drove it out of use.
68 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
When was needed, heavy carts were
a stouter conveyance
pressed into service or even four-wheel wagons drawn by
teams of oxen, though the Greeks always maintained a
preference for two-wheel vehicles. Strictly speaking, the Greek
word apene refers to the light passenger cart and hamaxa to
the heavy cart or wagon, but, like ourselves, the Greeks did
not always take care to speak strictly and the terms are
frequently used interchangeably.
A traveller in Greece of theand fourth century b.c.
fifth

thought twice before taking along any vehicle, light or heavy,

since roads that could handle wheeled traffic were by no
means to be found everywhere. A unified network of high-
ways could hardly be expected in a land diced up into tiny,
fiercely independent states. What is more, few of them had the
resources to go in for proper road-building even within their
own confines; at Athens, for example, what construction and
repair there was seems to have been paid for by occasional
special levies on the rich. Besides, Greece is so rocky and
mountainous that the cost of laying good roads would have
been prohibitive, no matter how wealthy a state was. The
guidebook writer Pausanias, who travelled all over the country
in the second century a.d., reports that the main road to
Delphi as it neared its destination was difficult even for a man
on foot. A route he followed into the hills beyond Sicyon
was ‘impossible for vehicles because of its narrowness’; plenty
of other mountain roads must have been the same. There was
a pass in the Peloponnese, he tells us, that was named ‘The
Ladder’ because travellers used to get over one part of it by
means of steps chopped into the rock. A road from Corinth
past Mycenae to Argos was called the ‘Staif-Road’, presumably
because it was so difficult that those who took it needed the
support of a staff. The main route from Corinth to Megara
and Athens ran along the top of precipitous mountains that
skirt the shore of the Saronic Gulf; here was where Sciron in
the legend of Theseus had his station, where he stopped all
travellers coming through, robbed them, made them wash his
 TRADE AND TRAVEL 69

feet, and, while they were doing so, with one good kick sent
them hurtling over the edge.

For six miles it ran along a narrow, crumbling ledge half-way

up the face of an almost sheer cliff ... So narrow was the
path that only a single sure-footed beast could make its way
with tolerable security along it. In stormy or gusty weather
it was dangerous; a single slip or stumble would have been
fatal.

This was how the road looked to travellers in the last century,
and it could have been little hundred
different twenty-five
years earlier. At one point the emperor Hadrian gave it his
attention and, thanks to the skill of Roman engineering, the
track was made over into a fine carriage road able to take two
chariots abreast. But this state of affairs lasted only as long as
money from Rome’s treasury was available to maintain it.
The Greeks did pay attention to the roads that led to their
sacred places, particularly the sites of the great festivals.
Wherever possible, they made them broad enough to take
wheeled traffic. Travellers from the Peloponnese, for example,
were able to go most of the way to Delphi in carts or wagons
big enough for a family to sleep in. In some cases roadbuilders
£
saved money and time by constructing rut roads’, a sort of
remote ancestor of the railway track (cf. Fig. 8). Instead of
taking the trouble to level the entire width needed, they
limited themselves to cutting out a pair of ruts, each about
three to four inches deep, eight to a little less than nine wide,
and some fifty-four to fifty-seven inches apart. The were
ruts
polished and squared carefully, and the carts, which must have
had more or less a standard gauge, ran along them like a train
on rails. The ruts were all that counted; the surfaces between
them or alongside were left unfinished. When carved in rock,
as was often the case in Greece, such a road was practically
wear-proof and weather-proof. There was a rut road from
Athens four hours by foot to the sanctuary of Demeter at
Eleusis, from Sparta to the sacred town of Amyclae some
70 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
three miles away, over stretches of the sacred way from Elis
to Olympia and from Athens to Delphi. Heavily trafficked
work roads were also given ruts. The road between Athens
and her marble quarries at Mount Pentelicus, which carried a
steady stream of lumbering ox-carts or sledges bearing
ponderous loads, was paved with stone slabs to a width of
sixteen feet and fitted with a double set of ruts to accommodate
two-way movement. On one of the rut roads hacked in the
hills north of Athens, at a certain point a projection from the
rock wall was not cut away but left to stick out, and the
inside rut comes to a dead stop against it; this foolproof
barrier may have been connected with a toll station at this

point.
Even ordinary highways were heavily used, such as
that
the road between Athens and Delphi or Sparta and Olympia,
were here and there given double tracks. And single-tracked
roads had bypasses at intervals to enable traffic going in
opposite directions to get by. But no doubt there was many a
stretch where, when two met head on, one or the other
carts
had to back up a discouragingly long way. One of the most
famous murders in literature was very possibly caused by
such a confrontation. The legend of Oedipus tells how he
killed his father when they met, each unaware of the other’s
identity, on the ‘cleft way’, a segment of the rocky road between
Delphi and Thebes. His father was coming from Thebes,
riding in a horse-drawn carriage as befitted a king of heroic
times; Oedipus was coming from Delphi on foot. What
happened next is best told in the words Sophocles puts in
Oedipus’ mouth:

I walked along, and as I neared this road

I came face to face with a herald and a man,
Such as you describe, who was riding in a carriage
Drawn by horses. The herald and the man were both
Intent on driving me from their path by force.
Their groom shoves me from the road. Enraged,
 TRADE AND TRAVEL 71

I strike him. When the man sees this he waits until

I come abreast and then from the carriage brings down
Upon my head his two-pronged goad. But I
Paid him back far worse, for a second later

He had taken a blow from the staff in this very hand

And rolled out from the carriage upon the ground.
I killed them, every one.

Oedipus flared up because of what he considered humiliating

and insolent treatment. But his father may very well have
insisted on the right of way not through royal arrogance but
because his carriage wheels were locked into the grooves of a
rut road.
Greek roads offered little in the way of amenities. Shade
trees were rarely planted along the sides; a traveller either
carried a parasol or rode with the blazing sun full upon him.
There were no road signs as such, but at least at crossroads or
boundary lines there was a serviceable substitute, the hermeia
or ‘shrines of Hermes’; Hermes, messenger of the gods, for
obvious reasons doubled as patron deity of roads. In their
earliest form these wayside shrines of his were just heaps of

stones, and passersby, as a gesture in his honour, would add

one to the heap. As time went on, the hermeia became more
sophisticated. In some places the helter-skelter heaps gave way
to arrangements of hewn stones; Strabo, the Greek geographer
who wrote toward the end of the first century b.c., remarks
on some extraordinary examples he saw in Egypt that were
made up of boulders no less than six feet in diameter and at
times as much as twelve. Elsewhere they took the form of an
oblong shaft, often with the upper end carved into a likeness
of Hermes. The passerby’s gesture now consisted of pouring
out a libation of oil. The Greek writer Theophrastus, dis-
cussing various traits of character, describes a superstitious
man asone who, ‘when he goes by the carved shafts at cross-
roads, pours oil on them from his flask, falls on his knees,
makes an obeisance, and only then moves on’.
72 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
An ancient description of a tourist route through Boeotia
starting from Athens gives some idea of what it was like to
travel on Greek roads. Although it was written toward the
end of the second century b.c. or the beginning of the first,
things could not have been very different two hundred years
earlier. The first leg was to Oropus, a distance of some thirty
miles, which the author calls ‘just a day’s journey for a good
walker’; much of it was uphill but the ‘abundance of inns
offering rest and plenty of life’s necessities keeps the traveller
from feeling fatigue.’ The second day one went on to Tanagra
through olive groves and woodland along a road ‘absolutely
free from attack by robbers’. We are also told that Tanagra
itself was ‘the safest city in all Boeotia for strangers to stay

in’; both statements should probably be taken with a pinch

of salt. Then on to Plataea by way of ‘a road rather desolate

and stony . but not too precipitous’; it followed the slopes
. .

of Cithaeron, the forbidding mountain where the infant

Oedipus had been abandoned. From Plataea on it was easy
going, the way to Thebes being all along the flat, while from
there to Anthedon the road, running through the fields, was
good enough to take wheeled traffic.

Whether a man went by land or sea, a problem he had to

consider seriously was the danger involved. Travel at this
time had its risks. For those who chose the water, there was
the ever-present chance of capture by pirates, or by some
enemy craft if, as was usually the case, a war was going on.
The Athenian navy, the finest afloat during the fifth and fourth
centuries B.c., offered the best protection it could, but this
only alleviated matters. One of Demosthenes’ lawsuits, for
example, involved a businessman who had been seized by
some warship; took twenty-six minae , a good £5,000 or
it

$13,000 in purchasing power, to buy his release. Another

case dealt with the property of a merchant killed by an arrow
during the fight that took place when the ship he was on was
attacked by pirates. A favourite plot of the comic playwrights
 !

TRADE AND TRAVEL 73

of the day has to do with a girl who had been carried off by
pirates as a child and sold into slavery; she remains in this

unhappy position until the last act, when a miraculous con-

course of circumstances restores her to her rightful state.

Theophrastus, characterizing a coward, says he ‘is the sort

who, when aboard ship, imagines that every headland is a
pirate galley’. No doubt about it, pirates were a prime worry
for anyone who booked passage on a vessel.
Our scanty sources of information do not often mention
highwaymen, but these were no doubt as much a plague as
pirates. Whatever police forces a city-state maintained were

for keeping order within the town walls; the open country
to all intents and purposes was a no-man’s land. The travellers’
only recourse was to move in groups or to take along plenty
of slaves; they were as much bodyguards as body servants.
The satirist Lucian in one of his imaginary dialogues set in
the underworld has a group of spirits discuss how people
got down there; one tells of a rich Athenian who:

was murdered by highwaymen, I think while travelling over

Mt Cithaeron to Eleusis. He arrived groaning and holding
his wound with both hands He blamed himself for being
. . .

rash: he crossed Mt Cithaeron and the district around

Eleutherae, which had been left deserted by the wars, taking
along only two servants for the trip — a man who was
carrying four cups and five bowls of solid gold

As a consequence, those leaving on journeys tried to hold

the money and valuables they took to a bare minimum. This
brought another problem in wake its — what to do about
whatever was left behind. There were no such things as safe
deposit boxes, but there were adequate substitutes. Temples,
all of which had accommodate votive gifts to the
facilities to

god, often served as public treasuries, taking on deposit state

moneys, and, under certain circumstances, objects or funds
from private individuals. Bankers too would accept custody of
valuables; a speech by Demosthenes, for example, refers to
74 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
the embarrassment caused when a clerk made the mistake of
handing over to one client two precious bowls that had been
left by another.
Money posed most serious concern of all because, with
the
no instruments of credit available, it had to be carried in coin.
A businessman could probably limit the amount he took and
count on replenishing his funds from his associates abroad,
and the aristocrat no doubt made reciprocal arrangements
with the friends and relations who would put him up in the
various places he visited. But even they had to carry some
cash with them, while the rank and file of, say, those heading
for one of the great festivals had to take enough to cover all
expenses while away from home. Greek bandits could be
pretty sure that their efforts would be rewarded, that any
traveller they pounced on would have a fairly well-filled purse
on him.
There was yet another difficulty connected with money:
what kind was it to be? Since Greek city-states insisted on
having coinages of their own, the money-changer was even
more essential to travel then than now. He was to be seen
in every commercial town, down at the port or in the market
place or in front of some strategically located temple, seated
before his little table; the word
money-changer in Greek,
for
trapeiites means literally ‘table-man’. He would weigh in all
,

coins offered him in a balance to make sure they were up to

the mark, and feel or smell or make ring any that looked
suspicious, even test them by scratching them on a touchstone,
a piece of special black jasper found only in certain stream
beds in Lydia. In the west and in Greece proper, coins were
mostly silver; further to the east, gold was common, and also
electrum, a natural alloy of silver and gold. When Athens
was in her heyday, in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c., her
money became an international form of exchange, and anybody
planning a voyage found it useful to lay in a supply of ‘owls’,
the distinctive silver pieces stamped with a goggle-eyed
version of Athena’s sacred bird. People heading east did
 TRADE AND TRAVEL 75

equally well with the electrum staters of Cyzicus, a thriving

city-stateon the Sea of Marmora, or with gold Persian darics,
struck, as the name shows, by Darius the Great. These three
(Fig. 2) were internationally accepted currencies, and they
meant not only a great convenience to the traveller, but a
saving as well, since the ancient money-changers’ charges
were not the painless fraction they are today but a murderous
five to six per cent.
There was one problem the Greek traveller was spared:
harrowing decisions about what clothes to take. The vases
of the period are often decorated with genre scenes, and from
these we can see that the contemporary wardrobe was relatively
simple. The basic garment for men was the chiton a loose ,

sleeveless linen or woollen tunic which came down to the

knee or calf and was gathered in around the waist with a belt,
the lone. When travelling, men tended to double their chiton
over the belt to draw it up higher and, in that way, leave the
legs free and keep the hem out of the reach of dust or mud.
‘As for the length of the journey’, Herodotus will say, ‘a well-
girdled ( euionos ) man will spend five days on it’ ;
he is referring
to someone belted up in this fashion, prepared, that is, for
serious walking and not dawdling. For outer covering the
traveller carried a chlamys an oblong of wool that could be
,

worn as a short cape (Fig. 3). On his feet he tied sandals

securely with thongs reaching to the calf; he wore no socks
or stockings since these were all but unknown throughout
ancient times. On his head he clapped a sort of sombrero, the
petasos , a wide-brimmed hat with a chin strap (Fig. 3);
fitted

in hot weather he could uncover simply by letting the hat

slide down his back and hang from the strap, while in cold
he could pull the strap tight in such a way that the brim
closed in and covered his ears. He had to carry his own bedding
— a feature of travel that lasted until about the last century;
he would pack a himation or chlaina , a good-sized oblong of
wool that served as a blanket at night and doubled as a wrap-
around cloak for cold or stormy days. His wife would have
76 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
a tunic like his, and, as headgear, a chic version of the broad-
brimmed might also carry a parasol. She had no short
hat; she
cloak, just the large oblong of wool which she would wear
as a mantle draped about her. Whatever was not on their
backs was packed up into cloth sacks and put in the care of
the slaves who accompanied them. Only exiles, refugees, or
the like travelled alone; ordinary voyagers invariably took
along at least one servant.

The people willing to undergo the hardships and hazards that

travel in these days posed fall into a number of well-defined
categories.
Traders, journeying regularly year in and year out, no
doubt made up the biggest number both on land and water.
But along certain roads and sea lanes at certain times of year
they and any other random travellers were lost amid what was
without question the largest single block of people on the move
at any one time in this age — the crowds hurrying to attend
the great panhellenic religious festivals. We read, in Herodotus’
account (31 above), of the incredible numbers at Egyptian
festivals; the Greek ones called forth similar throngs.

The notion of holding joint religious ceremonies arose

early in Greek history. Groups of nearby city-states fell into
the practice of coming together at a given centre to worship
a divinity they honoured in common. Gradually, for reasons
that are not exactly clear, four of these occasions increased in
importance until they became recognized as national festivals,

with Greeks from all over taking part in them. These were the
Olympic Games, Pythian Games, Isthmian Games and
Nemean Games. Each was dedicated to a single god and
included due measure of sacrifice and prayer; they were
called ‘games’ since one of the ways Greeks honoured a deity
was to offer up to him a superlative athletic or artistic per-
formance. The festivals furnished in one unique package the
spectrum of attractions that have drawn tourists in all times
and places the feeling of being part of a great event and of
:
 —

TRADE AND TRAVEL 77

enjoying a special experience; a gay festive mood punctuated

by exalted religious moments; elaborate pageantry; the excite-
ment of contests between performers of the highest calibre
and, on top of all this, a chance to wander among famous
buildings and works of art. Imagine the modern Olympics
taking place at Easter in Rome, with the religious services
held at St Peter’s, and you can gain some idea of what made
high and low, from far and near, non- Greeks as well as
Greeks, bend every effort to be on hand.
The oldest and most important of the four great festivals
were the Olympic Games. These were held every fourth year
in honour of Zeus at Olympia, a gracious spot along the
banks of the Alpheus river in the northwest corner of the
Peloponnese. The was neither central nor easily accessible.
place
—
The time of year the blazing, dry midsummer must have —
been hard on both participants and spectators, though in
recompense they were spared the discouragement and dis-
comfort of rain. The city-states were almost continuously at
war with each other but this did not stop the Olympics. In
common with the other three festivals which drew a pan-
hellenic audience, it enjoyed the benefits of a ‘sacred truce’.
On the first full moon after 22 June, the city-state of Elis — it

was located near the festival site and its most important
industry was the running of the great occasion sent out —
heralds called ‘truce-bearers’ to announce the opening of the
‘sacred truce’. This meant that, for the next month, war was
totally outlawed. Even bitter enemies, up to that moment
locked in a struggle to the death, laid down their arms. If
they did not, they were subject to a stiff fine, two minae for
each member of the violating army. When Sparta launched
an attack with 1,000 men during the Olympics of 420 b.c.,

Elis fined her 2,000 minae —perhaps four hundred thousand

pounds or a million dollars in purchasing power. Since the
festival lasted but five days, visitors had ample time to arrive
and enjoy the spectacle free of worries about how they were
to get home.
78 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
We have no idea of the total number that attended but it

must have been at least in the tens of thousands. At the head

of the social ladder were the embassies sent at public expense
by every state, rich and solid citizens who put in an official

appearance at all the functions dressed in elaborate formal

garb.The wealthy were well represented, making as much or
even more of a show, though not officially. Then there were
the contestants, each with his entourage —and the entourage
of, say, an entrant in the race for four-horse chariots, with
grooms and stableboys and the like, could reach a sizeable
figure. Alcibiades, that master at public relations, once entered
seven different chariots —and even got sponsors to foot the
bill:Ephesus gave him a magnificent tent for his lodgings,
Chios supplied fodder for the twenty-eight horses, and
Lesbos furnished food and wine for his entertaining (and
Alcibiades was no stingy host). Then there was the rank and
file of spectators. Lastly we must add all whom such a crowd
inevitably brings in its wake to supply services both needed
and unneeded, vendors of food and drink, guides, touts,
prostitutes, hawkers of souvenirs. The mere job of supplying
water must have required hundreds of men circulating about
carrying jars or leading donkeys loaded down with them, for
it was not until half a millennium later, in the second century

a.d., that Roman engineering and a millionaire’s philanthropy

combined to put up an aqueduct and provide the site with
running water.
At the ancient Olympics as at its modern descendant, the
keynote was athletics. The oldest events, going back to the
festival’s earliest days, were the running races: the ‘stadium’
course, a single length of the stadium or about 210 yards;
the ‘double course’ or two lengths of the stadium, comparable
£
to our 440; and the long 24 lengths of the stadium or
race’,

a little over 5,000 yards, a gruelling run, in other words, of

not much less than three miles. Other events were the pen-
tathlon (a five-part contest involving long jump, discus,
running, javelin, wrestling), boxing, the pancratium (a brutal
 TRADE AND TRAVEL 79

sport that combined bare-knuckle boxing with wrestling),

chariot racing, and horse racing. Before and after matches
spectators could walk the grounds and visit the sights, in-
cluding the mighty temple of Zeus which housed Phidias’s
gigantic statue of the god, a celebrated work destined to be
included in the list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient
World (232 below). They could stop to listen as the best
modern authors delivered readings of their works or the
greatest names in oratory made important addresses on vital
issues, or to inspect works of art displayed by ranking con-
temporary sculptors and painters. These incidental attractions
as well as the athletic contests must have been of all-absorbing
interest since they were able to distract the visitors’ attention
from the crowded conditions, lack of organized facilities, and,
above all, the heat. Spectators passed entire days crammed
into benches like sardines, bareheaded (the Greeks generally
wore hats only when travelling; cf. 75 above), and with no
protection if a summer shower happened to come along.
‘Don’t you get scorched?’ questions Epictetus, ‘Aren’t you
all jammed in together? Isn’t it hard to get a bath? Don’t you
get drenched when it Don’t you get fed up with the
rains?
din and the shouting and the other annoyances?’ It was so
bad that a story was told of a master who brought an unruly
slave into line simply by threatening to take him along to the
Olympics.
The Pythian Games, dedicated to Apollo and held near his
oracle at Delphi, offered somewhat There were
different fare.
athletics to be sure, but the emphasis here was upon song and
dance; the event was akin to the international music festivals
that are so important in today’s tourism. There were contests
in choral dancing; in singing to the accompaniment of the
lyre; in musically accompanied recitations of Homer; and in
the ‘Pythian melody’, a piece of instrumental programme
music describing the mythical struggle between Apollo and a
dragon that had taken place in that very locale (it was in five
movements: prelude, onset of the struggle, struggle, triumph,
80 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
death of the dragon). Other music festivals included singing
for fluteaccompaniment as well, but this was barred from the
Pythian Games on the grounds that the dirges and threnodies
usually so sung were too sombre for the occasion. The
Pythian Games were the answer to a music-lover’s prayer, a
unique opportunity to see the world’s greatest instrumentalists
and vocalists straining to outdo each other. The art lover was
not forgotten, since the programme included exhibitions of
sculpture and painting. The festival took place the spring of
every fourth year, so scheduled as not to conflict with the
Olympics.
At Corinth on the isthmus between the mainland of Greece
and the Peloponnese were celebrated the Isthmian Games
dedicated to Poseidon. They were held every other year,
alternating between spring and summer; the keynote was
athletics, although music and dance were also included. The
Isthmian Games were less important than the Olympics but
very likely drew almost as large crowds since Corinth was the
most accessible spot in Greece; with a port on each side of the
isthmus, it could be reached by water from either east or west.
The fourth of the international festivals was the Nemean
Games in honour of Zeus. Like the Isthmian, these were
scheduled for every other year, alternating between winter and
summer, and included music and athletics with emphasis on
athletics.

The sacred truce that the panhellenic games enjoyed

practically guaranteed a large turn-out. Local festivals did not
have this advantage, yet some offered such irresistible attrac-
tions that they drew a considerable number of out-of-towners
despite the dangers of travel. This was certainly true of the
Greater Dionysia, the annual festival in honour of Dionysus
that Athens held each March. The programme was given over
entirely to music and literature —
there were no athletics and —
the high point was a series of competitions between writers of
tragedy and comedy.
To this festival we owe the very art of the theatre. Drama
 TRADE AND TRAVEL 8l

came into being as part of the rites used in the worship of

—
Dionysus precisely how is obscure and has been much
—
debated and was made a standard element in the ceremonies
at his festival.In the Greater Dionysia of 534 b.c., an actor
named Thespis performed a primitive play of his own com-
position; was drama’s formal debut. The new art then
it

developed with amazing speed. Thirty-five years later in 499,

Aeschylus presented his maiden effort; by 458 he had written
his Oresteia trilogy, a milestone in Western dramatic literature.
During the golden age of the Greek theatre, the second half
of the fifth century b.c., three days of the festival were given
over to plays. In the mornings the writers of tragedy put
on pieces they had newly composed for the occasion, in the
afternoons the writers of comedy. In every audience there was
a goodly number of overseas visitors; exactly how many we
cannot say but enough so that Aristophanes was once prose-
cuted by a demagogic leader on the grounds that the play-
wright, to whom nothing was sacred, was criticizing the
government in the presence of strangers. They came from all
over, undismayed by the rigours of an early spring sailing or
a trek along muddy roads; the chance to see Euripides’ or
Sophocles’ or Aristophanes’ latest masterpiece was worth any
risk or discomfort. Skilled road companies later took the plays
from Athens to other city-states.
The theatre at Athens was a huge open-air affair, set on
the slant of a with a capacity of some 14,000; the slopes
hill,

above and to the sides provided unofficial space for perhaps

as many again. All Greek theatres were big, some even bigger
than Athens’; they are the equivalent of today’s sports
stadiums rather than theatres. Yet, such was the enthusiasm
for drama were not enough seats to go around.
that often there
The performances, whether at Athens or on the road, were
first and foremost for the local citizens; this meant that out-

of-towners simply had to take their chances. At Athens the

best seat in the house, the front row centre seat, was for the
Priest of Dionysus, and the one alongside for the herald
82 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
who made the announcements. The next best, the rest of
the front row and similar choice seats, were for other clergy,
the city’s magistrates, official foreign guests such as members
of embassies, and a number of recognized public benefactors
both and non-citizen. In addition, sections were given
citizen
—
over to certain groups a block for the corps of youths,
perhaps a block for each of the ten tribes into which the
population was divided. Tickets — pieces of metal resembling a
coin — indicated only the section and the bench within the
section, not individual seats, and the ushers were often called
upon to settle the arguments that inevitably arose when
gate-crashers tried to wedge into benches already filled to
capacity. Theophrastus gives as an example of brazen effrontery
the man who buys a bench-full of seats for a group of out-of-
town friends, squeezes himself in with no ticket of his own,
and, at the next day’s performance, manages to jam in as well
all his children plus their tutor. The Athenian citizen who was
too poor to afford the price of admission had it paid for him
by the state out of a special fund, the ‘Seeing Fund’. Strangers
with no official position to entitle them to seats either got them
through some local, like the friends of Theophrastus’ sample
of brazen effrontery, or simply picked themselves a spot on
the slopes around the auditorium.

So far asnumbers were concerned, no single category of

traveller came near matching the throngs en route to the great
festivals. But they were merely occasional, they took to the

road only at certain times during certain years. A substantial

category which might be seen on the roads day in and day
out was made up of the sick or infirm wending their way to the
sanctuaries of the healing gods, of Asclepius in particular.
Such places were generally set in surroundings carefully chosen
for their pure air and water and natural beauty; often there
were mineral springs on the site. Here patients found not
merely treatment but facilities for rest and diversion, which
the keen Greek mind recognized as being an essential part
 : —

TRADE AND TRAVEL 83

of nursing the sick. The sanctuary at Epidaurus, for example,

located where Asclepius was said to have been born and
hence the most venerated in the Greek world, spread over an
extensive tranquil grove. The buildings included the central
temple of Asclepius with a famous statue of the god and other
celebrated sculptures, additional temples also housing noted
works of art, colonnades for shaded walks, a stadium for
athletic events, and a theatre that, seating some
was 17,000,
the second largest in Greece ; this last monument has managed
to survive the centuries and is one of the most impressive
sights to be seen in Greece today.
Alongside Asclepius’ temple was the next most important
two were where the cures took
building, the ‘dormitory’ ; these
place. All visitors who wished —
and certainly most did
would spend a night in either and, asleep on the floor amid
the dogs and tame snakes sacred to Asclepius, would in a
dream be visited by the god and either be advised what treat-
ment to take or be magically cured; obviously the priests of
the sanctuary were not adverse to eking out the purely medical
resources at their disposal with divine help. On the walls of
the ‘dormitory’ were plaques inscribed with glowing testi-
monials to the god’s effectiveness. ‘On these tablets’, writes

Pausanias, who visited Epidaurus in the second century a.d.,

‘are engraved the names of men and women who have been
healed by Asclepius, together with the disease from which
each suffered, and the manner of the cure.’ Archaeologists,
during the excavation of the site, came across a number of
such plaques. Here are some rather spectacular cures they
record

1. A man who suffered much from anon the toe

ulcer
was brought forth by the attendants and placed on a
seat. While he slept, a serpent came forth from the

dormitory and healed the ulcer with his tongue. It then

glided back into the dormitory. When the man awoke
he was cured, and declared that he had seen a vision; he
84 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
thought a young man of goodly aspect had smeared a
salve upon his toe.
2. Lyson, a blind boy of Hermione, had his eyes licked by
one of the dogs about the temple and went away whole.
3. Gorgias of Heraclea had been wounded with an arrow
in one of his lungs at a battle. Within eighteen months
the wound generated so much pus that sixty-seven cups
were filled with it. He slept in the temple, and in a
dream it seemed to him that the god removed the barb
of the arrow from this lung. In the morning he went
forth whole, with the barb of the arrow in his hands.

Another way the patients had of showing their gratitude

was by votive offerings; excavators have brought to light
hundreds of clay models, usually rather crudely made, of feet,
hands, legs, ears, eyes, intestines, and so on, dedicated to the
god by those who had been cured of an ailment or wound in
the portion of the anatomy represented.
In addition to the ‘dormitory’ where patients bedded down
for a single night to receive treatment, there was also a big
inn where visitors, sick or well, could put up for any length of
time. It included four identical square complexes set alongside
one another to form a total square 250 feet by 250 feet. Each
complex was laid out in the fashion that, as we shall see
(88 below), was usual for Greek inns, a courtyard surrounded
by a two-storey building; since each court had 20 rooms
opening onto it on both the lower and upper floors, there
were 160 in all. The rooms were by no means cramped: most
were about 15 feet square, while those in the corners were
double chambers some 15 by 30 feet.
Other sanctuaries that drew visitors, although doubtless
far fewer than Dionysus’, were the oracles. The two greatest

were Zeus’ at Dodona in northwestern Greece and Apollo’s

at Delphi; another important oracle of Apollo, at Didyma
near Miletus, served Asia Minor. They catered first and fore-
most to governments, statesmen, generals, and the like, who
 !

TRADE AND TRAVEL 85

regularly consulted them when deliberating a significant action.

But they also received those who had personal questions to
pose; probably the best known instance is Socrates’ disciple
Chaerophon’s inquiring of the Delphic oracle about his master’s
wisdom. There were plenty of other oracular seats which were
of lesser rank, and very likely people with private problems
tended to patronize these, going to the one that happened to be
nearest. The Boeotians were particularly well off in this regard;
for some reason Apollo maintained half a dozen within their
borders.
Men abroad on business, visitors to festivals, the sick or
puzzled en route to sanctuaries — these accounted for the bulk
of the travel that took place in the and fourth centuries
fifth

b.c. One more category deserves mention, even though it was

compared with the others the tourists
infinitesimally small —
pure and simple. ‘A great many Greeks went to Egypt’,
writes Herodotus, ‘some, as might be expected, for business,
some to serve in the army, but also some just to see the
country itself.’ He himself belonged to this last category,
although there is a possibility (98 below) that he travelled for
business as well as sightseeing. We are distinctly told that
Solon combined the two when, after completing an arduous
term as Athen’s leader during a crisis, he relaxed by taking a
trip abroad. Athens itself developed into a tourist attraction
from the second half of the fifth century on, when the Par-
thenon and other exciting new buildings crowned its Acropolis;
as a contemporary writer of comedy put it:

If you’ve never seen Athens, your brain’s a morass;

if you’ve seen and weren’t entranced, you’re an
it ass;
if you left without regrets, your head’s solid brass

To go in for disinterested travel required leisure and money,

and those who enjoyed such privileges in the fifth and fourth
centuries b.c. were but a wafer-thin crust on Greek society.
The numbers, as we shall see, were to increase steadily in the
succeeding centuries.
86 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Let us turn now to what awaited a traveller upon arrival at his
destination.
The answer has to be general and lacking in detail since
no ancient author ever specifically described travel experiences.

We have to use casual remarks dropped by historians, stray

lines in ancient comedies, genre pictures on vases, and the
like, then piece this in with certain information available from
later centuries, and, finally, add a seasoning of plain guesswork.
To begin with, ancient travellers made it a rule to arrive by
daylight. In an age that did not know the lighthouse, let

alone beacons or illuminated buoys, no skipper wanted to enter

a harbour in the dark. Walkers or riders were just as averse to
threading their way at night through unmarked, unpaved, and
unlit streets, unable to see either their way or where to jump
when they heard ‘Stand back’ and rubbish came flying out of a
!

window. Street lamps lay centuries in the future, and paving

was not only rare but, where it did exist, just a poorly drained
layer of stone chips rammed into the surface. To add to the
confusion, those most useful devices, street signs and house
numbers, were yet to be invented. A character in a comedy
by Plautus comes on stage looking for an address and mutters,
£
My master said it was the seventh building from the town
gate’; a few lines later he reports that he is ‘staying at the third
inn outside the town gate’. These were as precise indications
as one could give. Even street names were sparingly used;
only main avenues had them. In one of Terence’s comedies
a set of directions goes like this:

You know that house there, the one that belongs to Cratinus,
when you get past that house, go straight
the millionaire? Well,
down the street there to the left, then when you get to the
temple of Diana go right. Then just before you get to the
town gate, right by a watering pond there, you’ll find a
little bakery and, opposite it, a carpenter’s shop. That’s
where he is.

By arriving during the day the stranger could at least step

 TRADE AND TRAVEL 87

around potholes, avoid piles of refuse, see where to duck in

warning call of someone throwing rubbish, find passersby
at the

to ask the way, and stand some chance of following their

instructions successfully.
In the early days, as we have noted (48 above), travellers
often had no alternative to using private hospitality. And
private hospitality continued to play a significant role long
after the increased pace of movement had planted inns all

over the land. Traders counted on being lodged with business

associates, the noble or wealthy with their influential friends,
and the humble with whoever would take them in. Families
in different cities united by ties of friendship extended hos-
pitality to each other from generation to generation. The ties
did not have to be particularly close; indeed, there were
certain households with the generous tradition of putting up
all citizens from a given place regardless of whether these
were personally known or not. The dwellings of the well-to-do
always included at least one xenon or guest room; usually it
had its own entrance, and sometimes it was a separate little

lodge. The visitor would be invited to his host’s table the

day after his arrival; thereafter provisions were sent to the
xenon or he bought them himself, and his servant prepared
them. On departure, guest and host exchanged gifts.
Those who had no access to private hospitality perforce
went to an inn, a pandokeion ‘place for receiving all [comers]’.
By the fifth century b.c. inns were to be found along the major
roads, in most towns, and in considerable numbers in ports or
big centres. The trouble was that most of them were un-
prepossessing, to say the least. Aristophanes’ Frogs opens
with a scene in which Dionysus decides to go to the under-
world. He consults Heracles — was an expert on
the hero
getting there since one of his Twelve Labours had been to
—
bring back Cerberus, Hades’ watchdog and an urgent request
he makes is for a list of ‘landladies with the fewest bedbugs’;
as in the earliest days of travel (37 above), innkeeping was
still a woman’s profession. The inn in Hades where he eventually
88 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
puts up, it turns out, is run by a lady with a terrifying way of
carrying on about guests who do not pay — the ancestor of
FalstafFs Mistress Quickly and other formidable female inn-
keepers of English literature. If there were any snug comfortable
hostels, we never hear of them.
We know the layout only of country inns or those built
where generous space was available. They were like the
hostelry at Epidaurus, a large square or rectangular central
courtyard surrounded on all four sides by a shallow con-
tinuous structure, usually two stories high. This was parti-
tioned off into a line of small rooms, each opening onto the
court or a covered passage surrounding it. The principal
facade w^as pierced by
gateway giving access to the court.
a
Inns in town were very likely much more cramped, as in
Roman times (207 below). The traveller left his carriage or
pack-animals in the court and was ushered into one of the
rooms, which he might have to share with any number of
other guests, depending upon the volume of traffic. The only
furniture would be a pallet, perhaps also a spread; for a
blanket, he used his cloak. The room would certainly be
dark, with few or even no windows; this had the advantage
of keeping it cool during the summer, the most popular time
for travelling. If the weather happened to be cold enough to
require heat, he might convince the innkeeper to send in a
charcoal brazier. There were no toilets —
there were none in
the finest mansions in town either —
just commodes, which

hopefully the servants emptied promptly. In town, where there

were markets, he would rent just the room and buy his own
food, which his servants or the kitchen staff would prepare.
In a country inn he would strike a bargain with the innkeeper
for each item separately —bed, drink, meals (cf. 270 below).
Rates including full board were the exception, to be found
only in regions where food was so plentiful it was practically
thrown in.

By the fifth century b.c. temple precincts, as we shall see in

a moment (90 below), had inns of their own. Somewhat later,
 —

TRADE AND TRAVEL 89

perhaps sparked by the example of the temples, certain cities

began to run inns. One imposing example has been unearthed

in a ratherremote spot in Epirus in western Greece. The
entrance facade was decorated with columns, the court
measured an ample 46 feet six inches by 38 feet 4 inches and
the —
rooms opening on to it there were some eighteen on the
ground floor and another dozen or so on a second floor
were furnished with tables as well as beds. Cities still main-
tained leschai, the loggias (48 above) where the populace
could idle away part of the day sheltered from rain and sun,
and these, though they offered no more than a roof over one’s
head, were better than nothing for anyone who could not
afford an inn or find a household generous enough to offer
its xenon.
As Greek inns, at least those in towns or
a matter of fact,
cities, offered very little more than a night’s shelter. Food, as

just mentioned, had to be bought elsewhere. A guest who

wanted to wash off the dust of the road would go down the
street to the nearest public bath carrying his own towel and
his own flask of oil for rubbing down with afterwards; the
establishment furnished a cleanser, usually a lye of lime or
wood ashes or fuller’s earth (soap properwas unknown at
this time). He took off his clothes in the dressing room and

made sure they were in someone’s care while he was bathing,

since robbing garments from dressing rooms was practically a
profession, and the management assumed no responsibility.
The bath itself, as we can tell from pictures on contemporary
vases, was a big basin over which he leaned while an attendant
sloshed water over him. A form of shower very much like
those of today also occasionally appears, but we have no way
of telling how widely it was used. Upper-class houses sometimes
included a private bath — yet another in the long list of
conveniences enjoyed by those who could stay with friends.
Inns offered so little because they were primarily for transient
guests. Travellers who had to spend any amount of time in
a place looked for lodgings in a private house. In ports such
90 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
as the Peiraeus, Corinth, Byzantium (the Greek predecessor
of Constantinople), or the like, these were plentiful enough —
of them at Byzantium, for example, to give rise to a story that
the men there spent so much time lounging and drinking in
the wineshops, they hardly had any use for their homes and
would rent them out, wives included.
At temples or sanctuaries of any importance there generally
were facilities for receiving guests, both lodgings and banquet
halls. The temple of Hera at Plataea in Boeotia, for example,
by the fifth century b.c. boasted a two-storey inn that was
over 200 feet square and had perhaps as many as 150 rooms.
In Hippolytus’ sanctuary at Troezon in the eastern Pelo-
ponnese, archeologists have uncovered a banquet hall with
couches for fifty-six diners and Argos a series of
in Hera’s at
three small dining-rooms that could accommodate twelve in
each. At the site of the Olympic games, in the fourth century
b.c. a certain philanthropist paid for the erection of a handsome

hostelry that measured all of 242 by 262 feet overall and was
two storeys high. It followed the layout we usually associate
with ancient Greek inns (88 above), a patio surrounded on
four sides by lines of rooms, all opening onto it. Here the
patio was a spacious affair with an arcade of Doric columns.
There were slightly more than twenty rooms on each floor,
even the smallest of which were of good size, about 18 feet
wide and 35 deep, while the largest, in the corners, were ample
chambers more than 35 feet square. An imposing line of Ionic
columns, 138 in all, ran about the whole exterior. At other
than festival times, the rooms and halls at the various sanc-
tuaries were available for rental by whatever visitors could
afford them, the proceeds making a welcome addition to the
temple revenues. During festivals, since they could take care
of but a fraction of the thousands who flocked in, they must
have been reserved for ranking notables.
Housing the crowds at any of the panhellenic games posed a
monumental problem. The well-to-do usually arrived equipped
to take care of themselves, with tents and household gear and a
 TRADE AND TRAVEL 91

staff of servants. For the rank and file, who came with little

more than a change of clothes, the local authorities provided

some temporary shelters. Whoever could not jam into these
simply slept under whatever cover there was porticoes, —
loggias, temple porches — or bedded down in the open and
hoped that it would not rain.

At the festivals there were activities, formal or otherwise,

going on endlessly, so people were spared the problem of
what to do with themselves. In towns of any size, visitors in
search of diversion had the kapeleia or potisteria ‘drinking
shops’ to turn to, which offered not only wine but meals
and gambling and dancing girls. In most cases such establish-
ments were extremely modest, catering to no very elevated
trade; the wealthy entertained themselves and their guests at
home. There were, however, exceptions, as archeologists
discovered when digging at Corinth, one of Greece’s most
important and active seaports until Rome destroyed it in 146
b.c. Sometime in the second half of the fourth century b.c. the

Corinthians put up a long elegant portico with an equally

long and elegant two-storey structure behind it. The ground
floor housed a line of thirty-one taverns, each with its own
entrance onto the portico, and the second floor a line of two-
room suites entered from a corridor approached by a staircase
at either end of the portico. Each tavern was a bit over 15

feet square, had a storeroom of equal size behind, and from the

storeroom a back door led to a small neatly paved area with

a latrine. What is more, each tavern had in the middle of its
main room the nearest thing to a refrigerator that the ancient
—
world could supply a well whose bottom opened onto a
man-made tunnel connected with fresh springs. Here, at the
end of long cords, were kept wine jugs and containers of
foodstuffs submerged in the cool water. When excavated the
wells turned out to be full of debris from the shops: battered
wine jugs, broken flutes, knuckle bones, drinking cups. Some
of the last were intact, including a number of the kind that,
used for libations, had the name of the god to be honoured
 —

92 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

inscribed on them. All the names are well known — e.g.
'Dionysus’, 'Love’, ‘Joy’, 'Health’, — except one: Pausi-
kraipalos ‘Stop-the-Hangover’. The
above the shops
suites
were no less well fitted. Each was entered from the corridor,
like the rooms in a modern hotel. The door led into a small

antechamber, open at the back; here a shallow staircase of two

steps, flanked by a simple column on either side, brought one
to the main room. The antechamber, which was easily curtained
off at night, could have been for servants.
There may have been a special reason for facilities of such
unexpected luxury in Corinth at this time.
338 b.c., From
when Philip of Macedon became master of Greece, to the
death of his son Alexander in 323, the city was the seat of the
confederacy of Greek states that Philip had created. Whenever
meetings were called, every member sent delegates there.
Quite possibly the suites were their living quarters and the
taverns where they ate and spent their leisure.
If a delegate sought greater diversion than even such
handsome taverns could offer, he could spend the evening
with a courtesan, a lovely lady finely trained in all the arts
music, dance, and conversation, as well as making love — that
delight a man’s soul. Their prices were steep; they were a
luxury that only the likes of delegates or prosperous business-
men could afford. Some well-to-do merchants, in ports they
visited regularly, kept girls on a retainer as it were, paying
through the nose for the exclusive use of their charms. Lucian
has an amusing skit in which a sailor from the Athenian navy
storms at a courtesan because she threw him over for a tooth-
less, balding fifty-year old merchant; the girl icily retorts that,

instead of gifts of onions or cheese or cheap shoes, her new

had given her ‘these earrings and a rug, and the other
client
day two minae [about £400 or $1,000 in purchasing power]
. .
., and paid the rent’.

The tourist today who gets into trouble abroad runs out of —
money or has an accident or is caught up in some outbreak
 TRADE AND TRAVEL 93

of violence- —has his consul to turn to. The ancient Greek

had his proxenos . The two, though differing in many key
respects, served a number of the same purposes.
A proxenos was a person living in a city-state either as
citizen or resident alien, who was officially chosen to take
care of the interests of another city-state —he was, in effect,
the other state’s accredited representative in the one where he
dwelled. He was necessarily a man of wealth and position; the
family of Alcibiades, for example, was for generations Sparta’s
proxenos at Athens, Demosthenes was Thebes’, Nicias, the
political successor of Pericles, was Syracuse’s. In the above
instances each, as it happens, was an Athenian citizen serving
as proxenos for a foreign state; more often the proxenos was a
resident foreigner who was selected by the city in which he
lived to represent the city of his origin. The proxenos prime
duty was to aid and assist in all ways possible any of his
compatriots who turned up in the place of his residence,
particularly those who had come some official capacity.
in
For example, in 325 b.c. the Athenian government passed a
resolution designating as proxenos a certain Heracleides of
Salamis, a city-state on the island of Cyprus. Heracleides
henceforth would be expected to give hospitality to any
government representatives Salamis sent to Athens, secure
them admission to meetings of the Assembly, get them
tickets to the theatre, and so on. He could be asked for help
by any Salaminian who might be involved in a lawsuit at
Athens, or for a loan by any who chanced to run short of
funds while there. He could be asked to negotiate the ransom
of Salaminians taken as prisoners of war. If a Salaminian died
at Athens, the heirs could request him to wind up relevant
Athens for some reason
financial matters there. Conversely, if
had to send a representative to Salamis to beg a favour or
negotiate a delicate issue, Heracleides would be the natural
choice. A proxenos received no pay from the state that appointed
him. He was granted certain privileges, and unquestionably
his position opened up useful business contacts and oppor-
94 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
but his prime motivation seems to have been the
tunities,

honour of it, his highest reward to be given public recognition

in the form of an official decree carved on stone and set up
in a public place —sometimes in duplicate, one in the state
which appointed him and where he served and the other in
the state which he represented.

Thus, as late as the end of the fourth century b.c., travel in

and around Greece was neither easy nor particularly pleasant.

Those who went by sea depended on the sailings of merchant-
men, put up with casual accommodations once aboard, and
worried about pirate attacks during the whole voyage. Those
who went by land found the roads generally poor, the inns
worse, and had to keep a sharp eye out for highwaymen. The
wealthy were better off only in having the money to take a
cabin aboard ships that offered such amenities, friends to put
them up in various places, and the influence to ensure the
help of their city’s proxenos if they got into difficulties.

Most who travelled did so with specific ends in view:

government representatives, businessmen, itinerant merchants,
actors on tour, the sick heading for a sanctuary of Asclepius,
the festival crowds en route to the panhellenic or other
well-known games. But there were a few who, despite all the
discouragements, travelled for the love of it. One was the
man who has the distinction of being the world’s first travel
writer.
 5

The First Travel Writer

In 490 b.c. King Darius of Persia launched an amphibious

attack upon Athens—the first of the Persian Wars mentioned
above (58). It was Goliath against David, a David with no
secret weapon but just the traditional courage and skill
of
Greek men-at-arms. Athens repulsed the invasion practically
single-handed. Stung by such an unexpected defeat, Xerxes,
Darius' son, returned ten years later at the head of a gar-
gantuan expedition by sea and land. The Greek city-states or —
at least a —
good many of them were for once alarmed enough
to give up fighting each other and combine against the common
enemy. They smashed Xerxes' navy at Salamis, and his army
at Plataea. The two stunning victories made them overnight
the foremost people in the eastern Mediterranean and
marked
the beginning of Athens' dazzling career as
political and
cultural leader.
We know about this w*ar as we do few others, thanks to a
keen-eyed, keen-minded, and widely travelled Greek who
wrote about it and thereby earned himself the title of ‘Father
History . Herodotus History of the Persian JPars was
something totally new in literature. He was not, to be sure,
the first to record the past. For over two thousand years
Near Eastern monarchs had been inscribing monuments with
accounts of their heroic accomplishments, and the Jews had
long before drawn up the story of their vicissitudes as Jehovah’s
chosen people. The fundamental purpose of all these writings,
however, had been to attest to the triumphant fulfilment of
96 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
heaven’s Herodotus concentrated on man’s doings, and
will.

he had the vision and genius to take a vast mass of material

and organize it into a narrative which would show the human
motives and actions that brought Greeks and Persians into
conflict and gave victory to the one and defeat to the other.
What is more, to introduce the protagonists properly to his
audience, he begins with an extended survey of the vast
polyglot Persian empire and the neighbours who figured
significantly in its history, drawing upon information he had
acquired through personal observation and inquiry during
long and far-ranging journeys. He has thus the distinction of
being the world’s first travel writer as well as historian.
We know tantalizingly little about this extraordinary man
who spent the better part of his life as a tourist and used the
experience so creatively. Greek writers are reticent. They
assume that readers want a book for information about its
subject, not its author. There is hardly a word in Herodotus’
pages about what he ate, where he stayed, whom he met,
what adventures he had, and the rest of it. In fact, there are not
many about where he actually travelled. From a random
mention that he saw a certain bowl at ‘a place between the
Hypanis (the Bug) and the Borysthenes (the Dnieper)’ we
realize that he had been to south Russia. We know he traversed
Egypt as far as the First Cataract since he remarks at one point
that he is reporting on the country ‘as an eye-witness as far
as Elephantine’. We gather he had been to Babylon because,
in describing a solid gold statue eighteen feet high, he adds
‘I didn’t see it myself, I only report what the Babylonians tell

me’.
He w as born
r
in Halicarnassus, a Greek city-state on the
southwest coast of Asia Minor, in the early decades of the
fifth century b.c. Halicarnassus was a vassal of Persia in those
days and contributed a squadron to the navy Xerxes massed
on Greece. Herodotus was probably of school
for his attack
age when Artemisia, the queen of Halicarnassus, brought the
ships limping home from Salamis; years later he was to
 —

THE FIRST TRAVEL WRITER 97

immortalize her by telling how that naval Amazon commanded
the contingent in person and drew compliments from the king
for her courage and cunning in action. He left Halicarnassus
as a young man; there are vague hints of a contretemps with
Artemisia’s successor, so it may have been exile that started
him on his wanderings. He spent the rest of his life abroad,
exploring widespread parts of the Greek and Persian world.
He visited Athens more than once, perhaps even taking up
occasional residence, and, when Athens in 443 b.c. sent out a
well-publicized colonizing expedition to found Thurii in the
instep of the Italian boot, he either joined the emigrants or
followed shortly after. He died there sometime between 430
and 425 b.c.

Herodotus came from good family, was well educated, and

—
had money only a member of the leisured class could indulge
a wanderlust as he did. His interests are those of the cultivated
intellectual. He is on comparative religion;
particularly keen
in fact, a desire to check foreign gods and ritual practices
against the Greek and see which can claim priority appears
to have been the prime motive for many a journey. He
is a serious student of physical geography. He theorizes

—
we now know that Egypt originally had been
accurately, as
an arm of the sea; among other reasons, his sharp eye had
noticed 'sea shells appearing on the mountains’, in other words,
marine fossils. He analyses the hypotheses offered for the
Nile’s annual flood, and we can forgive him for branding the
theory that it was the result of melting snow as 'especially
some of his contemporaries knew better but the
inaccurate’;
knowledge was soon lost, and not regained until nineteenth
century explorers came upon the towering Ruwenzori
Mountains whose melting snows set the White Nile in spate.
Studious inquiries of this kind are only to be expected of
Greek intellectuals of the time; they were always seeking to
discover the cause of things. What is surprising is to find in
Herodotus an equally lively curiosity in matters that are norm-
D
 :

98 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

ally businessmen’s concerns. He is intrigued by modes of
transport and reports in detail on certain odd craft, oversize

round coracles, he saw on the Euphrates around Babylon

(where they are still to be seen) and on the curious way Nile
boats were put together out of short lengths of plank (they
still are, at least south of the Second Cataract). He notes local

products — the big fish caught at the mouth of the Dnieper

(we prefer our sturgeon smoked);
that are ‘good for salting’
the linen of special weave that Egypt produces; the cloth
woven from hemp in south Russia which is so much like
linen that anyone who does not know hemp cannot tell the
difference; the candy, tamarisk syrup thickened with wheat
flour, that was a specialty of a certain town in Asia Minor.
He reports strange ways of doing business, such as the tech-
nique the Carthaginians use in trading with the natives of the
west coast of Africa

they lay out their goods in a row on the beach, return to

their ships, and raise a smoke signal; the natives see the
signal, go to the beach, put down an amount of gold, and
move away from the goods; the Carthaginians disembark,
take a look, and if the gold seems enough for the goods
take it and go off, and if not, they go back to the boats and
wait, and the natives come out and add to the gold till the
sellers are satisfied.

Herodotus’ fellow-travellers were more often than not traders

and commercial agents, and he surely whiled away many a
long day on deck or donkeyback talking business with them;
apparently it rubbed off on him. Was he perhaps a trader
himself as well as a tourist? It was unusual for a Greek of his
station —but he was an unusual Greek.
Since he tells us so little about himself, we cannot map
in detail the course of his travels. He did not make one grand
tour but rather a number of individual voyages. It goes
without saying that he had been all over Greece and the
Aegean islands; and he was at least once in Cyrene in north
 THE FIRST TRAVEL WRITER 99

Africa, an easy sail from the Aegean. In the west he knew

southern Italy and Sicily well' —he probably explored these
areas during his stay at Thurii —but never went further west-
ward. His exotic travelling was done in the east. One voyage
took him from Ephesus on the west coast of Asia Minor to
Sardis, and from there over parts of the Persian Royal Road

(53 above). He sailed over much of the Black Sea, including

the northern coast, which gave him the chance to visit the
Greek settlements in the general area of Odessa and inquire
about the Scythians and other native tribes of the hinterland
who lived outside the frontier of civilization.
South of Asia Minor through Syria and Palestine to Babylon
and Egypt — all was part of the sprawling Persian Empire in
Herodotus’ day. This made things easier for a traveller; there
were no boundaries to cross, and he could cover ground
swiftly —by ancient standards — on the well-maintained Persian
roads. Herodotus got as far eastward as Babylon. What his
exact route was is anybody’s guess. Most probably he sailed
to Syria and landed at some port near the present site of
Antioch (not to be founded till 300 b.c.), where the distance
from the coast to the Euphrates is shortest, struck east until he
reached the river, and then followed the caravan track along
it. His reward for weeks of arduous plodding was to come

upon a vast complex:

square in shape, with each side 14 miles long, a total of 56

miles. Babylon is not only of enormous size; it has a splen-
dour such no other city of all we have seen
as The city . . .

wall is 85J feet wide and 342 high ... Its circuit is pierced
by one hundred entrances, with gates, jambs, and lintels of
bronze .The town is full of three- and four-storey houses
. .

and is cut through with streets that are absolutely straight,

not only the main ones but also the sidestreets going down
to the river.

This student of religion was naturally struck by the soaring

ziggurat he saw there, the distinctive Babylonian type of
100 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
temple that rises in square stages, like a stack of children’s
building blocks: ‘in the middle of the sacred precinct a solid
tower has been erected, two hundred yards along each face,
upon this tower a second is set, and still another on this up to
5
eight . The whole must have seemed a marvel to a man
city
accustomed to modest-sized Greek towns with their two-
storey buildings, narrow and twisting alleys, low and graceful
temples. We can hardly blame him for the inflated figures he
gives for dimensions; he probably got them from the guides
who took him around, and he was in no position to check
the numbers they must have glibly reeled off.
5
Somehow a sizeable part of Herodotus survey of Syria and
Mesopotamia failed to survive. Luckily we have the whole of
his account of Egypt, a unique and for the most part eye-
witness report that forms one of the largest single sections of
his book. Herodotus went there to see the sights, but his
curiosity was not at all about the things that bring people to
Egypt today and not primarily about what brought them there
during subsequent centuries of the ancient world. He is not the
least bit interested in Egyptian art: ‘the walls are full of carved
5
figures is his offhand reference to what must have been
hundreds of yards of bas-reliefs, tastefully sculpted and
painted. He cared little for Egyptian architecture as such; when
taken into one of the courts of the gigantic temple at Karnak,
5
‘itwas large he remarks, and hurries on to his point, namely
,

the number of statues there of high priests and what calcula-

tions about the antiquity of Egypt could be made from the
total. The special quality of Egyptian art and architecture, to
be sure, more or less a discovery of our own times. But
is

Herodotus was just as little interested in Egypt’s chief drawing

card in all ages, her grandiose witnesses to a once mighty
empire.Some of them excited his wonder he would hardly —
—
be human if they did not but as feats of engineering more
than anything else. Take his reaction to the pyramids. To
him the ramp built to carry the chunks of quarried stone
from the river to the Great Pyramid and up its sloping sides
 THE FIRST TRAVEL WRITER IOI

was ‘just about as big a piece of work as the pyramid’. His

description of the monument work gangs and
dwells on the
how they operated in shifts, the size of the hewn blocks and
how they were raised and set in place, how the monument
was finished off (from the top down), how much time it all
took (ten years for the ramp, twenty for the pyramid itself) and,
of course, how much it cost. Here he had only a straw in the
wind, but he grasped at it:

There is an inscription in Egyptian on the pyramid telling

how much was disbursed on radishes, onions, and garlic for
the workmen. And, remember very well what the guide
as I
said when translating it for me, it was an expenditure of
i, 600 talents [perhaps twenty million pounds or fifty million

dollars]. If this is so, what figure can we put on the rest of

the expenses —
for the iron used, for the food [as against mere
trimmings such as onions and garlic] and clothing of the
workmen?

Whatever the inscription was, a guide of the fifth century b.c.

could no more read Old Kingdom hieroglyphics than those
who take tourists around the pyramids today. Herodotus’
guide was either telling a taller tale than usual or possibly just
—
having fun with him Herodotus’ figure for the length of the
sides of the Great Pyramid is so close to the mark (800 feet
as against 760) that it looks as if he paced it off himself;
perhaps the guide was getting even with a sceptical client who
refused to take his word.
The only other building he describes in equal detail is the
so-called Labyrinth, and this piqued his curiosity because of
its amusing maze-like arrangement. He reports:

We saw the upper chambers, and they surpass any of the

works of man. All the various passageways in and out of
chambers and the various goings this way and that way
through the courtyards produce wonder after wonder as you
move from courtyard to chamber or from chamber to
102 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
gallery, then into different chambers from the galleries and
different courtyards from the chambers.

He thought it was a memorial building put up by a group of

kings of relatively late date, the seventh century we know
b.c. ;

now that it was a tomb-temple built by Amenemhet III in

the nineteenth b.c., and excavation has shown that it does
indeed have an unusually intricate and complicated ground-
plan. The monument lay near the ancient Lake Moeris. To
Herodotus the lake was even more of a marvel than the
Labyrinth, since he assumed it was all man-made and estimated
its circumference to be an imposing 420 miles
a gigantic feat —
of engineering in any age. Actually the lake was far smaller,

less than half the size he assigns it (the remnant left today,
Birket-el-Karun, measures a scant thirty miles by six), and it

was mostly though the pharaohs’ engineers

a natural basin,
get credit for some impressive improvements that enabled it
to be used as a reservoir for surpluses from a high flood of the
Nile.
What drew Herodotus to Egypt more than anything else

was what it had to offer to the student of religion. In one of

those rare moments when he talks about himself, he gives us
a glimpse of the extent to which this interest determined his
movements. While in Egypt he inquired into the antiquity of
what he refers to as the Egyptian Heracles; exactly what deity
he means by this is hard to tell. He was not completely satis-
fied, so, he writes, ‘wanting to learn the facts of the matter
from what sources I could, I sailed to Tyre in Phoenicia as
well, since I had heard of a temple there, a very holy one,
dedicated to Heracles’. Here he must be identifying Heracles
with the Phoenicians’ Melkart, the Baal of the Bible. While
there, he continues, ‘striking up a conversation with the priests,

I asked how long ago the temple had been built . . . They
said it was as old as Tyre itself ... At Tyre I noticed another
temple to Heracles, the so-called Heracles of Thasos, so I

went to Thasos too ... In fine, my researches make it clear

 ;

THE FIRST TRAVEL WRITER IO3

that the worship of Heracles is very ancient.' His inquiries

covered everything from the antiquity of Heracles to the
number of times a day priests washed themselves. Egypt at
that time was the land of religion and superstition par ex-
cellenceHerodotus had a veritable field day there. He looked
into the selecting and sacrificing of the Apis bull sacred to
Ptah, the way bulls were sacrificed to Isis, the ritual attitude
toward pigs (considered unclean, and as a consequence swine-
herds never enter temples), what foods were taboo for priests
(fish and beans), what happened at Egyptian festivals (a lot

of drinking; cf. 31 above), the various sacred animals, the

available types of embalming (de luxe, medium priced, cheap),
and dozens of other matters. He equates Egyptian deities with
Greek —Amun is Zeus, Isis Demeter, Osiris Dionysus, Bast
Artemis, and so on —and spends much time arguing that the
Greek gods are derived from
the Egyptian —
rather a waste
of time from our point of view, since we know, as he could
not, that the two sets of divinities are totally distinct.

Religion, customs, physical geography — all these may have

provided the key motives for Herodotus’ wanderings in Egypt
and elsewhere, but he was not always so serious. He spent a
good deal of time just ‘doing the sights’. In Egypt, as mentioned
above, he went to the pyramids and the Labyrinth. At Delphi
he saw Croesus’ famous offerings to the sanctuary, including
a solid gold lion that originally weighed about 575 pounds
and a mixing bowl that could hold about 5,200 gallons.
silver
In the temple of Hera at Samos he saw the two wooden like-
nesses Pharaoh Amasis had donated of himself. At
that
Tegea he saw hung up in the local temple the fetters the
Spartans had brought to use when they invaded Tegea but
which were clapped on themselves when they lost the battle.
Outside of Sardis he visited the monumental tomb of Croesus’
father, Alyattes. He went over battlefields —not only Marathon
and Thermopylae, which he was interested in as historian, but
any he happened to be near, such as the site of a decisive
104 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
encounter between Egyptians and Persians. He paid a visit
to the descendant of a celebrity, the grandson of a Spartan
who had gained immortal fame by dying a hero’s death in
battle.

Like most travellers in ancient times, Herodotus went by

ship whenever he could. This is why we find him reporting
on so many harbours and river towns. His arrival in Egypt
—
was by sea he remarks that, a day out of port, sounding
with the lead will pick up samples of muddy bottom at eleven
—
fathoms and he was lucky enough to get there when the
Nile was in flood (between August and November) and so was
even able to go up to the pyramids by water (21 above).
From Memphis at the apex of the delta he went by boat up
the Nile, managing to get off at Thebes but missing some
important stops along the way, such as the holy city of
Abydos which he mentions nowhere. In Asia Minor, Syria,
and Mesopotamia he went overland for the most part, not by
choice but because these areas had few navigable waterways.
On ship or ashore he was always an ordinary tourist, travelling
in no official capacity, having no special entree. In Greek
towns he no doubt could frequently count on private hos-
pitality and the help of people he was recommended to;

elsewhere he was strictly on his own. Then there was the

problem of language. Greek carried him from Italy to the
west coast of Asia Minor. From there it was either Persian or
Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Near East, or Egyptian. Like
any good tourist, Herodotus picked up a smattering of foreign
words as he went along. He casually mentions some Persian
words ( artal , the Persian dry measure, and parasang, the
Persian measure for distance), a number of Egyptian (the
typical loaf of bread was called cyllestis , the typical tunic
calasiris , the typical Nile boat baris , a crocodile was a champsa ),
5

and even some Scythian ( arima means ‘one spu means ‘eye’,
,

the national drink of one of the remote tribes was aschy), and
he surely must have known many more, at least in Aramaic
and Egyptian, including no doubt the indispensable ‘Does
 THE FIRST TRAVEL WRITER 105
7

anyone speak Greek? In making the rounds of sights he

.

inevitably depended upon Greek-speaking guides. When he

went through temples, he was shown about and talked with
what he calls priests, but who must have been sacristans or
the like (lofty Egyptian prelates did not take tourists around,
say, the great temple at Karnak any more than cardinals and
archbishops take them around the Vatican). The conversations
must have been carried on through his guide or an interpreter.
Some of the mistakes he makes may be because he had no way
of verifying what these told him. Take, for example, his
report that ‘the Egyptians were the first to say that the . . .

soul, when the body has some other creature,

died, enters
each at the moment of birth, and, after making the rounds of
every form of animal, fish, and bird, re-enters a newborn
human body’. Thanks to the findings of the Egyptologists,
we now know that Herodotus is totally wrong. Metem-
psychosis is foreign to the Egyptians’ way of thinking; in
Herodotus’ day they were still clinging unwaveringly to their
age-old belief that good men at death become Osiris, the
all

god who had been killed by a wicked brother but then lived
on forever in another world. Quite possibly Herodotus’
interpreter, out of his depth in attempting such a subject,
put the question in a garbled form. Another possibility is

that Herodotus, who was convinced of Egypt’s priority in so

many things, had him ask, ‘Isn’t it true that the soul etc.?’

and the sacristan orwhoever was being quizzed obligingly

gave the answer that was obviously called for.
Apart from guides, Herodotus probably got a certain
amount of information from the sort of people tourists
generally come into contact with, porters, drivers, waiters,
maids, and so on, a few of whom must have had a smattering
of Greek. A conversation conducted half in pidgin Greek or
pidgin Egyptian or both and half in sign-language could very
well have been the source of Herodotus’ description of the
hippopotamus; no eye-witness could possibly compare it in
size to an ox, to say nothing of giving it cloven hooves, a
 6

10 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

horse’s mane, and a horse’s tail. Even his own sharp eyes could
trick him. All Egyptians, he writes, eat out-of-doors. Probably,
as he walked village lanes at meal times, he saw family upon
family cooking in front of the house as they do today; had
he been invited to dine in an upper-class household, he would
have learned otherwise. Egyptian women, he informs us, wear
only one garment —
no doubt, of servants or those in the
true,
fields, but other Egyptian women of the time wore two, even

three. Yet, if he made mistakes, he was by no means gullible.

He reports what he is told about the fabulous bird called the
phoenix, but carefully adds that he never saw one himself.
An island was pointed out to him that was allegedly remark-
able for being afloat; ‘I myself didn’t observe it floating or
even moving’, he comments. His informants Babylon told at

him that the god entered the temple to sleep in a couch left
at the top; ‘that’s what they say’, he notes, ‘but I don’t believe

it.’ Certain statues he was shown had no hands, and he was

given some esoteric explanation for the absence; ‘it was

nonsense’, he remarks, ‘even I could see that the hands had
fallen off through age’.

Herodotus wrote not merely to inform but to entertain. His

technique is that of a skilled conversationalist, who moves
easily from subject to subject to provide pace and variety,
leaving one as soon as he senses his audience has had enough
of it to go off on another. Just so, Herodotus steps leisurely
along, slipping effortlessly from history to anthropology to
geography and back again. Consider his account of Babylon.
He by describing the walls and temples. Then he
begins
details what two highly intelligent queens did for the city:
Semiramis put up dykes for flood control, and Nitocris had
the course of the river changed and spanned it with a bridge
(Nebuchadnezzar probably deserves the credit for this; cf. 51
above). This reminds him of the grim joke Nitocris played:
she inscribed on her tomb a notice to the effect that any
subsequent king of Babylon who needed money had her
 THE FIRST TRAVEL WRITER 107

permission to open the grave and help himself; inevitably one

of her successors fell into the trap —and found only a second
notice scoffing at his greed and sacrilege. Since Nitocris’ son
happened to be on the throne when Cyrus the Great led his
Persians against Babylon, Herodotus is minded to tell of the
attack, starting with a story of how Cyrus en route punished
a river for drowning a prized horse he turned it into a —
creek by making his army spend a summer digging run-off
channels. Finally getting to his subject proper, he adduces
some facts about Babylon’s wealth and resources, but soon
digresses to describe the ‘greatest wonder of all next to the
city itself’, the curious round coracles used for ferrying people
and goods across the Euphrates. He closes his account with a
description of some of the Babylonians’ more striking peculiar-
ities. They affect wear turbans, perfume the whole
long hair,

body, and carry walking sticks. Until recently they had a

unique way of arranging marriages which Herodotus considers
eminently sensible and regrets has disappeared each year each :

village used to collect all marriageable girls and auction them

off; the big prices for the beauties went into a fund to supply

dowries that would ensure husbands for the homely. Another

practice that gains his approval is the Babylonians’ way of
handling ‘They bring the sick into the town square,
illness:

since they do not use doctors. Each invalid is then approached

and given advice by passersby who have either suffered from
the same sort of ailment themselves or know someone else
who has These prescribe what they did to recover or what
. . .

they know others did who recovered. You are not allowed to
go by a sick person without asking what’s the matter with
him.’ One practice he vehemently disapproves of is die
religious injunction upon every woman to go at least once in
her life to the temple of the goddess of love and fertility and
have relations with any stranger who comes along and picks
her; ‘the and goodlooking are soon home again, but the
tall

ugly spend a long time there, some of them even three or

. . .

four years’.
108 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Or consider his account of the Scythians, Because Darius
had once made a foray against complex of tribes dwelling
this
along the northern shore of the Black Sea in and around the
Crimea, Herodotus includes an account of them the first —
description in western literature of peoples living beyond the
pale of civilization. It is three times as long as the report on
Babylon; he had visited the region himself and been so
fascinated with everything he saw and was told that he could
not bear to omit any of it.
He begins, fittingly, with the question of origins. Although
he is convinced that the Scythians are found in Russia for the
plain and simple reason that they were pushed there out of
Asia by powerful tribes in their rear, he conscientiously offers
two view of the Scythians themselves and of
alternatives, the
the Greek settlers in a nearby colony: the Scythians were
convinced that they were descended from the sons of the
local god, the Greeks that they were nothing more than the
progeny of a child whom Heracles, happening to be passing
through on the return from one of his labours, fathered on a
local creature, half-woman and half-snake. He then mentions
the source of certain of his information, a poem by one
Aristeas —
which reminds him of a curious story about
Aristeas: he fell dead in a cleaner’s shop, his body suddenly
disappeared, and then he himself suddenly reappeared seven
years later in his home town and 240 years later in a town in
southern Italy. Returning to his subject, Herodotus describes
the various tribes and how they live (by agriculture, grazing,
or hunting), how hard the winters are, how this affects horses

very little but mules and donkeys very much —and at this

point he cannot resist breaking off to tell us that in Elis in

Greece mules cannot be bred at all; Tm digressing’, he admits,
‘but in this book, from the opening pages, I’ve been on the
lookout for such digressions.’
Beyond the Scythians, he goes on to say, live the Hyper-
boreans ‘people beyond the north- wind’, and no one knows
anything about them —except the priests on Apollo’s sacred
 THE FIRST TRAVEL WRITER I09

island, Delos. This is because the Hyperboreans dutifully send

offerings there, parcels carefully wrapped which they
in straw
deliver to their nearest neighbours, who pass them on to their
neighbours, and so on to Delos (the kernel of fact behind this
story seems to be the amber trade amber came from the far
;

north and passed from people to people until it reached the

Mediterranean). The Hyperboreans bring to Herodotus’ mind
the various attempts to map their remote northern abode,
indeed to map the whole world, and that leads him to tell of
the circumnavigation of Africa (61 above) and of Darius’
exploration of the Indian Ocean (60 above), to comment on the
oddness of dividing up one land-mass into three continents of
quite unequal size (he thought them unequal because he
thought of Europe as far bigger than the other two), and to
wonder where the names Libya (his name for Africa), Europe,
and Asia came from, anyway. Here he pulls himself up short —
‘That’s enough on this subject’ —
and doggedly returns to the
Scythians.
They are ideally fitted for self-preservation, he reports,
sinceno one can come to grips with them they live in wagons,
:

feed on their cattle, and fight on horseback with bow and

arrow. He then sings the praises —
as any inhabitant of arid
—
Greece would of their well-watered land, with its great
navigable streams (under the guise of the ancient names we
can identify the Danube, Dnieper, Bug, and Don). He turns
next to religion, always a favourite topic with him. The chief
god of the Scythians, he informs us, is female. Their methods
of sacrifice are totally unlike the Greeks’ (who roast the meat
of a victim on spits, shashlik-style): they boil the meat in a
huge pot, or when they have no pot, cook it in the victim’s
stomach, haggis-style. Prisoners are all slaughtered as sacrifices
to their god of war. As a matter of fact, the Scythians are in
general a bloodthirsty lot: a youngster has no status until he
has killed his man and drunk his blood, while enemies killed
in battle are beheaded and scalped, and the skulls of particularly
hated enemies are converted into cups. The scalps are pre-
IIO TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
served, and a warrior’s reputation depends on the number he
can display. When their king falls ill, he calls upon a committee
of the three top soothsayers to determine the cause; they
usually endup charging someone with having sworn falsely
by the king’s hearth (their most solemn oath) but — if the
accused is able to defend his innocence, the committee is

summarily burned alive. When their king dies he is given a

most elaborate funeral involving a country- wide display of the
body, self-mutilation on the part of the mourners, rich tomb
gifts of gold, and the wholesale slaughter of horses and servants

to be buried with the royal corpse or planted about the grave.

After any funeral the Scythians have a special ritual for cleansing
themselves. First they wash their hair. Then they go through
what Herodotus calls a ‘hot-airing’, which seems to be nothing
less than a ‘trip’ on hashish they build
: a teepee-like tent, put
in a brazier full of red-hot stones, crawl in with a handful of
hemp, place it on the stones, sniff the fumes, and, as Herodotus
puts it, ‘get such pleasure from this “hot-airing” that they howl
out loud’. Scythians will have nothing to do with foreign
ways. To prove this, he relates the sad story of King Scylas
who, born of a Greek mother, had a fatal weakness for
Greek ways. Scylas secretly set himself up a household,
complete with wife, in the nearest Greek town, where he
would sneak off and spend a delicious month or more incognito
living a la grecque He went so far as to get deliriously drunk
.

with the mobs celebrating the festival of Dionysus- —and this

was too much; some eye-witness blabbed to his subjects, and
they promptly turned him out.
On and on Herodotus goes, spinning the narrative with
unflagging interest, with unfailing charm and good humour.
It seems to be a melange, yet it is all — or nearly all —woven
with art into a whole that has a studied design. To heighten
the flavour he shrewdly seasons it with spicy marvels from
the lands that, like the Hyperboreans’, lie beyond the geo-
graphers’ ken. Ethiopia, where ‘men are the tallest and
handsomest and longest-lived’ does not count; that had been
 THE FIRST TRAVEL WRITER III

Shangri-La to the Greeks ever since the days of Homer.

But he provides a fine yarn about certain Indian tribes living
in the Hindu Kush who from sand heaps thrown
extract gold
up by burrowing ants bigger than foxes; the Indians have to
work fast and make their getaway on female camels since only
these are speedy enough to outrun the ants and then only
with a good head start. Herodotus is somewhat doubtful of the
truth of all this and keeps reminding the audience that he had
not personally seen such ants, that he got the whole story
from the Persians. He tells of an island off the west African
coast where gold dust is fished up from the bottom of a lake;
—
he passes it on as perhaps just a tale but then again maybe
not. He reports on donkeys with horns, dogheaded men,
headless men with eyes in their chest, one-eyed men, goat-
footed men, men who hibernate for six months. It is pure
nonsense, he assures us —but tells it nonetheless.

The travel writer does not merely purvey information; that

is for the Karl Baedekers, the sober compilers of guide books.
His role is to be the tourist’s perfect companion: to be articulate,
well-informed, a skilled raconteur; to include in what he tells

a fair share of the unusual with a dash of the exotic; to tell it

all with infinite zest. It was Herodotus who set not only the
pattern but a standard.
 PART TWO

TRAVEL IN
ROMAN TIMES
 6

One World

When Herodotus left the Greek city-states along the coast of

Asia Minor to make his way further east and south, he entered
a different world. It spoke a babel of strange tongues, followed
a traditional way of life inherited from forefathers who lived
thousands of years earlier, and knew only rule by monarchs.
Whatever Greeks were there, were transients like himself.
Little more than a century later, Alexander the Great smashed
the Persian empire and made his spectacular march to the
borders of India, and all changed almost overnight.
As Alexander penetrated eastward, he dropped off con-
tingents of his soldiers to found settlements; each became, as
it were, an injection of the Greek way of life into the body of
the ancient east. Fever cut him down in 323 b.c. before he had
time to carry out what seems to have been his intention, an
amalgamation of Greek and Oriental. For the next few
decades his generals fought like wildcats over the carcass of
his empire. When the battling ended, about 270 b.c., they
had torn it into three parts. The family of the Antigonids
held his ancestral throne in Macedonia with a general control
over the city-states of the Greek mainland. The family of the
Seleucids ruled a sprawling patchwork of parts of Asia Minor,
Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. The plum, the rich valley
of the Nile, was in the hands of the Ptolemies.
The dream of an intermingled world of
great conqueror’s
Greeks and Orientals was abandoned; his successors, though
able men, were no visionaries. But the movement of Greeks
II 6 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
into the newly opened east went on apace. The Seleucids and
Ptolemies, each an island of Greek rulers in a vast sea of
non- Greek subjects, surrounded themselves with a dependable
armed force of Greek soldiers, settled permanently on the
land. On top of this they actively recruited Greek technicians
and administrators to staff a bureaucracy — indeed, they opened
the gates to any Greeks who wanted to come in, merchants,
‘Go east, young man, go east’, if we may
artisans, farmers.
paraphrase Horace Greeley, was the watchword of the third
century b.c.

And so, from 300 Near East was gradually trans-

b.c. on, the

formed. Alongside the dwellings and places of worship of

age-old oriental type rose Greek temples and theatres and
porticoes and the rest of the architectural apparatus of a Greek
city-state. Robed and turbaned locals now shared the streets

with Greeks in their light tunics, and gradually got used to

the sight of Greek youths working out in the nude in the
newly built gymnasia, at Greek elders shouting in violent
debate at town council sessions in the newly built meeting
chambers, at Greeks of all ages chattering like magpies in the
newly built market-places, the agoras.
This Hellenized east became an integral part of the Mediter-
ranean Greek world west of it. In the far west, to be sure, the
great city of Carthage still ruled the seas and no Greeks or —
—
any others were allowed to pass a line that ran roughly
from Carthage (near where Tunis stands today) to the
Balearics. But east of Carthage, the world had been Hellenized
all the way to Babylon. Herodotus’ language troubles were a

thing of the past; Greek would take you anywhere now, and,
to make things even easier, the age developed a standardized
form, the koine ‘common tongue’, which replaced, or was
spoken alongside, the traditional welter of dialects. New ports
sprang up to handle the increased movement by sea. This is
when Antioch began its long career; it was founded by the
Seleucids in 300 b.c. Alexandria, as the name shows, was
established somewhat earlier (331 b.c.); the Ptolemies made it
 —

ONE WORLD 117

their capital and turned it into the greatest entrepot of the

ancient world. From either port you could book passage on
big seagoing freighters that sailed over open water to Syracuse
and from there on to Marseilles.
The Mediterranean world, bound together as it had never
been before by language, trade, and similar way of life,
developed an international, cosmopolitan culture. When the
Ptolemies established at Alexandria a richly endowed research
centre — famous Museum and Library (258 below)
their
literary lights and distinguished scholars and scientists flocked
there from everywhere: Eratosthenes, the geographer who
calculated the circumference of the earth with astonishing
accuracy, came from Cyrene; Hipparchus, the astronomer
whose concept of the universe with the earth as its centre
lasted till the days of Copernicus, from Nicaea; Theocritus,
the only first-rate poet the age produced, from Syracuse.
There was an international style in art. A middle-class Greek,
down in the Fayum not far from the age-old Labyrinth,
settling
might hire Egyptian workmen to decorate his walls with
murals —but the pictures themselves would be crude imitations
of what was being painted at Athens or Syracuse or Antioch,
and would be done in the same style.

The verve and dash that sent Greeks to seek fame and fortune
in the east carried some of them even further,made them into
explorers who pushed far back the confines of the known
world.
The most dramatic voyage of exploration was one that broke
through the clouds of mystery where they were thickest, to
the north. About 300 b.c., a certain Pytheas sailed from
Marseilles through the Straits —somehow he
of Gibraltar
managed to slip through the Carthaginian blockade— and was
off* on the open Atlantic heading north. We have no clue as

to what motivated him. Perhaps it was scientific curiosity.

Perhaps he was searching for the secret that Carthaginian
merchants were keeping so carefully to themselves, the source
Il8 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
of the tin they shipped into the Mediterranean. In the event,
he accomplished both: he made a number of observations of
the sun which enabled later geographers to calculate several
parallels of latitude, he determined the true position of the
polestar, and he also investigated and reported upon the tin

mines of Cornwall. He not only visited Britain but circum-

navigated the whole of and fixed the position of Ireland.
it

From the British Isles he pushed on to an ‘island of Thule’,

six days north of Britain and one day south of the ‘frozen’
sea, where the sun went down for only two or three hours
at night. There has been much clamorous debate about where

this distant Thule is. Did Pytheas actually get as far as Iceland?
Or did he merely see part of Norway, which he mistook for
an island?
From this northernmost penetration he returned to Britain,
recrossed the channel to Brittany, and turned leftward to
explore the northern coast of Europe to the Here he
east.

passed an enormous estuary and came to an island where

amber was so plentiful that the natives used it for fuel. Again
much clamorous debate: some claim he went right round
Denmark and into the Baltic, a source of amber, but most
that he got no further than the North Sea, that the estuary
was the Elbe and the island Heligoland, a way-station for the
amber trade.
Two voyage of explora-
centuries later another important
tion was made at precisely the other end of the world. Its
guiding spirit was one Eudoxus, a native of Cyzicus on the
Sea of Marmora. About his motives we have no doubt what-
soever: both he and his backer, Ptolemy VIII, the Pot-
Bellied, were solely interested in breaking into the rich trade
that flowed from India and Arabia to the Greek world.
Whatever Indian spices and Arabian incense came to the
Mediterranean by water travelled in Indian and Arab bottoms
as far as the Red Sea and in Arab bottoms from there on,
and Indian and Arab shippers had every intention of keeping
it just that way. Eudoxus happened to be in Alexandria —
this
 ONE WORLD II9

—
was about 120 B.c. when a half-drowned sailor was brought
to the court. Nursed back to health and taught Greek, he gave
out the story that he was an Indian, sole survivor of his crew,
and offered to prove it by showing the way back to his home
to anyone the king picked. He must have been a Tamil-
speaking native of southern India where Greeks rarely went;
had he come from the north, there would have been plenty of
interpreters available, since Alexander had brought the Indus
Valley within the Greek orbit.
Indeed, northwestern India by this time was fairly familiar

to the Greeks. After Alexander had conquered up to the

Punjab, his successors had maintained petty kingdoms there
for a while. Some of their expeditions had penetrated as far
south as Bombay and as far east as Patna. The Greeks now
knew of the Ganges river, of the Himalayas, of the island of
Ceylon. They knew that water rather than desert, as Herodotus
had reported (61 above), bounded India to the east. But the
only way they were able to get there was the way Alexander
had, by the long and arduous land route with its exhausting
climb through the mountain barrier that closes off India on
the northwest. The Arabs controlled the coastal waters of the
Indian Ocean and much of the Red Sea and closed the Greeks
out as effectively as the Carthaginians did in the western
Mediterranean. What is more, they and their Indian colleagues
kept to themselves the precious secret of India’s monsoons.
From May to September the winds blow steadily from the
southwest; a skipper can leave the mouth of the Red Sea,
stand off the south coast of Arabia, and then strike boldly
across open water, and the blustery southwest monsoon, coming
steadily over the starboard quarter, nearly astern, will carry
him directly to India. By delaying his return until any time
between November and March, when the monsoon shifts to
exactly the reverse direction, blowing clear and fresh from the
northeast, he can make the voyage back just as expeditiously.
Indian and Arab seamen had been shuttling back and forth
this way for centuries, bringing in pepper, cassia, cinnamon,
120 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
nard, and other Indian spices. They had maintained so rigid
a monopoly Greeks believed that some of these
that the
products originated in Arabia (60 above), which actually served
merely as middleman in the trade.
Eudoxus, with his resuscitated Indian knowledgeable in the
ways of the monsoon to guide him over open water safe from
Arab attack, made two pioneering voyages from the Red
Sea to India, returned safely each time —and each time had
the precious cargo of spices he was carrying confiscated by
Ptolemy’s customs officials. So he decided to reach India by
sailing in the other direction around Africa and in that way
bypass the king’s inquisitive and acquisitive agents. He got
together a well-equipped expedition (there were even dancing
girls aboard, whether for the harems of Indian rajahs or for
whiling away the long days at sea, we cannot be sure), but
made it only as far as the Atlantic coast of Morocco, far short

of the mark set by Hanno (63 above), where a mutiny turned

him back. Undiscouraged, he fitted out a second expedition,
set off, and was never heard from again.

On his second return from India, Eudoxus ran straight before

the northwest monsoon instead of keeping it on his quarter
and, as a result, landed well south on the east coast of Africa.
Here, in the best explorer tradition, he made friends with the
natives by giving them strange delicacies (bread, dried figs,
and wine, the last of which probably helped the most).
Again he was not exactly breaking new ground. The trade
in frankincense and myrrh from Ethiopia and Somalia was
almost as old as Egypt itself (28 above). In Eudoxus’ day, it
was, like the traffic from India, largely in the hands of Arabs.
The Ptolemies, more to aid in capturing elephants for use in
the army than in opening trade routes, kept sending out
numerous expeditions along the east coast of Africa, and the
Greeks gradually acquired a good knowledge of the shoreline
up to Cape Guardafui, Africa’s easternmost point. Eudoxus
must have landed at some obscure spot below the cape, but
 ONE WORLD 121

not far south enough to provide positive information about

the orientation of the coast. For two more centuries, map-
makers were going to show it making a right-angled turn to
the west just below Guardafui.

What Alexander and his successors had begun was brought

to its logical conclusion by Rome.
In the last act of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra ,
Caesar,
about to leave Alexandria for Rome, is told superciliously by
Apollodorus a cultivated and artistic Greek, that Rome will
never produce any art. ‘What!’ Caesar answers, ‘Rome
produce no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art?’
Discipline, organization, a gift for administration — these
were Roman qualities par excellence, and they brought Rome
spectacular triumphs, war and then in peace.
first in Roman
peasants, fresh off the farm, were swiftly hammered into
disciplined and finely organized fighting units, the renowned
legions that, within the three centuries from about 500 to
200 b.c., raised Rome from an obscure village on the Tiber
to master of the Italian boot and then, after Carthage was
humbled, of the entire western Mediterranean. Within two
more centuries, the east had been added. When, in 30 b.c.,
Mark Antony fell on his sword and Cleopatra pressed an asp
to her bosom, Augustus, leader of the victorious legions,
became sole ruler of an empire that stretched from Spain to
Syria.
— —
For the first and last time in history, the Mediterranean
was politically as well as culturally one world. Along with
unification under a single ruler, there came, after centuries of
almost continuous bloodshed, the rare and precious gift of
peace, close to two hundred years of it. The Roman emperors,
with the revenues and manpower of this farflung realm at
their disposal, were able to build up a fence of forts and
garrisons, in places continuous walls, which cordoned off the
empire from barbarian incursions. A permanent navy was
founded with units based at strategic points around the
122 TRAVEL IN ’THE ANCIENT WORLD
Mediterranean, and it wiped the perennial scourge of piracy
from the water.
And so, the first two centuries of the Christian Era
were
halcyon days for a traveller. He could make his way from the
shores of the Euphrates to the border between England and
Scotland without crossing a foreign frontier, always within
the bounds of one government’s jurisdiction. A purseful of
Roman coins was the only kind of cash he had to carry; they
were accepted or could be changed everywhere. He could sail
through any waters without fear of pirates, thanks to the
emperor’s patrol squadrons. A planned network of good roads
gave him access to all major centres, and the through routes
were policed well enough for him to ride them with relatively
little fear of bandits. He needed only two languages: Greek

would take him from Mesopotamia to Yugoslavia, Latin from

Yugoslavia to Britain. Wherever he went, he was under the
protective umbrella of a well-organized, efficient legal system.
If he was a Roman citizen and got into trouble, he could, as
upon trial
St Paul did, insist at Rome. If he was not a citizen,

Rome permitted him to be tried under his own native law,

and there were special courts to handle cases where different
native codes were involved.
Trade and travel did not stop at the empire’s frontiers but
stepped past them to traverse areas that had still been terra
incognita in the days of Alexander’s successors. The known
world now extended north to Scotland, west to the Canary
Islands, south to Zanzibar, east to Indonesia.
The bounds had not been thrust back by eager explorers;
there were no Roman Pytheases or Eudoxuses to try their
luck on uncharted seas or paths. In Europe it was the legions
who did the job. They pushed Rome’s frontier steadily more
to the north, and in their wake came swarms of traders who
hawked their wares deep in the lands beyond and returned
with precious information about them. In the Far East and
Africa, the traders did the job all by themselves, as they
doggedly worked their way towards the source of the ivory,
 ONE WORLD I23

spices, silks, and other oriental luxuries for which, now that
Roman society was becoming increasingly affluent, the
demand generally outstripped the supply.
Northern Europe had lost much of the mystery that
surrounded it when Pytheas made his way there. England
was by this time a province of the Roman empire, and traders’
reports told much about Scotland and Ireland. Roman troops
had operated in parts of the low countries. Germany, which
had never been conquered and made part of the empire, was
not quite as well known. North of Germany, knowledge grew
definitely thin: Denmark was thought to be much larger than
it actually is, Scandinavia much smaller and an island to boot.
Still further north, the usual fairy stories took over — five

days west of Britain was an island where Zeus had exiled his
deposed father Cronos, some 500 miles beyond was a great
continent whose rivers poured out enough silt to make the
Atlantic hard to cross and whose people viewed the known
world mere island, and so on.
as a
Russia was mostly outside the orbit of travel. The north
coast of the Black Sea was known in somewhat more detail
than in Herodotus’ day, but practically nothing of what lay
behind. Even as sober a geographer as Claudius Ptolemy
located there the home of the 'Amazons’ and a tribe of ‘Lice-
Eaters’.
The most dramatic advance in knowledge concerns the Far
East. Finally the two great civilizations of the ancient world,
Graeco-Roman and Chinese, made Sometime after the
contact.
death of Alexander, Chinese silk, transported by caravan
through central Asia and passed along by a chain of middle-
men, started to filter through to the Mediterranean, where its
superiority to the nearest thing the Greeks had, produced
from wild Asia Minor silkworms, was swiftly recognized. In
the second half of the second century b.c., the Chinese became
more active in the trade, dispatching caravans on a regular
basis. Starting from Paochi, centre of a complex of roads,
these moved inside the Great Wall by way of T’ienshui,
 —

124 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Lanchou and Wuwei end of the wall and deep
to the western
into Chinese Turkistan; by 118-114 b.c., some ten caravans
a year were making the trip. At Anshi between the Gobi desert
and the Nan Shan mountains the route forked into three
branches to avoid the vast salt swamp in the Tarim Basin,
two looping to the north and one to the south. The southern
loop and one of the northern came together at Kashgar, then
forked again to snake through the difficult Pamir mountains;
this stretch was more or less the halfway point to the Mediter-
ranean. All three rejoined at Merv to continue across the
desert and joinup with the tracks that led through Persia
and Mesopotamia to the sea. Nobody went the whole distance.
Somewhere between Kashgar and Balkh was a place called
Stone Tower, and here the Chinese turned their merchandise
over to local and Indian traders. The latter carried their share

south to India to send it the rest of the way by boat, the others
plodded on into Persia, where they met up with Syrians and
Greeks who took care of the final leg.

The western world reached the Chinese by water as well,

although only Ever since Eudoxus breached the Arab
just.

monopoly of the sea trade with India, that country had become
increasingly integrated into the network of Graeco-Roman
trade. From the beginning of the first century a.d., fleets of
ocean-going freighters, sped by the monsoons, sailed there
yearly, no longer just to the Indus Valley but all along the
down to the tip of the peninsula. Agents of Graeco-
coast
Roman trading companies made their homes in India, settling
down, in time-honoured fashion, in separate little foreign
quarters. They exported a variety of Indian products
cinnamon, nard, cotton, above all some
pepper —and also
Chinese, the most important, naturally, being silk. Although
a certain amount of the silk, as we have just noted, came in
overland, the largest part arrived by sea in Indian or Malay
bottoms (the Chinese did not get into overseas shipping until
centuries later). It was inevitable that westerners would move
into this portion of the trade as well; by the end of the second
 ONE WORLD 125

century a.d. their freighters had ventured into the waters east
of India, cutting across the mouth of the Bay of Bengal to
trade with Malaya, Sumatra, and Java, Here they discovered
cloves, which grow in the Moluccas, to add to the list of
spices they dealt in. What drew them on more than anything
else was the desire to move nearer the source of silk. A
£

Chinese account mentions that in the ninth year of the Yen-

hsi period, during the Emperor Huan-ti’s reign [a.d. 166] .. .

the king of Ta-ts’in, An- tun, sent an embassy which, from

the frontier of Jih-nan [Annam], offered ivory, rhinoceros
horns, and tortoise shell. From that time dates the intercourse
with this country.’ Ta-ts’in is the Chinese name for the
Roman Empire, and An-tun is Antoninus, the family name of
Marcus Aurelius. The account goes on to comment about
the very ordinary gifts the embassy had brought for the
emperor; there were, for example, no jewels. Most likely it
was not an official body at all but a group of shippers who,
to get one jump ahead of were trying to
their competitors,
buy their silk directly from China instead of through middle-
men.
Unfortunately, whether by land or sea, the contact between
the two great cultures was always tenuous. Shipments of
Chinese goods came to the Mediterranean year in and year
out, cinnamon-leaf and camphor and jade and other items as
well as silk, and Graeco- Roman statuettes and jewellery and
pottery made was there
the journey the other way, but rarely
a direct exchange; in between were merchants from other
countries, particularly India, which not only lay astride the
sea lanes but was firmly linked by branch roads with the
overland silk route. These middlemen had solid information
to pass on —
it was they who supplied the many place-names

in Central Asia and the names of Indonesian islands that the

—
geographers now know but they were businessmen, not
reporters. What filtered man in a Roman or
back to the
Chinese street was mere fanciful hearsay. The Romans thought
the Chinese were all supremely righteous ; the Chinese thought
126 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
westerners were all supremely honest. Kan Ying, sent as
envoy to Mesopotamia in a.d. 97, describes the people he
met as ‘honest in their transactions and without any double
—probably
prices’ and
the time
first has ever been
last that
said about Near Eastern tradesmen. Kan Ying, embassy the
of An-tun—we can number on of one hand
the fingers the
known occasions when westerners and Chinese met face to
face.

In Africa knowledge of the east coast now went a good deal

further than Cape Guardafui. Traders, carrying cheap clothes
and trinkets to exchange for tortoise shell and ivory and
incense, regularly worked down to Zanzibar, and one man
seems to have gone as far as Cape Delgado, eleven degrees
south of the equator. Map-makers consequently no longer
showed the coast abruptly turning west but extended it straight
south, allowing it to end in a vast terra incognita There was .

even some new information about the interior, thought not

very much. Hunters or traders had already found out about
the heavy rains in the Ethiopian highlands and discovered
Lake Tana there, enabling geographers to deduce, correctly,
that here was the source of the Blue Nile. The emperor Nero
sent a military expedition into the Sudan which reached the
great mass of floating vegetation that blocks the Nile some
nine degrees north of the equator, a point not to be reached
again until 1839. A trader who had been blown down along
the coast as far as Zanzibar either himself saw, or more likely
heard natives describe, a mighty mountain range of tremendous
height whose melting snows formed two lakes whence the
Nile took its start. It was as close to the truth about the source
of the White Nile as anyone was to come until the mid-
nineteenth century. Other African traders brought back tales
of ‘tribes without noses, their whole face being perfectly flat,

others without upper lips, still others without tongues. One

group has the mouth closed up as well as no nose, and they
have just a single orifice through which they breathe and suck
in liquids through oat straws, also oat-grains for food’; the
 ONE WORLD 127

story is obviously inspired by a description of certain Negro

features, but the kernel of fact is almost wholly buried beneath
an overlay of fancy.

The Mediterranean world of the first two centuries a.d., then,

was bigger than it had ever been before. So was the volume
of movement. The roads and sea ways were now thronged
with traders in larger numbers than the Greek world had
ever known, with armies, bureaucrats, couriers of the govern-
ment post, and just plain tourists, from the few who travelled
far and wide to see the great sights to the thousands who

yearly left for nearby beaches or hills to escape the heat of the
cities. We learn about these travellers in many and various
ways, from the battered remains archaeologists have unearthed
of the inns they stayed at to lofty descriptions in Roman poetry
of the places they visited. And so we know them far better

than their Greek predecessors and can tell of them in some

detail — the reasons that sent them off on trips, the way they
travelled, where they spent the nights, the sights they saw,
and how they were shown them.
 7

A Miscellany of
Travellers

I built myself five ships, loaded them with wine —which was
worth its weight in gold at the time —and sent them to
Rome. . . . Every
one of them was wrecked, that’s
single
the god’s honest truth; Neptune gulped down a cool thirty
million in one day. ... I built myself some more, bigger and
better and luckier got another cargo of wine, added
. . .
,

bacon, beans, a load of slaves. . . . The little woman did the

right thing by me: she sold all her jewels and clothes and
put a hundred gold pieces in my hand. ... I netted a cool ten
million on that one voyage.
The time is the first century a.d., the speaker the celebrated
character in Petronius’ novel the Satyricon , Trimalchio, the
ex-slave who became a multimillionaire. Trimalchio was
drawn from life, patterned after the thousands who were
making their fortune in the booming business of import and
export. A certain Flavius Zeuxis, in an inscription on his tomb
£
in Hierapolis in Asia Minor, proclaimed that he as a merchant
had rounded Cape Malea [in Greece] seventy-two times on
voyages to Italy’. He very possibly averaged two trips per
summer. Irenaeus, an Alexandrian businessman, writes from
Rome to a brother back in Egypt sometime in the second
or third century a.d. :

I am well. This is to let you know that I reached land on

 6 A Roman merchantman
of the early third century
a.d. sails into Rome’s har-
bour, passing the lighthouse
at the entrance (note the
flame at the top). On the
afterdeck two men and a
woman — probably the cap-
tain, owner or charterer, and
his wife —conduct a sacrifice
to celebrate the safe return.

7 Roman road paved with massive oblong blocks near Aleppo in Syria.

*.
8 Roman mountain road in
the Alps (at Donnaz, roughly
midway between Turin and
Aosta). The road is of solid
rock formed by slicing away the
cliff and is provided with
artificial ruts.

9 The bridge at Narni, built

by Augustus. It carried the Via
Flaminia over the Nera, a
tributary of the Tiber, about
fifty miles north of Rome.
 A MISCELLANY OF TRAVELLERS 129

Epeiph 6 [30 June] and we unloaded our cargo on the 18th

of the same month. I went up to Rome [from the port at the
mouth of the Tiber, some fifteen miles away] on the 25th
of the same month [19 July] ... We
are daily expecting our
sailing papers; up to today not one of the grain freighters
has been cleared. Remember me to your wife and dear ones.

There were enough ships in that fleet to transport 150,000

tons of Egyptian wheat annually. During the first century
a.d., before Rome’s harbour was improved, they used to put
in at Puteoli, the port just west of Naples; when they arrived,
writes a contemporary, ‘the whole mob at Puteoli stands on
the docks; they can pick out the ships from Alexandria even
in a big crowd of vessels by their sails’. Wheat from Egypt,

olive oil from Spain, wine from France, elaborately carved

stone coffins from Athens —
these and dozens of other products
were hauled back and forth across the Mediterranean by a
merchant marine larger than any Europe was to know again
till the eighteenth century. Certain lines of we have
traffic, as
seen (123-7 above), went far beyond the Mediterranean. The
shippers of Alexandria extended long fingers of trade down the
east coast of Africa to Zanzibar and across the ocean to India.
Trade was so active that some cities maintained offices in the
major commercial centres to help any of their citizens doing
business or on visits there. Tarsus, Tralles, Tiberias, and a
number of others, for example, had stationes as such offices
,

were called, in Rome right in the middle of the forum. They

were, in effect, consulates, providing the services that the
proxenoi of the Greek city-states had centuries earlier (93
above).
And so a never-ending flow of merchants, shipowners,
bankers, buyers, and their various agents kept the ports and
sea lanes of the Roman Empire humming. Businessmen were
to be found on the roads as well, but in fewer numbers.
Transport by land, as already noted (65 above), was pro-
hibitively expensive, and most large-scale hauling, particularly
E
130 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
of bulky items, was by water. The roads had been built in the
first instance for the government, and the government remained
on a regular basis.
their chief user Along them was a constant
going and coming of government personnel — the couriers of
the public post (182 below), tax collectors, circuit judges,
district officials, the governors of the provinces (as the
administrative units which the Roman Empire was
into
divided were called), at times the emperors themselves. When
a governor took to the road, his retinue of staff and servants
made up a sizeable group, and, when an emperor travelled,
there was a veritable parade. And neither of them produced
anywhere near the numbers using the roads when units of
the army were on the march. A single legion, six thousand
men strong with a multitude of pack animals and vehicles, the
whole line proceeding at the pace of the beasts who drew the
wagons carrying the catapults, could stop all other traffic at

any point for long hours; an army might stop it for days.

Trade and government no doubt accounted for the lion’s

share of travel, but far from all of it. There were plenty of
people on the go for other reasons.
To begin with, there were those travelling for their health.
It was the doctors of antiquity who first thought of the idea

of the long sea voyage. ‘In the case of tuberculosis . . .’,

wrote Celsus, the Roman medical authority, in the first

century a.d., ‘if the patient has the strength, a long sea voyage
and change of air is called for. ... For this purpose, the voyage
from Italy to Alexandria is perfect.’ Celsus obviously had in
mind patients with money. Of the throngs who took to the
road for their health, poor and in-between as well as rich, the
vast majority were heading not for the deck of a ship but for
one of the sanctuaries of Asclepius.
We have spoken of these before (82 above). The earliest
were established in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries B.c.,
and, by the fourth, were to be found all over the country,
on most of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, in the
 1

A MISCELLANY OF TRAVELLERS 1 3

Greek cities along the coast of Asia Minor and in those of

southern Italy. Asclepius was one of the first foreign gods
admitted to Rome, making his debut there in 291 b.c.

In the days of the Roman Empire, three of his sanctuaries

stood out above all the rest. One was the foundation at
Epidaurus; achieved great repute early (83 above) and never
it

lost it. A second was the one at Cos (267 below), home of
Hippocrates and his school of medicine. The third was at
Pergamum, which reached its height in the middle of the
second century a.d., when Galen, the most renowned physician
of the day, practised there, on and off, for many years. In
addition to multiplying, the sanctuaries had prospered
mightily. At Pergamum in its heyday, for example, the heart
of the complex was a vast rectangular court, 360 feet by 430,
entered through a monumental gateway. Along three sides
ran colonnades to shelter the patients from sun and rain as
they took leisurely walks or sat and rested. At one corner was
a library, at another a theatre with seats for 3,500, at a third
an impressive rotunda, 86 feet in diameter, for medicinal
bathing. Within the court was the temple of Asclepius as well
as several others.
The procedure was the same as it had always been (83
above). The patient entered the sanctuary, took a ritual bath
to purify himself, entered Asclepius’ temple, prayed, spread a
pallet, and lay down on it to spend the night there. In his
dreams he received the help he sought. Some sanctuaries had
a special area for sleeping, but in others, as at Pergamum,
people stretched out anywhere in the temple and perhaps other
buildings within the precinct. In a few notable cases the cure
was a miracle: the patient awoke the next morning hale and
hearty. More often he received some prescription, usually
spelled out plainly, occasionally enigmatically. There was
rarely anything exotic about these. Most of the time they
involved the taking —or the not taking —of certain baths or
exercises or foods, the application of unguents and salves, the
downing of doses of special drugs.
132 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Whatever the reason —and very plausible ones have been
suggested — the cures apparently had a fairly high percentage
of success or else the sanctuaries could not have enjoyed such
favour for so long. Here, for example, is a testimonial drawn
up by a grateful Greek who, some time in the first or early
second century a.d., visited the establishment which Asclepius
shared with the Egyptian healing god Imhotep at Memphis:

It was night, when every living creature was asleep except

those in pain; the moment when the divinity used to manifest
itself in its more active state. I was burning with fever and
convulsed with loss of breath and coughing because of the
pain in my side. My head was heavy from my suffering, and
I was dropping off half-conscious into sleep. My mother . . .

was sitting without enjoying even a brief moment of sleep,

distraught at my torment. Suddenly she spied it was no —
dream or sleep, for her eyes, though not seeing clearly, were
fixed wide open —
a divine apparition. It came in, terrifying
her and easily preventing her from seeing the god himself
or his servants, whichever it was. All she could say was that
there was someone of more than human height, clothed in
shining garments and holding in his left hand a book; he
merely eyed me two or three times from head to foot and
then disappeared. When she had recovered herself she tried,
still all atremble, to wake me. Finding me drenched with
sweat but with my fever completely gone, she knelt down in
worship to the divine manifestation. When I spoke with. . .

her, she wanted to tell me about the god’s unique ability,

but I, anticipating her, told her all myself. For everything
she had witnessed with her own eyes had appeared to me in
my dreams. After these pains in my side had ceased, and the
god had given me one more healing treatment, I proclaimed
his benefactions to all.

was not only the uneducated poor who flocked to seek

It

Asclepius’ aid and emerged cured —

or thinking themselves
cured, which would amount to the same thing. His patients
 —

A MISCELLANY OF TRAVELLERS 133

covered the spectrum of society. The composer of the above,

as we can tell from the way he writes, was a man of con-
siderable culture. Aristides, of whom we shall have much to
say later (193 below), a man of very good family, recipient of
the best available education, and the greatest public speaker
of his age, felt that he owed his life to Asclepius’ ministrations.
In 142 a.d. or so, he became ill and for the rest of his life was
in and out of health sanctuaries, in particular Asclepius’ at
Pergamum. At the outset of his sickness, which seems to have
been some sort of respiratory ailment, he passed two full years
there, praying, sacrificing, partaking in the ceremonies, and,
of course, dreaming. Some of the prescriptions he received
were, no question about it, sheer nonsense. Once, debilitated
as he was, he was sent in the dead of winter to take a plunge
into the sea. Another time, when burning with fever, he was
told to bathe in icy water. Still another time he was sent on a
walk out and back in midsummer heat to a place fifty miles
away; luckily this was at a moment when he was feeling
rather well. None of this, as he more or less admits, did him
the least bit of good. But the god also urged him to keep on
—
with his oratorical career and this was the turning point.
Moreover, at the sanctuary he was surrounded by a coterie of
like-minded patients, men of culture and learning also there
for various cures (one is reminded of the groups to be found
in Swiss sanitoria before World War II), and they reinforced
the god’s orders with their encouragement. The combination
did the trick. It restored his purpose in life and sent him forth
from the sanctuary, not completely well he was never that —
but able to go on to a dazzlingly successful career and live
until he was sixty.
Aristides shuttled back and forth from his estate at Cyzicus
or his house in Smyrna to Pergamum (cf. 193 below). The roads
yearly saw thousands and thousands like him, people who rose
from a sickbed at home make their way to the nearest
to
sanctuary of the god of healing. The flow went on unabated
for hundreds of years, until well into the fourth century a.d.,
 —

134 travel in the ancient world

when Asclepius, sharing the fate of his relatives, succumbed
to Christianity.

Asclepius’ ministrations were for the seriously ill. For the

merely ailing, particularly the hypochondriacs who liked to
season their efforts in behalf of their health with some pleasures,
there were the aquae , the mineral springs. These were as well
patronized in Roman days as European spas in our own
indeed, in many cases the one is simply the descendant of the
other. Aquae Calidae has been re-baptized Vichy, Aquae
Sextiae Aix-en-Provence, Aquae Suits Bath, Aquae Mattiacae
Wiesbaden, and so on. Italy was particularly well supplied
with them. Convenient to Rome were the springs of Vicarello
on Lake Bracciano. The ruins have yielded up four silver
vessels shaped like Roman milestones and inscribed with the
route from Cadiz to Rome; they were gifts to the divinity of
the springs from grateful Spaniards who, in Rome on a visit,
took advantage of the opportunity to try the waters out.
Over 1,500 coins were also found lying on the bottom of the
springs — ancient travellers, no less than we, had the super-
stition that there was something to be gained by tossing a
coin into a fountain; masses of coins have turned up in hot
springs elsewhere. Sicily had spas at Segesta, Selinus, Himera
even one on the little island of Lipari and a well-known one at

that: 'Many people throughout Sicily', wrote Diodorus, a

contemporary of Caesar and Augustus, 'who are troubled with
their own peculiar ills go [to Lipari] and by using the
. . .

baths become healthy again in incredible fashion.’ The Bay

of Naples, a natural vacation land because of its beauty and
climate, is ringed with hot springs. The whole shore, as a
consequence, sprouted a line of watering places which became
the most fashionable in the Roman world (142 below).

For problems of any kind and not merely health, there were
the oracles. People had always patronized them (cf. 84 above)
but in this age, marked by incredibly widespread superstition,
 A MISCELLANY OF TRAVELLERS I35

they did a far more thriving business than ever before, playing
somewhat same role that horoscope casters and readers of
the
tea leaves and palms play today. Apollo, as always, was the
fortune- telling god par excellence, and his great oracular seats
at Delphi in Greece, Delos in the Aegean, Clarus and Didyma

in Asia Minor, answered questions for multitudes yearly. There

was the Oracle of Trophonius near Lebadea in Greece, where,
to present your query, you had to go down a well-like shaft
and slide through a hole at the bottom into a dome-shaped
cavern. There was the Temple of Fortuna at Praeneste in the
hills back of Rome, where the answer to your question was

a marker, drawn by a child at random, which bore an enigmatic

line of writing (a fair sample, from another but similar oracle,
5
runs: ‘If is a fine looking horse, but you cannot ride on it ).
There was the Oracle of Heracles in Greece, where you cast
four dice, and the position of the figures on them, appro-
priately interpreted, determined the reply. All these and any
number of others had at least the excuse of antiquity, having
been established in most cases in remote times. The super-
stition of the age, however, even countenanced brand-new

ones. A gifted faker named Alexander founded an oracle in a

backwater on the south shore of the Black Sea. Here, for stiff
prices, a talking serpent he had rigged up answered questions
for the local hayseeds and was so successful that:

the fame of the shrine made its way to Italy and descended
on Rome. Every soul there, one on the heels of the other,
hurried either to go out in person or to send an envoy,
particularly the most influential and important personages in
the city. The leader and prime figure in this movement was
Rutilianus [a prominent Roman] ... He heard about the
shrine and practically threw up his current public office to
fly off to Abonoteichos; as next best thing he sent out one
envoy after another . . . He got the people at the emperor’s
court so worked up, most of them promptly rushed out to
hear something about their own futures.
136 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Lucian, who reports the above, was a professional satirist and
inevitably held a highly jaundiced view of such mumbo-
jumbo. Yet even allowing liberally for exaggeration, Alexander
must have been responsible for a good deal of traffic on the
roads to Abonoteichos.

The Greek international games, such as the

traditional
Olympics in honour of Zeus or the Pythian for Apollo (76
above), lasted almost as long as the Roman Empire itself. In
the first and second centuries a.d., profiting from the peace
and prosperity of the age, they were going as strongly as
ever — and drawing from far afield not only spectators but
many others as well. At the Isthmian Games for Poseidon, for
example,

one could hear crowds of miserable sophists [the ancient

equivalent of soapbox orators] around Poseidon’s temple
shouting and insulting each other . . . ,
writers reading aloud
their silly works, lots of poets reciting their poems while
others applauded them, lots of jugglers showing their stunts,
lots of fortune tellers telling fortunes, countless lawyers
perverting justice, and no lack of peddlers peddling what
each happened to have.

The international games were merely the oldest and best

known; there were lesser versions going on all over the
empire. Cicero mentions in a letter (138 below) his plans to
detour to Antrim because his daughter was anxious to be
there for the local games. Nero made his debut as a musician
on the public stage at the games given in Naples; it was a trial
run for the appearances he looked forward to at the great games
in Greece. Then were such events as Sparta’s festival in
there
honour of Artemis where the piece de resistance was the ordeal
by whipping of the Spartan boys. This grim ceremony,
deriving from the city’s most primitive days, was carried on
for over a millennium, and in Roman times its sadistic delights
attracted spectators from many places. Cicero reports seeing
 :

A MISCELLANY OF TRAVELLERS 137

it in the first century b.c., Plutarch in the second a.d. (both

mention boys dying under the lash), Libanius in the fourth.
But the events that drew the greatest crowds of all in this
age were the grandiose spectacles the emperors put on in
Rome. By the second century a.d., 130 days out of the year
were holidays, given over to lavish public entertainments that
featured chariot racing, boxing, theatrical performances, and
the like. To celebrate great occasions they gave full scope to
the Roman taste for blood-letting with gladiatorial extrava-
ganzas. Augustus, in a document that recapitulates all he had
done for the country during his reign, lists the occasions he
entertained the public at his own expense

Three times I put on contests of gladiators in my own name,

and five times in the names of my sons or grandsons; in these
some 10,000 men fought. I put on sports events with athletes
brought in from all over twice in my own name and a third
time in the name of my grandson. I held festivals four times
in my own name and twenty-three times in place of the
regular officials. ... I put on hunts of African wild animals
in the circus, forum, and amphitheatres in my name and
those of my sons or grandsons twenty-six times; in these
some 3500 beasts were killed.

When the Colosseum was opened, Titus inaugurated it with

100 days of spectacles. In a.d. 107 Trajan celebrated certain
military victories by sending ten thousand gladiators into the
ring within a space of four months. All this, to be sure, was
aimed primarily mob, was part of the emperors’
at the city

policy of ‘bread and circuses’. But no out-of-town aficionado

who could afford the travel expense was going to pass by such
chances to gorge himself on the finest gladiatorial fare the age
could offer.

Then there were the people on holiday —but they deserve

a chapter to themselves.
 8

On Holiday

£
‘I wrote Cicero to a friend in April, 59 b.c., to get to
intend’,
my place at Formiae on the Feast of Pales [21 April] I’ll . . .

leave Formiae on the first of May so as to reach Antium on the

third. There are gladiators at Antium from the fourth to the
sixth, and Tullia [Cicero’s daughter] wants to see them. Then
I’m thinking of going to Tusculum, and from there to
Arpinum, reaching Rome on the first of June.’ Not only
Cicero but all of his neighbours were making such plans. For
the coming of spring was the signal that sent Rome’s social
set forth on their annual peregrination as it was called, the
moving out of the city to make the rounds of their out-of-
town villas.

Cicero’s letter mentions the names of three where he

places
had villas. In the course of his lifetime he accumulated no less
than six, to say nothing of the lodges he maintained along the
roads to put up at overnight when travelling from one to the
other.The villa at Formiae, a seaside resort about two-thirds
of the way from Rome to Naples, was one of his earliest
was also, as it happens, the scene of his death;
acquisitions. (It
his servants were hurrying him off in a litter when Mark
Antony’s soldiers overtook them.) Sometime before 60 b.c. he
bought his first along the Bay of Naples, where it was de
rigueur for all with social ambitions to own a villa. It turned
out to be a bit out of the way so, a few years later, he got
himself a second at Cumae more to the west. This was the
fashionable neighbourhood, and Cicero was very pleased at
 ON HOLIDAY 139

having moved into it (one of his lifelong problems was the

way and neighbours looked down
his aristocratic colleagues
their Roman noses at a novas homo ‘new man’, someone whose
place in politics and society came from his abilities and not his
exalted lineage). In 45 b.c., just a few years before his death, a
friend willed him a third more or less midway between Cumae
and Naples, which was convenient for transacting business at
Puteoli, a bustling port and commercial centre as well as
summer resort. The two others named in his letter were
inland. At Tusculum Alban hills southeast of Rome
in the cool
he had an elegant, handsomely appointed retreat, and at
Arpinum, the mountain town where he was born, he kept up
the family property.
was by
Cicero’s appetite for country and seaside real estate
no means exceptional. All of Rome’s fashionable world main-
tained the two kinds of villas along the shore for the cool and
:

pleasant days of spring, and in the hills for the summertime

when the Mediterranean sun made the shore an inferno and —
several of each so as to avoid the monotony of always going
to the same place. It was not only the millionaires who could
afford such sybaritic vacationing. Cicero, for example, by the
standards of the day, was no more than a moderately wealthy
man.
And so villa upon villa dotted the hills about Rome and
studded the shoreline down to Naples and beyond. The spot
that was far and away the most favoured was the superbly
beautiful stretch embraced by the arms of the Bay of Naples,
from Cumae and Cape Misenum on the west to the Sorrento
peninsula just past Vesuvius on the east. Here the gilded homes
clustered so thickly, their terraces and piers thrust so far into
the water Fig. 5), that Horace was moved to observe
(cf.

that the fish were feeling cramped. The aristocracy began to

build in the area in the second century b.c., and it never lost
its popularity. Among Cicero’s fellow holiday-makers here
were the greatest names of the Roman Republic — his only
rival in oratory Hortensius, the celebrated bon vivant Lucullus,
 ;

140 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony. Their establishments were all
sumptuous and some of them were veritable palaces. Augustus’
step-father owned one where he once put up not only Caesar
but Caesar’s retinue of two thousand. The most stupendous of
all was the villa Lucullus built at Naples (he had another, some-

what less grand, about twelve miles west on Cape Misenum)

it par excellence of conspicuous spending,
offered the example
a tunnel driven deep through the nearby mountains just to
bring in salt water to fill the fishponds. ‘Xerxes in a toga’, was
the way one acidulous visitor, after being shown the place,
described his host.
With coming of the Roman Empire, the emperors and
the
their relatives replaced the potentates of the Republic. Augustus
maintained at least four residences in the neighbourhood.
Tiberius spent most of the last ten years of his life at a monu-
mental establishment on Capri. Nero was staying at his villa
at Baiae the night he attempted to drown his mother; he
finally had her assassinated in the bedroom of her own place
at Bauli a few miles away. For neighbours the emperors had a
new class of villa owner brought into being by the booming
prosperity of the early empire, the nouveaux riches Vedius .

Pollio, who started life as the son of ex-slaves and went from
rags to riches, built himself a villa on a height between Naples
and Puteoli which he called Pausilypon ‘Sans-Souci’; so
distinctive was it that it gave its name to the hill, Posillipo as
it is known today, where his property once stood. It was the
likes of Pollio who provided the model for Petronius’ Tri-
malchio (128 above); the novelist sets the scene of his prota-
gonist’s gargantuan dinner party in a de luxe villa near Naples.
Some liked a villa right at the very edge of the shore
(Fig. 5), so close that they could fish just by dropping a line
from a bedroom window, others one that nestled high on a
seaside cliff. On the slopes, where there was plenty of room,
the villas were dotted about haphazardly; along the shore,
where space was at a premium, they stood, then as now, cheek
by jowl. In either case, what determined the location and
 ON HOLIDAY I4I

layout was a view of the water. The preferred style for both
was the portico-house, a house that consisted basically of a
long porch overlooking the sea on to which opened a series

of rooms side by side; each room, thus, commanded a sea-

view. A large villa might have four or five tiers of such
porches rising one above the other).
The rooms were never very large and windows were small;
the object was to keep out the brilliant sunlight rather than let
it flood in. Walls were painted, at first with simple and regular
patterns, later,from about 90 or 80 b.c. on, with increasingly
elaborate and fanciful decor that combined architectural set-
tings with pictures of scenes from mythology, genre scenes,
landscapes, seascapes. Outside were prim rows of plane-trees,
myrtle, box-wood, and the like. The most lavish villas boasted
piscinae or fishponds where special breeds, in particular
muraenae , a type of salt-water by Roman gourmets,
eel prized

were raised for the master’s table. This was the status symbol;
only multimillionaires were piscinarii to use Cicero’s word
,
c

for them, members of the fishpond set’. The parvenu Vedius

Pollio, so the story goes, fed his eels on human flesh.
The villa owners spent a good part of their time making
leisurely visits to each other, usually capped by elaborate
dinner parties. For favoured guests the piscinarii would offer
eels from their own ponds. Another choice dish were the

oysters from Lake Lucrinus, a salt-water lagoon in the western

part of the Bay of Naples; they were cultivated here by a
method still used in certain places today, by being fastened to
ropes hung from horizontal wooden frames (Fig. 19). During
Augustus’ war to the death with Pompey’s son, the lake had
been turned into a naval base. When peace came, Augustus
had the base transferred to Cape Misenum; it is not impossible
that the oyster growers, backed by their influential customers,
got him to do it.

were varied with rides along the shore in litters, with

Visits
excursions on the lake or around the bay in oar-propelled
yachts. ‘When [the fashionable crowd] goes sailing from Lake
142 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Avernus [a lake next to Lucrinus] to Puteoli in their gaily
painted yachts’, observed one historian tartly, ‘it’s a veritable
quest for the Golden Fleece, particularly when they venture
forth in steaming hot weather. If a fly slips in between the silk-
fringed gilded fans, or a tiny ray of sun comes through a hole
in the canopies suspended over them, out come laments that
they weren’t born in the land of the Eskimos.’
The were only the upper crust of the
glittering villa folk
holiday-makers to be found in season around the Bay of
Naples. Particularly during the prosperous first two centu-
ries a.d., people of all walks of life were able to exchange the

heat of the city for a room in a boarding house at Baiae or

Puteoli or Naples. Finding pleasant ways to pass their time
was no problem. The shoreline around the bay is studded with
hot springs, so the towns along it were spas as well as seaside
resorts. The holiday-maker was able to divide his days
between baths and beach, or, if he wished, to rent a small boat
and go out on the water. Puteoli had two amphitheatres, so
there must have been a good selection of gladiatorial shows
for the sports enthusiasts. There there were visits to be made
to the fishponds in the emperor’s villa, which were open to
the public, visits to the oyster beds, strolls through Baiae’s
silva or tree-shaded park, jaunts down to the pier at Puteoli
to watch the ships come in, shore dinners in the local restaur-
ants, shopping for gimcrack souvenirs (286 below) or just —
the unadorned joys of Mediterranean dolce far niente.
Of all the vacation spots along this coast, none was more
celebrated than Baiae, lying ten miles or so west of Naples and
a mile and a quarter past Lake Lucrinus. It was Rome’s first
summer resort and forever remained the most popular. Strabo,
writing near the close of the first century b.c., reports that
here, ‘with luxury palaces built one alongside the other,
another city as big as Puteoli has grown up’. Being particularly
well supplied with hot springs, Baiae became the favoured
watering spot. It attracted pleasure seekers of all kinds, and,
as will happen, acquired a reputation for impure as well as
 ON HOLIDAY 143

pure delights. The respectable elements of society sailed

decorously about the lake during the day; at night the smart
set invited shady women aboard their yachts, went bathing in
the nude, and ‘filled the lakes with the din of their singing’.
‘Unmarried girls are common property, old men act like young
boys, and lots of young boys like young girls’, snapped Varro,
Cicero’s learned contemporary. ‘Why must I look at drunks
staggering along the shore or noisy boating parties?’ com-
plained the moralist Seneca a century later. Who wants to
listen, he grumbled, ‘to the squabbles of nocturnal serenaders?’
Cicero in one of his speeches describes a loose woman by
listing ‘her debauchery, her love affairs, her adultery, her
Baiae’ — the name by itself spoke volumes. Later on he
thunders about her vicious habit of going to dinner parties
with men who are total strangers to her not only in Rome, not
only in the gardens of her own villa, but ‘amid those crowds
at Baiae’. Martial, the satirist, composed a sardonic little poem
about a certain couple:

The wife, evenworse than her glowering husband,

never strayed from virtue’s paths,
until she came to the Lucrine Lake
and heated up in Baiae’ s baths.
It put her on fire: she left him flat
to run off with some young boy;
she came to town Penelope,
she left it Helen of Troy.

The though he often holidayed in the

straightlaced Augustus,
neighbourhood, never showed his face in town and took a
dim view of those who did.
The line of from Baiae past Puteoli and
villas carried
Naples to Pompeii and Stabiae and out on to the Sorrento
Peninsula. Each of the towns that grew up had its own
personality. Baiae was spa and seaside resort combined, and
the gathering point of the pleasure-seekers. Puteoli was rather
more staid, since its resort area rubbed shoulders with one of
144 travel in the ancient world
Italy’smost important commercial harbours; while people on
holiday frolicked along the shore, merchants and shipowners
bargained, and stevedores sweated around the quays. Naples
appealed to the intellectuals. Like most of the great cities in
southern Italy, it had been founded by Greeks, and even in
the days of the empire, after centuries of Roman domination,
a Greek atmosphere reigned: Greek was heard up and down
the streets, Greek institutions and ways of life lived on, and
visiting Romans doffed their togas to walk about in the
pallium or chlamys (75 above). The traditional Greek contests
for poets and musicians were kept up and drew throngs of the
culturally minded; it was here, as mentioned above, that
Nero made his debut as a musician. This special ambience
induced many cultivated people, foreigners as well as Romans,
to take up permanent residence and promoted the growth of a
thriving literary colony. Schoolmasters found the place well
suited for setting up academies, and the elderly for passing
their declining years.
Year after year, through all vicissitudes, the Bay of Naples
continued to serve vacationers. Romulus Augustulus, the last

Roman emperor of the West, when from the capital

exiled
after a.d. 476, was sent to live out his days in one of Lucullus’
villas; it was still in existence over five hundred years after its

builder’s death. Though the eruption of Vesuvius that

destroyed Pompeii wiped out the estates on its flanks, though
the convulsive crises that shook the empire through most of
the third century a.d. thinned the ranks of the villas, life went
on in much the same fashion; the gilded gentry continued to
make their decorous rounds or to have a wild time in Baiae.
The tart description cited above of luxuriating on the lake
was written in the middle of the fourth century a.d. A few
decades later, in a.d. 391, the Roman aristocrat Symmachus, who
maintained no less than six villas in the area, wrote to a friend :

I’ve passed a few days on this shore . . . where the healthy air

and cool waters are such inducements to linger . . . Now,

 ON HOLIDAY I45

through mutual invitations, we’re transferring either to Bauli

or to Nicomachus’ villa [i.e., of Symmachus’ son-in-law,
near Puteoli]. I have a steady stream of friends dropping in
on me. I’m not afraid that you’ll think of away my
me idling
time in such delightful surroundings amid such good things.
Wherever I am, I lead the life of a Roman consul; I’m serious
even on Lake Lucrinus. No carolling in yachts, no gourmet
banquets, no going to the baths, none of the young set’s nude
bathing parties.

Plus fa change , plus c est la meme chose.

In the letter of Cicero quoted earlier listing the moves he

planned for the coming of spring, the first, as we have seen,
was the traditional one to the shore in April. His next was to
Tusculum, his villa in the hills back of Rome. This too was
traditional. The culturally minded may have lingered on at
Naples all summer, and the ordinary folk at the seaside resorts,
but not the haut monde With the onset of the intense heat in
.

May they left their luxurious villas in the hands of their staffs

and transferred to the cool of the hills.

The Alban and Sabine hills that ring Rome on the east and
southeast are high enough to insure relief from the summer
heat and near enough to the capital to enable a senator to leave
the stifling senate chamber and refresh himself for a day or
two with a minimum of travel. As a consequence, from the
first century b.c. on, they were dotted with country retreats.

In the neighbourhood of Tusculum alone there were four

belonging to various emperors and ten times that many to
private citizens. The scene of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations
is set in the elegant villa he maintained there; he lavished time,
energy, and money not only in its construction but in securing
just the rightworks of art for decorating it. In the hill villas
the emphasis was on quiet, cool, and shade. The owners liked
to have their bedrooms in the interior, sometimes totally cut
off from any natural light, the arcaded corridors for their
 — a

146 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

casual strolling were often half-sunk in the ground, and the
gardens and courts were laid out with fountains so that the
splash and murmur of water was an ever-present sound. A
private bath was normally included, complete with cold room,
hot room, and swimming pool; some pools were even heated.
The greatest villa of this kind was the grandiose complex
erected by the emperor Hadrian; for reasons we can only
guess at, he put it on the hot plain below Tibur instead of on
its cool slopes. Spread over some 180 acres, it included two

theatres, three sets of baths, libraries, endless porticoes —

veritable city with the room and facilities to accommodate
thousands. The architecture was daring, avant-garde; the effect
upon contemporaries must have been like that of World’s
Fair architecture today. The decor included not only mosaics
and wall-paintings but thousands of statues, chiefly replicas
of renowned Greek works. And the site was honeycombed
with underground passageways so that the army of hard-
working slaves who provided the services stayed discretely
out of view.
Though set in the heart of the country, these were first and
foremost ornamental Growing of farm produce was
estates.

strictly secondary; many an owner had to load up on supplies

in the city on setting out for a stay. Martial describes one whom
you could see on the Via Appia in a wagon groaning under a
load of cabbages, leeks, lettuce, beets, fowl, hare, suckling pig:

Is he homeward bound
from the country air?
It’s the other way round

he’s going there!

In the prosperous first two centuries of the Roman Empire,

even the middle class had their country retreats. The farm in
the Sabine Hills that Maecenas gave to Horace and to which
he rushed gratefully at every possible chance, must have been
a relatively modest establishment. Martial, who started his
career living in a garret three flights up, eventually got himself
 — —

ON HOLIDAY 1 47

a little cottage amid a few acres in the vicinity of Nomentum,

some thirteen miles as the crow flies from where Horace’s
place had been located. And he has a poem about a seedy
lawyer who made a poor but sure living off a clientele of
rustics who used to pay him in farm produce; then he bought
a piece of farm property to retire on, and things were reversed :

So, Pannychus, you’ve bought some land,

with a ramshackle hut whose roof needs supports,
with a view on a roadside graveyard, and
you’ve deserted your city estate, the courts.

Your seedy gown paid steadily, if not well

but the millet, barley, w heat,
r
and rye,
that when practising law you used to sell,

now you’re a farmer, you’ll have to buy!

The moving about of all these villa-owners with their

staffs, provisions, and families must have put long lines of
carts, carriages, and on the roads, in the spring when
litters

the tide flowed to shore and country and again in the fall when
it ebbed back into the cities. Around Rome, where the wealth

of the nation was concentrated, the traffic must have been

especially dense, filling first the Via Appia that led south to
the seaside resorts, and later the Via Tiburtina, Via Prae-
nestina, and Via Tusculana that led to Tibur and Praeneste in
the Sabine Hills and Tusculum in the Alban Hills.

In the age of the Greek city-states we noted that there were

some five basic motives for travel: people left home on busi- 47

ness, either their own or the government’s, for their health, to

go on pilgrimage to an oracle or shrine, to be present at well-
known festivals, and, in a very few cases, to see the world.
The Romans, as we have just observed, added one more
the holiday — the annual departure from town for the shore or
mountains and back.
But far more significant was the Roman contribution to
the extent and volume of travel. During the first three cen-
148 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
turies a.d., when the Mediterranean had become one world
politically as well as culturally, thesame motives put infinitely
greater numbers on the sea and roads, and their movements
extended far further in all directions. Businessmen and govern-
ment personnel now moved about from Britain to India,
Asclepius’ sanctuaries catered to an international clientele, the
—
games drew spectators from everywhere and so many more
were able to indulge in the pastime of sightseeing that, as will
appear in due course, the topic calls for full-scale treatment.
On the Sea

When Pliny the Elder, compiling his encyclopedia in the

second half of the first century a.d., turned to the subject of
flax he waxed rhapsodic. ‘What greater miracle is there’, he
wrote, ‘than this plant which has brought Italy so close to
Egypt that Galerius arrived at Alexandria just seven days after
leaving the Strait of Messina . . . ,
which has put Cadiz within
seven days of Ostia and the nearer coast of Spain within four?’
The ancients used sails of linen spun from flax (cotton, an
exotic import from India, was chiefly for fine garments), and
Pliny is made by the clippers of his
referring to record runs
day. To go from Italy to Spain by land would have taken a
month, to Alexandria well-nigh two. And, even in cases where
the length of a trip was the same over land as by sea, it was
infinitely less wearing to pass the days lolling on a deck than
walking or riding a mule or mule-drawn carriage. On the
other hand, there was the matter of danger to balance against
comfort. Rome’s efficient administration, at least during the
two centuries a.d., had swept the seas clear of pirates and
first

chased away most of the bandits from the main highways.

But the perils of storm were something else again; no matter
how careful a skipper was in picking the right season and
winds for a sailing, the unexpected could always happen.
People on the road trudged or jolted along at a snail’s pace,
but at least they were spared worries about shipwreck. And
the Romans, a lubberly lot in general, were particularly
nervous when it came to sea voyages. Time and again their
150 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
writers fearfully bring up the mere finger’s breadth of plank
that separates a sailor from a watery death, and the farewell
poems they address to friends departing for overseas some-
times read like elegies on their certain death.
There was yet another factor which anyone choosing
between land and sea had to keep in mind ship passages were
:

not available all year round. In ancient times the sailing season
was limited by and large to the period from May to October.
This was partly because of the severe storms of winter, but
even more because of the increased amount of cloudiness that
occurs between fall and spring. In the days before the invention
of the mariner’s compass, sailors plotted their courses by land-
marks or the sun during the day and by the stars at night; they
gambled on getting good weather, and the odds were with
them only in the summer months. Movement by water
between October and May did not completely stop, but it
—
was always exceptional the transport of troops to meet an
emergency, the hauling of cargo to alleviate a serious shortage
— and could play little part in the planning of itineraries.

Rome, Antioch, Caesarea, Alexandria, Carthage, Cadiz,

Cartagena, Tarragona, Narbonne, Marseilles, Arles — these
were the chief entrepots that ringed the Mediterranean. Sea-
lanes crossed from one to the other, while coastal sailings
connected each with the neighbouring smaller ports to either
side. Rome, the capital and centrally located, was inevitably
the best served, with routes fanning out in all directions.
For travellers heading for the eastern Mediterranean from
anywhere within the western part of the empire, Rome was
far and away the best jump-off point. To get to Egypt there

were the fast sailings offered by the Alexandria- Rome grain

fleet (158 below). To get to Greece, there were at least two

feasible alternatives. The all-water route went from Rome (or

Naples) through the Straits of Messina and around the Pelo-
ponnese to Corinth and Athens. Those willing to include
some travel on land went by road to Brindisi, where they
 ON THE SEA 151

boarded a boat which carried them across the Adriatic and

through the Gulf of Corinth to Corinth’s harbour on the west
side of the isthmus ; if headed for Athens, they walked across
to the sister harbour on the east sideand continued by water.
From eitherAthens or Corinth it was an easy sail across the
Aegean to Ephesus or Smyrna, the chief ports of Asia Minor,
and from either of these there were coastal craft to carry
passengers north or south. Those leaving from Rome for Asia
Minor who wanted to bypass Greece could get a direct sailing
to Rhodes or the Asia Minor ports.
The time a voyage took depended on the winds and the
type of craft chosen, whether a seagoing vessel that went
straight over open water or something smaller that stayed
close to shore. Ranking government officials occasionally
travelled on war galleys placed at their disposal by the Roman
navy; since these were little more than oversize racing shells,
they necessarily followed the coasts and put into harbour
every night. When Cicero left Athens for Ephesus in 51 b.c.,
en route to the southern part of Asia Minor where he was to
assume his duties as a governor, he was put aboard a light
naval unit, one of a flotilla. The ships set sail on 6 July, made
their way through the Aegean islands (Ceos-Gyaros-Syros-
Delos-Samos), with a stop at each one of them, and finally
arrived on the 22nd —more than two weeks after departure.
His return to Athens, once more on one of a flotilla of galleys,
again took two weeks. The distance they covered over the
open sea was no more than two hundred nautical miles or so,
which even a slow-paced sailing vessel could have done in
three or four days. In recompense every night Cicero enjoyed
a shore-based meal and a night’s sleep in a stable bed.
What principally determined the speed, and at times even
the direction, of travel by water were the summer trade winds
of the Mediterranean, the Etesians or 'yearly winds’ as the
ancients called them. These blow consistently from the
northern quadrant. Thus the voyage from Rome to Alexandria
was apt to be a traveller’s dream: with the prevailing wind on
152 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
the stern, he could generally count on
and easy run of
a quick
ten days to three weeks. But he paid the price on the return,
which could take as much as two months or more. The same
winds, adverse now all the way, forced vessels into a rounda-
bout course via the south coast of Asia Minor, Crete, Malta,
and Sicily, much of which they had to cover beating against
headwinds. The voyage from Rome to Corinth or back
involved both fair and foul winds and consequently took
between one and two weeks. When Pliny the Younger,
nephew of the encyclopedist, left the capital to take up his
post as governor of the province of Bithynia on the north
coast of Asia Minor, he sailed directly from Rome to Ephesus
but, from there on, he was compelled for at least part of the
way to take to the roads since the Etesians ruled out making
the whole trip from Ephesus north to the Hellespont by water.

Ancient ships never had towering tiers of canvas. Their drive

was principally supplied by a big square mainsail (Fig. 6). By
Roman times a small triangular topsail had been added that
was useful for catching upper airs during light winds or calms.
Forward was a small squaresail, much like the bowsprit-sail
of the eighteenth century (cf. Fig. 16); it served the same
purpose, to aid in manoeuvring the vessel; the very largest
ships added a mizzen of modest size. It w'as no rig for develop-
ing speed, particularly on the capacious big-bellied hulls the
Greeks and R.omans favoured. Even before a fine breeze from
the right quarter, their ships did no better than six knots. Thus
the voyage, say, from Gibraltar to Rome or Carthage never
took less than a week. Narbonne was at the very least three
days from Rome, Corinth five, Rhodes seven, Alexandria ten.
Byzantium (Constantinople) to Rhodes was at least five days,
to Alexandria nine. These, we must remember, were optimum
voyages; if the return involved sailing from southeast to
northwest, against, that is, the prevailing northerlies, it could
take twice as long or more.
There were no such things as passenger vessels in the
 ON THE SEA 153

ancient world. Travellers did as they were to do until the

packet ship finally made its debut in the nineteenth century:
they went to the waterfront and asked around until they found
a vessel scheduled to sail in a direction they could use. ‘In
Constantinople’, writes Libanius, describing his travels in
c. a.d. 340, T went down to the Great Harbour and made the
rounds asking about vessels sailing for Athens.’ When
St Paul was from Caesarea in Palestine to stand trial in
sent
Rome, he boarded a ship making for the south coast of Asia
Minor, which happened to be on his line of course; arriving
at the port of Myra there, he had the luck to find a freighter

on the Alexandria-Rome run in harbour and booked passage

on it. Rome offered a convenient service which spared people
much weary tramping along the waterfront. Its port was
located at the mouth of the Tiber. In the town of Ostia nearby
was a big piazza surrounded by offices. Of these, many
belonged to the shippers of various seaports: the shippers of
Narbonne had one, the shippers of Carthage had another,
the shippers of Carales in Sardinia still another, and so on.
Anyone seeking a sailing had only to check at the offices of
whatever cities lay along his route.
Since the vessels were first and foremost for cargo and
carried passengers only incidentally, they provided neither
food nor services. The crews were solely for working ship;
there were no stewards among them to prepare meals or tend
cabins. As in earlier times (66 above), voyagers went aboard
with their own servants to take care of their personal needs
and with supplies of food and wine (the ships did furnish
water) to sustain them until the next port of call where there
would be a chance to obtain replenishments.
Having selected his sailing, a traveller arranged to book
passage with the magister navis ‘master of the ship’, the officer
charged with the business side of a voyage, the maintenance of
the vessel, and similar matters; on small ships he could be the
owner as well, on large he was most often the owner’s or
charterer’s representative. The actual handling of the vessel
 ;

154 travel in the ancient world

under way was left to the sailing master, the gubernator or
kybernetes as he was called in Latin and Greek respectively. A
booking rarely involved a cabin, since cabin space was at a
premium (cf. Fig. 6). The magister and gubernator most likely
each had one of their own, and on big seagoing freighters
there were a few available for VIPs or the very wealthy, but
the great majority of travellers simply purchased deck passage.
They slept in theopen or under little tentlike shelters that
their servants put up every evening and took down every
morning. Most ships, even quite small ones, had a well-fitted
galley with a hearth for cooking. The crew very probably had
first call upon it, but no doubt hours were set aside when

passengers were allowed to send their servants to prepare food.

With his passage arranged, the traveller’s next move was to
secure an exit pass —or at least in some ports, for we are not
sure whether such passes were required everywhere. They
certainly were for people departing from Egypt, but Egypt,
because of its vital importance as a source of food and revenue,
was in many respects under more stringent regulation than
the other provinces of the Empire. To leave from Alexandria,
for example, one had to apply to the governor who, if disposed
to approve, would authorize a port official to issue a pass.
These involved a fee, which apparently varied widely accord-
ing to the trade of the applicant. A price of a.d. 90 for
list

passes to leave Egypt by way of a Red Sea port has luckily

been preserved, and it reveals an amazing range. The captain
of a merchant ship paid 8 drachmae, some of his ratings 10,
his sailors and ship’s carpenter 5. A skilled labourer paid the
same as the captain, 8. The government seems to have been
out to discourage women from leaving, because common-law
wives of army men were charged 20, and prostitutes no
less than 108.
When the day of departure drew near, the traveller set
about packing his bags (
viduli, manticae cf. Fig. 13). Like
some voyagers right up to the last century, in addition to
clothing he took along a battery of things needed for cooking,
 —
ON THE SEA 155

eating, bathing, sleeping —from pots and pans down to

mattresses and bedding. And, as mentioned above, he had to
find room for provisions, an item that on certain voyages
the run over open water from Rome to Alexandria, say, a
minimum of ten days —could bulk formidably large. He then
transferred with it all and his servants to a waterfront inn or
to the house of some friend who Here
lived near the harbour.
he stood by with his ears cocked for the cry of a herald making
the rounds to announce the departure of his vessel. He had to
do it this way because ships never left on a fixed schedule.
First they had to await the arrival of a wind from the right
quarter. Then was the matter of the omens. The Roman
there
Imperial age, as I have mentioned (134 above), was a supersti-
tious one in general, and seamen are a particularly superstitious
lot. On many days of the year the religious calendar forbade
business of any sort, and this included the departure of ships.
Then there were days, our Friday the 13 th, which were
like
ill-omened; e.g., no Roman skipper would shove off from a
port on 24 August, 5 October, or 8 November, and the end of
the month as a whole was considered no time to be found on
the water.
Assuming that the wind was favourable and there was
nothing wrong with the date, the ship’s authorities would
proceed to make a pre-sailing sacrifice (a sheep or a bull;
Poseidon preferred bulls), and, if the omens during this were
not right, the sailing had to be delayed. If the wind was
favourable, if there was nothing wrong with the date, and if
the sacrifice had gone off as desired, superstition still left a
gamut of bad omens to be run a sneeze as you went up the
:

gangplank was bad (although if you had sneezed to the right

during the sacrifice, that was good), a crow or a magpie sitting,
croaking, in the rigging was bad, a glimpse of some wreckage
on the shore was bad, the uttering of certain words or expres-
sions were bad. A sailing could also be held up by dreams, if
a voyager or the ship’s officers took them seriously, as so
many of the age did. According to an ancient book on the
156 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
subject, to dream of turbid waters or a key or an anchor was
an unmistakable veto on travel by sea. Goats presaged big
—
waves or storm and terribly big, if the goats were black.
Wild boars meant violent storms. So did bulls, and shipwreck
if they gored. Owls and other night birds meant storm or

pirate attack, gulls and other sea birds danger but not death.
To dream that you saw your face on the moon meant destruc-
tion, to dream of flying on your back or walking on water
were good omens. In general, encouraging dreams seems to
have been far fewer than the other kind.
Omens were not limited to embarkation only; they were
equally operative under way. For example, the dreams just
listed meant the same whether they came to one in a water-
front inn or under a shelter on deck. Birds settling in the
rigging during a voyage was a good sign; it meant land was
near, and a skipper who had lost his bearings often found his
way by following the flight of a bird. So long as the weather
was good, there was to be no cutting of hair or nails; if it
turned bad, nail clippings and locks could be tossed to the
waves as an appeasement offering. No blasphemies were
allowed; it was bad even if they were merely in a letter
received on board. Dancing was taboo. If anyone died during
a voyage, the body was immediately cast into the sea, since
death aboard a ship was the worst possible omen.
Passengers amused themselves as best they could. They
had each other for company, and big ships, such as the ones
that plied between Rome and Alexandria, could accommodate
no small number. Josephus once crossed to Rome on a vessel
carrying 600. People of importance were given a chair on the
poop where they could chat with the skipper — the equivalent,
as it were, of eating at the captain’s table on a modern trans-
Reading to pass the time was for those who
atlantic liner.
could afford books, which, being handwritten, were far from
cheap; travellers preferred the parchment codex editions,
much like a modem book in form, to scrolls, which not only
were bulkier (there was writing on only one side of the sheet)
 ON THE SEA 1 57

but also less convenient since they had to be held with both
hands at all times. Almost certainly gambling must have
helped while away many There was always the
a long hour.
handling of the ship to watch: the helmsman guiding her, not
as today by spinning a wheel which controls a rudder at the
stem, but by pushing or pulling on tiller bars socketed into
enormous steering oars on each quarter (Fig. 6), an apparatus
every bit as efficient as a stern rudder; the sailors trimming the
lines of the huge mainsail or the triangular topsail or little

foresail; the hands in the hold getting rid of bilgewater by

walking a treadmill that activated a pump; the hands on the
afterdeck hauling in the ship’s boat, which was towed astern,

to pass some rations to the lonely sailor who stood watch

there; the ship’s carpenter on the foredeck (Fig. 6) fashioning
spare oars, shells for blocks, belaying pins, andwhat not; in
short, all the miscellaneous chores that go on day in and day
out aboard sailing ships no matter what age they belong to.
There was no problem about keeping occupied when trouble
was in the offing. Then everybody aboard, passengers as well
as crew, were put to work. When a storm hit St Paul’s ship,
he and the other passengers helped jettison the tackle. In any
blow, the yard, an enormous spar which could be almost as
long as the vessel itself, had to be lowered to the deck and
either secured properly or cast adrift, a job that needed all the
muscle aboard. Later, when the danger grew even worse, Paul
and the others pitched in to help dump the cargo of grain.
The alternative to keeping the ship afloat was death, since
ancient vessels carried no lifeboats; the ship’s boat, which
might accommodate a dozen people at best, was for harbour
service not saving lives.
As the vessel sailed into its port of destination, the captain
gratefully performed a sacrifice on the poop (Fig. 6). A
—
harbour tug a heavy dory manned by husky rowers pulling
extra-long oars —
came out and, taking a line from the ship,
got it under tow, brought it up to a dock nose first, and here
it was securely moored to a huge stone ring on the quay. The
158 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
gangplank was lowered, stevedores swarmed aboard to start
unloading the cargo, and the passengers with a sigh of relief
walked down to terra firma. A sigh of relief because, among
other things, the tension had been greater than ever from the
moment the harbour had been sighted :from then on it was of
crucial importance that no one utter any word, or commit any
act, of ill omen.

The comfort and speed of voyage depended upon the

a sea
ship —
and ancient ships, like modern, ran the gamut from
lordly long-distance freighters to humble local coasting craft.
When the Jewish princeling Agrippa was planning to
leave Rome for Palestine, the emperor Caligula advised him
not to take the coastal route: ‘from Brindisi to Syria, which
was long and tiring but, waiting for the Etesian winds, to take
5
a direct sailing to Alexandria . He added that, ‘the ships are

crack sailing craft and their skippers the most experienced

there are; they drive their vessels like race horses on an
5
unswerving course that goes straight as a die . Caligula was
referring to the mighty ships that plied between Alexandria
and Rome bringing Egyptian grain to feed the capital. By a
lucky coincidence, we happen to know what they looked like.
One day about the middle of the second century a.d., one of
them ran into a particularly bad stretch of weather, was blown
5
far off course,and ended up in the Piraeus, Athens port. The
arrival of a unit from the famous grain fleet in what was at
this time a commercial backwater created a sensation. Every-

body in town turned out to see it including, fortunately for us,

Lucian. He and walked the five miles from Athens
his friends
to the waterfront to get a look at what was causing all the
excitement. He was astonished. He wrote:

What a size the ship was! 180 feet in length, the ship's
carpenter told me, the beam more than a quarter of that, and
44 from the deck to the lowest point in the hold. And
feet

the height of the mast, and what a yard it carried, and what a
forestay held it up! And the way the stern rose up in a
 ON THE SEA 159

gradual curve ending in a gilded goose-head, matched at the

other end by the forward, more sweep of the prow
flattened,

with its figures of Isis, the goddess the ship was named after,
on each side! Everything was incredible: the rest of the
decoration, the paintings, the red topsail, even more, the
anchors with their capstans and winches, and the cabins aft.
The crew was like an army. They told me she carried enough
grain to feed every mouth in Athens for a year. And it all
depended for its safety on one little old man who turns
those great steering oars with a tiller that’s no more than a
stick! They pointed him out to me; woolly-haired little

fellow, half-bald. Heron was his name, I think.

More than 180 feet long, more than 45 wide, with a hold
—
44 feet deep it was a mighty vessel, probably able to hold
over a thousand tons of grain, or three times as much cargo as
any merchantman between Europe and America
that plied
before 1820. And probably able, too, to squeeze aboard a
thousand passengers. ‘And we were in all in the ship two
hundred three score and sixteen souls’, said Luke of the vessel
used on the same run that he boarded with Paul at Myra, and
that was during an off-season sailing.
The Isis represents one end of the scale, the queens of the
Roman merchant marine, the biggest and finest vessels a
voyager could book passage on. It is not surprising that the
emperor Vespasian preferred them to the naval galleys avail-
able to him. At the other end of the scale were the modest
vessels that tramped along the coast. And we have some idea
of what these were like thanks to a description by Synesius.
This aristocratic Greek intellectual, who was converted to
Christianity and eventually became Bishop of Ptolemais, took
one in a.d. 404 to go from Alexandria along the Egyptian and
Libyan coast to Cyrene and wrote up his experiences in a
lively, chatty letter to his brother back, in Alexandria. Though
we must take a good deal of what he relates with a large pinch
of salt —Synesius is as much interested in entertaining the
 —

l6o TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

reader as in informing him — it provides an amusing and
illuminating picture of what a trip on one of these humble
craft was like:

Our shipowner was being crushed to death by a load of debt.

There were twelve in the crew all told, with the captain
making thirteen. Over half were Jews, including the captain,
a race of non-conformists who are persuaded that piety
consists in arranging to kill as many Greeks as possible. The
rest were ordinary farm boys who up to last year had never
touched an oar. The one thing they all shared in common
was having some bodily defect. And so, so long as we were
in no danger, they made jokes about this and called each
other by their misfortunes instead of their real names
Cripple, Ruptured, One-Arm, Squint; each and every one
had his nickname. All this rather amused us. But, in time of
need, it was no laughing matter; we had reason to groan
over these very defects, since there were more than fifty
passengers, about one-third of them women and mostly
young and pretty. Don’t be envious: a curtain walled us off,
a good strong one, a piece of sail that had recently ripped, a
veritable wall of Semiramis in the eyes of decent temperate
men. And
even Priapus himself would have been decent and
temperate if he had been a passenger on Mr Amarantus’ ship.
There wasn’t a moment when he let us relax from the fear
of mortal danger.
To start with, after rounding [the cape] near you with the
temple of Poseidon, he decided to make straight for Taposiris
with all sail flying and take a try at Scylla, the one in the story
books we get so scared at. When we realized this and, a hair’s
breadth from disaster, let out a shout, we just managed to
force him to give up doing battle with the rocks. Then, spin-
ning the vessel about as if having a change of mind, off he
went for the open water, for a while struggling against the
sea as best he could but later helped along by a good breeze
from the south.
 io Milestone marking the 79th mile of the Via
Appia Traiana, the extension of the Via Appia
from Benevento to Brindisi built by Trajan. The
inscription reads: IMP(erator) CAESAR DIVI
NERVAE F(ilius) NERVA TRAIANUS
AUG(ustus) GERM(anicus) DACIC(us)
PONT(ifex) MAX(imus) TR(ibunicia) POT(estas)
XIII IMP(erator) VI CO(n)S(ul) V P(ater)
VIAM A BENEVENTO BRUNDISIUM
P(atriae)
DIVINE RVAE-F PECUN(ia) SUA FECIT ‘The Emperor Caesar
nervatraianvs Nerva Trajan, son of the Divinized Nerva, Augustus,
Victor in Germany, Victor in Dacia, Pontifex
AVGCERMDACiC Maximus, holding the tribunician power for the
11#
p^TMAXTR.POI | thirteenth time [i.e. in 108 a.d.], Imperator for

|
XIII
IMPVI COSV '! the sixth time, Consul for the hfth, Father of the

p.p Fatherland, built the road from Beneventum to

Brundisiuin at his own expense.’
ABFNEVENTO
“"VNnisiVMPECVN
SVA FECIT

1 1 Roman wagon of the early second century

a.d. drawn by a mule. It is a relatively unusual
type being fitted with shafts for a single animal
instead of a draught-pole for a team.
1 2 Roman covered wagon, perhaps a carruca dormitoria of the Imperial
,

13 Gravestone of the second to third century a.d. showing a dispatch

carrier of the Roman cursus publicus in a light carriage. See page 183.
 :

ON THE SEA l6l

Had Synesius known anything about the handling of a

sailing ship, he would have realized what was happening. The
skipper had started with a long tack landward, extending it

just as far as he possibly could, as a good skipper will. He then

‘spun the vessel about’ —but not because of any change of
mind; he simply wore ship to go on the opposite tack, where,
as even Synesius became aware, he was helped along by the
offshore wind. As he extended this tack, he left the shore
further and further behind, and Synesius, suspicious of the
crew’s competence and getting more and more nervous, began
to complain bitterly. Amarantus patiently explained what was
going on, but Synesius remained only half convinced.
Toward evening, the wind started to make up and by
midnight they had run into a storm

The men groaned, the women shrieked, everybody called

upon god, cried aloud, remembered their dear ones. Only
Amarantus was in good spirits, thinking he was going to get
out of paying his creditors. ... I noticed that the soldiers
[a large group of the passengers were members of an Arab

cavalry unit] had all drawn their swords. I asked why and
learned that they preferred to belch up their souls to the open
air, on the deck, rather than gurgle them up to the sea. True
descendants of Homer, I thought, and approved of the idea.
Then someone called out that all who had any gold should
hang it around their neck. Those who had, did so, both gold
and anything else of the value of gold. The women not only
put on their jewellery but handed out pieces of string to any
who needed them. This is a time-honoured practice, and the
reason for it is this you must provide the corpse of someone
:

lost at sea with the money to pay for a funeral so that whoever

recovers it, profiting by it, won’t mind giving it a little

attention. . . .

The was rushing along under full canvas because we

ship
couldn’t shorten sail. Time and again we laid hands on the
lines but gave up because they were jammed in the blocks.

F
l 62 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
And secretly we began to be equally afraid that, even if we
escaped from the raging we would be approaching land
sea,

in the dead of night in this helpless condition. Day broke

before this happened, and we saw the sun —
and never with
greater pleasure. As the heat of day came on, the wind
moderated, and, with the wetness out of the ropes, we were
able to use them and handle sail. To replace with a stormsail
—
was impossible it was in the pawn shop. We took the sail
in like the folds of a tunic, and within four hours, we, who
had been expecting death, find ourselves disembarking in a
remote deserted spot with not a town nor farm nearby for
fifteen miles around. The ship was tossing in the open roads

(for the spot was no harbour), held by one anchor the —

second anchor had been sold, and Mr Amarantus did not own
a third. When we touched beloved land, we embraced it like
a living mother.
 —

Roman Roads

The web of roads that Rome spun the length and breadth of
the territory she administered was not only a magnificent
achievement, but one of profound significance. It enabled her
and maintain the most durable empire in
rulers to establish
European history; it set the lines along which traders, priests,
and soldiers would carry the seeds of change in western
civilization; it determined where many of the great urban
centres of Europe were to be. Only a rich and powerful state

whose authority stretched unchallenged far and wide could

have carried out the task, could have built so many thousands
of miles of highway, maintained them more or less in good
order, fitted them with the appropriate facilities, and given
them the essential police protection. When the Roman Empire
broke up into a number of independent states, its great road
system broke up with it, and, since no nation in the Middle
Ages had the necessary organization or money, the fragments
gradually degenerated. Spanish and French and English
coaches jounced painfully or got bogged down on stretches
where, fifteen hundred years earlier, Roman redae and carrucae
had clipped along on smooth all-weather paving.
The Romans learned the art of roadbuilding from excellent
teachers, the Etruscans. This mysterious people, who settled in
what is today Tuscany in the ninth century B.c. and flourished
there for half a millennium, has left striking witnesses to their
ability as engineers, particularly hydraulic engineers. They
taught Rome how to make sewers, aqueducts, bridges, and
164 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
more to our present point —properly drained roads. The
Etruscans never went beyond well-graded, drained, and care-
fully surfaced dirt roads. The Romans went one key step
further: they added paving. It had long been known, for the
Near East had used it for centuries for short distances in
special areas (50 above). Rome used it for mile upon mile of
her major highways.
The first of the great Roman thoroughfares was the Via
Appia, the regina viarum ‘queen of roads’, begun in 312 b.c.
under Appius Claudius, commissioner of public works for
that year. It went to Capua, and then later was carried on to
Brindisi, the gateway for travel to the east (150 above). A
century later two highways leading to the north end of the
peninsula were laid down. The Via Flaminia, named after
Gaius Flaminius, public works commissioner in 220 b.c., the
year construction was started, ran from Rome to Fano on the
Adriatic coast, snaking across the Apennines so ingeniously
that there were few times in the year when snow closed the
passes; some decades later the consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus
added the Via Aemilia, which carried the Flaminia on to
Piacenza (it was eventually extended to Milan). The second,
the Via Aurelia, which was begun in 144 b.c. or even earlier,
took traffic from Rome along the west coast, reaching, with
various prolongations, as far as Genoa.
Thus, by the end of the second century b.c., the Italian
boot had a set of first-class highways traversing its entire
length. The next step was to extend these further, as Rome
acquired territories outside of Italy, to permit an uninterrupted
flow of soldiers and dispatches from the capital to all points
in the Roman sphere of authority. These splendid thorough-
fares, we must remember, though used by traders and travellers

in plentiful numbers, were built primarily by and for the army.

The East claimed the road-builders attention first. Just
across the Adriatic from Brindisi, terminus of the Via Appia,
was the town of Durazzo. Shortly after 148 b.c. they began to
lay the Via Egnatia from here across Macedonia to Saloniki,
 ROMAN ROADS 1
65

where met up with the roads leading to the city-states of

it

Greece. Later it was prolonged to Byzantium, on the site

occupied today by Istanbul. From this point on Rome’s
engineers did not have to bother with new construction so
much improve and consolidate what the Assyrians, Persians
as
and Greeks had built long before. By the first century a.d.,
the traveller who had taken the Via Egnatia to Byzantium and
been ferried across the Bosporus could count on good roads
right across Asia Minor and down the length of Syria to
Alexandria in Egypt.
In the west, there were the tracks used by the Gallic tribes
much work was needed to bring them up to
to follow, but
Roman standards. From Genoa the coast road was steadily
extended till eventually it carried traffic through Marseilles,
Narbonne, and Tarragona as far as Cadiz on the Atlantic
coast of Spain. More than a dozen routes straddled the Alps
(cf. Fig. 8): over the Mont Genevre Pass, the Little and Big
St Bernard, the Spliigen and Julier into France and Switzerland,
and from Aquileia over a number of low passes into the
Danube valley. For some reason, Rome’s highway engineers
ignored some of today’s favourites there was no carriage road
:

over the Brenner until late in the second century a.d., and
none during all of ancient times over the Mt Cenis or Simplon
or St Gotthard.
In North Africa a long ribbon ran from Alexandria all the
way to Algeria.
So, by the first century a.d., the Mediterranean was girdled
along its various coasts by a nearly continuous ring road.
Trunk roads and branches radiated from it deep into Europe
and Asia, somewhat less deeply into North Africa. In each of
Rome’s provinces two or three cities came to serve as nodal
points for the road web within it. Most have continued to
serve, first as road and then and along their
as rail centres,
approaches Roman paving can often be found under the
asphalt or the railway ties. In Spain there was Zaragoza,
Cordoba, and Merida, of which only Merida has been left in
1 66 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
the lurch and is now but an archaeological site. In France
there was Lyons and Rheims, both of them still busy road and
rail centres. In Britain it was London, in Italy Rome and

Milan and Aquileia; the last, after the fall of Rome, was
overtaken by its rising neighbour, Venice. In Asia Minor,
from among the many well-established Greek cities there,
Rome chose Pergamum, Ephesus, and Apamea as hubs for
her road pattern, and, in North Africa, Carthage in Tunisia,
and Tebessa and Constantine in Algeria. The ebb of the tide
of civilization in both Asia Minor and Africa has reduced most
of them to ghost towns or backward villages today.

‘The roads were carried straight across the countryside without

deviation, were paved with hewn stones and bolstered under-
neath with masses of tight-packed sand; hollows were filled in,
torrents or ravines that cut across the route were bridged; the
sides were kept parallel and on the same level all in all, the—
work presented a vision of smoothness and beauty.’ So wrote
Plutarch describing the construction programme carried out
by Gaius Gracchus between 123 and 121 b.c. Plutarch’s
language is fulsome, but he does not exaggerate he : is describ-
ing main highways, and by and large this is the way they
were built. The hallmark of a Roman road is the directness of
its course. Over the flat it runs like an arrow shot, and even
where the terrain is not perfectly level, as in Britain, a stretch

can go twenty or thirty miles with only a half-mile deviation.

When driving in Europe today you often can tell you are
going over what was once a Roman thoroughfare by the way
it on and on without a curve.
rolls

Rome’s prime concern was to have through routes that were

usable at all times of year and in all kinds of weather. In other
words, they had to be laid on a firm foundation, to be properly
drained, and, where traffic was heavy, to be surfaced with a
durable paving. This was a tall order for Roman engineers
who disposed of limited manpower the work on main —
thoroughfares was done by the army which often could not
 —
ROMAN ROADS 167

spare troops for the time-consuming job of building roads-

and the simplest of tools pick, hammer, mattock, spade. Rock
:

obstructions had to be painfully picked away, earth obstruc-

tions spaded away, and the chips from the one and dirt from
the other carried off in baskets, since that superbly useful
instrument, the though long used by the
wheelbarrow,
Chinese, did not reach Europe until the Middle Ages. The
feats Rome’s road builders were able to perform with this
meagre equipment are impressive (Fig. 8). There is a point
along the coast at Terracina where a huge slice of rock
measuring 126 feet from top to bottom was removed from a
sheer cliff in order to squeeze the Via Appia in between the
cliff and the sea; we know this because the construction gang

carved numbers in the rock, starting at the top, to record how

many feet they chopped and the road ran along at the
off,

level of the CXXVI mark. The modern road laid over the
Via Flaminia still passes through a forty-yard tunnel that was
hacked out in a.d. 77, and there are other tunnels extant
(though no longer in use) that measure up to 1,000 yards in
length. But the Romans went in for such works only when
absolutely unavoidable. Their standard procedure was to take
advantage of the terrain rather than fight it, and they did this
with great skill.

When building over plains, as in the Po Valley, they laid

their roads straight across, sometimes raised slightly above the
level of the land. This not only helped drainage but, in regions
that saw snow, enabled the road to stand out even after a
heavy fall. In rolling or hilly terrain, rather than putting roads
on the floor of the valleys, they favoured running them along
the sides, even though this made for curves and added length.
At times a modern highway will proceed straight over a valley
floor, while its Roman predecessor will be high above, follow-
ing the twists and turns of the slopes. The point was to avoid
laying a bed on marshy or even just damp soil, to avoid the
problem of spring floods, and to cross streams high in their
course, where they are easy to ford, rather than at their full
l68 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
width where they would have to be bridged. Moreover we
must always remember that these roads were built first and
foremost for the army, and a slope along one side of a road
protected marching troops from attack in that direction. To
the Roman planners, extra curves were little enough to pay
for these many advantages.
Having determined where a road was to go, the engineers
then surveyed its track, a procedure that often taxed their
primitive instruments. Roads were laid in segments, and fre-
quently, because of imprecise surveying or imprecise determi-
nation of gradients, segments meet each other unevenly or
vary in level. Their next step was to make a careful study of
the terrain and the soil to see what kind of road-bed they
would put down.
We commonly read in handbooks that the Romans, in
building major highways, dug
to a depth of 2J to 3! feet to
lay a bed of three different courses, one of which was sealed
with cement. We are also given the impression that roads were
built in this fashion for the whole, or nearly the whole, of
their length. Nothing could be further from the truth. The
error goes back to a wrong set of conclusions arrived at by a
French scholar early in the seventeenth century and repeated
uncritically by one writer after another ever since. In the past
decades, scholars have examined the actual remains of Roman
roads in many parts of western Europe, and particularly in
Italy and France, and have discovered two striking features.
The first is that the Romans never used cement in road-
building, the second that they never stuck doctrinairely to one
type of bed but let the choice depend on soil and terrain.
A major road had to have an all-weather surface. Where
traffic was light, as in the provinces, the engineers made do

with a gravel surface; we will have more to say about this in

just a minute. Where traffic was heavy, as along the Via Appia
or Flaminia or any of the great highways that fanned out from
Rome, they laid a first-quality road, a via silice strata ‘road

paved with silex’, i.e. with polygonal paving stones of durable

 ROMAN ROADS 169

igneous rock, such as basalt (silex), granite, or porphyry. The

stones were massive, not uncommonly measuring a foot and
a half across and eight inches deep and sometimes much bigger,
and were fitted together as cunningly as a jigsaw puzzle to
form an absolutely smooth surface. Since igneous rock can be
quarried to break off in polygonal chunks, one simple way of
getting perfect jointswas to put stones together on the road-
bed just as they had come out of the quarry; presumably
contiguous pieces were marked in the quarries and shipped in
a batch. The key problem was to prepare a bed that would not
allow any of the stones to sink and form depressions. These
were fatal since, over and above the jolts they gave to the
passing traffic, they held rainwater which would eventually
seep through and undermine the road. As a Roman poet, who
had watched the building of a road through soft sandy terrain
west of Naples, put it, the engineers had ‘to prepare the
underbody for a pavement in such a way that the ground
would not give, that the foundation would not prove treacher-
ous, that the bed would not prove unstable when the paving
blocks pressed down on it [sc. under the weight of traffic]’.
Sometimes a road went over land so firm that there was no
need whatsoever of a bed and all the gangs had to do was level
a track and place the paving stones right on the ground there ;

is a beautifully preserved stretch of the road that ran from

Antioch to Chalcis in Syria laid this way (Fig. 7). Where the
ground was not that resistant, the gangs trenched until they
came to a firm enough layer. Into the trench they set the bed,
usually of more or less naturally rounded stones in a mass of
clay or clayey earth; the thickness of the bed depended
entirely on how deep the trench had to go. When a raised
road was called for, as often happened, the bed was built up
until it overtopped the ground level to the desired height. The
one thing Rome’s engineers were finicky about was that the
earth or clay used as binder come from elsewhere, not from
any trenching done for the road. The sides of the embankments
were prevented from being washed away by the addition of
170 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
terrace walls of either fieldstone or, where a more decorative
effect was sought, of squared stone.
Sometimes the surveyors simply could not avoid cutting
across marshes or over sand, and then the road gangs had to
go to great lengths to prepare a proper bed. One way was to
open a deep trench and simply toss in rock until so ponderous
a load of stone had been laid down that a firm bed resulted.
Where this would not work, they drove in wooden piers,
brought in the carpenters to fashion a grillwork of wood, and
then laid a gravel road over the wood.
Once was ready, the masons set about fitting the
the bed
paving blocks. These were laid so as to leave the road with a
pronounced crown, i.e. higher in the middle than at the sides,
in order to shed rainwater. In roads running along slopes the
same purpose was achieved by tilting the whole surface
—
toward the lower side. Lastly or at least on the great
—
thoroughfares a raised stone border was put along each side,
and outside the border an unpaved track, some two feet or so
wide, was levelled for pedestrians and pack-animals. At
intervals high stones were set along the sides to help a traveller
—
mount a horse most welcome in an age that did not use
stirrups (181 below) — or climb into a high-wheeled carriage.
And all highways, whether fitted with borders and paths or
not, had channels (fossae ) along one side or both to carry off
rainwater.
Not only the bed, but the surfacing as well varied with soil
and terrain. In North Africa, even major routes were simply
tracks marked out in the sand. In mountainous or other stony
areas a road was often made by cutting into the rock a level
surface of the appropriate width (Fig. 8); artificial ruts, like
those the Greeks and Etruscans had used centuries earlier
(69 above), might be added along certain spots to enable carts
to move along without danger of skidding (Fig. 8). Some-
times the kind of road had more
do with the facts of life
to
than the facts of construction. Every now and then, for
example, we find a piece of road of first quality followed by a
 ROMAN ROADS ljl

long unpaved tract of mediocre workmanship; it looks very

much army engineers did the first part and then,
as if expert
called away for some reason, left the locals to finish off.
The width of roads varied. The Via Appia, Rome’s first
large-scale road-building project, is in places ten Roman feet

wide (about three and a half inches short of ten English feet),
in other words, a comfortable two-lane road where carriages
could pass abreast with ease. Elsewhere it measures eight feet,
which was the minimum the Romans allowed for a two-lane
road. Between major points highways were sometimes given
three lanes, that is a width of fourteen to eighteen feet. Most
of the roads that led into Rome spread to thirty feet or more
just before the city gates. All these figures are for the road
proper, the part used by horsemen and vehicles. Borders and
footpaths would add at least five feet.

In mountainous areas, where road-building was painfully

slow work and traffic relatively light, widths were held to a
minimum. Through narrow passes roads sometimes slimmed
down to a single lane, about six feet wide, with occasional
bypasses to enable traffic meeting from opposite directions to
get through. Along where neither cutting away the
stretches
rock nor tunnelling was feasible, the road-builders would pin
wooden scaffolding to a cliff to support a wooden road, a
rather dangerous expedient since it demanded continuous
surveillance and maintenance. Grades were carefully adjusted,
but were rather steep by our standards, going as high as 5 per
1

cent. At the Maloja pass between Italy and Switzerland, for

example, the modern road uses twenty-two curves to get
up a slope that the ancient took in three.
The Romans set their roads high above valley floors in
order, among other things, to cross a stream where it could be
forded —and they had no compunction about using fords. On
occasion they unbent sufficiently to pave the stream bed with
flat stones. Where they had to they made bridges, in remote
areas with timber, along the main highways with durable
structures of stone, or of concrete faced with stone, in the
172 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
form of an arch or series of arches resting on massive piers.
The Via Flaminia crosses a river near Narni over a bridge
(Fig. 9) whose central arch stood more than sixty-two feet
high and spans more than one hundred feet. A Roman bridge
built under Trajan still carries traffic over the Tagus near
Merida in western Spain; its six arches rise some 245 feet
above the normal level of the water. Roman engineers
designed their bridges with long access ramps on either side
in order to keep the approaches as nearly horizontal as
possible.
As highways rolled on out of populated or active zones
into the hinterland, they gradually lost their amenities, the
footpaths, the borders, and eventually the elegant surface of
polygonal paving stones. Now they were paved only along
the approaches to towns, at crossroads, or other important
points; the rest was no longer a via silice strata but a via
glarea strata ‘road paved with gravel’. The bed was still made
in the careful Roman manner, by trenching until firm ground
was reached and putting down a thick course of naturally
rounded stones packed in clay or clayey earth; where needed,
the bottom of the trench received a reinforcing floor of flat
stones. The upper part of the bed, worked smooth and given
a crown to throw off rainwater, formed the surface; ditches
alongside carried the rainwater away. Secondary roads were
all made in this or even more primitive ways, down to the

via terrena , the simple dirt road.

The government’s set-up for administering the road system
was calculated to favour Italy at the expense of the provinces.
In Italy each highway had its own curator or commissioner,
charged with keeping it in repair and adequately policed. In
the provinces the governor had the responsibility for roads
along with everything else, and he simply passed along orders
to the local communities: they were to keep the army-built
highways in repair and to construct from scratch whatever
additional roads were needed. How well or how quickly the
orders were executed is another matter; communities were
 ROMAN ROADS 173

often too hard pressed by taxes and the upkeep of other

services to do much about roads.

The last step in building a road was to put up miliaria ‘mile-

stones’. These were placed every Roman mile (1,000 five-foot
paces, hence some ninety-five yards shorter than our mile).
In Italy each was inscribed with a figure giving the distance
from Rome or from the city where the road started (Fig. io).
In the provinces they showed sometimes the distance between
towns, sometimes from the roadhead — e.g. roads fanning out
from Lyons would carry the number of miles from that city.
Occasionally they gave even more information, the distance
from either end of the road or from three or four principal
points along the road. In Rome itself, at one end of the Forum
stood the miliarium aureum , the 'golden milestone’, which, in
letters of gilt, indicated the mileage from Rome along the
trunk roads to key points in the empire. Road centres in the
provinces had their local equivalent. To the voyager, plodding
along on foot or in a slow-moving cart and wondering how
long he had to go to get a meal or bed or change of animals,
milestones were a godsend, so much so thatmany a settlement
took its name from the stone it was nearest. Some have kept
such names right up to the present day. On the road from
Marseilles to Aix, four Roman miles out of Marseilles one
comes to a village with an area called Cars or Carts, surely a
derivative of quartum ; in Roman times it was ad quartum
lapidem ‘At the Fourth Stone’. Three miles further along, or
seven out of Marseilles, is the village of Septemes, from
septimum ‘seventh’; nine miles out there was in the Middle
Ages a villa de nono\ and fourteen miles out is the town of
Milles, which probably got its name from the miliarium
planted there.
Lining the roadsides along with the milestones were
religious monuments, particularly in honour of Mercury, or
his Greek equivalent Hermes (cf. 71 above), the patron saint
of wayfarers. They ranged from full-fledged roadside sanctu-
174 travel in the ancient world
aries through single statues, often simple and rough, down to
mere mounds of stones, 'Mercury’s heaps’; these somehow
symbolized the deity, and passersby carried on the age-old
practice of making an obeisance by tossing an additional stone
on the pile.

As it happens, the Romans were not the only skilled road-

builders of antiquity. On the other side of the world the
powerful lords of the Han dynasty of China (c. 200 b.c.-
a.d. 200 ) ruled an equally farflung empire, which they too
knit together by means of a comprehensive system of high-
ways. Their engineers, like Rome’s, laid the tracks as straight
as possible, cutting through forests and bridging streams, and
even outdid Rome’s when it came to hacking out roads in
China’s towering mountains or running them over trestles at
dizzying heights. They went in for greater width than Rome;
fifty feet is mentioned for major routes, wide enough for nine
chariots abreast. We cannot confirm the figure since the
Chinese never used paving — gravel surfaces satisfied their
needs —and accordingly hardly a trace of their ancient roads
has survived. We have only contemporary or near contempor-
ary descriptions to go on, and these cannot always be taken
as gospel truth.

In Europe during the Middle Ages wherever possible traffic

passed over the roads that Rome But by now the

had built.

horse collar had been invented (181 below), and a vehicle

could carry a far heavier load. This put a burden on them that
they had never been intended to bear, and the surfaces
gradually came to be chewed up as a result. Any new roads
that were laid were surfaced with a jumble of stones bound
only by what dirt the traffic brought and ground in. In one
respect the road-builders of the Middle Ages did surpass the
Romans: thanks perhaps to their experience in raising Gothic
cathedrals, they put up finer bridges —
but allowed them to be
approached by grades that were almost impossibly steep.
 ROMAN ROADS I75

The Renaissance brought inimproved surveying instru-

ments, the seventeenth century the use of earth embankments
(rather than stone with an earth binder as was the Roman
practice), but Rome’s road-building efforts were not really
surpassed until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
J. L. McAdam introduced his revolutionary technique of
minimizing the road-bed and surfacing with a layer of small
cut stones of approximately equal size.
On the Road

To by land was more time-consuming than by water

travel
and infinitely more tiring but, as we saw earlier, there were
compensations. For one, storms were rarely a matter of life
and death. For another, the season of the year did not have to
make a difference. There was no obstacle to starting a trip at
any time along the major roads ringing the Mediterranean.
Even in mountainous areas travel was merely reduced during
the winter months ; only periods of heavy snowfall brought it
to a complete halt.
A trip by land might involve more baggage than by sea. In
addition to the inevitable kitchenware and tableware, towels,
bedding, and the like, the traveller probably had to have more
changes of clothing, as well as special wear adapted to the
rigours of the road: heavy shoes or heavy sandals, broad-
brimmed hat 75 above), and a selection of capes (cf.
(cf.

Fig. 13) — a short light one for milder weather (the Greek
chlamys or the Roman lacerna:), another for rainy days (e.g.
the Roman paenula , made of wool or leather, fitted with a
hood, and reaching to the knees), still another for cold days
(e.g. the birrus , a long wool garment with hood, rather like an
Arab burnous). Money and valuables were carried in a purse
on a belt about the waist (yona) or in a little bag on a cord
about the neck ( crumena , lallantiori). Travellers who insisted
on knowing the time could equip themselves with a pocket
sundial, a little round gadget of bronze (the specimens that
have been found range from if to 2§ inches in diameter);
 ON THE ROAD 1 77

some were designed anywhere in the Roman Empire,

for use
others in limited areas. Women on the road wore more or less
the same clothes as men, though of greater length, reaching to
the ankles. If they took along jewellery, they kept it out of
sight. ‘Bring your gold jewellery with you, but don’t wear it!’
cautions a soldier writing to his wife who was to join him at
his station.
We —
happen to have they were by great good fortune
—
unearthed in Egypt the account books kept by a high
Roman official named Theophanes during a trip he made from
upper Egypt to Antioch sometime between a.d. 317 and 323.
Theophanes took along practically a miniature household.
The inventory of his clothing lists three types of tunic (light,
ordinary, sleeved), light and heavy capes, various mantles and
hoods, a rain-wrap, light felt shoes as well as heavy sandals,
numerous changes of underwear, and several pairs of riding
breeches. Then there was the kitchen equipment: cooking
utensils, tableware, napkins; also oil lamps, both standing and
hanging. For washing and bathing he carried olive oil, alum,
and natron (a natural compound of sodium carbonate and
sodium bicarbonate abundant in Egypt), and myrrh as an
after-washing lotion, and a supply of wash-cloths, hand towels,
face towels, and bath towels. For sleeping he had mattresses,
sheets, blankets, pillows, rugs, and a selection of cushions.
Since a traveller put up with friends or family wherever he
could, inevitably there were gifts or things they had requested
tocram into the bags. ‘When you come,’ the soldier mentioned
above instructs his wife, ‘bring ten wool fleeces, six jars of
olives, four jars of honey, my shield — just the new one —and
my helmet. Bring my lances too. And bring the fittings for my
tent.’ Luckily for the poor lady, the projected trip was down
the Nile andwould be done comfortably by boat. If a traveller
was heading for areas where inns were few and poorly stocked,
he had to make room for food and drink on top of everything
else. Theophanes’ party, for example, when crossing the
desert between Palestine and Egypt laid in extra supplies of
178 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
bread, eggs, and wine; the wine aloneamounted to 150 litres
or more. More baggage inevitably meant more servants to
oversee, pack, and unpack it; Theophanes had so many that
their upkeep accounted for well-nigh a third of his daily
expenditures.
In Italy or along the great routes that linked major centres
the roads were good enough to permit hauling baggage in
carts or wagons as well as on pack-animals, which in the Near
East now included camels
54 below), in addition to the
(cf.

ubiquitous donkeys and mules. Off the main roads pack-

animals or porters were the rule, with porters favoured over
animals in mountainous or heavily forested areas.

As the date for departure approached, the superstitious

anxiously thought over their dreams. For a journey by land,
no less than by sea, was subject to the proper omens. To
dream of quail presaged being tricked or meeting bandits
en route, owls meant meeting storms or bandits, wild boars
meant meeting storms. A gazelle foretold an easy or hard trip,
depending on its physical condition. Donkeys meant a safe
trip but slow. Garlands of narcissi or marshes were bad omens,

clear bright air or stars good. Certain gods, such as Hermes

or Aphrodite, augured a good journey, others, such as the
Dioscuri or Dionysus, a bad one. A dream in which statues
of the gods seemed to move was favourable.
If his dreams were favourable, or if he was not the kind to
take such things seriously, the voyager proceeded to get him-
self and baggage from house or inn to a convenient town
his
gate. Since in many cities wheeled traffic was not allowed to
circulate within the walls during daylight hours (263 below),
this could mean leading a parade of servants and hired bearers
or pack animals, all loaded down with gear. Those who had
the money were able to rent litters or sedan chairs to carry
themselves and whoever went along with them.
Once at the city gate, the voyager had several possibilities

to ponder over. If he was alone he might choose to go on

 ON THE ROAD I79

foot — if poor, he had no alternative —trudging stolidly on

hisway; along some of the very first-class Roman roads there
were pavements to accommodate such traffic. En route he
might hitch an occasional ride on a ponderous plaustrum a ,

farm or work wagon. These were hauled at a snail’s pace by

a team of oxen and announced their coming from afar by the
tortured creaking of their wheels; the only lubricants available,
dregs of olive pressings or animal fat, were too expensive to
be used very liberally. For those who could afford to hire a
carriage, there were livery stables conveniently located at the
city gates and offering a wide range of choice. Couples or
single persons with little baggage might take a birota a two- ,

wheeled passenger cart (Fig. 15), perhaps an essedum , large

and elaborate and therefore preferred by the emperors and
their like, perhaps a covinnus or a cisium both of which were
,

lighter and simpler and hence a much commoner sight on the

roads. All were almost always pulled not by one but by a pair
of horses or fast-stepping mules, for reasons to be explained
in a moment. They accommodated two to three passengers.
A larger party, or anyone following a route that led over slow
secondary roads, would hire a reda (Fig. 13), a robust open
four-wheeled wagon drawn by one or two pairs of mules.
The covinnus was so light and handy, it could be driven by
one of the passengers; other carts and wagons had not only a
driver ( mulio ) but a man at the bridle (cursor) who led the
animals along at a swift walking pace (cf. Fig. 15). More
comfortable and better suited for family travel was the car rue a,
the Roman descendant of the age-old covered wagon (25 above)
with an arched leather or cloth canopy (Fig. 12); certain types
were fitted for sleeping (carruca dormitoria ). People of wealth,
particularly ladies of the court, frequently used the carpentum .
This was a heavy two-wheeled de luxe carriage with a sub-
stantial roof supported by ornamental columns; the sides

could be closed off with draw curtains, often gaily decorated,

often of expensive fabrics such as silk. The differences between
a homely reda and an elegant carpentum were solely for the
l8o TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
eyes of the beholders; their riding qualities were the same.
Both had wooden wheels with iron tyres and were innocent
of springs; the occupants jounced along feeling every bump in
the road. The way to avoid such discomfort was to go in a
litter ( lectica ) rather than a carriage; there was no longer any

prejudice against them (67 above), and they were also avail-
able for hire at the city gates. The travelling litter consisted of
a couch fitted with canopy and draw curtains; the rider lolled
at his ease as six or eight husky slaves bore it along on their
shoulders. For long journeys, the men could be replaced by
a pair of mules harnessed to the carrying poles, one ahead and
one behind. A bearer-borne litter was the most painless way
of travelling, but inevitably the slowest.
The emperors and others of high society or of wealth took
to the road in the grandest imaginable style. They packed a
veritable household to spare them the ignominy or discomfort
of stopping at any inns save those able to accommodate a
royal party: tents and commodes as well as the usual cooking
utensils, bedding, and tableware; some of the last could be so
precious and fragile it had to be carried by hand and not
trusted to a jolting wagon. An army of attendants was de
rigueur Horace ridicules one Roman worthy who, for the
.

short trip from Rome to his villa at Tibur, took along no less
than five slaves, even though he was so tight-fisted that the
only gear they were called on to handle were the two items
—
he refused to be without wine jug and commode. A lavish
spender’s entourage could include not merely the customary
maids, valets, chefs, scullions, and so on, but exotic Moors and
Numidians in eye-catching costumes to run ahead and make
sure no traffic encumbered the way, or mincing pages with
their faces masked so that the sun or cold would not hurt
their delicate complexions. Matched teams of mules or horses,
covered with embroidered or purple cloths and fitted with
gilded trappings, pulled the vehicles, which were themselves
gorgeous affairs adorned with gold and silver statuary and
upholstered in silk. The emperor Claudius, who liked to play
 ON THE ROAD l8l

dice, had a travelling carriage fitted as a gaming room.

Commodus had one with seats that swivelled, so that he
could adjust them to catch the sun in cool weather or a breeze
in hot,and others rigged with a gadget that recorded the miles
covered. The Elder Pliny, a compulsive writer, always made
room for a stenographer who had pen and tablets at the ready.
Some travellers went on muleback or on a slow-gaited cob,
with their servants trudging in their wake. Few rode fast

saddle horses, since horses, as in times past (52 above), were

chiefly for cavalrymen, hunters, or dispatch-riders. Expense
was one, but not the only, reason for this. Riding a horse in
ancient times, particularly for long distances, was a wearisome
business : stirrups were unknown — this crucial piece of equip-
ment did not come into use in Europe until the ninth cen-
tury a.d. —and saddles were rudimentary, often consisting of
little more than a cloth on the horse’s back. In fact, as we
noted earlier (24 above), the ancients never realized the full

mount or draught animal.

potentiality of the horse either as
As mount they limited its usefulness not only by riding
without stirrups or a proper saddle but also by leaving it
unshod; they did have certain sandal-like devices of metal,
leather, or straw, which slipped over the hoof, but these, made
for mules and camels as well as horses, apparently were only
temporary expedients for special circumstances, to protect a
sore hoof or to provide a grip on slippery ground. The iron
horseshoe fastened permanently with nails found general
acceptance only from the eighth century a.d. on. And, as
draught animal, the ancients insisted on putting it in a harness
basically designed for oxen, setting a pair of horses on either
side of a draught-pole, and harnessing them by means of a
breast-band to a yoke at the front end (Figs. 12, 13, 15). The
breast-band had an unfortunate tendency to slide up the
throat and press on the windpipe; the harder the pull, the
greater the choking effect. The padded horse-collar, which
made the point of pressure the shoulders instead of the neck,
did not come into being until the Middle Ages. From the
182 travel in the ancient wolrd
beginning of the second century a.d. on, there are examples of
wagons fitted with shafts (Fig. n), which permitted the use
of a single horse instead of a pair, but it seems to have found
limited acceptance despite its advantages of cheapness and
convenience, particularly on narrow country roads.
The voyager, having picked a conveyance or riding and
pack animals, having loaded up and got under way, next
faced the problem of where to stop for the night, and, if he
was travelling with hired gear, where to find a change of
animals and equipment. As it happened, his choices were often
determined by the network of inns and hostels that belonged
to the cursus publicus , the government post.

Rome’s was created by Augustus, but the idea

cursus publicus
of such a service was hardly original with him; it is an
essential tool for any government that rules extended areas.
The earliest examples we know of go back to the third
millennium b.c., when the city-states of Mesopotamia first
began to build miniature empires (36 above). Five centuries
before Augustus’ day the Persians were using the highly
developed service that Herodotus admired so (53 above); on
the other side of Asia, at just about the same time, China’s
Chou dynasty had built up an equally efficient system. And,
by the third century b.c., China’s Han dynasty and the super-
centralized administration that the Ptolemies had set up in
Egypt were running the nearest thing to a modern postal
system that the ancient world was to know. The carriers were
all mounted. In China the post-stations were some eleven

miles apart, with two or more substations in between. In

Egypt they were sparser, at intervals of six hours by horse-
back or roughly thirty miles apart. Some records of one of
these Egyptian post offices have been dug up by the archeolo-
gists, so we have a fair idea of the way they worked. Thanks
to Egypt’s geography, mail had to go only north and south,
along the ribbon of inhabited land bordering the Nile. The
offices handled at least four deliveries daily, two from each
 ON THE ROAD 183

direction. For packages and other heavier matter there was an

auxiliary camel-back service.
When Augustus conquered and annexed Egypt in 30 b.c.,
the system was right at hand to serve as a model. He, however,
was interested neither in speed nor regular delivery. What he
sought was a facility which would forward dispatches when
necessary and permit him to interrogate the carriers as well as
read the papers they brought. So he fashioned a service in
which there were no relays: each messenger went himself the
whole route, and since time was not of the essence, travelled
in carriages rather than on horseback. As the system developed,
the couriers were more and more drawn from the army,
especially from the elite unit called speculatores ‘scouts’;
instead of scouting the situation of an enemy, they scouted, as
it were, the situation at the headquarters they were delivering

to. A gravestone of a speculator has survived which bears a

relief picturing the deceased in the course of his duties (Fig. 13).
We see a reda , an open four-wheeled carriage, drawn by three
horses, two in the yoke and a trace-horse. On the box is a
driver who, plying the whip, keeps the team stepping smartly
along. On a bench behind is the courier wearing a hooded
travelling cloak and holding what seems to be a riding crop.
Behind him, facing rearward, is his servant, who sits on the
baggage and clutches a lance with a distinctive head, a special
insignia of office showing that his master was attached to the
staff of the local governor.
In Egypt the Romans may well have maintained the
Ptolemies’ mail service, since it was so feasible a system there.
But everywhere else the Roman post operated as Augustus
had designed it, making sporadic deliveries according to need
—or rather the emperor’s need, since officially only men
carrying dispatches from him or
him were entitled to the
for
privileges of the cursus publicus Every user had to have a
.

diploma as a post warrant was called, signed by the emperor

,

or, in his absence, his authorized agent; governors of provinces

could also issue them, but they disposed of a limited number
184 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
only, rationed out by the emperor. A diploma entitling one
,

to travel with the use ofgovernment maintained facilities, was

a prized possession, and inevitably some fell into hands which
did not deserve them (188 below). When the emperor Otho
was defeated in battle in a.d. 69, with the inevitable conse-
quence that warrants bearing his name would no longer be
honoured, an interested party hushed up the news and spread
word of a victory in order to keep the precious documents
alive.

At the beginning of the third century a.d., Septimius

Severus altered the system radically: he added the cursus
clabularis , a transport service charged with the duty of purvey-
ing provisions for the army. Overnight the organization
swelled in size and became more complicated. The administra-
tive staff had to be expanded, there was more intensive use of
all facilities, there had to be an increase in the size and number

of the post stations, and wagons and heavy duty draught

animals had to be added to the couriers’ light carriages and
fast-stepping teams. The diploma now took two forms, the
partial warrant ( evectio ) which authorized transport only, and
the full ( tractoria ) authorizing both transport and subsistence.
We know the operations of the cursus best in the fully
developed form it achieved by the second half of the fourth
century a.d., when it had long been in use as a transport as well
as dispatch service. All along the routes at strategic intervals
were more or less well-equipped inns (201 below) called
mansiones or stationes\ the first term originally applied to
places with the facilities to handle an imperial party, the second
to posts maintained by the road police, but by this time the
two had gradually merged. In between the mansiones or
stationeswere very simple hostels (202 below), mutationes
‘changing places’ as they were sometimes called, which could
supply the —
minimum of a traveller’s needs a bite to eat, a
bed, and, as the name implies, a change of beasts or vehicle.
The distancefrom one mansio to the next depended on the
terrain and how thickly an area was populated, but in general
 ON THE ROAD T
85

an effort was made to keep them twenty-five to thirty-five

miles apart, that is, the length of an average day’s travel. In
densely settled districts, such as around the capital, they
tended to be a good deal closer. There might be one or two
hostels between a pair of mansiones again depending on the
,

terrain. For example, a traveller setting out from Aquileia at

the head of the Adriatic to cross the Alps into Yugoslavia,

which was the main route from northern Italy to the east,
came to a simple hostel at eleven miles, a second one twelve
miles further on, and then, after another twelve miles to make
thirty-five in all, arrived at an inn ( mansio ). Next day he
climbed twelve miles to the top of the pass, where he found a
hostel, and then ten miles down the other side to an inn.
The inns varied widely in the range and quality of what
they could provide, from the so-called praetoria with accom-
modations to put up a royal party down to modest establish-
ments that were but a cut above the hostels. A fully equipped
inn offered practically everything a traveller might possibly
need: meals and sleeping quarters; change of clothing for the
drivers and postilions; change of animals (big stations stabled
as many as forty horses or mules), carriages, and drivers
( muliones
); grooms (stratores) ; escorts for bringing back
vehicles and teams to the previous station ( hippocomi ); porters

(
bastagarii, catabolenses)\ veterinarians ([mulomedici ) to put to
rights animals in trouble; Cartwrights (
carpentarii ) to put to
rights equipment in trouble.
The inns and hostels of the cursus publicus were not built
specifically for it, nor did they service only those travelling on
official business, although these had an ironclad priority. The
post, despite the fact that was run wholly for the benefit of
it

the central government, was largely maintained by the com-

munities along the routes. The emperors simply selected given
existing inns of the required quality and incorporated them
into the system, requiringthem to put up without charge any
holder of a diploma who came along. Only in remote areas, as
on mountain passes or along lonely tracts of road, did they
l86 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
have to build from scratch (202 below); such places, too, to
help meet expenses put up all voyagers, private as well as
official. Vehicles, animals, drivers, stablehands — all were
requisitioned,wherever possible, from local citizens. With the
passage of time these found the upkeep of the post a galling
burden, since demands grew steadily, not merely the
its

legitimate demands but those of unscrupulous officials who

would arbitrarily seize horses and equipment or barefacedly
bed down unauthorized travellers in the inns. Every now and
then, the emperors tried to do something about the situation.
Severus, for example, shifted a good part of the costs to the
government treasury; by Constantine’s time, however, all
expense was again on the backs of the locals. Emperor after
emperor enacted stringent laws to eliminate abuses and to
keep the service up to the mark. There were regulations
governing the number of wagons or animals that could be
requisitioned, the size of the wagons, maximum permissible
loads, numbers of drivers to be used, routes to be followed,
weight of saddles and saddlebags, even the size and nature of
the whips. One regulation stated that ‘no person shall remun-
erate any driver, cartwright, or veterinarian employed on
the public post, since . . . they obtain subsistence allowances
and clothing, which is believed sufficient for them’ — in other
words, no tipping allowed. Rarely have no-tipping rules been
made to work, and all signs indicate that neither it nor very
many of the other well-meaning statutes on the books were
adequately enforced.
Anyone using the cursus publicus had to know exactly
where the various inns and were
hostels belonging to it

located. Handlists called itineraria were available, which

detailed for a given route the stopping places along it and
how far each was from the next. There were also maps
designed specifically to show not only the location of such
places but what they had to offer. By good fortune a copy
made in the Middle Ages of one of these has survived, the
so-called Tabula Peutingeriana (Fig. 14). Done on an elon-
 ON THE ROAD 187

gated piece of parchment that is no more than thirteen inches

wide but over twenty-two feet long, it presents a map of the
Roman empire as distorted as if seen in a trick mirror. This
was done on purpose: the cartographer’s sole aim was to give
a schematic picture of the Roman road system in a form
suitable for ready reference. He put in just about the same
information we on a modern automobile map: lines
find
showing routes; names of cities, towns, and other stopping
places; numbers indicating the distance in Roman miles
between them. In addition and most interesting, alongside
many of the names there stands a little coloured picture-
symbol. These serve the same purpose as the surprisingly
similar symbols used in the Guide Michelin or other modern
guide books, to show at a quick glance the nature of the
facilities available for spending a night. A schematized picture
of a four-sided building with a court in the centre stands for a
town or country inn of some consequence, one that could
offer a considerable range of services. A picture of the front
of a house with a twin-peaked roof stands for a less pretentious
country inn. Twin cupolas instead of peaks means the same
grade of inn but with ample water available. A single-peaked
boxlike cottage stands for a very modest inn. Names with no
picture alongside probably indicate the simplest form of
hostel, places that could furnish little more than water, shelter,
a bare meal, and a fresh relay of animals. For example, a
traveller leaving Rome by the Via Aurelia, which ran north
along the west coast, could see by the map (cf. Fig. 14) that
his first convenient stopping place would be Alsium, eighteen
miles from the capital, with minimum facilities (no picture)
and that from here it was ten miles to Pyrgi, with minimum
facilities; then six miles to Punicum, with minimum facilities

but close to Aquae Apollinares, with first-rate facilities (four-

sided building); then nine miles to Castrum Novum, with

quite good facilities (twin-peaked building); then four miles
to Aquae Tauri, with the same facilities as Aquae Apollinares,
and so on.
l88 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Government couriers hustled along from station to station
at an average of five miles an hour for a total of fifty miles in
a normal day’s travelling. Thus, a dispatch from Rome would
reach Brindisi in about seven days, Byzantium (where Con-
stantinople was later founded) in about twenty-five, Antioch
in about forty, Alexandria in about fifty-five. During emer-
gencies, travelling night and day, they could treble this speed.
When the legions mutinied at Mainz on the Rhine in a.d. 69,
the news reached Rome in some eight or nine days; the
messenger had averaged better than 150 miles per day.

The traveller charged with government business, and hence

with the facilities of the cursus publicus at his disposal, had few
problems: he would present his diploma to the nearest
authorized inn and be issued an appropriate conveyance. He
would consult his handlist or map for the stopping places
available along his route, and at these he would eat, sleep, and
pick up changes of animals and equipment until he reached
his destination. Private voyagers were officially barred from
the cursus publicus , human nature being what it is,
but,
exceptions were inevitable. ‘My lord,’ wrote Pliny, governor
of a province in the north of Asia Minor in a.d. 109-m, to
the emperor Trajan, ‘up to this moment, I have never accom-
modated anyone with a diploma. However, my wife
. . .

heard that her grandfather died, and since she wanted to run to
see her aunt, I thought it unnecessarily severe to deny her the
use of a diploma! Libanius, scion of one of Antioch’s leading
.

Constantinople in a.d. 336 with his own

families, arriving at
mules exhausted, was chagrinned to discover that ‘the man I
had hopes would send me on to Athens with a team from the
Imperial Post had fallen from power, and
. . .
,
said he, . . .

this was the one thing he could not do’. The aristocrat
Sidonius Apollinaris, who went from his home town in
southern France to Rome in a.d. 467, reports that, as soon as
he emerged from the town gate, he ‘found the government
post at my disposal, like someone summoned by a letter from
 ON THE ROAD 189

the emperor’. These cases involve the time-honoured relaxing

of the rules in favour of the highly placed; more serious and
frequent were the cases involving political influence, bribery,
even the blatant sale of post warrants. The regulations on the
books against unauthorized use of the cursus publicus steadily
increased, the penalties became stiffer (selling a diploma was
punishable by death), but how effectively they were enforced
is an open question.
The private voyager who had no access, legitimate or
illegitimate, to the government post would still find himself
putting up at inns and hostels that formed part of the network,
because in many areas they were the only ones available and
elsewhere were presumably the best. Moreover, if not travelling
in a carriage or with animals of his own, he would find himself
applying to them for what was available for hire. Along the
open road, if he reached a station just after an official party
had come through and had requisitioned everything in sight,
he had no alternative except to wait. In any event, he inevi-
tably moved along more slowly than the government couriers.
In normal terrain, with no toilsome slopes to negotiate, he did
about fifteen to twenty miles a day on foot, some twenty-five
to thirty in a carriage. Forty, even forty-five, was possible
but it meant an exhaustingly long and hard day’s travel. The
stopping places along the open roads were spaced to accom-
modate such speeds. For example, an itinerary of the fourth
century A.D., prepared for use by pilgrims going from
Bordeaux to Jerusalem, lists for the stretch of sixty-two
Roman miles from Toulouse to Carcassonne: nine miles to a
mutatio (hostel) at Nonum, then eleven miles to a mutatio
(hostel) atVicesimum, then nine miles to a mansio (inn) at
Elusione, then nine miles to a mutatio at Sostomagus, then
ten miles to Vicus Hebromago (a village), then six miles
to a mutatio at Cedros, then eight miles to Carcassonne.
Carriages, in other words, were expected to do the trip in two
days, covering twenty-nine miles the first to spend the night
at Elusione, and thirty-three the next. The mutationes , the
190 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
modest roadhouses in between, were set eight to ten miles
apart on the average. In difficult terrain, as we would expect,
the stopping places were closer together. Between Arles and
Milan, for example, a journey that included crossing the Alps,
the average distance between them diminished to six miles.

To get some idea of what itwas like to journey along the

roads during Roman times, of what were the traveller’s day
to day experiences, let us follow three very different men
making very different kinds of trips. The first is the Roman
administrator Theophanes, mentioned several times above,
who was sped by the government post on official business
from upper Egypt to Antioch and back. The second is the
Greek intellectual Aristides, a private citizen travelling on his
own along more or less back-country ways in Asia Minor.
The third is the poet Horace, who accompanied one of
Augustus’ great ministers of state down the Appian Way in
the days before Augustus had brought the government post
into existence.

On 12 April in one of the years between a.d. 317 and 323,

Theophanes left Pelusium (not far from the modern Port
Said) on the edge of Egypt proper. He was accompanied by
at least two subordinate officials, a steward, a clerk, and a host
of servants. We have, as it were, a worm’s eye view of his trip,
one derived not from a formal description but from some
preserved pages of the ledger in which his clerks recorded the
points reached and the daily expenses incurred at each. Since
nowhere are there entries for lodgings or the hire of animals,
it is clear that Theophanes and his party were enjoying the

privileges of the public post. On the other hand, his daily

outlays for food show that he did not have a courier’s full

warrant, but one that authorized only transport and lodging.

Details are lacking for the voyage out, and about all we can
do is reconstruct his itinerary and speed. The party took four
days to plod across the desert between Egypt and Palestine,
 ON THE ROAD 191

never doing more than twenty-six miles in a day and one day
doing as little as sixteen. Once in the land of milk and honey,
however, they stepped up the pace sharply to average forty a
day for six days, which brought them right to Tyre. Here they
let up a bit, averaging under thirty a day for the next eight
days to Laodicea. From Laodicea to the final destination at
Antioch was a good sixty-four miles but, like horses smelling

the stable, they reeled it all off in a single day, arriving on

30 April. The trip had taken eighteen days in all.

On 19 July Theophanes readied his party for the return.

A load of food supplies w^as purchased in anticipation for
departure the next morning: fine bread for Theophanes and
the others who shared his table, cheap bread for the servants,
jars of local wine, 2 lb. and 1 oz. of beef or veal for the master’s
dinner, fruit (grapes, apricots, watermelon), cabbage, olive
oil, the special strong cooking sauce called garum, honey for
sweetening, and wood for the cooking fire. The following
day, after adding a purchase of sausages and apples, the party
got under way; probably it was late in the morning, since they
stopped for the night at some village only fourteen miles
along. On the 21st, however, they put all of fifty miles behind
them Theophanes must have had business
to reach Laodicea.
here because they stayed in town all of the 22nd, using some
of the time to lay in more supplies: the usual two grades of
bread, 1 lb. 6 oz. of beef for the master’s dinner, and more
fruits and wine. Theophanes was particular about his wine: at

Laodicaea the pint he had for his lunch cost him almost as
much as all the vin ordinaire he bought for his squad of
servants.
On the 23rd they were back on the road and by the 25th
were in Byblos, having covered a respectable 140 miles in
three days. Our connoisseur must have treated himself to a
particularly good wine here, since the ledger records an
expenditure for snow, which must have come from the heights
of the Lebanon that rears up behind the city, to cool it. This
luxury was not very expensive, considering the trouble it
192 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
took to get it; the wine for dinner cost 700 drachmas, the
snow only 100. They came to Beirut, twenty-four miles
further on, on the 26th, where they were able to lay in a
variety of fruits (grapes, figs, peaches, apricots) and re-stock
on cleaning materials (natron, bath oil, soap). The next day’s
stop was Sidon, thirty-four miles along, and here eggs were
bought in for the master’s dinner (safer no doubt than meat
in the height of summer). The entries for the following few
days are fragmentary, and all we can do is trace the party’s
progress: thirty-six miles to Tyre on 28 July, forty-five to
Ptolemais on the 29th, and forty-four to Caesarea on the 30th,
with a stop for lunch at a mutatio on the way. The next day
they also lunched at a mutatio one that had an animal available
,

to slaughter for them, since an entry records the purchase of

4 lb. They stopped for the night at

2 oz. of beef or veal here.
Antipatris, having covered thirty-three miles. Lunch at Gebala
the next day (1 August) included lamb and pork rather than
beef or veal, and at a fraction the cost. By evening they had
done the forty-three miles to Ascalon, where Theophanes had
eggs for dinner and everyone enjoyed a wide variety of local
fruits: peaches, plums, grapes, figs, apples. The second of
August brought them thirty-nine miles to Raphia, where
dinner was cheese and goat’s meat, and the fruits melons,
grapes, and mulberries. Another thirty-eight miles on 3 August
and they were at Rhinocoloura, the jump-off point for the
desert crossing. Here they stocked up. Theophanes had eggs
for dinner, and laid in some extra for the following day. They
bought in triple supplies of bread and, since the desert is a
thirsty place, no less than 140 to 160 litres of the local wine.
And the master prepared for the austerity ahead by treating
himself and some guests at lunch to a wine that cost exactly
one-half of what the 140 litres cost. At the desert hostel the
next day (4 August) they were able to pick up some cheese
for lunch and dinner and some grapes and water-melon for
dessert, but the hostel they stopped at for lunch on 5 August
apparently had nothing at all to offer. By nightfall they were
 ON THE ROAD 193

at Pelusium Egypt and back, so to speak, in civilization.

in

They celebrated by buying not only eggs and cheese but also
dried fish, while some of the party had snails for lunch. And
the next day, for the first time in the eighteen since leaving
Antioch, they had fresh fish.

In the summer of a.d. 165 or perhaps a few years later,

Aristides, a well-known public was stricken by a fresh

lecturer,

attack of illness after a span of fairly good health and decided

to leave his sick bed at Smyrna and go to the famous sanctuary

of Asclepius at Pergamon, where he had enjoyed some near
miraculous recoveries before. He describes the trip in detail in
one of his essays. The morning of the day of departure he had
the baggage loaded on carts or wagons to be sent ahead with
the servants and wait for him at Myrina, a town along the way.
When the preparations had all finally been completed, it was
noon and too hot for him to be out on the road. He waited
around a few hours until the sun lost some of its bite, and
about half past three in the afternoon he and his party got into
their carriages and started off. By seven that evening, they had
covered fourteen Roman miles and arrived at an inn a short
distance from the point where the road crossed the river
Hermus. He debated whether to pass the night there, but
decided against it —
there was no sign of his baggage, the inn
was pretty bad, and, as darkness set in, a cool invigorating
wind was springing up. They crossed the river and by about
10 p.m. had covered ten more miles to the next town, Larissa.
The inn here was just as discouraging, stillno sign of the
baggage, so he was just as pleased to keep moving. By mid-
night or a little later he was at Cyme, only to find everything
shut. Aristides again was not unhappy: the party had covered
thirty-five miles, the cool evening had turned into a chilly
night, all the others were begging for a halt, but he by now
had the bit in his teeth, and there was no stopping him. About
four in the morning they clattered wearily into Myrina and —
there, sitting in front of one of the inns were the servants with
G
194 travel in the ancient world
the baggage still all packed: they had arrived so late they
found everything closed for the night. With forty- two miles
behind them and no sleep for almost twenty-four hours, the
whole party was dropping with fatigue. There was a pallet
lying in the vestibule of the inn and they wasted time trying
out places to set it, but to no avail, there was no getting
comfortable on it. The only thing left to do was bang on
likely doors; they did, but could not wake a soul. Finally
they found a way to get into a friend’s house —but the gate
porter had let go out, so they had to grope their way
the fire

through in the dark. While a fire was being started, dawn

broke. Aristides refused to let up at this point and waste the
daylight in sleep; he roused the company and grimly made
them push on. After stopping to offer sacrifice to Apollo at a
sanctuary along the way, they finally bedded down at Elaea,
twelve miles beyond Myrina. The following day they covered
sixteen more to the final halt at Pergamon. It had been a
gruelling grind for a well man, let alone one hurrying to a
sanatorium.

In 38 or 37 B.c., from Rome to

the poet Horace travelled
Brindisi as member of an embassy headed by one of Augustus’
great ministers, Maecenas. On his return, he wrote up his
experiences in chatty, lighthearted verses. He set out with a
friend —they were to meet up with the rest later—along the
Appian way, most likely in a carriage. The first day they
covered sixteen miles and stopped ‘modest
at Aricia at a inn’,

the second day twenty-seven to

—
Forum Appii ‘we divided
into two days’, remarks Horace, ‘a journey that faster stepping
travellers than ourselves make in one; the Via Appia is easier
on those who don’t take it in a hurry.’ Forum Appii was ‘full
of boatmen and nasty tavern keepers’, chiefly because of a
barge service it offered: travellers could, toward evening,
board a little barge there which, towed by a mule down a
canal through the Pontine marshes, would bring them while
they slept almost to Terracina, the next major stop, thereby
 ON THE ROAD 195

saving them a day on the road. At Appi Forum Horace’s

troubles started:

Because of the water, which was horrible, I declare my belly

a public enemy and wait, not very happily, for my fellow
travellers to finish dinner. When it was time to board, the
sailors hollered at our servants, and our servants at them:
‘This way with the boat! You’re jamming three hundred
people aboard —hey, that’s enough!’ By the time the fares
are collectedand the mule hitched up, a whole hour has been
lost. Then there was no sleep for anyone, thanks to the

murderous mosquitoes, the frogs in the swamp, and the

sailor and one of the passengers —
soused on stale wine, they
were taking turns serenading absent girl-friends. Finally the
passenger gets tired out and falls asleep, and our shiftless
sailor unhitches the mule to let it graze, tethers it to a stone,
stretches out on his back, and snores away. By now it’s dawn,
and we notice that the boat is standing still. A hothead jumps
up, flails away at sailor and mule on flanks and head with a
willow branch, and finally, about io a.m., we dock.

They stayed the night at Terracina; here they met up with

Maecenas and the main body of the party, and Horace took a
moment off to get some black salve for his eyes, which were
bothering him. The next day brought them to Formiae,
twenty-six miles further along, where a local aristocrat
extended them the hospitality of his villa. The following
morning number of others including Vergil joined them,
a
and the party was complete. The next day they did twenty-
seven miles to a very simple inn for the night, and ‘from there
the mules put down their loads in Capua in good time.
Maecenas goes off to play, Vergil and I to sleep.’ They had
arrived early since they only had seventeen miles to cover in
getting to Capua. The day after, twenty-one miles further
along, they had the best accommodations of the trip at a
sumptuous villa owned by one of the notables in the party.
They lingered long over dinner, being amused no end by a
196 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
time-honoured and timeless form of entertainment, a pair of
professional comics flinging insults at each other (Td say you
look With horns.’ 'You talking with that scar?
like a horse. —
What happened, somebody cut off the ones on your fore-
head?’). Maybe they slept late as well, because all they made
the following day was eleven miles to Beneventum. Here the
innkeeper was so anxious to do the right thing by his distin-
guished guests that he almost burned down his kitchen while
barbecuing some scrawny fowl for their dinner. By now they
were going through the Apennines, and the next night’s stand
was at a little hostel well in the mountains. Horace had a bad
time here. The firewood was damp and the chimney smoked,
which made his sore eyes water. And he 'stupidly stayed up
till midnight waiting for a liar of a girl’ ;
she never came, he
had an erotic dream, and soiled his bedclothes. The next
day they did twenty-four miles in wagons ( redae ) to
another mountain town where the water was the world’s
worst but the bread was superb; smart travellers, Horace
comments, usually carry off an extra supply since the bread at
Canusium, the next stop, is hard as rock. From Canusium
they arrived at Rubi dead tired; it had been a long twenty-four
miles, and constant rain hardly helped. The day after they
made twenty- three miles from Rubi to Bari; the weather was
better but the road poorer. By now they were on the coastal
plain and the end was almost in sight; they stepped up the
pace, reeling off thirty-seven miles to Egnatia on their next to
last day (where they got a good laugh when shown the local

miracle, an altar that burned incense without fire) and all of

thirty-nine to Brindisi on the last
—
'the end of a long journey
as well as scroll’ quips Horace in the closing line of his poem.
It had taken him about two weeks to do some 375 miles, and

he had had his taste of the typical ups and downs of travel:
some sunny weather, swift travel on major highways, first-rate
accommodations, good company, lots of fun; some rain, slow
going overbad roads, primitive hotels, traveller’s tummy, nights
without sleep, and a rendezvous with a girl who never showed up.
 12

Inns and Restaurants

Where to stay? It was a crucial question as a traveller walked

off a dock, or neared the gate of a town, or noted night
darkening the sky while on the open road.
If he was in the service of the government, he would go to
the nearest facility maintained by the cursus publicus If he .

was well-to-do or noble or both, there were a number of

equally simple alternatives. He might have a house or estate
at the intended destination (195 above), and all he need do was
alert the servants to his arrival. Here, for example, is the text

of a letter sent in a.d. 256 by a wealthy landowner to one of

his caretakers:

God willing, expect us to come toyou on the 23rd. As soon

asyou receive this letter of mine, do your best to have the
bathroom heated, having logs brought in and collecting chaff
from everywhere, so that we can bathe in warmth since it is

now winter. . . . See to it that we have everything we need,

especially a nice pig for my guests —but let it be a good one,
not like the last time, skinny and worthless. And send word
to the fishermen to bring us some fish.

The writer lived in Egypt, and the estate he intended to visit

was Fayum; letters like this must have been received day
in the
in and day out by bailiffs and caretakers all over the Roman
Empire. Owners of villas that lay more than a day’s travel
from town often maintained lodgings at strategic points to pro-
vide shelter during the journey there and back (138 above).
198 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
When people of means had no establishment of their own to
put up at, they did the next best thing: they arranged to stay
with friends, family, business associates, or other acquaintances;
a rich man’s mansion often included for the use of guests a
whole separate wing complete with its own street entrance,
bedrooms, and dining rooms. Where such hospitality was
unavailable, as on trips through relatively remote areas, they
would pack tents in addition to the usual traveller’s gear and
—
camp out in elegant style to be sure, waited upon by the
omnipresent staff of servants. Finally, if all else failed, they
could always turn to the local authorities. When Cato the
Younger, after finishing his military service, toured through
parts of Asia Minor he used, Plutarch reports,

the following procedure. At daybreak he would send ahead

his bakerand cook to the place where he planned to put up.
These, very decorously and quietly, would go into town
and, if Cato did not happen to have acquaintances or friends
of the family there, would prepare for his reception at an inn,
without bothering anybody. Where there was no inn, they
would turn to the local officials for hospitality, gratefully
accepting whatever was offered.

Cato, who liked to project an image of himself as a man of

simple tastes, as one who asked for no more than any of his
fellows, was an exception. The average highly placed Roman
on the road expected the purple carpet. A letter like the
following, which was excavated in Egypt and was no doubt
the work of a clerk in the Ptolemies’ foreign office, must have
been typical. Dated 112B.C., it is addressed to an official in
the chief city of Egypt’s Fayum, Arsinoe or Crocodilopolis
‘Crocodile town’ as it was also called from the presence there
of a sacred crocodile, the local god:

Lucius Memmius, a Roman Senator in a position of consider-

able importance and honour is sailing [up the Nile] from
Alexandria to the district of which Arsinoe is capital to see
 :

INNS AND RESTAURANTS 199

the sights. Receive him and see to it that,

in the grand style,

at the usual points, lodgings are prepared and landing facil-

ities to them are completed, and that the gifts, a list of

. . .

which is attached below, are presented to him at the landing

places.Also provide furniture for the lodgings, the special
food for feeding to Petesouchos [the crocodile god] and the
crocodiles, whatever is needed for a visit to the Labyrinth,
offerings, sacrifices. ... In general, remember to do every-
thing possible to please him; put forth all your efforts.

Memmius, in other words, was to get specially prepared

housing, gifts, and guided tours to the two key sights in the
neighbourhood, the sanctuary of the sacred crocodiles and
the Labyrinth (ioi above). Still another letter, dealing with a
visit that took place a century shows how elaborate
earlier,

such preparations could be. This one is from a local official

who has been asked to get things in order for the arrival of
some notable. He writes

In accordance with your letter, we have made ready for the

visit of Chrysippus, Secretary of Finance and Chief of the
Bodyguard, 10 white-head fowl, 5 domestic geese, 50 fowl;
of game birds, 50 geese, 200 birds, 100 pigeons. We have
borrowed 5 riding donkeys, and have in readiness 40 pack
donkeys. And we are getting on with building the road.
It sounds as if Chrysippus and his fellow travellers totalled
five (exclusive of servants, who would walk), and that their
gear needed no less than forty beasts of burden; they were not
exactly travelling light. They must have come by way of the
Nile, and the poor on top of supplying the animals to
locals,
transport the entourage from the river to their town, had to
fix up the road to take a pack train this size. The distinguished

guests were obviously going to eat well and plentifully if —

they happened to like fowl. Another document of this kind
reveals that, when the governor of Egypt stopped at the town
of Hermopolis in a.d. 145 or a few years later, the combined
resources of dozens of local worthies had to be called upon to
200 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
furnish a proper menu, which, over and above the domestic
and wild fowl that Chrysippus had been served, offered veal,
pork, dried and fresh fish, cheese, olives, lentils, and vegetables.
Obviously playing compulsory host in this fashion could
become a burden. In one of his best-known letters Pliny the
Younger tells how a certain coastal town was forced into
taking drastic action when it suddenly became a tourist
attraction thanks to a remarkable dolphin that one day joined
the children swimming off the beach and from then on
desported with them daily. ‘All the government officials
poured in to see the sight, and the unexpected expense of their
arrival and staying around wore down this modest community.
And, in the last analysis, the place itself was losing its peace
and privacy. So the decision was taken to kill off surreptitiously
5
what was causing the influx.
The ordinary traveller, with no claim on official hospitality,
no well-to-do friends to put him up at their various abodes or
provide letters of recommendation that might secure him such
accommodation, and no staff of servants and pack train to
handle elegant camping equipment, had no alternative he —
put up at an inn.

Anyone making his way along major routes or through

populous districts had no problem: he could choose where to
stop, in places even have a choice of inns. If, for example, he
had left Rome to follow the Appian Way he could, as Horace
did (194 above), put up at Aricia —
or he could end his day’s
journey some four miles short of there at Bovillae and stay
at the inn where Cicero’s bitter enemy Clodius was taken
when wounded and near which he was eventually murdered.
Seventeen miles further along was Tres Tabernae, where the
Disciples met St Paul on his way to Rome; the place must
have derived its name from the presence there of ‘three inns’.
Another ten miles on was Forum Appii, which was ‘full of
nasty tavern keepers’, as Horace reported (194 above), and
most taverns had rooms for travellers.
 INNS AND RESTAURANTS 201

on the other hand, he was making his way through open

If,

country, he had to bed down at whatever lonely lodging

house he managed to reach by nightfall. They were available
along most highways, strategically placed, as we have seen
(189 above), a day’s travel apart. Often, in the course of time,
such solitary inns sparked the growth of settlements about
them which came to bear their names. This is the only way to
explain such place-names as Rufini Taberna, ‘Ruflnus’ Inn’,
a Roman hamlet in north Africa, or Ad Stabulum, ‘By the
country inn’, a Roman Narbonne in southern
village near
France, or the Tres Tabernae on the Appian Way, or a
host of others. Quite a few modern place-names can be
traced back to ancient village names that arose in this fashion.
Zabern, between Strassbourg and Metz, is simply a version of
Tabernae ‘The inns’; the same word is the ultimate source of
such French place-names as Saverne, Tavers, Tavernieres,
Tavernolles.
Archeologists have uncovered a few isolated country inns
(cf. Fig. 15) in western Europe that must have belonged to
Rome’s comprehensive public post. In Styria, a district of
Austria, they brought to light what was very likely a standard-
sized Roman
roadhouse, a mansio (184 above); built in the
reign of Augustus, it remained in continuous use for the next
three hundred years. It was a two-storey oblong structure,
measuring roughly 40 feet by 70, set with one of the short
sides fronting the road. Paralleling one of the long sides was
a court for wagons and carriages. The ground floor included
dozen or so animals, a repair shop
a stable that could handle a
complete with blacksmith’s forge, an office, a kitchen measur-
ing some feet by 19J and a dining-room of about the
feet,

same size. Office, kitchen, and dining-room all faced south,

and the last in addition had hot-air ducts under the floor, the
usual Roman system for heating a chamber. The upper floor,
now gone because it was probably of wood, must
entirely
have contained the bedrooms (cf. Fig. 15).
A much more elaborate mansio also built in the first cen-
,

G*
202 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
tury a.d. and used until the fourth, has been laid bare at the
top of the Little St Bernard Pass, which carried over the Alps
one of the main routes between Italy and France. It was a
complex of stables and court and buildings that covered a
total area of some 60 feet by 216. One half of this oblong was
given over to a court approximately 36 by 75 surrounded
feet

on three sides by two floors of chambers; most of those

preserved measure roughly 16J feet by 16J, and a few are
much longer. The rooms on the second storey were entered
from an outside gallery, which, projecting over the court,
provided a certain amount of covered space below. The lower
storey must have included the public rooms and some bed-
rooms, the upper only bedrooms. The other half of the
building was given over to stables, repair shop, and so on.
There are no traces of heating ducts, so the rooms must have
had fireplaces or braziers.
Even an example of what was probably a mutatio (184 above),
a simple hostel, has been found, near the top of the pass that
brought the road from Aquileia over the Alps to Yugoslavia.
Again we have a rectangular building, although this time much
smaller than the two others, only about 47 J feet long and
21 wide. It was divided into three rooms, a central chamber
flanked by a kitchen on one side and a bedroom on the other.
The kitchen was of modest size (5 feet by 12J), and the
bedroom tiny (3 feet by 7J), leaving the lion’s share of the
available space to the central hall. All three rooms were well
heated, as we would expect in an Alpine lodge, the kitchen by
its hearth, the bedroom by a fireplace, and the long chamber
by The bedroom was perhaps
a floor fitted with hot air ducts.
for the landlord, to be surrendered, when occasion called, to
exalted or well-heeled guests; the long chamber probably took
care of the ordinary clientele, serving as refectory during the
day and dormitory during the night. The stables, forge, and
other facilities must have been in sheds back of or alongside
the main house.
In the Greek world, the traditional inn of earlier times
 :

INNS AND RESTAURANTS 203

(88 above) was a square or oblong courtyard for accommo-

dating animals and vehicles, on all which was a line of
sides of
more or less identical rooms for their owners or drivers. In
the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire this
type apparently lived on to become the spacious khans of the
Near East, for these are laid out in just that way. In the barren
region east of the Dead Sea there still stand the imposing
ruins of a building erected in late Roman or Byzantine times,
that is exactly like a khan and has its generous proportions. It

is square, with each side measuring about 150 feet, and

embraces a yard roughly 100 feet square, providing plenty of
space for unloading, feeding, and stabling pack-animals. The
rooms along each side were also generous, averaging some
20 by 13 feet or better, and there were even some two-room
suites.

The only other type of inn known from the Greek east is

represented by Olympia for housing distinguished

a pair at
visitors to the games; one was put up in the first half of the
second century a.d. and, when this was turned to some other
use, a replacement was put up in the second half. Like the inn
that stood on the grounds five hundred years before (90 above)
for the same purpose, these consisted of a gracious patio
surrounded by public rooms and by bed chambers of ample
size; in the earlier of the two buildings, for example, the

smallest bedrooms were io£ feet square, and most were larger,
many of them considerably so.
There is much more known about inns in the Latin-
speaking part of the empire. As we have just seen, excavators
have brought to light several examples of inns maintained for
the cursus publicus along the open road; what is more, they
have uncovered in the ruins of Ostia and Herculaneum and
Pompeii any number of the kind to be found along city streets.
And, in addition to such physical remains, Roman writings,
especially of the jurists, tell a good deal about the facilities and
personnel of inns in general.
The country inn furnished the traveller the basic minimum
204 travel in the ancient world
food, a night’s lodging, and, if he was using hired vehicles or
animals, a change of either or both. But even in a major centre,
as it happens, he could not look for very much more.
We are told that a series of resort hotels or nightclubs lined
the canal linking Alexandria with Canopus. Perhaps Rome or
other great metropolises boasted similar facilities. But even if

they did, such establishments were rare exceptions. The

average public house in town was a workaday no-nonsense
place for housing the rank-and-file traveller overnight, the
equivalent of our commercial railway hotels. People who had
to spend more than a few days in a place and had no friends
or associates to offer them hospitality, nor any letters of
recommendation, took hired lodgings, as St Paul did during
his stay in Rome. Owners of private houses used to rent out
rooms, just as they do today —and the problems were the
same, to judge from a plaque which one resigned owner
displayed ; in Latin verse he announced :

If you’re clean and neat, then here’s a house

ready and waiting for you.
If you’re dirty — well, I’m shamed to say
it, but you’re welcome too.

The transient, however, most often put up at an inn, and even

respectable inns, the ones the Romans generally dignified by
the neutral terms hospitium ‘place for hospitality’ or deverso -
rium ‘place for turning aside’, included prostitutes among the
services offered, while the kind they called a caupona was
distinctly low class: it catered to sailors and carters and slaves;
itsdining-room had more the atmosphere of a saloon than a
restaurant; and the caupo (or copo ), as one who ran a caupona
was called, was of the same social and moral level as his
establishment. Indeed, caupones , along with ships’ captains
and owners of livery stables, were the subject of special legisla-

tion, since a traveller was completely at their mercy, and the

law was aware that, as a group, they were hardly noted for
scrupulous honesty. Ordinarily Roman law allowed a person
 INNS AND RESTAURANTS 205

who had been robbed to look for satisfaction only from the
thief —which admittedly made things hard since a thief first
had to be caught. However, a guest at an inn or a passenger on
a ship whose baggage had been stolen had the right to institute
proceedings against the innkeeper or the ship’s captain; the
one was legally responsible for the acts of his maids and
servants, the other for those of his sailors. There must have
been some bounds set to their liability; after all, if the victim
happened to be a courier entrusted with, say, a bagful of gems,
this could be disastrous for a poor caupo whose only mistake

was to assign to bedroom cleaning a slave who was not proof

against temptation. Roman law allowed a proprietor of general
storage facilities to post notices to the effect that ‘he did not
receive gold, silver, or pearls at his risk’; probably inn-
keepers, then as now, could do the same.
The one clear advantage of spending a night in a town as
against a country inn — at least in a fair-sized town —was that
it could offer a selection of accommodations and, as we shall

see in a moment, a choice of entertainment as well. The

traveller would come upon inns even before he reached the
town proper; they lined the roads outside the city limits just
as rows of lodgings catering to motorists do today. Most of
these would be the kind the Romans called a stabulum an ,

establishment which, like its country cousin, had a courtyard

for handling vehicles and a place to stable animals for the
night. Just inside the gates would be more inns, and there
were still others in and around town centre.
Inns in town were not hard to identify. Even a traveller
arriving late at night could spot them, by the lamp they kept
lighted over the door. During the day there were the street-
front bars, the standard eating facility of an inn in town, to
distinguish them or a sign with an appropriate picture to
illustrate the establishment’s name. The names have a familiar
ring, since they belong to a tradition that has lasted in Europe
to this day: there were inns named after animals (The Elephant,
The Camel, The Little Eagle, The Hind, The Cock, The
 20 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Serpents), after things(The Wheel, The Sword), after deities
(The Diana, the Mercury and Apollo). Often the facade was
gaily decorated with relevant murals, such as wine jars, or,
depending on the trade the owner catered to, erotic scenes. In
addition to the nature and general condition of the external
decor, posted notices helped the potential client make his
choice. A The Mercury and
plaque that once stood outside
Apollo in Lyons reads ‘Here Mercury promises you wealth,
Apollo health, and Septumanus [the inn-keeper] room and
board. Whoever comes will be the better for it afterwards.
Traveller —
keep an eye on where you will put up!’ One
uncovered at Antibes announces, ‘Traveller, listen. If you like,
come inside; there is a bronze plaque which will tell you
everything’ — in other words, a posted list of prices (they
must have been fairly stable to have been engraved on bronze).
A most elaborate notice has survived which was carved in
Greek on the portico in front of some inn in Egypt. Written
in heroic verse a la Homer, it proclaims

The walls of Thebes were razed and destroyed.

But this wall of mine has never known either Ares,
who with hate raises the din of war, or the
deeds and cries of enemies.
Here flourish banquets with grand talk, and
crowds of youths gathered from all over;
Here is heard the call of the flute, not of the bugle;
Here the soil is drenched with blood of butchered
cattle, not men;
Here we dress ourselves in white robes, not armour.
Not the sword but the cup is what our banqueters use.
All night long with good cheer we sing the Sun-God’s
praises, our heads wreathed with garlands.

No doubt in many an establishment the owner or manager

stood in the doorway and did his best to hawk customers in.

In a lively little poem attributed to Virgil, a lady innkeeper, to

tempt a tired and weary traveller, raves about the charm and
 INNS AND RESTAURANTS 207

cool of her place, reels off the plats du jour , and assures him he
will find not only Ceres and Bromius, i.e. bread and wine, but
also Amor. A found in a town in southeast Italy amus-
relief

ingly summarizes the range of services an ancient inn pro-

vided. It pictures an innkeeper, female as in the poem just
mentioned, talking with a departing guest, and above the
figures is inscribed the dialogue they are carrying on:

‘Innkeeper, let’s reckon up the bill.’

‘One sextarius of wine [about a pint] and bread,

one as. Food, two asses'
‘Correct.’
‘Girl, eight asses.'

‘Correct again.’
‘Hay for the mule, two asses.'
‘That mule will be the death of me!’

The wine, so cheap it was reckoned in with the bread and not
separately, was surely local stuff. No mention is made of a
room; since the guest could hardly have had a girl without
one, maybe the eight asses covered both.
A stabulum an inn at the edge of town with accommodation
,

for vehicles and animals, could not afford to spread itself the

way those in the open country could. One found at Pompeii

had on the ground floor facing the street an antechamber,
flanked on either side by modest-sized rooms for kitchen,
restaurant, and reception, and, tucked in a corner, the latrine.
Going through the antechamber, you came out at the back
into a court-yard where wagons could be unharnessed and
left; at the rear was a shelter that served as a stable. A second

storey was given over to bedrooms; there were some bedrooms

as well on the first floor opening onto the court. The inns
within town, intended for lodging only guests, lacked the
antechamber and court; on the ground floor were kitchen,
restaurant, reception, latrine, and perhaps a few bedrooms,
with most of the bedrooms on the second floor. The restaurants
generally had a separate street entrance of their own since, as
208 travel in the ancient world
we shall see shortly, like the grill-rooms of modern hotels,
they catered to the general public and not just the inn’s clients.

The inns found at Pompeii are all small, rarely with more
than a dozen or so rooms to rent. But Pompeii was just a
provincial town, and larger and more active centres could well
have supported, at least in desirable locations, bigger facilities.

In the heart of Rome, few steps from the forum, a

just a
building has been uncovered which had more than thirty
nearly identical rooms, windowless little cells they measured —
as a rule a scant five to six and a half feet by six that were —
entered from narrow low corridors. The place was either a
cheap rooming-house or brothel. It lasted in its choice location
until, along with everything else nearby, was demolished toit

make way for the grandiose park Nero laid out around his
sumptuous new palace, the Golden House.
As far back as the earliest days of travel, innkeeping was
often a woman’s job (37 above), and this continued right on
into Roman times. If she ran a caupona she was called a copa
, ,

even as the male equivalent was called a copo The keeper of a .

hospitium or deversorium was a hospes 'host’. Frequently

owners of inns, instead of running them personally, used an
institor , a manager, either a freedman or a slave. The rest of
the staff —the doorman ( atriarius or ianitor ), bellboys and
porters and waiters (minis tri, pueri ), barmaids vinariae
(- cf.

Fig. 16), cleaning girls (

ministrae , ancillae) —were usually
The boys and maids would
slave. shoulder the luggage and
accompany the guest to his room (< cella ), most often of very
modest and to be shared with as many fellow guests as the
size

innkeeper could cram in. The furniture was minimal: bed

(lectus or lectulus ‘cot’), mattress (>matella ), and candle-holder

would look the mattress

(candelabrum). Experienced travellers
over carefully since bedbugs were so common they were
known as cauponarum aestiva animalia 'the summertime
creatures of the inns’. The apocryphal Acts ofJohn tells a story
of how the Apostle dealt with these nuisances during a trip
he took from Laodicea to Ephesus. He and his companions
 INNS AND RESTAURANTS 209

spent the night at an abandoned inn. Perhaps it had been

abandoned for the very reason that the bedbug population
had increased beyond the tolerance point, because, during the
night, John, who had been given the only bed, was heard to
call out, ‘I say unto you, O bugs, behave yourselves, one and

all, and leave your abode for this one night and remain quiet

in one place, and keep your distance from the servants of

God.’ The others who, stretched out on the floor, were spared
the problem, giggled at their leader’s discomfiture — yet,
thereafter, the Apostle slept in utter peace, and the next
morning they found all the bugs dutifully lined up outside
the front door.
The decor of the average inn was minimal, with some of it

not infrequently contributed by previous guests who had

vented their feelings by scribbling on the bedroom walls.
‘Vibius Resti tutus slept alone here and yearned for his Urbana’
wrote one faithful lover or husband who had spent the night
at an inn in Pompeii. ‘Innkeeper, I pissed in the bed. I did
wrong, I admit it. Want know why? There was no
to
mattress!’ is the snarl another has left. One homesick traveller
scrawled his fond goodbyes to his home town, Puteoli. Some,
in the Kilroy tradition, simply inscribed their names.
Having deposited his baggage in the room, the traveller
would probably be interested in washing. This was
hardly a problem: no town of any size was without that
ubiquitous feature of Roman life, well-equipped public baths.
Here he would find a swimming pool and all that is provided
in a —
modern turkish bath indeed, these were given their
name by early British visitors to Constantinople who, seeing
the old Roman baths still in operation, jumped to the conclu-
sion that they were a Turkish invention. He might spend
long leisurely hours there, inasmuch as the ordinary Roman
public bath offered much more than just bathing facilities:

gymnasiums, beauty treatments, concerts, art exhibitions,

lectures, promenades, and the chance of meeting and chatting
with practically everybody in town. If he was hungry, he
210 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
could pick up a bite from a food vendor ( lixa ) or at one of
the bars in the bath complex.
There were usually a few inns located conveniently near
the public baths, but they were not for guests seeking peace
and quiet. The Roman philosopher Seneca once hired lodgings
over a bath, and his description of the noise that came up from
below is hair-raising:

I live right over a public bath. Just imagine every kind of

human sound to make us hate our ears! When the muscular
types work out and toss the lead weights, when they strain
(or make believe they’re straining), I hear the grunting, and
whenever they let out the breath they’ve been holding in,

there’s the whistling and wheezing at maximum pitch. If it’s

a lazy type I’m up against, someone satisfied with the cheap

massage given here, I have to hear the crack of the hand as
it hits the shoulders, one sound when it’s the flat of the hand,
another when it’s the cupped hand. But if a ball-player arrives
on the scene and begins to count shots, then I’m done for.

Add the toughs looking for a fight, the thieves caught in the
act, and the people who enjoy hearing themselves sing in the
bath-tub. Add also the people who dive into the pool with
a deafening splash. On top of all these, who at least make
ordinary sounds, don’t forget the hair-removal expert forever
forcing out that thin screech of his to advertise his services
and only shutting up when he’s plucking a customer’s arm-
pits and can make someone else do the yelping for him. Then
there’s the drinkseller with his various cries, the sausage-
seller, the cake-seller, and all the managers of the restaurants,

each hawking his wares with his own special intonation.

When night fell, no inn within the city limits could guarantee
its guests quiet since, with sunset, there began the creaking of
cart wheels, cracking of whips, and swearing of muleteers.
This was because any number of towns and cities, Rome
included, banned almost all wheeled traffic from the streets
 —

INNS AND RESTAURANTS 211

during daylight hours, and heavy transport had to take place

between dusk and dawn.
If the traveller, having sampled all the baths had to offer,
still felt in the mood for diversion he could try one of the
local brothels; he might even be lucky enough to find a new
one in town, its presence announced by an oil lamp over the
door burning all day as well as all night. If he preferred a more
restful ambiente , he could return to his room and send down
for one of the maids, who doubled as prostitutes; in a lonely
country inn, this was just about the only entertainment
available. When dinnertime came, his servants would buy
food and serve it in the room. There was also room service
the inn’s kitchen could on request send up a meal. Or he
could eat at a restaurant, if he did not mind the atmosphere

which brings us to the subject of ancient restaurants.

The traveller who elected to eat out would sally forth in

search of a satisfactory kapeleion or potisterion as it would be

called in a Greek-speaking city, popina or taberna in a Latin-
speaking one. If he wanted to go further afield than the
facility run by his own inn or any of those nearby, he could
find an ample selection almost anywhere in town: near the
city gates, around the baths, theatre, gladiator barracks, forum,
and so on. At Pompeii, for example, the main street, which
was a little over 600 yards long, boasted as many as twenty of
various kinds and grades, an average of one every thirty yards.
If he was in a hurry and wanted just a quick bite, but some-
thing more than he could pick up from a street vendor, he
would stop form of taberna which was the
at the simplest ,

ancient equivalent of a snack bar (Fig. 17). It had a marble-

topped counter opening on to the street, which ran from the
side wall to the doorway, generally a distance of some six to
eight feet or so. Often the counter, after running its distance
to the doorway, made a right-angled turn into the shop to
provide a few more feet of counter space. At Pompeii the
surface of the marble tops was broken every few feet by the
212 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
gaping mouth of a big clay wine- jar embedded in the masonry
that supported the counter, and, near the end, by an emplace-
ment for a little charcoal-burning furnace where a kettle of
hot water was kept simmering. Against the wall at which the
counter ended was a series of marble-topped shallow shelves,
on which glassware,
rising in steps like a miniature staircase,
plates, etc. were kept. The shop proper was a tiny cell accom-
modating the counterman, who was usually the owner, his
assistants— who would normally be his wife and grown
children or his slaves —
a clutch of big jars of wine for
replenishing those set in the counter, a basin for washing
tableware, and a narrow staircase which led to a little mezza-
nine where the family slept. The customer would stand in the
street, and what he ordered would be slapped down on the

counter in front of him: wine, ladled from one of the jugs,

bread, a cut of sausage, and the like. An ancient Roman,
planted in front of the bar of such a taberna , munching his
piece of meat and guzzling his glass of wine, is the forbear of
the clients of today’s espresso bars.
If a traveller was tired of being on his feet and wanted to sit

down, or was looking for entertainment as well as a meal, he

would go to a popina (Fig. 16). Its streetward aspect was little
different from a snack bar’s; it had the same counter and set of
stepped shelves. However, adjoining would be at least two
small rooms, a kitchen with a charcoal fire for cooking, and a
dining-room fitted with tables and chairs. More elaborate
popinae had several dining-rooms, a few private rooms for
dalliance as well as eating, and latrines. The dimensions were
always modest. In a typical popina at Pompeii, the main
dining-room measures 6J feet by 14!, while the two private
rooms are cells roughly 6J feet square. Some popinae had an
open court for eating al fresco and this could offer some
,

elbowroom. Near the amphitheatre at Pompeii was a popina

with a grape arbour 60 feet long and 30 wide; on days when
games were scheduled and the weather was good, it must
have been thronged with customers who, seated under
 INNS AND RESTAURANTS 213

the vines, enjoyed a cool glass of wine in refreshing

shade.
The ancients preferred to eat reclining rather than seated,
and there generally were a few better class popinae in town
whose dining-rooms had tables surrounded on three sides by
couches rather than chairs. To dine seated was for the poor
or hurried, the equivalent of our eating perched on a bar stool.
The emphasis in every one of these establishments, from the
street-counter snack bar to the restaurant with couches, was on
drink as much were all bars as well as cafes.
as food: they
Their stock-in-trade was presumably cheap local wine, but
even a very modest establishment could usually satisfy custo-
mers who were interested in something better. One popina in
Pompeii has a picture of a servant pouring out wine and the
caption reads, ‘A cup of Sedan, too’, i.e. wine from Setia, a
town in the hills north of Terracina that produced a fine
quality. Another shows a picture of a girl identified as Vinaria
Hedone ‘Hedone, the barmaid’, and the caption goes on to say:
‘Drinks served for one as; if you pay double, you will drink
better; if you pay quadruple, you will drink Falernian’;
Falernian, famous through Horace’s loving references to it,

was Italy’s prize wine. Even imported wines of Spain and

France and Greece were available in the popinae of Italy; very
likely Italian and other western wines could be had in the
kapeleia and potisteria of the cities in the eastern part of the
empire. And, to the north, in Gaul for example, taverns
served beer.
The ancients never drank wine straight; they always added
water. This one reason why a simmering kettle was so
is

standard a feature on a wineshop’s counter: customers often

ordered hot toddies, wine with warm water. (In poor neigh-
bourhoods, the wineshop’s kettle performed a further service:
it helped out the many local inhabitants whose quarters were
so cramped they had no facilities for heating their own water.)
Cooled drinks, on the other hand, were only obtainable at a
taberna or popina that had a well in which jugs could be
214 travel in the ancient world
stored suspended at the end of a line (91 above), or at a country
inn on a brook, where the jugs could be kept submerged in the
cooling waters. At the banquets of the high and mighty, wine
was sometimes chilled with snow (19 1 above), but this expensive
procedure was not for the likes of ordinary inns or restaurants.
Bartenders also served more complicated drinks than merely
the standard mix of wine and water, types of wine punch
involving seasoning with various spices and sweetening with
honey (sugar was practically unknown to the ancient world).
The drinks were served in ample cups which often bore
inscriptions that presumably tickled the fancy of the customers
5 5 5
‘Give me a drink! ,
‘Fill it up, bartender! ,
up again! ,
‘Fill it
5
‘Another! more specifically, ‘Let’s
,
or, have some punch,
5
bartender! or still more specifically, ‘Spare me the resinated
,
5
stuff! Give me Amineum! (Amineum was a fine Italian wine).

In mixing wine with water, there was always a precise

amount to be added depending upon the wine, more with
heavy wines, less with light. The ancients complained about
the adulteration of wine by crooked innkeepers or owners of
popinae as much as we do about the watering of mixed drinks
by unscrupulous bartenders. One irate customer scribbled on
the wall of a tavern at Pompeii, taking the time to put his out-
burst into quite respectable verse:

May you soon, swindling innkeeper,

Feel the anger divine,
You who sell people water
And yourself drink pure wine.

The innkeeper who ‘watered wine

5
— i.e. watered the stuff
that he was selling as presumably pure wine appears in —
literature from at least the seventh century b.c. on: ‘Your wine
5
is watered ,
railed the prophet Isaiah, addressing the city of
Jerusalem. The satirist Martial, who spent his fair share of
time in the popinae of Rome and elsewhere, directed the
following shaft at one offender:
 :

INNS AND RESTAURANTS 215

The rains this year left sopping wet

on every vine.
the grapes
So, barman, don’t you try to say
there’s no water in your wine.

At Ravenna, Martial ran into the reverse of the coin. In this

marshy area good drinking water was so scarce it cost more
than wine. Martial complains that

A Ravenna barman did me in.

He well knew how to cheat:

I order up a standard mix,
And he serves it to me neat.

Cheating apparently could go on in the kitchen as well as

the bar, though not nearly to the same extent. The Roman
physician Galen, for example, in describing human flesh as
tasting very much like swine’s, adds that he ‘knows of many
innkeepers and butchers who have been caught selling human
flesh as pork, and the diners were totally unaware of any
difference.’ The perpetrators of such frauds were no doubt
helped by the fact that the meat at a popina ran to the poorer
cuts well roasted or well stewed and probably highly seasoned.
The exotic creations of Roman cookery that we hear so much
about were for the haut monde not the clientele of restaurants.
,

Wining and dining was only part of a popina s function; it

was also a place of entertainment, affording at once the facilities
of a night-club, gambling den, and brothel. You went there to
spend the whole evening or, if you were a popino ‘barfly’, to
spend the day as well, since popinae opened for business about
eleven a.m. or earlier. Many an establishment offered music
and dancing; in the poem attributed to Virgil mentioned
above, the innkeeper, a Syrian girl, put on some of her native
oriental shimmies for the customers. Most had prostitutes
available. The preserved remains of popinae at Pompeii reveal
that frequently one or more rooms were decorated with the
phallus erectus or with erotic scenes, clear enough indication
21 6 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
of their use; some customers proudly noted in scribblings on
c

the wall that they had had intercourse with the proprietress’
herself. And all offered gambling. ‘Serve him wine and the
dice’, says the Syrian innkeeper in Virgil’s poem; the two went
naturally together.
A popina at Pompeii has the walls of a room decorated with
scenes, complete with captions, which give a good idea of the
activities carried on there. In one, we see a serving girl bringing
a jug and a glass to two seated customers. ‘This way!’ says
one of the two. ‘No! It’s mine!’ says the other. And the girl,
exasperated, retorts, Hey, Ocean
‘Whoever wants it, take it!

[this addressed to a fanciful third person to whom she gives an

appropriate name], come on and drink!’ Two other of the

scenes follow in sequence. In the first we see two customers
seated around a table playing dice. One has just thrown and
says triumphantly, ‘I’m out!’ The other replies, ‘No! It’s

three 2’s.’ In the next scene there are three figures, all on their
feet. The first two are our pair of gamblers and one is saying,
‘So strike me dead — I swear I won!’ The second replies by
calling him a filthy obscenity and shouts, ‘/ won!’ And the
third, the proprietor, pushing the two toward the door, says,
‘Go on outside to do your fighting.’
It follows from all we have said that ancient restaurants

catered to a clientele of no very high level. If you went to one,

your fellow diners would be muleteers, sailors, pedlars, and
the like. Juvenal, the mordant Roman satirist, sneers at a
certain wealthy aristocrat who frequented a popina at Ostia,
the port town of Rome: ‘You will find him at table with some
thug, mingling with sailors, crooks, and runaways in a crowd
of hangmen, low-class morticians’ assistants, and eunuch
drunk to beat their tambourines.’ Many a popina
priests too
must have been a low dive of this sort, the ones that Cicero
claims Mark Antony haunted, or those that, according to
Nero’s biographer, the emperor made the rounds of as soon as
night fell. To the very lowest level must belong a popina of
the first century a.d. discovered at Catania in Sicily. It can be
 —

INNS AND RESTAURANTS 217

identified by on the wall of what was

the messages scratched
£

probably the dining-room, one of which reads: i 6 August,

Festival of Lady Ceres. Here three young fellows read their —
names: Onesimus, Lucius Valerius Ersianus, Filumenus had —
a good time, one of them, the last named, with a woman’
and the other two presumably with each other. The adding of
the date was important: it showed they deliberately chose the
solemn holiday when women were supposed to observe nine
days of chastity to carry on this way. The names reveal that
two of the men were Greek slaves and the third a freedman.
The woman is unnamed since she was just hired for the
occasion.
It was establishments of this ilk that the aediles, the city

officials in charge of, among other things, inns and restaurants,

had to crack down on so often. In the first century a.d. the
Roman emperors were still interested in attempting to improve
the moral tone of the capital, and one of their devices was to
try to cut down the activity of Rome’s popinae by limiting
the foods they could serve. Tiberius banned bread and cakes,
Claudius banned cooked meats and hot water and shut down
completely those places that sold only wine and no food,
Nero allowed only the sale of vegetable dishes, Vespasian
only peas and beans. That each emperor had to institute a new
decree reveals how much more these regulations were
honoured in the breach than the observance, and, after
Vespasian, we hear of no further efforts in this direction.
Since popinae serviced the lowest ranks of society, the
decor could not help but reflect this. Wall paintings ran to the
scatological, as well as the erotic. In a popina at Ostia, one
room is decorated with a series of portraits of impressive
looking men, pictures of first-rate quality done by a skilled
professional artist. They represent the 'Seven Sages of Anti-
quity’, and each sage’s portraitaccompanied by a line of
is

writing purporting to summarize his philosophy his philoso- —

phy, in this case, with regard to the actions of the bowels:
‘To promote a good movement, Solon used to rub his belly’;
2l8 travel in the ancient world
5
‘Thales advises the constipated to push hard ;
‘The subtle
Chilon taught the art of breaking wind silently’. Below the
portraits appear a line of men obviously manning the seats in
a latrine, and each figure has an appropriate caption: ‘Put some
effort into it and you’ll get there quicker’; ‘I’m hurrying’;
“Have a good move-
‘Friend, you’re forgetting the proverb:
ment and screw the doctors”.’ It was inevitable that the
Church, when it achieved power, would pass a rule allowing
priests to eat at restaurants only when on the road, where
there was no alternative.

So, a traveller, having filled in his daylight hours pleasantly at

a public bath, could while away equally pleasant evening hours
at a popina , chatting or taking an occasional turn at the dice,

or, if the spirit moved him, having a session in a back room

with one of the girls. If the last piqued his appetite for further
diversion of this sort, he could move on to a fully equipped
brothel.
As early as the third millennium b.c., the city-states of Meso-
potamia had devised a government postal system (36 above).
Assyria worked up an expanded form to meet the needs of
her far-flung empire, and Persia further refined this to create
the service that so impressed Herodotus (53 above). Even
Persia’s minuscule neighbours, the city-states of Greece, had
their means of communication, staffs of 'day-
organized
runners’ or ‘herald-runners’ who, tirelessly reeling off mile
after mile at a steady trot, delivered the formal messages that
one state addressed to another. And, of course, from Augustus’
time on there was the sophisticated cursus publicus of the
Roman Empire.
But all government use only or for the
these were for —
favoured few who managed to avail themselves of the facilities
through bribery or influence. Private citizens did not get a
service specifically intended for their own needs until as late

as the seventeenth century, when Charles II of England

established the London ‘Penny Post’. Before then all they
could do was improvise.
Well-to-do Greeks or Romans were better off in this as in
so many other respects in effect they supplied their
: own post-
men. Among their slaves they included a certain number
whose prime duty was to serve as couriers, grammatophoroi
‘letter carriers’ as they were called in Greek, tabellarii ‘tablet
men’ in Latin. Family and friends living near to each other
used to pool their couriers in order to increase the opportun-
220 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
ities to get off or receive a letter. was basically a catch-
But it

as-catch-can arrangement; there never were enough carriers

to meet the needs, and delays were inevitable. Tor many days
I have had a letter on my hands waiting for a courier’, laments

Cicero in a note to his brother. The opposite side of the coin

was to have to dash off some lines at breakneck speed to take
advantage of an available carrier. We find Cicero complaining
to a correspondent that:

you have preposterous couriers . .

.
they clamour for a letter

—
when they leave me yet when they come they bring none.
Anyway, they’d oblige me more if they’d only give me a
moment to write something, but in they come, hat on head,
and tell me their mates are waiting for them at the gate.

When, under the emperors, the official government post was

in operation, even the wealthy found it convenient to pull
strings and have their correspondence travel in the govern-
ment pouch.
The vast majority of letter writers, of course, had neither
couriers nor the pouch available to them. Their only recourse
was to find some traveller who happened to be heading in the
right direction. This is what correspondents did whether
writing in the second millennium b.c. (37 above) or the second
century a.d. ‘Finding somebody going your way from Cyrene,
I felt I had to let you know
was safe and sound’, writes a
I

young Greek en route to Rome from Egypt in the second

century a.d. ‘I was delighted to receive your letter’, writes a
Greek living in Egypt in the third a.d., ‘which was given to
me by the sword-maker; the one you say you sent with
Platon, the dancer’s son, I haven’t got yet.’ ‘I sent you two
other letters,’ writes another in a.d. 41, ‘one by Nedymos and
one by Kronios, the armed guard. I’ve received the one you
sent with the Arab.’ Cicero himself at times could do no less.
‘Have Acastus [a servant] go down to the waterfront daily’,
he writes while en route to Italy to his secretary, who was then
in Patras, ‘because there will be lots of people to whom you
 MAIL 221

can entrust letters and who will be glad to bring them to me.
At my end I won’t overlook a soul who is headed toward
Patras.’ Travellers, we gather, had no objections to filling the
role of —
postman it was, after all, the only way they could get
word to anyone themselves.
Not only delivery but the very writing of a letter was a
much more complicated business than now. There were no
such things as pencils, nor convenient types of pen. The only
writing instrument was a reed pen, and ink was of lampblack,
gum, and water that normally had to be mixed for the occa-
sion. The Greeks and Romans usually used papyrus for
letters, a kind of paper made up of razor-thin slices from the
pith of the papyrus reed, which was almost as good and
convenient as the heavier types of modern paper. It was, how-
ever, vastly more expensive; ancient correspondents did not
as a rule go There were no envelopes,
in for lengthy missives.
so, when the writer had put down all he had to say, he rolled
the sheet up, or folded it, keeping the message on the inside
surface, addressed it, tied it about, and, to seal it, fixed a blob
of clay or wax to the tie and impressed his seal on it. The
address was usually very simple, e.g. ‘To Apollinarius from
his brother Irenaeus’; there was no need for anything more,
since the person who agreed to make delivery was going to
the addressee’s town or and would be told by the
village
sender just what street and house to go to.
Mail moved quite fast over short distances. Cicero, in his
villas near Naples, used to get letters from Rome in four or
five days on the average; the Italian post office does not do
much better today. But long distances, particularly when
crossing water was involved, was another matter. The courier
checked the waterfront to see if any ships were sailing in his
direction and, if none were, all he could do was sit around
and hope. A letter Cicero wrote from Rome to his son in
Athens took over seven weeks, while another from Rome to
Athens took only three. In the first case the carrier
had to wait
for a ship, in the second he had the luck to find one right
222 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
away —which must have been unusual, since Cicero com-
ments that the letter arrived sane strenue ‘mighty quickly’.
Cicero’s secretary once wrote to him from Patras,and the
letter arrived at Brindisi fifteen days later, even though the
distance involved could have been covered, all things being
equal, in three. From Africa to Rome was a three-day trip,
yet it once took twenty for a letter from there to reach Cicero.
Some letters from Syria to Rome arrived in fifty days, others
needed double that time.
A number of home by random
letters sent travellers or
tourists have been preserved. They were all addressed to
people living in Egypt, where they were unearthed in the last

hundred years; the recipients tossed them into the rubbish

heap, and, since the valley of the Nile in places gets practically
no rainfall, there they remained intact, or nearly so, until the
archeologist’s spade brought them to light. They are written
in Greek, the language of the middle and upper class living

in Egypt in the days of the Roman empire. Most do just what

travellers’ letters do in any age — report safe arrival. ‘Having
arrived on someone in the second cen-
Italian soil’, writes
tury A.D., ‘I felt it essential to let you know that I and all with
me are fine. We had a slow voyage but not an unpleasant one.’
‘Dear Mother,’ writes a young naval recruit also sometime in
the second century a.d., ‘greetings! I hope you are well. I’m
fine. ... I beg you to know, Mother, that I arrived in Rome

on Pachon 25 [20 May] in good health, and was posted to [the

naval base at] Misenum, though I don’t know the name of
my ship yet. ... I beg you, Mother, take care of yourself and
don’t worry about me; I’ve come to a fine place. Please write
telling me you’re all right, and how my brothers are, and your
whole family. And whenever I find someone [going your way]
I’ll write you
— —
I won’t put off writing to you. Remember me

to and here follows a long list of names of friends and

’

family. Another recruit in telling that he had arrived safely

mentions his giving ‘grateful thanks to the god Serapis who
came right away to my rescue when I was in danger on the
 MAIL 223

sea.’ And have already cited (128 above) the letter of an

I

Alexandrian businessman informing a brother of his arrival

at Rome.
On occasion a letter announced a safe arrival that very
nearly wasn’t. In the latter part of the third century a.d., when
the long years of the pax romana were at an end and the
empire was plagued by frequent breakdowns of law and order,
a certain Psois, who had just come back from a trip, writes to
a friend in Hermopolis: ‘Just as we were rejoicing at being
about to arrive home, we fell by bandits at
into an attack
Mt Maro, and some of us were killed Thank god I escaped
. . .

with just being stripped clean. I wanted to come your way to

tell you what happened to us, but I couldn’t and went directly

to Oxyrhynchus . God willing I’ll come for the festival in

. .

Phaophi [October]. I hope you are well.’ And here is a letter,

also of the third century a.d., from a lady who, held up not by
bandits but by such time-honoured traveller’s troubles as
missing connections and running short of funds, never arrived
at all:

Dear Mother,
First and foremost I pray to God to find you in good
health. I want you to know that on Tybi 13 [8 January] I
went to Tyrannis but I found no way I could get to you,
since the camel-drivers didn’t want to go to Oxyrhynchus.
Not only that, I also went up to Antinoe to take a boat, but
didn’t find any. So now I’ve thought it best to forward the
baggage to Antinoe and wait there until I find a boat and can
sail. Please give the bearers of this letter 2 talents and

300 drachmas in compensation for what I asked and received

from them in Tyrannis to pay for transportation. Don’t delay
them even an hour ... If you know you don’t have it at
hand, borrow it and pay them, since they can’t wait
. . .

around even an hour. See to it that you don’t fail me and

hold up these people who have been so nice to me. My
regards to [and here follows a series of names].
224 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Many letters reveal the traveller’s traditional hunger for
news from home. ‘Dear Mother’, writes a particularly anxious
son sometime in the third or fourth century a.d.,

I am writing to you via our Heliodorus [i.e., the family

servant who from Caesarea, where I intend
carried the letter]
to go off to Cappadocia, in good health and praying to find
you well and in good health. I pray for you to the local gods
here. I have already written many times about your well-
being, and you haven’t thought it worth your while to write
to me. If you’d just send a note telling me if you’re well or
how you are, so I can stop worrying! Up to now I’ve been
troubled about you since I haven’t had any letters from you.
Perhaps I’ll ask permission from my patron and come to you
quickly so I can greet you after so long a time. My news you
can get from our people, from Neilos and Eudaimon and
those who’ve come your way. Many greetings to my dear
sister Taesis and my brother Zoillos and all my friends. May
they all stay well for a long time!

Ancient travellers, like so many of us today, could not

resist sending streams of instructions on what to do about
things back home. ‘Dear Zenon,’ writes an associate of his in
252 b.c., ‘I am writing just after our arrival in Sidon. . . .

Please take care of yourself and write me if you want anything

done do for you. Would you please buy in time for
that I can
my arrival three jars of the best honey, six hundred bushels of
barley for the animals ,
and take care of the house in
. . .

Philadelphia so that it has its roof on when I arrive. Try to

keep an eye as best you can on the oxen, pigs, geese, and the
rest of the stock there And see to it that you somehow get
. . .

the crops harvested, and if there are any expenses to meet,

don’t hesitate to take care of them.’
Egypt has preserved as many letters written to travellers as
by them. A loving wife, for example, writes to tell her husband
how much she misses him: ‘Send for me — if you don’t, I’ll

die without seeing you daily. How I wish I could fly and come
 .

8r dquinf*’
rwti
i \MukUo ig.IL.,

tla^rtnumj »
Pu*«» ^I^ nn<uU*^»S <»AJg- CktjU* . .1
pKft» r >

g ut
**&**!£

un**-***0 *™*' !k*r i«v (*fcn trr«hi

u* [«'*V
8 #»«» lrif(fi'».'< li
Jwu. ft.

?}.»t>u-nt.. v>m»,
TO*

r,r9

V«*>

C»Tt»»

»>»»u

>«rt.tqmr ft

<K«m« tVi. [«*. Y\HHi

«U> mwttfmm *m
A\n*»fcn(r*

?*-- >)*#*** Ol ^aVwrbom* *"/*

*** :

**>»«»
$>\ i e
1
s \' •> At

('

14 Detail of the Tabula Peufingeriana showing the area around Rome.

See page 186.
15 Travellers arriving at a country inn. The inn with its peaked roof
and balcony across the front rather resembles an Alpine chalet. The
travellers are in a carriage drawn by horses. The cursor , the servant who
walks leading the horses, is being greeted by the personnel of the inn.
Fourth century a.d.

i 6 Travellers in a restaurant at the port of Rome. Third century

a.d. On the left is the vessel arriving at the port symbolized by the
lighthouse. On the right the travellers are seated in a restaurant. One
already has a drink, the other is being served by a barmaid. Behind her
is the bar with the usual three tiers of shelves on the wall beside it.
 MAIL 225

to you ... It tortures me not to see you.’ Another wife, whose

husband had obviously settled down for a long stay at

Alexandria, writes in quite another vein:

Fm disgusted at your not coming home, when all the others

. . . have. Here I’ve steered myself and the child through a
time like and been driven to the last resort because of
this,

the price of food, and now, when I’m thinking I’ll get some
relief with you coming back, you haven’t given a thought to

coming back, haven’t given any regard whatsoever to our

situation, how I had nothing when you were still here, not
to mention how much time has passed and all these crises
and you’ve sent us nothing. What’s more, Horus, who
brought me your letter, reports that your stay is over and
you’ve been released, so I’m completely disgusted.

And some of us will surely feel a fellow sufferer’s sympathy

for Theon who, toward the end of the second century a.d. or
the beginning of the third, received the following from his
son, Theon Jr:

A fine thing you did! You didn’t take me with you to the
city! If you don’t want to take me with you to Alexandria,
1 won’t write you a letter, I won’t talk to you, I won’t say

Hello to you even. If you go to Alexandria [sc. without me],

I won’t shake hands with you or greet you ever again after

this. If you don’t want to take me, that’s what will happen.

Mother said to Archelaus [probably the boy’s tutor], ‘He

upsets me —
take him away!’ A fine thing you did, all right.
—
Big gifts you sent me chicken feed They played a trick on
!

me there, the 12th, the day you sailed. Send for me, I beg you.
If you don’t, I won’t eat, I won’t drink. There!

H
 PART THREE

TOURISTS AND
TOURING IN
ROMAN TIMES
t

1
 :

14

The Sights to See

At the endof the summer of 167 b.c., Aemilius Paulus,

commander-in-chief of the Roman army, was in northern
Greece resting on his laurels as victor in a bitter struggle
against Macedon. The historian Livy recounts that at this
time

he decided upon a tour of Greece, to see those things which,

through their fame and reputation, had been magnified by
hearsay into more than what the eye beholds. ... With no
great retinue, ... he travelled across Thessaly to Delphi,
the celebrated oracle. Here he sacrificed to Apollo. Then
. . .

he went to the Temple of Zeus Trophonius and saw the

mouth of the cave which those who consult the oracle enter
to put their question to the gods. Next he went to Chalcis
. . .

to see the Euripus and Euboea, an island of enormous extent

yet yoked to the mainland by a bridge. From Chalcis he
crossed to Aulis, three miles away, the famous harbour that
once upon a time was the gathering point for the thousand
ships of Agamemnon’s fleet and the site of the temple of
Artemis, where that king of kings sought a fair wind for
Troy by sacrificing his daughter on the goddess’ altar. From
there he came to Or opus where an ancient seer
in Attica,
[Amphilochus] rather than any god is worshipped; the
sanctuary is very old and a pleasant spot because of the
springs and streams all about. Then to Athens, also renowned
230 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
for its hoary antiquity but still with many sights to see — the
Acropolis, the port town, the walls joining the Piraeus to the
city, the naval base . . . ,
the statues of both gods and men,
outstanding for every kind of workmanship and material.
He left the city after sacrificing to Athena, patron goddess of
the Acropolis, and proceeded to Corinth, arriving on the
following day. The city was then a splendid one; this was
before its destruction. The Acropolis and the Isthmus were
also sights to see —
the Acropolis, set on an immense height,
girdled with walls and flowing with springs; the Isthmus
splitting with its narrow span the neighbouring seas to east
and west. Then he visited the splendid cities of Sicyon and
Argos, and after that Epidaurus, far less wealthy but cele-
brated for the splendid temple to Asclepius; it stands five
miles from the city, and now is rich only in the traces of
votive gifts that were carried off as plunder; once was rich it

with the actual gifts, which the sick gave to the god as pay-
ment for their cures. Then to Sparta, with no magnificent
buildings but memorable for its institutions and educational
methods, and to Pallantium. Then via Megalopolis to
Olympia. Here he saw many sights, but what touched him
—
profoundly was the Zeus he felt he beheld the god in
person.

5
Paulus choice of places to visit illustrates to the letter the

interests of the vast majority of tourists who came after him.

He was no Herodotus, poking into the ways and manners of
men, picking up conversations with sacristans and business-
men. He was interested, almost to the exclusion of all else, in
the past. And, of the monuments of the past, he gave prece-
dence to those that commemorated the presence of gods; next
came those that recalled mythology and history. Thus he saw
the great temples and sanctuaries at Delphi, Athens, Oropus,
Epidaurus; he also visited the harbour where Agamemnon
gathered the fleet for the legendary attack upon Troy, and the
base that served the navy which, two and a half centuries
 —
THE SIGHTS TO SEE 231

before his time, had made Athens’ name great in history. He

included Phidias’ statue of Zeus at Olympia, not so much for
art’s sake as for its renown and the solemn religious effect it

had on the beholder (according to report, his reaction was,

‘Phidias has sculpted the Zeus of Homer!’). And he took in
one of nature’s marvels, the Euripus, the narrow channel
—
only forty yards wide between the mainland of Greece and
the island of Euboea, where the current whips through at four
to five miles an hour and seems to switch direction with
bewildering irregularity.

Among the sights Paulus included in his itinerary only one

had to do with nature — the channel of the Euripus. And he
went there not for aesthetic or emotional reasons but to see a
curiosity. We today take long trips for the pleasure of viewing
a varied terrain, or make laborious ascents to enjoy a superb
panorama, and we and savage prospects
particularly like wild
untouched by man’s hand. The ancients went to the trouble of
climbing a mountain for a specific reason, to investigate the
possibility of a practicable route across it, or in quest of some
natural marvel on the summit. They were not at all interested
in beholding serrated files of snow-capped peaks, they were
untouched by the austere beauty of boundless wasteland.
What enjoyment they found in a landscape generally was its
amoenitas ‘charm’. So far as nature was concerned, they were
mainly interested in places where one felt the presence of
divinity —
but not on mountain tops or in deserts, where we
tend to seek it, but rather in more intimate spots. They visited
springs, for, in the inexplicable perpetual bubbling forth of
the water theysaw the hand of a god; they erected shrines and
chapels nearby and honoured the deity by tossing into his
waters the offering of a coin (cf. 134 above) —thereby starting
a long-lived tradition. They visited grottoes, for, groping in
the gloom and hearing only remote mysterious sounds such as
the muffled roar of underground streams, they imagined them-
selves near to supernatural beings. They visited groves and
232 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
forests, where the chiaroscuro and quiet gave them the same

Certain natural features became attractions because of their

literary fame, the way the English lake country has for us. A
typical case in point is the Vale of Tempe in northern Greece,
whose were sung by poet after poet and a replica of
virtues
which, a triumph of landscape gardening, was one of the
wonders of Hadrian’s grand villa at Tibur. The ancient tourist
also liked to visit rivers which had made a mark in literature
the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, the winding Meander in Asia
Minor.
Lastly there were the impressive curiosities nature offers,
like the Euripus that Paulus went to see. The one mountain
the ancients did climb willingly was Etna — to gape in awe at

the crater of an active volcano. The hot springs at Hierapolis

in Asia Minor were famous not only for the waters but also
for a special sight, a fissure in the ground, only large enough to
admit a man, which gave forth a noxious gas so strong it

killed birds that flew through it or even bulls dragged up for a

sniff; a protective guard rail surrounded it, and a viewing
stand was nearby. The Lake of Avernus near Naples, where
similar exhalations took place (as they do now in the nearby
Solfatara), was turned by Virgil’s fancy into an entrance to the
underworld.

Sometime in the third century b.c., an unknown scholar who

probably lived in Alexandria worked up a list of seven wonders
of the world. They were not tourist meccas in any sense, but
they give a good idea of what the ancients considered note-
worthy. All were works of man, not nature, and most were of
considerable age: the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens at
Babylon, Phidias’ statue of Zeus at Olympia (which so
affected Paulus), the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the
Mausoleum. Only the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse
at Alexandria were modern, of the compiler’s own times.
In preferring the past to the present, the ancient tourist was
 THE SIGHTS TO SEE 233

not unlike his counterpart of today who travels to see the

glories of Greece, the grandeur of Rome, the hoary cathedrals

of the Middle Ages, and so on. The key difference is that the
ancients did not distinguish as carefully as we do between the
legendary and historical past; for them history began in the
earliest ages recalled in mythological tales. And so, among
the prime tourist sights were concrete memorials of those
remote days. At Salamis, the was shown the stone
visitor
where old Telamon sat and watched his sons, Ajax and Teucer,
sail off to Troy; near Sparta, the point in the road where

Penelope made up her mind to marry Odysseus; at Troezon,

the spot where Phaedra used to spy on Hippolytus while he
exercised in the nude; not far from the mouth of the Tiber,
the site of Aeneas’ camp (as late as the sixth century a.d. an
‘Aeneas’ ship’ was still on display in Rome; its timbers had
presumably held up for a thousand years); at Panopeus in
central Greece, remains of the clay from which Prometheus
moulded the first humans; and those intrepid enough to make
their way into the Caucasus mountains could look up to the
cliff where Zeus once had the Titan chained. Tourists could

see the hewn stone at Troy to which Cassandra had been tied
(the front side when touched or rubbed gave out milk, the
back side blood — or so the legend went); the plane-tree in
Phrygia in Asia Minor where Apollo strung up Marsyas for
flaying; the olive tree atTroezon where Hippolytus’ chariot
crashed, and the one at Mycenae under which Argos sat as he
guarded Io; the cave in Crete where Zeus was born, and the
one on Pelion where Chiron lived. At Agyrion in Sicily they
could examine certain prints in the rock which were supposed
to have been made by the cattle of Geryon, the triple-bodied
monster slain by Heracles. At Athens they climbed to a point
on the Acropolis from which the sea was visible and were told
how Aegeus had plunged to his death from there when he
saw Theseus’ ship approaching under black sails (Theseus had
forgotten to raise white ones, the agreed signal for his safe
return).
234 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
There were, as we would expect, no end of graves of heroes
and heroines to visit. You could see Helen’s on Rhodes,
Achilles’ and Ajax’ at Troy, Iphigeneia’s at Megara, Nestor’s
at Pylos, Phaedra’s at Troezon, Orestes’ at Sparta, Oedipus’

at Athens, Medea’s children’s at Corinth. To complicate

matters, the same personage sometimes turned out to have
been buried in two different places. Both Troezon and Athens
claimed Hippolytus’ grave, both Argos and Cyprus Ariadne’s,
Parium and Crebrene Paris’, Mycenae and Amyclae Agamem-
non’s and Cassandra’s. There were dwelling places of mytho-
logical times to visit as well as graves: Menelaus’ house at
Sparta (still standing, indeed still in use, 1,500 years later),
Nestor’s house at Pylos (also the cave where he kept his
cattle), Hippolytus’ house and Orestes’ hut at Troezon, the
site of Aegeus’ palace at Athens, the ruins of Amphitryon’s
house at Thebes (guides were even able to identify the room
that served as Alcmene’s bridal chamber).
Though mythology seem to have had first
the notables of
claim on the tourist, he by no means neglected those of
history. Xenophon’s grave was shown at Scillus, the town
near Olympia where he spent many years in retirement.
Themistocles’ was shown in the market place at Magnesia in
Asia Minor. Pindar’s could be visited at Thebes, Solon’s at

Athens, Demosthenes’ at Calaureia (the island near Troezon

where he committed suicide), and Virgil’s north of Naples.
Among the sights of Rome
were the tombs of the emperors :

the moundlike mausoleum where Augustus and Tiberius and

Claudius were buried; Trajan’s column, whose base housed a
gold urn with the emperor’s ashes; Hadrian’s grandiose monu-
ment, big and massive enough to be converted into a fortress,

the present Castel Sant’ Angelo. In Athens one could see

Socrates’ house,Demosthenes’ house with the underground
chamber where he used to shut himself up for months at a
time to practise oratory, the house where Alcibiades had
scandalously parodied certain very secret rites, the tomb of an
Indian who left Augustus’ entourage to burn himself alive in
 THE SIGHTS TO SEE 235

the approved Indian manner. At Thebes was the house of

Pindar, spared by Alexander when he razed the rest of the city.
At Heliopolis near Cairo was the house where Plato allegedly
stayed while imbibing ancient wisdom from the Egyptian
priests; at Metapontum in southern Italy the house where
Pythagoras lived and died; on Capri the cliff from which
Tiberius tossed into the sea people he suspected of treason; at
Rome on the Capitoline marking the spot where
a chapel
Augustus was born, and the ‘tiny dark room in a squalid
house’ where Titus was born; at Babylon the house where
Alexander the Great had died.
Alexander, as a matter of fact, was well-nigh a cult. Trajan
was able to go through the house at Babylon almost four
hundred years later. At Alexandria, the most famous of the
many cities named after him, a stately tomb sheltered his
corpse, which was enshrined in a sarcophagus of gold (when
Egypt fell on hard times in the first century B.c., one of its
rulers made off with the precious casket, and the remains had
to be transferred to a coffin of glass or alabaster). Mithridates
once spent a night in a certain lodge simply because Alexander
had slept there. Outside Tyre visitors were shown the spring
besides which he had had a dream that portended the capture
of the city. In a town in Macedon near the capital they saw the
school where Aristotle gave instruction to his prize pupil. At
Chaeronea they were taken to ‘Alexander’s oak’, a tree where
his tent had been pitched during the crucial battle in which he
and his father defeated Athens and Thebes and ended Greece’s
days as a collection of independent The four statues that
cities.

used to support the tent ended up in Rome, two in front of the

temple of Mars the Avenger, two in front of a building in the
forum. And a handbook forGreek shippers doing business
with the Indus valley in far-off India reminded them about the
‘remains of Alexander’s army in the area, ancient altars,

foundations of camps, and enormous wells’.

Another feature of the historical past that drew tourists were

236 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
memorials of great Athens often included
battles. Visitors to
an excursion to Marathon, twenty-two miles away, site of
Athens’ spectacular victory over the Persians in the First
Persian War. They were shown, among other things, the
mound marking the common grave of the 192 Athenians
killed in action (the Persians lost 6,400). Then there was the
battlefield of Chaeronea just mentioned. Here a mound sur-
mounted by a stone lion commemorated the spot where the
500 soldiers of Thebes’ elite guard died to a man and were
buried; visitors today still see the lion, for it was unearthed

in the last century and re-erected. The quarries at Syracuse

were one of the chief sights the city offered ; quite likely many
people went mainly to see the gelid caves which killed off
7,000 Athenian prisoners penned there after their disastrous
defeat in 413 b.c.

Lastly, then as today, art stood high on the tourist’s agenda.

Paulus’ visit to Phidias’ statue of Zeus at Olympia turned out
to be one of the highpoints of his tour —not too surprising
since this masterpiece had been included in the list of the
Seven Wonders and competed with Praxiteles’ Aphrodite for
the distinction of being the most famed work of art of the
ancient world. The was in Cnidus, a city on the south-
latter

west coast of Asia Minor, and the story goes that one of the
wealthy Asia Minor kings once offered to pay off the city’s
entire public debt in exchange for it. The Cnidians turned him
down, and there could have been hard-headed calculation as
well as sentiment in the decision: the statue, displayed in a
special open pavilion so that spectators could view it from all

sides, attracted droves of tourists to the island yearly. A third

renowned sculpture was a bronze cow by Myron that stood
on the Acropolis at Athens; poets scribbled ecstatic verses
about its being so realistically made that it could fool not
merely a herdsman but even calves and bulls. Cicero, in a
speech written about 70 b.c., mentions in passing some half-
dozen works of art of outstanding reputation, pieces that
 THE SIGHTS TO SEE 237

people made pilgrimages to These included, in addition

see.

to Praxiteles’ Aphrodite and Myron’s cow, a statue of Europa

on the bull at Tarentum done by Pythagoras of Rhegium; a
marble Eros at Thespiae in Greece executed by Praxiteles; a
painting at Cos of Aphrodite, shown rising from the sea, by
Apelles, who was considered by the ancients to be their
greatest painter (Romans were spared any travel to see this
masterpiece because, a half-century or so after Cicero wrote,
the emperor Augustus bought it and installed it in a temple
dedicated to Caesar in the forum); a portrait at Ephesus of
Alexander, also by Apelles; a picture of Ialysus, the legendary
founder of Rhodes, on Rhodes (but moved to Rome after
Cicero’s day) and a picture of the Paralos , one of Athens’
flagships, in the great gateway to the Acropolis at Athens,
both by Protogenes, a contemporary of Apelles. Cicero’s list
is illuminating: all are sculptures or paintings done 200 to

400 years earlier (Pythagoras, Myron, and Phidias lived during

the fifth century b.c., and Praxiteles, Apelles, and Protogenes
during the fourth). The ancient art lover, in other words, was
interested first and foremost in old masters.
But he could not see them conveniently collected in a
Louvre or Uflizi; the best he could do was make his way from
temple to temple. And how the ancient temple came to serve
as museum and art gallery is the subject we must turn to next.
Museums

The Europe today goes from cathedral to cathedral.

tourist in
His counterpart in the ancient world went from temple to
temple. Like a cathedral, a temple was a good deal more than
a specimen of architecture. It was, to begin with, the house of
a god, which raised it above the level of all other of man’s
works, gave it a very special distinction. And it had full

measure of that ingredient so precious to the Greek or Roman

tourist, the past. For one thing, the temples people went to
see — —
most churches we go to see were themselves places
like
where men had worshipped for centuries. For another, they
offered glimpses of manifold phases of the past, for they were
the nearest thing to museums that the ancient world had to
offer.

In ii6ob.c., Shutruk-Nahhunte, king of Elam, campaigned

triumphantly through Agade, Sippar, Eshnunna, and other
towns of Babylonia. He returned to his capital at Susa with a
rich haul of loot, which he offered up to the god who had led
him to his victory (it included among other things two price-
less pieces that archeologists unearthed there three thousand
years later, the stele of Naram-Sin, a chef d’oeuvre of Near
Eastern and the monument inscribed with Hammurabi’s
art,

law code). In all probability many a conquering monarch

before him had done likewise; it was an appropriate gesture,
and, indeed, becomes just about standard procedure in later
 MUSEUMS 239

ages. Shutruk-Nahhunte’s instance is notable only because it

is the first we are sure of: ancient records report that he

presented his booty to the Elamite deity In-Shushinak and
placed it on exhibition in his temple.
The next such dedications we know of were made by
that nation of soldiers par excellence, Assyria. In the ninth
century b.c. there was a chamber gateway at
in the western
Assur where the Assyrians stored captured mace-heads and
cudgels dedicated to their war god Nergal. Two centuries
later Assurbanipal’s records mention statues looted from Susa

after his destruction of the city, and obelisks brought back

from Thebes after his campaign against Egypt; he must have
dedicated it all somewhere in his capital, though the exact spot
is unknown.
Since a museum is byany ‘room, building, or
definition
locale where a collection of objects is put on exhibition’, the
display areas in In-Shushinak’s temple at Susa or the gateway
at Assur —
if it was open to visitors
—
qualify as museums, but
only just. For a museum that begins to approach what we
generally mean by the term we must go down in time to the first
half of the sixth century b.c., the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II
of Babylon. He and his successor were particularly interested
in the past. They studied archaic inscriptions, they restored
old buildings, they even conducted archeological excavations
to locate the foundation stones of ancient temples. So it comes
as no surprise to discover that Nebuchadnezzar II installed in
an area of his palace a collection of objects stemming from
bygone times.
We have a fair idea of what it was like, for excavators have
unearthed a good part of the contents. Its earliest piece went
back over a millennium and a half, an inscription from Ur of
2400 b.c. Then there was a statue of a ruler of Mari in upper
Mesopotamia of 2300 b.c., a clay spike from Isin in lower
Mesopotamia of 2100 b.c., a club of 1650 b.c. which had once
been wielded by some Kassite, one of the people who ruled
Babylon until the Elamites took over. There were Assyrian
240 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
pieces dating from about 900 to 650 b.c. inscriptions, reliefs,
:

stelai, clay cylinders. There were a few Aramaic pieces —

statue of a weather god and some stone bowls —
dated c. 700
to 600 b.c. And there were contemporary things, some clay
cylinders of Nebuchadnezzar himself. The collection was kept
up after his death since it included cylinders of his successor
Nabonidus and a stele from the time of Darius the Great of
Persia, who suppressed a revolt in Babylon around 520 b.c.
Obviously Nebuchadnezzar was following in the footsteps of
Shutruk-Nahhunte and the others before him who had
amassed displays of spoils of war. But his collection, though
acquired for the most part in the same way, shows deliberate
selection to illustrate a long span of time and a wide variety of
objects. He named it the ‘Wonder Cabinet of Mankind’, and
opened it to the general public. It was for all intents and
purposes a museum of historical antiquities.

museum was the ancient Near East, its

If the birthplace of the
coming of age took place among the Greeks. Certain important
Greek sanctuaries, like Apollo’s at Delphi or Zeus’ at Olympia,
gradually accumulated objects of special value donated as
thank-offerings for services rendered —or as bribes for services
that hopefully would be rendered. Some of the gifts were of
value for their historical associations, like the inevitable spoils
of war, but others for their own sake, for their costliness or
beauty, the precious metals or workmanship that had gone
into them. The Greek gods commanded a considerable
following among non-Greeks, and a number of these turned
out to be particularly generous donors. Delphi, for example,
was a veritable Fort Knox, thanks to the reputation the oracle
enjoyed among the kings of Phrygia and Lydia, lands blessed
with fabulous gold deposits. When
Herodotus made a visit
in the fifth century B.c., in the building called the Treasury of
the Corinthians he saw a throne dedicated by Midas of
Phrygia (c. 700 b.c.) whose very name conjures up visions of
gold, six gold mixing bowls dedicated by Gyges of Lydia
 MUSEUMS 24I

(678-652 b.c.) weighed in the aggregate some 1,730

that
pounds, and a gold lion from Croesus, the last king of Lydia
(560-546), that weighed 375 pounds (it was originally 575
but a destructive fire left it considerably slimmed down).
Herodotus singled these pieces out for mention because of
what they had cost; the workmanship in them was incidental.
For aesthetic quality we have to look to the offerings of the
Greeks themselves, inhabitants of a land poor in precious
metals but rich in artists. The temple of Hera at Olympia is a
good case in point. During the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.,
this venerated spot acquired, among other dedications, a
two-hundred-year-old cedar chest that was intricately carved
with scenes from mythology, and some twenty-odd statues of
major and minor done in the archaic
divinities, stately figures

style of the times. As the years passed, these hoary pieces were
joined by others from the hands of Greece’s best known
contemporary artists. In the fourth century b.c., it received a
particularly prized donation, a marble statue by Praxiteles of
Hermes holding the infant Dionysus; unearthed by archeolo-
gists excavating the temple in 1877, this has once again become
one of the sights to see at Olympia. Other notable votives were
a bronze by Cleon, and two gold and ivory figures by
Leochares; both men were contemporaries of Praxiteles and
not far behind him in repute. By the third century b.c. there

had been added a gilded statue of a naked child by Boethus,

a ranking sculptor of the time. In short, thanks to centuries
of dedications, any who came to the temple of Hera could see
a sculpture collection of scope and quality.
Nor was this an exceptional case. All over the Greek world,
through generous gifts of statues and paintings from the
hopeful or the satisfied, temples became art galleries as well as
houses of worship — exactly as Europe’s cathedrals and
churches were destined to become through the offerings and
grave monuments of pious Christians. And they drew visitors
the same way that art-laden churches do today, to see the
treasures and only incidentally say a prayer. A skit by
242 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Herondas, a Greek poet of the third century b.c. noted for his
skilful little genre sketches, portrays a visit by two ladies to
the temple of Asclepius on the island of Cos; the author has
the ladies hastily dispose of their offering to the god and then
settle down to the real business of their visit, a careful viewing
of the stellar collection of paintings and sculpture that the
place boasted.
One reason why Greek temples became museums of art
rather than of war trophies was the had of
practice the Greeks
cashing in their spoils and purchasing offerings in the form of
statues to dedicate. At the very entrance to the sanctuary of
Delphi, for example, the visitor passed a series of figures
erected by Tegea from the spoils of a victory against Sparta,
a series erected by Sparta from the spoils of a victory against
Athens, and a series by Athens from the spoils of the Battle
of Marathon.
This is not to say that the Greeks banished war trophies
from their shrines; they had their displays of historical
antiquities no less than the Near East. The Athenians filled a
colonnade at Delphi with ships’ figureheads and shields taken
in the naval battles of the Peloponnesian War, while at Athens
itself, in the Erechtheum on the Acropolis, was the sabre of
Mardonius, commander-in-chief of the Persian land forces
during the Second Persian War, and the breastplate of the
officer who headed the Persian cavalry in a crucial engagement.
In addition to mementoes of war, the Greeks enthusiastically
dedicated mementoes of the great names of bygone days.
Some of these came from the historical past: at Delphi, for
example, was preserved the iron chair of the poet Pindar, in a
temple on Rhodes the personal jewellery of King Artaxerxes
of Persia and the linen corselet of Pharaoh Amasis of Egypt,
in a temple in Arcadia the breastplate and lance of Alexander
the Great. Others came from the mythological past, since the
ancients did not distinguish between history and mythology
(cf.233 above). As a matter of fact, the heroes of mythology,
being mightier and more numerous than those of history,
 MUSEUMS 243

supplied by far the larger number andmost cherished. An

the
inventory of the contents of a famous temple to Athena at
Lindos on Rhodes happens to have survived; it reveals that
the building had been a storehouse of such relics. There was a
pair of bracelets that once graced the white arms of Helen of
Troy and the cup from which she drank (it was in the shape
of one of her breasts); various drinking vessels that once
belonged to Minos, Cadmus, Telephus, and other mytho-
logical notables; weapons and armour from Menelaus, Teucer,
Meriones, and Heracles; nine complete suits of armour
deposited by members of the contingent that Rhodes had sent
to the Trojan War; a set of tiller bars left by the helmsman of
Menelaus’ galley. All were presumably on display until the
fourth century b.c., when a disastrous fire wiped out the best
part of the collection.
Mythological bric-a-brac of this sort was to be seen the
length and breadth of the Greek world. Helen’s mementoes, for
example, were by no means all in Rhodes. Delphi had a neck
adornment and the stool she sat on, while one of her sandals
was in southern Italy. Zeus had visited her mother in the form
of a swan, and legend had it that she had been hatched from
an egg; the egg was in a temple at Sparta, suspended by cords
from the roof. Visitors could see Aeneas’ shield on the island
of Samothrace, Menelaus’ in a temple to Athena in south Italy,
Diomed’s in Athena’s temple at Argos (though the rest of his
armour was in her temple at Luceria in south Italy), Achilles’
spear in her temple at Phaselis in Asia Minor, the tools Epeius
used for building the Trojan horse in a temple in south Italy.

Orpheus’ lyre was in Apollo’s temple on Lesbos, Marsyas’

flute —he was the one who dared to challenge Apollo to a
music contest — in Apollo’s temple at Sicyon. Marsyas of
course and he was punished for his insolence by being
lost,

flayed; the skin was on display in the town in Asia Minor

where Apollo had it hung up. Relics of the wandering
Odysseus were not confined to the Greek world: a remote
town in Spain had a shield and the prow of a ship; Circei, on
244 TRAVEL in the ancient world
the Italian coastwhere Circe was reputed to have lived, had a
goblet; Djerba, the island off Tunisia which claimed to be
the land of the Lotus-Eaters, offered as proof an altar set up
by the hero; even remote Scotland had a memento, an altar
inscribed in Greek which he was supposed to have dedicated.
Inevitably, as happens today, the same relic sometimes
turned up in more than one spot. Thebes as well as Delphi
offered the visitor Helen’s stool. The hair that Isis tore out in
her grief at the death of Osiris could be seen either at Coptos
or Memphis. A towns in Asia Minor both displayed
pair of
the true sword with which Iphigeneia slaughtered victims
during her enforced service as priestess of Artemis among the
barbaric Taurians in the Crimea. Orestes, her brother, when
he rescued her from there, stole and brought back a famous
image of the goddess; Athens, Sparta, Aricia in Italy, and
several other places all claimed to have it in their local sanc-
tuaries of Artemis (one ancient writer in desperation suggested
that perhaps Orestes stolemore than one copy). The Palladium,
the image of Athena that kept Troy safe until Odysseus made
off with it, was on display in Argos, Rome, and three Italian
towns.
Temples preserved not only mementoes of the heroes of
mythology but even their physical remains, as churches
preserve those of saints. Tantalus’ ghost may have been in the
underworld vainly trying to drink the water at his feet and eat
the fruit out of reach above his head, but his bones, or what
passed for his bones, were in a bronze jar at Argos. His son
Pelops’ were in a bronze chest at Olympia, Orpheus’ were in a
stone jar in a small town in northern Greece, the head of the
gorgon Medusa was in an earth mound at Argos, and the bones
of giants were to be seen in any number of temples. Thebes,
for example, claimed to have Geryon’s, the triple-bodied
monster who was killed by Heracles.
'Giants’ bones’ brings us to another purpose Greek temples
served: in addition to art and historical or pseudo-historical
memorabilia, they housed curiosa of all kinds. Such bones, it
 MUSEUMS 245

has plausibly been argued, were really mammoth’s bones,

which not infrequently turn up in Greece. Similarly, Helen’s
egg has been explained as an ostrich egg. A temple at Tegea in
the Peloponnese displayed the hide and tusks of the Calydonian
boar that was hunted down by Meleager, and a temple near
Naples the tusks of the Erymanthian boar whose destruction
was one of the labours of Heracles; both exhibits were probably
the remains of boars of exceptional size.
In all these instances the objects had earned their exalted
posts at least in part by virtue of their alleged mythological
associations.There were, however, plenty of others treas-
ured purely and simply as curios. A rib or jawbone of a
whale was on view in the temple of Asclepius at Sicyon.
Until Carthage was destroyed in 146 b.c. one could see in
its temple to Astarte the skins of the ‘three women with hairy
bodies’, the chimpanzees or baboons that Hanno of Carthage
had brought back from his epoch-making voyage down the
west coast of Africa (63 above). Quite a few temples had
elephant tusks, and one near Naples a whole skull. These may
have come from India rather than Africa, since India supplied
a good many cherished oddments. A temple in Asia Minor
offered examples of Indian armour and Indian amber as well
as elephant tusks. Pliny reports that ‘Indian reeds’ as big as
tree trunks were a common sight in temples; they must have
been specimens of bamboo. ‘Indian nuts’, also reportedly a
common sight, probably were coconuts. Pliny is also our
source for what surely was the most remarkable Indian
curiosity of all: the horns of one of the monster gold-digging
ants of India (111 above), he informs us, could be seen in the
temple of Heracles at Erythrae in Greece. Even technological
curios were put on display, such as an archaic flute with but
four holes, a mirror that gave a distorted image, a special
dental forceps made of lead for testing extractable teeth (the
dentist was to go after only those which could be pulled by
this relatively feeble instrument). The list of items enshrined
in temples reveals a wildly haphazard miscellany, yet they were
246 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
a significant beginning, they represent the seeds that would
eventually blossom into our museums of natural history,
ethnology, geography. Even the mythological bric-a-brac
played its part. The various objects ascribed to Achilles,
Odysseus, and the others were no doubt genuine examples of
strange or obsolete weapons, armour, utensils, and adorn-
—
ments museum pieces, as we would call them.
And, of course, temples had marvels to offer. There was a
temple with an altar that consumed victims placed on it
without fire, and one with a cluster of candles kept in the open
which never went out. A sanctuary of Zeus had a fountain or
spring with the power to rekindle torches which had been
extinguished in it, while a sanctuary of the wine-god Dionysus
had one that ran with wine during the seven days of the god's
annual festival (the wine had to be consumed on the premises
because, if carried out of sight of the temple, it reverted to
water). Two statues of the goddess Artemis in two nearby
towns, though completely exposed, were never touched by
wind or rain. A temple at Pergamum, to protect a set of
valuable murals by Apelles, paid a pretty penny for the skin
of a basilisk which had the power to keep away spiders and
birds.

When the world of small city-states gave way to great empires

of Alexander the Great (115 above), quite a
after the death
few of the new monarchs turned out to be men of culture
ready to spend the wealth that a crown commands in the
cause of the arts. In Alexandria, Egypt’s recently founded
capital, Ptolemy I created an institute of advanced study
(258 below). In Pergamum, the Attalids, particularly Attalus II
(160-139 B.c.), collected art to adorn the impressive new
buildings they were putting up. Pieces available on the market
for purchase, they bought; what they could not buy, they had
reproduced. Their sculpture included, for example, a replica
of the renowned Athena by Phidias that stood in the Parthe-
non. They sent a team of painters to Delphi to copy a set of
 MUSEUMS 247

famous paintings there. The result of their efforts was an

extensive private art gallery, the first to be created by deliberate
selection and not haphazard dedications.
While the Attalids were acquiring art for their gallery with
taste and discrimination, off in the west the nation which was
soon to create the nearest thing to public museums that the
ancient world would know was gathering it in like fishermen
netting a catch. Rome, before the Punic Wars of the third
century b.c., was a rough-hewn town, unsoftened by the
presence of any Greek art. In 21 1 b.c., during the Second
Punic War, the Roman general Marcellus captured the rich
city of Syracuse and, as spoils of war, brought back a multitude
of statues and paintings which he proceeded to dedicate in
various parts of Rome.
was the opening of a floodgate: for
It

the next 150 years, as the legions made their way through
Greece and the Near East, the city was deluged with Greek
art. When Marcus Fulvius Nobilior in 189 b.c. occupied

Ambracia, a provincial capital in western Greece, he returned

with no than 285 statues in bronze and 230 of marble. In
less

the victory procession that Aemilius Paulus held in 167 after

defeating Perseus, king of Macedon, the parading of the looted
statues and paintings took a whole day. The climax came with
Mummius’ sack of Corinth in 146; the booty produced ‘the
greatest number and the best of the public monuments of
5
Rome ,
to use the words of Strabo, who visited the city a
century later. What these conquerors acquired went to adorn
their capital, not their private town houses or country man-
sions. As a matter of fact, some, like Mummius, had little taste
for art; the story goes that he only learned of the value of one
of his captured paintings when Attalus II, always on the look-
out for masterpieces, offered a fabulous price for it.

In the next century, the looting of art was joined by its

extortion —but the collectors were out for themselves rather

than their city. Verres, the scoundrelly Roman governor of
Sicily from 73 to 71 b.c. who was successfully prosecuted by
Cicero, outdid even Hermann Goering. Some works he
248 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
extorted, like the statue of Eros by Praxiteles that he made the
owner sell to him for the equivalent of a measly £200 (or
$500). What he could not extort, he confiscated, and what he
could not confiscate, he robbed. Others operated legitimately,
like Cicero himself; his letters are full of his enthusiastic search
to buy art treasures for decorating his various country houses.
Indeed, the mania for collecting had grown so among Romans
of power and wealth that became de rigueur to include in the
it

plans for a villa special rooms for mural paintings and special
areas for the display of sculpture.
With the fall of the Republic and the founding of the
Roman Empire, works of art ceased being ‘banished as exiles
to country villas’, as Pliny put and once again returned to
it,

the city’s temples and other buildings. Caesar, then Augustus,

and then most of the emperors of the first and second centu-
ries a.d. continued to adorn Rome with Greek art. Soon the
city had any number of temple-museums that boasted some of
the ancient world’s finest works. The collections emphasized
old masters; a Roman emperor would readily use a contempo-
rary artist to decorate a public building or do his portrait, but
for the display of art he preferred time-honoured pieces,
sculptures by Myron, Phidias, Praxiteles, Scopas
Polyclitus,
and Lysippus, paintings by Polygnotus and Zeuxis and
Apelles — in short, the recognized greats of the sixth to the
third century b.c. Their chef d’ oeuvres were on view all over
the city. The visitor could see a Zeus by Myron on the
Capitoline hill, a Heracles by him Maximus. The
in the Circus
temple of Fortune had four pieces by Phidias, the 'Key Bearer’,
an Athena, and two statues of figures in Greek dress. Praxi-
teles’ ‘Success’ and ‘Good Fortune’ were on the Capitoline,

and an Eros by him in the Portico of Octavia. Scopas was

represented by an Ares and an Aphrodite in the Circus
Flaminius, an Apollo in one temple of Apollo, the Children of
Niobe Apoxyomenos was in front of the
in another. Lysippus’
baths built by Agrippa, a Heracles by him on the Capitoline,
and twenty-five bronze figures he had made of Alexander’s
 MUSEUMS 249

leaders in the Portico of Octavia. Paintingsby Apelles were

to be seen in the Temple of Diana, the Temple of the Deified
Julius, the Temple of Mars the Avenger; paintings by Zeuxis
in the Portico of Philip or the Temple of Concord. The last-
named building was fitted with big windows, an unusual
feature in a temple; presumably they helped visitors see the

art inside.

The location of several of the works just mentioned shows

that, in their enthusiasm for decorating their city, the Romans
did not limit themselves to temples. Public buildings of all

sorts were adorned with statues and paintings, the porticoes,

the theatres, the monumental public baths. As a matter of fact,
by the third century a.d., after ruinous fires, like the one
during Nero’s reign, had destroyed the rich collections in
many a temple, the Baths of Caracalla became one of the
principal museums of Rome.
The Romans by no means limited their collecting to art.
Every bit as reverent as the Greeks about relics from mytho-
logical times, even more liberal in treasuring historical memen-
toes, and just as enthusiastic in preserving miscellaneous
oddments, they did their fair share of filling temples with
curiosa of all sword was in the temple of
sorts. Julius Caesar’s

Mars, a dagger from one of Nero’s would-be assassins in the

Temple of Jupiter, the royal robe of the early king Servius
Tullius in the Temple of Fortune, famous ring of Poly-
the
crates —he had tossed it into the sea only to have it turn up
again in the belly of a fish brought to him as a gift in the —
Temple of Concord. In the Temple of Eros at Thespiae in
Greece the emperor Hadrian deposited a she-bear he had
killed and in Zeus’ temple at Athens an Indian snake. During
the First Punic War, Roman soldiers campaigning in Tunisia
had killed with a catapult shot a 120-foot serpent; the skin and
jawbone were exhibited in some temple at Rome. A century
and a half later soldiers on campaign there came across certain
animals resembling wild sheep which were named ‘gorgons’
because their looks could allegedly kill; after a number of men
250 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
had been lost trying to get near enough for a sword thrust,
cavalrymen picked off a few specimens with well-aimed
javelins, and the hides were deposited in the Temple of

Hercules. There was a stuffed crocodile on display in Isis’

temple in Caesarea in north Africa, a large cinammon root

—
which must have come from India enshrined in a gold dish
in a temple on the Palatine, an extraordinary chunk of crystal
that weighed over 100 pounds in a temple on the Capitoline,
a breastplate of British pearls in a temple in Caesar’s forum.
The Romans were the first to put precious stones on public
view. Pompey, after the defeat of King Mithridates, looted the
latter’s collection and dedicated on the Capitoline, and
it

Caesar put into his favourite temple of Venus Genetrix no

less than six different collections.
With and paintings acquired haphazardly by the
statues
looting of conquerors or the whim of emperors, and standing
cheek by jowl with exotica gathered from here and there, did
not a Roman temple look like somebody’s old attic? Not
necessarily. Thanks to a description written in a.d. 95, we
know the contents and arrangement of a small collection in
the temple of the Deified Augustus near the forum (Fig. 18).
It was a model of careful judgement and taste. The works of
art were set out in the front porch of the building under the

projecting gable. After climbing the staircase to the level of

the porch, as the visitor stood on the top step, he saw on the
wall to his left a painting of Hyacinthus and a relief in marble
of an hermaphrodite; on the entrance wall facing him, he saw,
on one door a painting of Danae and, on the other,
side of the
a painting of Europa; on the wall to the right, he saw a marble
relief of Leander. As he walked down the middle of the porch

toward the entrance door, he passed between two files of three

free-standing statues each. In the file to his left stood a gold
statue of a Victory, behind that a clay statuette of a boy, and
behind that a bronze of Apollo by Praxiteles, the piece de
resistance of the collection. To his right was a silver statue of
Athena, behind that a clay statuette of Heracles, and behind
 —

MUSEUMS 251

that a bronze of Heracles as an infant strangling a pair of

serpents. The exhibit was subtly arranged: a marble relief on
either side wall; a gold statue to the left balanced by a silver
one to the right; behind each of these two, to right and left, a
clay statuette; behind each statuette, to right and left, a bronze.
Though but a small collection, it was admirably compre-
hensive. It included three major art forms: painting, free-
standing sculpture, relief. It presented a variety of materials
precious metals, bronze, clay, stone. And it illustrated at least

three periods of art: Praxiteles’ work and the paintings were

of the mature classical style of the fourth century b.c.; the

infant Heracles exemplified the baroque-like style of the next

two centuries; and the two marble reliefs were ‘modern’.

Statues, paintings, armour, snakeskins, dental forceps — all

were on display for the art lover and curiosity seeker, yet all
were in buildings whose prime function was something else,
most often a house of worship. They were museums, but
only incidentally, and as such all they usually did was to give
house room to objects which people were expected to gape
at

in wonder without making any particular sense out of them.

And this situation continued for well-nigh a millennium after
the fall of Rome. The products of the minor arts that the
Middle Ages had such a fondness for —enamels, wood carvings,
ivories, fabrics —found their way into the cathedrals and the
churches, as did the Arab glass and armour and rugs that
flooded back to Europe in the wake of the Crusades. And
churches took over the role of ancient temples in becoming
repositories for oddments: the cathedral
Arezzo shelteredat
the jawbone of a whale, St Stephen’s in Vienna some bones of
mammoths, St John’s at Liineburg the shoulder bone of some
sea monster, a church at Ensisheim in Alsace a meteorite, the
cathedral at Merseburg a large tortoise shell, the cathedral at
Seville a stuffed crocodile as well as a few elephant tusks and
the bridle used by El Cid. As time went on, wealthy nobles
caught the fever and began to amass private collections of
252 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
such curios. The brother of Charles VI of France toward the
beginning of the fifteenth century had a ‘cabinet of wonders’
that boasted ostrich eggs, snakeskins, porcupine quills, boars’
tusks, whalebone, polar bear hides, mammoths’ bones, and
coconuts. It was a primitive museum of natural history —but
it was strictly for his eyes and those of his friends, not the
general public.

And on 15 December, a.d. 1471, Pope Sixtus IV took

then,
an epoch-making step: he set aside certain rooms in the
Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill for a display
of ancient sculptures and appointed a board of four men to
take charge of them. By this act he brought into existence the
world’s first true museum of art. Very soon thereafter, along-
side the wealthy amateurs with their ragbag agglomerations of
curiosities, arose a new type of collector, the professional
scholar. Georg Agricola of Saxony (1494-1555), for example,
a physician who worked in the mining areas of his country,
gathered specimens of minerals, published codified descriptions
of them, and by his writings induced his sovereign, Augustus
of Saxony, to found at ‘Chamber of Art and
Dresden a
Natural History’ that eventually grew into the city’s fine
museums. Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603) was a passionate
botanist who headed a botanical garden at Pisa; his pupil,

Michele Mercati (1541-1593), became keeper of the botanical

garden of Pope Pius V
and founded at the Vatican Italy’s
richest collection of minerals and fossils. These are but a few
names out of many. By the sixteenth century the day of the
modern museum had without question dawned.
 16

The Itinerary

We travel long roads and cross the water to see what we

disregard when it is under our eyes. This is either because
nature has so arranged things that we go after what is far off

and remain indifferent to what is nearby, or because any

desire loses its intensity by being easily satisfied, or because
we postpone whatever we can see whenever we want, feeling
sure we will often get around to it. Whatever the reason,
there are numbers of things in this city of ours and its
environs which we have not even heard of, much less seen;
yet, if they were in Greece or Egypt or Asia ... we would
have heard all about them, read all about them, looked over
all there was to see.

So wrote the younger Pliny around the beginning of the

second century a.d. Like the New Yorkers who have climbed
the Eiffel Tower but never the Empire State Building, the
ancient tourist hankered after what was exotic and remote.
And he went to find it, as Pliny reveals, chiefly in three areas:
Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt.
In the fifth century b.c., Herodotus had gone all the way to
Mesopotamia; in the second a.d., Pausanias, a lifelong traveller

(292-9 below), remarks that he never saw the walls of Babylon

himself nor ever met anyone who had. The tourist’s passion
for the past clearly had its limits. Even Syria and Palestine
were not included in the normal itinerary, although the day
was not far off when, with the Holy Land sites to offer, they
254 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
would become the tourist attraction nonpareil. Voyages
were for businessmen.
farther afield, to Africa or India,
If Romans fanned out eastward to tour what was to them
the old world, people living in the provinces flooded in to
Rome itself. So many were there that, as we have seen
(129 above), cities maintained offices in the forum to aid their
citizens when they came to visit or do business in the capital.
There was plenty of the past to be seen in Rome: the fig-tree
at the foot of the Palatine Hill where the cradle holding
Romulus and Remus overturned; the shepherd’s hut on the
hill, complete with cradle, where the twin infants were raised;
the Temple of Vesta forum where the Virgins kept the
in the
sacred flame burning eternally; the door of Janus’ temple,
which was left open in times of war and closed only in times
of peace; the rich collections of art (248 above). But the citizen
from the provinces was there to see the new Rome just as
much as the old, the grandiose monuments the emperors had
built testifying to the wealth and power of the state to which
he belonged as well as to their own generosity. He gaped at the
palaces on the Palatine Hill; these housed not only the
emperor’s quarters but the central administration too, and, as
the business of government and its paperwork grew, so did the
number of palaces. He passed leisurely hours enjoying the
superb facilities of the huge public baths. If he had timed his
trip right, there were programmes at the arenas or circuses to

keep him busy for days (137 above). From the original forum
he walked through a series of new forums, each donated by a
different —
emperor Caesar’s, Augustus’, Vespasian’s, Nerva’s,
Trajan’s. All were splendid places, lavishly decorated with
expensive imported stone. Augustus boasted that he found a
city of brick and left it a city of marble, and his successors
carried on in the same tradition.
Those who started from Rome for Greece, Asia Minor, or
Egypt, had to make a fundamental decision: whether to go by
sea or land (149 above). The sea route, which involved embark-
ing at Ostia, the port of Rome, or at Puteoli, the port of
 THE ITINERARY 255

Naples, and sailing to Athens or Alexandria, was not only the

most comfortable way to go but, since the vessels all passed
through the Straits of Messina, passengers had an opportunity
to see Sicily, which had a good deal to offer the tourist. First,
there was Syracuse itself with temples to Artemis and Athena
that sheltered famed works of art, the quarries where the
Athenian prisoners had been kept (236 above), and the fountain
of Arethusa, a vast spring of sparklingly clear water teaming
with Then there was the ascent of Etna to see the
fish. crater,

a must on many itineraries. Still another curiosity of nature

that drew visitors was the Lacus Palicorum, a small pool about
forty to fifty miles northwest of Syracuse, where twin jets of
volcanic acid from fissures in the bottom kept the water
moving agitatedly as if boiling.
In Greece tourists followed, by and large, the itinerary that
had been in vogue for centuries (229 above) : Delphi, Athens,
Corinth, Epidaurus, Much had changed
Olympia, Sparta.
since the days of Classical Greece. Olympia, for example, now
had some of the amenities Roman engineering could supply,
such as running water brought in by an aqueduct (78 above).
The Corinth earlier Greek travellers saw had been wiped out
by the Romans in 146 b.c. and replaced by a thriving new
—
town but that meant little to those who came primarily for
a look at the acropolis and the isthmus with its two ancient
harbours, one on either side, and its diolkos the paved way ,

over which warships and other relatively light craft were

hauled from one to the other. Epidaurus, after a period of
decline (230 above), had got a new lease of life, and splendid
new votives thanking Asclepius for his cures had replaced the
ones that had been plundered. Much of Greece, however,
unlike Epidaurus and Corinth, had fallen into decay by Roman
Imperial times, enabling tourists avid for mementoes of the
past to enjoy the added dimension of picturesque abandon-
ment. Site after site offered the romantic combination of ruins

in a serene pastoral setting that we see in Piranesi’s prints of

the remains of Rome and that so ravished eighteenth-century
256 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
travellers to Italy. The famed Thebes found the
visitor to
greater part of it deserted. The city of Pisa, which a thousand
years earlier had owned the land where the Olympic games
were held and had taken charge of them, was now a vineyard.
The walls of an erstwhile thriving town in Euboea now
encompassed only farm land; its gymnasium had been turned
into a wheat field where statues of deities and worthies peeked
out amid the stalks, and sheep grazed in the agora surrounded
by the ghosts of buildings that had once housed public offices.
The tour of Greece also included some of the islands.
Visitors went to Delos with its venerable sanctuary of Apollo;
to Samothrace, home of certain mysterious divinities whose
worship, immensely popular, involved various secret rites;

above all to Rhodes, which, like Athens, still had impressive

witnesses to its days as an independent and rich nation. The
Colossus, a brobdingnagian bronze statue of Apollo that stood
at the harbour, had collapsed during an earthquake around
224 b.c., but there were still thousands of other statues, broad
streets, and a circuit of formidable walls.
From Rhodes it was but a hop and a step to Asia Minor.
And Asia Minor offered the greatest tourist attraction of all

the site of the Trojan War, ‘Homer Country’, so to speak.

Priam’s Troy, after the sack, had more or less lain neglected
in ruins for a long while. Around 700 b.c. or so, Greek settlers
raised a new town on the site, a second Ilium. This remained
a modest place until the Romans turned their
relatively
attention to it. Rome had been founded, the legend went, by
a handful of Trojan survivors who managed to escape from
the burning city and, under the leadership of the hero Aeneas,
sailed to Italy. Julius Caesar, whose family claimed to be
descended from Venus, Aeneas’ mother, felt himself personally
involved in the legend and viewed the site as a sort of national
shrine. As a consequence, he heaped honours on the little

town, granting it additional territory, independence, and

exemption from taxes ; his successors confirmed all his favours
and thought up some new ones. To its privileged status, Ilium
17 A restaurant at Herculaneum. First century a.d. Note the counter
with jars sunk into it and the three tiers of shelves on the wall beside it.
1 8 Arrangement of the art on display in a small Roman temple museum:
173 painting of Hyacinthus, 174 marble relief of an hermaphrodite, 175
painting of Danae, 180 painting of Europa, 181 marble relief of Leander,
170 gold statue of a Victory, 17 1 clay statuette of a boy, 172 bronze of
Apollo by Praxiteles, 179 silver statue of Athena, 178 clay statuette of
Heracles, 177 bronze statue of Heracles.
 —

THE ITINERARY 257

soon added a thriving business as the official custodian of

Homer Country. It supplied guides who made sure that every
significant place or feature mentioned in the Iliad was identi-
fied. They showed the tourist the strip of beach where the
Greek ships had been pulled up, the plain where the battles
had taken place, the two rivers that occur in so many scenes,
the fig-tree outside the Scaean gates, the tombs of Achilles
and Patroclus and Ajax (Protesilaus, the first Greek to jump
ashore and the first to be killed, was buried just across the
Hellespont), the cave where Paris gave his fateful judgement,
even the spot from which Zeus’ eagle carried off the Trojan
princeling Ganymede. In a temple on the site, they pointed
out a lyre allegedly belonging to Paris and armour allegedly
of the Homeric heroes. Asia Minor had other sites to offer the
visitor —Cnidus, the home of Praxiteles’ world-famous statue
of Aphrodite; flourishing cities such as Ephesus and Smyrna;
the venerable oracles of Apollo at Colophon and Didyma
but none had the appeal of the site of the Trojan War; this
was the piece de resistance .

Next came Egypt, and getting there from Asia Minor was
no problem at all. Those who w ere satisfied with seeing no
r

more of Asia Minor than Homer Country could push on some

twenty miles to Alexandria Troas (‘Alexandria at Troy’) and
take a boat from there directly to Alexandria in Egypt. Those
who went on to Smyrna or Ephesus could get a sailing from
either place.
Egypt was a tourist’s paradise. It offered an exotic landscape,
an exotic way of life, monuments and, on top of all this,
exotic
relatively easy travel. Almost everybody went there by sea,
and those who came directly from Rome made the crossing
on the big comfortable grain ships that plied between
Alexandria and Rome (158 above). Once in Egypt, the visitor
was able to continue to do his moving about by water, since
the inhabited portions of the country were strung out along
the river. To make things ideal, the Nile was a particularly
easy stream to sail on. It is blessed with a prevailing wind that

1
258 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
blows opposite to the direction of flow; a boatman can drift
effortlessly downstream (or help his progress along with the
oars if he is in a hurry) and, when it is time to go back, hoist
sail and be wafted up-river. That very special traveller,

Apollonius of Tyana, the miracle-working sage of the first

century A.D., preferred to go by land and see every village

instead of sailing by them; he and his party padded along the
bank on camels from Alexandria to the pyramids.
The visitor’s first thrill came even before he landed while —
he was still some thirty miles out at sea, he could make out the
top of the lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders
of the World. The city itself offered practically everything.
There were famed monuments such as the tomb of Alexander,
the temple of Serapis, the sanctuary of Pan (which was built
on the top of an artificial hill and afforded a fine view of the
5
entire city), the Museum. This last was a 'museum in the
ancient sense of the word; we would call it a research institute
or institute of advanced study. It included four faculties:
literature, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. It had a
great hall that served as commons room, where the faculty
members ate together, a cloister for walks or ambulatory
lectures, a theatre for public discussions, studies and quarters
for the individual professors, library, botanical garden, and
menagerie. Then there was the bustling life of the city itself.

Alexandria was the greatest port in the Mediterranean, handling

trafficfrom India and Africa as well as from most of the
provinces of the empire, and offered all the features of a
booming international entrepot: a waterfront where you saw
not only Mediterranean types but Arabs, Persians, Ethiopians,
and Indians as well; various foreign quarters; an entertainment
district lined with nightclubs. Unus illis deus Nummus est,

—
'They worship only one god there Cash someone once
5

grumbled. It was not completely true. If Alexandria was the

Marseilles of the ancient world, it was also the Vienna, a city
of passionate lovers of music; at cithara concerts, for example,
it was said that even humble listeners who could not read or
 THE ITINERARY 259

write had so keen an ear they were able to spot every false
note.
Alexandria was a Greek city with a cosmopolitan overlay.
For the real Egypt, the tourist had to go up the Nile. He took
a boat and sailed along the Canopic arm until he reached the
site of modern Cairo near the apex of the Delta. Here he

disembarked for a look at Heliopolis, where the most ancient

temple to Re stood. By Roman times Heliopolis was a ghost
town, the temple was partly in ruins (around io b.c. Augustus
had carried off two of its obelisks to Rome, where they stand
today), and of the once great population of learned priests
only a handful were left to perform routine sacrifices and show
visitors around. But the buildings were still impressive and
legend made them more so; the guides took pains to point
out where Plato and Eudoxus, a well-known Greek astrono-
mer, lived during their apocryphal thirteen-year stay with the
priests to learn from them the secrets of the heavenly bodies.
A little further upstream was Egypt’s greatest claim to
fame, Memphis. Here was the venerated temple of Ptah and
the building that housed the sacred Apis bull; you were
allowed a peek through a small window in the stable or, at a
fixed time, the chance to see him take his exercise in an interior
courtyard —
as a matter of fact, the exercise period was largely
for the benefit of tourists. Notable as these sights were,
Memphis had something far better to offer: it was the starting
point for a visit to the great pyramids. We marvel at their

size; the tourist of those days was able to marvel at their

superb finish as well, for he saw them wrapped in the

still

smooth skin of their revetment and adorned with numerous

hieroglyphic inscriptions. All that is now left of the revetting
is a scant cap about the apex of the pyramid of Khafre.
Back aboard the boat to sail on to Lake Moeris and get a
look at a monument that the ancients ranked with the pyra-
mids — the Labyrinth (ioi above). Nearby was Crocodilopolis
where were encouraged to feed the sacred crocodile
tourists
that incarnated the god Suchus (199 above, 271 below). Before
260 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
27 b.c., when, as we shall see in a moment, Thebes gained
precedence, these sights stood highest in the list of Egypt’s
tourist attractions — at least it seems that way from the pains
the Ptolemies took to invite junketing VIPs to visit them.
I have already cited (198 above) the letter, written in 112 b.c.,
alerting the officials of Crocodilopolis to the arrival of a
Roman dignitary. Here is another from a much earlier time,
254 b.c., which instructs one of the minister of finance’s agents
that he:

upon receipt of this letter send the light chariots and other
conveyances and the pack-mules to Ptolemais for the ambassa-
dors from Paerisades and the envoys from Argos whom the
king has sent to see the sights of the Arsinoite nome ... At
this moment of writing, they have already set sail upriver.

Paerisades was ruler of a far-off kingdom in the Russian

Crimea, Argos is the well-known Greek city-state, and the
king referred to is Ptolemy II (285-246 b.c.). The party had
been put aboard a boat at Alexandria and were to get off at the
river port of Ptolemais, a convenient point for anyone going
to the Arsinoite nome. This was the district of which Arsinoe
was capital, and Arsinoe was Crocodilopolis, renamed by
Ptolemy II in honour of his queen, whose contribution to the
success of his reign he was well aware of. The Labyrinth was
no more than seven and a half miles away from it.
Having finished with this area, the tourist took to the river
again, this time for a long ride upstream to Abydos to see the
temple of Seti. Once again aboard ship to proceed further
southward to Thebes. Thebes’ renown had reached Greece as
early as Homer’s day, for the poet sings of its many houses
and hundred gates. For many centuries visitors ventured
its

there, as they do now, chiefly to see the underground tombs

in the Valley of the Kings (278 below). Then in 27 b.c., the
city leaped into the forefront of Egyptian tourism when the
so-called statue of Memnon, which had been standing there
quietly since c. 1400 b.c., suddenly began to ‘talk’ and its
 THE ITINERARY l6l

unique performance became the acknowledged highlight of a

country (272 below).
visit to the

Those who were determined to leave nothing out continued

on upriver to Syene (Aswan) at the First Cataract, which for
thousands of years marked the southern border of Egypt.
After sailing as near to the cataract as they could, they would
go along the bank for some miles to get past the rapids, and,
just beyond, be ferried out in a tipsy Egyptian canoe to see
the temple on the island of Philae. And that was the end of
the road for most visitors. Only the most determined of
sightseers went past this point to brave the barren stretches
of the Sudan, and they did not go very far.

So, in the days of the Roman Empire, tourists concentrated

on these points above all: Rome; certain parts of Sicily;
Greece; Delos, Samothrace, Rhodes, and perhaps a few other
islands of the eastern Mediterranean; Asia Minor, particularly
Troy and its environs; and Egypt.
 17

Sightseeing

When plane, train, and car replaced sail, hoof, and foot, one
key aspect of travel, the getting to a place, underwent revolu-
tionary change. But the equally important aspect of what the
traveller did when he got there —
that is another story. Here in
many respects time stood still; the ancient Roman, say, who
landed in Greece for a holiday went about things not too
differently from the thousands who have flocked there ever
since.
Olympia or Delphi or Athens, he probably
If he arrived at
did as tourists have done in all ages, embarked as soon as
he could on an investigatory walk about the place. At Olympia
or Delphi, if he arrived late in the day, he had to wait until
the next morning — just as the visitor does today. At Athens,
or any sizable town, he could, if he wanted, take an evening
stroll. Along the main street, light was no problem, since the
oil lamps in the open-fronted shops provided plenty of
illumination.At Pompeii, for example, excavation has revealed
that one main avenue some 500 yards long had forty-five
shops on either side; since each kept at least one lamp burning,
there was a light every ten yards or so. Another street, some
700 yards long, had a total of 170 shops on both sides, so here
the lamps were even closer. Street lights — as distinct from
casual lighting —
from shops were limited to main inter-
sections, and there was a tendency to emphasize not illumina-
tion but effect, by, for example, setting up street lamps behind
stone masks with gaping holes in the eyes and mouth, like
 SIGHTSEEING 263
5
jack-o lanterns. Side streets were in total darkness, and anyone
who planned to wander there had to hire linkboys to light
the path either with torches, which just blazed the way, or
with oil-burning lanterns which, when fitted with razor-thin
sheets of horn or mica, could be adjusted to throw a shaft of
light. And he had to be sure he knew his way back. Street signs
and house numbers were as unknown to Roman as to Greek
times (86 above), and the stranger’s only recourse, stopping
some local and asking, was hardly feasible in the small hours
of the night.
In addition, pedestrians roaming after dark had to keep a
sharp eye out for traffic. Many ancient cities had the good sense
to ban most wheeled vehicles during daylight hours, limiting
their movements to between late afternoon and sunrise.
People on the streets then often found themselves squeezing
into doorways in order to avoid getting crushed under some
massively loaded, precariously swaying oxcart.
The daytime too had its perils for leisurely strolling.
Though there may have been no wheeled traffic to worry
about, a careless walker could easily be bowled over by a litter
on the shoulders of a team speeding along at a brisk trot and
with no means of braking to a fast stop. And then there were
the dangers that in all ages confront the stranger on the street.
‘There are shysters’, warns a travel writer of the late second
century b.c. in his description of Athens, ‘who run about
the city and swindle the well-to-do strangers who come to
town. When the authorities catch them they hand out stiff

penalties . . . But what you must guard against with all your
might are the prostitutes; they’re a pleasant way of getting
ruined without realizing it.’
When the time came for serious sightseeing, the ancient
tourist sallied forth stripped for action, with servants at his
heels to carry any food or gear he took along. He was not even
burdened with a guidebook. Not that this most useful form
of literature did not exist. From at least the fourth century b.c.
on, guides to individual places or monuments were available,
264 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
and, between a.d. 160 and 180, a period when tourism was
flourishing, Pausanias published his excellent Guidebook of
Greece (292 below). But all these were for preparatory reading,
not for use on the spot like ours. Moreover, ancient books,
handwritten on relatively thick papyrus or leather sheets, were
too bulky for casual carrying around, to say nothing of being
too valuable.
Some ancient tourists must have been as interested as their
camera-carrying descendants in having a pictorial memento
of what they saw. If they had an aptitude for sketching, they
could take along papyrus, pen, and ink, or perhaps merely
wax tablets and stylus, much as travellers of the last centuries
packed their boxes of watercolours. If not, they almost
certainly were able to find, lined up waiting for business, any
number of quick-working miniaturists, who could dash off,
say, a bravura portrait with, at Athens, the Parthenon as back-
ground, at Delphi the temple of Apollo, at Olympia the
temple of Zeus, and so on.
In setting forth to see a site, the ancient visitor’s first

problem was the same that so often confronts his counterpart

—
today to run the gauntlet of local guides lying in wait for
him, the periegetai ‘leaders around’ or exegetai ‘explainers’, as
they were called in Greek. ‘I was going around the colonnades
in the sanctuary of Dionysus,’ says a character in one of
Lucian’s satirical sketches, ‘examining each one of the
paintings . . .and right away two or three people ran up to
,

tell me all about them for a small fee.’ Many of us, willy nilly,
submit to these tyrants; it saves the energy spent in lugging
maps, plans, and a tourist handbook, and the time spent
pouring over them. The ancients, with no such literature at

their disposal, did not even have this alternative. And, from
all accounts, local guides have not improved very much in
the course of two thousand years.
To begin with, they were everywhere; the sightseer could
not avoid them even if hewanted to. They were not only at the
great tourist sites, such as Athens or Troy, but even in small
 SIGHTSEEING 265

towns that boasted but few attractions of no great dawing

power. Lucian, in a spoof of the Baron Munchausenesque
travel writers of his day, tells how he took a group of intrepid
voyagers on a trip that included a visit to the Underworld,
and there, when they reached Purgatory, ’guides showed us
around and, for each victim, filled in the biographical data and
reasons for punishment’. Another satirist has a character in
one of his pieces utter the fervent prayer: ‘Zeus, protect me
from your guides at Olympia, and you, Athena, from yours
at Athens.’
Next, the ancient guide shared with modern descendants
the inability to stop, once he was launched on his patter. ‘The
guides went through their standard speech’, grumbles one of
the characters in a sketch Plutarch wrote about a party that
was seeing the sights of Delphi, ‘paying no attention whatso-
ever to our entreaties to cut the talk short and leave out most
of the explanations of the inscriptions and epitaphs.’ When the
party managed to seize a few moments to discuss among
themselves the point that particularly interested them, the
patina on a certain bronze statue, the very moment their
conversation came to an end, the guides were dinning their
ears again.
was not only that guides never stopped talking; it was
It

also what they talked about. Much of their information, of

course, was useful, even essential. They led a tourist over a
place, they identified and filled in the historical background of
buildings and monuments and statues, they explained the
subject matter of paintings, they described local ritual and
custom. At a site such as Olympia, where there was a veritable
forest of statues and votive offerings, the accumulation of
hundreds of years of dedications by or honour of victorious
in
runners, wrestlers, jumpers, racing teams, etc., a tourist was
helpless without a guide. But useful information was not their
only stock in trade. For example, they liked to discourse on
the monuments they could not point out as much as those
they could. At Delphi they held forth on the barbecue spits a
266 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
celebrated courtesan had once dedicated there but which had
disappeared ages ago; at Syracuse they held forth on the
numerous works of Verres (247 above) had made off
art that

with (Cicero, in a prosecuting speech against the scoundrel,

observed that the guides at Syracuse had turned ‘their tours

around. Before, they used to show where each piece was. Now
they show where each piece was stolen from’). Even worse,
whatever facts they did offer they liked to embroider with
fancy, knowing that the average hearer had no way of checking
up. ‘Your guide’, remarks Aristides, ‘amid practically oblitera-
ted traces points and tells you “Here’s Semele’s marriage
chamber, here’s Harmonia’s, here’s Leda’s”, and all that sort
of thing.’ The guides who took Herodotus around the pyra-
mids fed him a tall story about the fabulous amounts paid out
for supplying the workers with radishes, onions, and garlic

(10 1 above); six centuries later, their descendants were telling

Aristides that each pyramid extended downward into the
earth the same distance it did upward. The priest who showed
tourists around a certain temple at Ephesus, as he approached
a famous statue carved out of particularly luminous marble,
would stop and make each person cover his eyes they might —
be damaged, he warned, by the intense reflection from the
stone. When a small town in Asia Minor was hit by a severe
storm, the rain and wind laid bare a skeleton on a nearby
hillside; the local guides immediately began passing it off as

Geryon’s, the mythological triple-bodied monster slain by

Heracles. Pausanias on his visit to the site could not resist
pointing out that Geryon had lived, died, and been buried at
Cadiz, at the opposite end of the Mediterranean. At Argos,
the guides told him
one of the treasures
that of their city was
the celebrated image of Athena which had once been Troy’s
sacred possession; ‘But’, comments Pausanias in exasperation,
‘everybody knows that the Palladium, as the statue is called,

was taken to Italy by Aeneas.’ And he adds sorrowfully, ‘The

guides at Argos know very well that not all the stories they
tell are true, but they tell them anyway.’ Much of the embroider-
 SIGHTSEEING 267

ing of fact came from the guides’ passion to connect whatever

they could with the heroic days of mythological times, a
passion no doubt nourished by the eagerness with which the
customers lapped up such nonsense. 'Abolish fabulous tales
5

from Greece, snickered Lucian, 'and the guides there would

all die of starvation, since no tourist wants to hear the true
5
facts even for nothing.
Having picked his guide, the ancient sightseer then began
dutifully following him about. Knowledgeable tourists went
soberly about their business trying, like the party Plutarch
describes at Delphi, to shut the guides up or, like Pausanias, to

keep them from too wild flights of imagination. The gullible

dogged the guide’s footsteps, eagerly drinking in every word,
like the Caius Licinius Mucianus whom Pliny quotes so often.
Mucianus, who spent a long time in the Near East —he was
governor of Syria in a.d. 68 —and though a
travelled widely,
ranking statesman and soldier, apparently swallowed whole
everything he was told; it was from him that Pliny got the
story of a spring in a temple of Dionysus that could flow with
wine (246 above), of a temple in Lycia that preserved a letter
written by one of the heroes of the Trojan War, of the people
on Mt Tmolus in Asia Minor who lived to be one hundred
and fifty years old, of a certain elephant that learned to read
Greek and could write, of all things, ‘I myself wrote this and
dedicated these spoils won from the Celts.’
Most of the tourists were neither particularly knowledgeable
nor particularly gullible, but went about being properly
impressed by what they were seeing. The clearest proof we
have of this is the skit by Herondas mentioned before
(242 above). It concerns a trio right out of tourist life: Phile,
the kind of female who bubbles enthusiastically about what-
ever she is shown; Kynno, her and so knowl-
friend, serious
edgeable that she is able to act as guide; and an unctuous
sacristan. The two ladies go to make an offering at the well-
known temple of Asclepius on the island of Cos, the site of
the famous school founded by Hippocrates, father of medicine.
268 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
The place was also a museum of considerable renown, since
some of the walls had been decorated by Apelles, perhaps the
greatest painter of the ancient world, and the votive offerings
thatwere all about included a number of celebrated sculptures
(one was Boethus’ statue of a boy struggling with a goose, a
work so popular that innumerable copies of
were made, and it

no less than four have survived to this day). While waiting

for the sacristan to report on how the god had reacted to their
offering —
it was only a rooster; that was all the poor ladies

could afford —they decided to look over the collection. The

impressionable Phile starts gushing immediately:

phile Kynno, my dear! What beautiful statues! What

sculptor did this one? Who paid to set it up?
kynno Praxiteles’ sons. Don’t you see the inscription on
the base? And a Euthies, son of Prexon, had it set up.

phile May the god bless them and Euthies for such beautiful
things.

kynno Phile, see the statue of that girl, the one looking up
at an apple.
phile Wouldn’t you say she’ll simply faint if she doesn’t
get that apple? And, Kynno, that old man and, in —
heaven’s name, that boy choking a goose! If it weren’t in
stone, as you can see close up, you’d say that piece could
talk!

kynno I tell you, one of these days men will be able to

bring even stone to life.

phile That’s right, Kynno. Just look at the way this one
shows that hussy Batale standing, the statue of that pimp’s
daughter [presumably a portrait dedicated by some local in
honour of a cure the god had affected]. Anyone who didn’t
know her, could just look at this image and never need the
real thing.

kynno Follow me, my dear, and I’ll show you something

beautiful, the likes of which you’ve never seen in your
 SIGHTSEEING 269

whole life.(To her maid) Kydilla! Go call the sacristan

out. You there, looking every which way with that stupid
expression, I’m talking to you! (To Phile ) Look at that!
Doesn’t pay a bit of attention to what I say. Just stands
there staring at me worse than a crab! (To the maid) You
heard me, go call the sacristan! . . . Kydilla, as god’s my
witness, I don’t want to lose my temper, but you are
making me furious! I tell you, as god’s my witness the
day will come when you’ll be rubbing that damned skull
of yours!
phile Don’t be so quick to take everything to heart,
Kynno. She’s only a slave. Laziness plugs the slave’s ears,
you know.
kynno But it’s getting on, and the crush is getting bigger.
(To maid who had finally started to go off) Hey, wait!
the
The door opened. We can go into the sacristy.
phile Kynno! My dear! Look at these! Wouldn’t you say
Lady Athena carved them herself? (Turning and suddenly
seeing a statue of Athena) Why, hello, my lady! (Looking
at a painting of the sacrifice of an ox) Why that naked boy,
if I were to scratch him, wouldn’t he just bleed, Kynno? The

flesh is painted on him so that it’s warm, it beats with life

in the picture. And that pair of silver tongs if any —
Mr Lightfingers saw it, wouldn’t the eyes pop out of his
head! He’d think it’s really silver. And the ox, and the
fellow leading it, and the girl attendant, and that hook-
nosed fellow and the one with his hair sticking up aren’t —
they all the image of life? If I didn’t think it was unlady-
like, I’d have screamed out loud that that ox might do me

harm. The way he looks at me sideways, Kynno, with

that one eye!

kynno Phile, Apelles’ hand is true in everything he paints.

You can’t say, 'There’s a man who took up one thing and
disregarded another.’ No, whatever came to his mind, he
was eager to jump up and try. If anyone looks at him or
270 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
his works without being overwhelmed why let him be —
strung up by the heels in a laundry [i.e. the place par
excellence for squeezing, wringings heating\
sacristan {coming forth to greet them ) Ladies, your offering
is perfect; it looks as if better things are in store. No one
has pleased our lord more than you. {Praying) O Lord,
for these fair offerings of theirs, thy blessings on these
ladies and whoever be their spouses and near of kin, O
Lord. Amen.
kynno Amen, great Lord, and grant that we come back in
good you a better offering, along with our
health to bring
husbands and children. {To a maid) Kokkale, don’t forget
to cut a nice drumstick off the bird and give it to the
sacristan.

To do the collection of an ancient temple was somewhat

easier than, say, an art-laden church, since many of the
treasures were out of doors, in full sunlight and never barred
by lock and key. War trophies, such as shields, were often
hung on architraves and along friezes. Statues in marble or
bronze were set up in the porches at either end (Fig. 18) or
between the columns along the sides. Or they might be placed
at various points in the sanctuary grounds; two favoured

solutions were to put them under colonnades or in niches in

the perimeter wall. Objects of intrinsic value, like pieces in
silver or gold, or objects that could not take the weather, like
statues of wood or of gold and ivory, were generally within
walls. To one faced the problem that has plagued
see these,
tourists through the centuries, of knowing the hours of
opening or of finding someone to unlock the doors. In
Herondas’ sketch, Phile and Kynno started with the statuary,
which must have been dotted about the sanctuary, but then,
for the paintings, which were inside, they had to wait until
the sacristan opened up. Praxiteles’ masterpiece, the Aphrodite
at Cnidus, was in a special building which enabled visitors to

—
view the figure from all sides but, to see it from the rear,
 SIGHTSEEING 27 1

they had to go through a back entry, and that involved

locating a lady who had There was no question that
the key.
temples had to be kept locked, for they were robbed as ruth-
lessly as churches are today. At Rome thievesmade off with a
hoard of gold stored in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline,
the sword of Caesar that was kept in the temple of Mars the
Avenger, even the helmet from the statue of Mars there. The
situation got so bad at times that the Roman authorities made
the guardians of temples with particularly valuable pieces
responsible for them with their life.

The opportunity to see great works of art or historical build-

ings and monuments is what draws a tourist to a site. However,
once there, he is glad to have some diversion; even the
confirmed lover of art and antiquities can lose interest after
hours of plodding around, particularly during the heat of a
Mediterranean summer. And so, in ancient times as now, the
the locals had special performances to offer which provided a
welcome change of pace for a footsore sightseer. One of the
high points of the tour of the pyramids, for example, was to
watch men from the nearby village of Busiris, who had made
a specialty of the feat, shinning up from the ground to the
very tip — a bravura display of agility in those days when the
sloping faces, with the revetment still intact, were absolutely
smooth. Further up the Nile were the sacred crocodiles; the
priests had taught them to come when called and, on command,
open their jaws and let their teeth be cleaned and then wiped
dry with cloths. At Arsinoe, where the crocodile who incarna-
ted the god Suchus dwelled, a tourist could enjoy an even
better show. If he came to the temple provided with an
appropriate food offering for the god —
a kind of pastry, some
roasted meat, and a pitcher of wine sweetened with honey he —
could watch while the priests called the beast, opened its
mouth, stuffed in the pastry and meat, and flushed it down
with the wine. Suchus must have been uncommonly well fed
because, if a second tourist came up to make an offering, the
272 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
would forthwith go through the whole routine again.
priests
At Syene (Aswan) on the First Cataract, the local boatmen
would put on a special act they had perfected: working their
way upstream to a point beyond the cataract, they turned
around, downstream, and then shot the
set their craft drifting

rapids; this, however, was for the delectation of distinguished

visitors only.
The most renowned performance of all, one that attracted
touristsfrom all over the ancient world, was put on by nature
and not man. At Thebes in Egypt, not far from the Valley of
the Kings, stands a pair of colossal statues, each consisting of
a base and a throne with a seated figure upon it. They are as
tall as a six-storey house; the feet alone are three yards long.
But was not their
it size that drew the crowds; it was that one
of them ‘talked’.
Today we know that the singularly gifted statue represents
Amenhotep III, who reigned about 1400 b.c. and was one of
Egypt’s greatest pharaohs. The Greeks and Romans, however,
were convinced it was a likeness of the mythological Memnon,
child of the Goddess of Dawn, who figures in the legend of
Troy; he was king of the Ethiopians, and met an untimely
death at the hands of Achilles when he led an army from his
native land through Egypt to help the beleaguered Trojans.
At some time, probably about 27 b.c., an earthquake broke
the statue across the torso, and the upper part fell to the
ground. The remainder developed a unique feature — the
ability to utter sound. At daybreak —not any other time of
day, only daybreak — it made a sharp cracking noise which
somewhat resembled the snapping of the string of a musical
instrument. The conviction arose, no doubt ably fostered by
the local guides, that these sounds were Memnon’s way of
talking to his bereaved mother.
The earliest to report the phenomenon is the learned geo-
grapher Strabo, who wrote in the last decade of the first

century b.c., not too long, therefore, after the statue had
started to ‘talk’. Strabo was not convinced. Mentioning that
 SIGHTSEEING 273

the upper half of the colossus had fallen, reportedly as the

result of an earthquake, he goes on to say:

It is believed that, once a day, a noise like a blow of no great

force produced by the part of the statue
is remaining on the
throne and base. I myself was present on the spot along with
Aelius Gallus [governor of Egypt] and a group of his com-
panions and soldiers and, an hour after sunrise, I heard the
sound —whether came from the base of the statue or was
it

deliberately made by one of the people standing around and

near the base, I cannot say for sure. Indeed, because the
source is indeterminate, any plausible idea that occurs to one
is easier to believe than that the sound was sent out by stones
fixed that way.

When
Pausanias was compiling his Guidebook of Greece
sometime about the middle of the second century a.d., the
statuewas still talking. Pausanias includes a description of it,
and, though not an out and out sceptic like Strabo, is definitely
guarded. He writes:

What surprised me
more than anything else was the
far

Colossus of the Egyptians. At Thebes in Egypt you come . .

.

to a seated statue that gives out a sound. Most people call it

Memnon . . The Thebans, however, say that the image
.

represents, not Memnon, but a native with the name of

Phamenoth [probably a garbling of Amenhotep]. I have also
heard some claim that it represents Sesostris [a quasi-
mythological Pharaoh]. Every day at sunrise it cries out,
. . .

and the sound can be best compared to the snapping of the

string of a lute or lyre.

But Strabo with his scientific doubts and Pausanias with

his caution were voices in the wilderness. For all who flocked
there, the statue was Memnon conversing with his mother.
And they kept flocking right up to the beginning of the third
century a.d. when for some reason Memnon stopped talking.
It was just about this time that the emperor Septimius Severus
274 TRAVEL in the ancient world
had the piece which had fallen down replaced, and it may have
been this that struck Memnon dumb. It has been suggested,
with some plausibility, that the sound was caused by the
sudden increase of temperature at sunrise, which heated the
air trapped in holes in the broken surface causing it to expand
and, in escaping, produce a sound. Thus, when the recon-
struction covered up this surface, the miraculous voice was
abruptly silenced.
Since Memnon during his vocal period had performed daily,
he was able to gather far more witnesses to his unusual powers
than, say,any of today’s miracle-working statues of saints
which perform only annually on the appropriate saint’s day.
We know of these witnesses and their steadfast faith in the
talking statue thanks to yet another tourist characteristic that
has not changed one whit during the course of two thousand
years — the compulsion to scribble one’s name in the places
one has been, to leave, as it were, a calling card for all subse-
quent visitors to see.

We can trace this compulsion back at least four thousand

years, to the days of Egypt’s Eleventh Dynasty around
2000 b.c. Henu, a high official under pharaoh Mentuhotep III,

had been entrusted with an expedition of some sort down the

Red Sea; as he made his way back through the gorge that
leads from there to the Nile, the Wadi Hammamat, he chiselled
on its walls his name and accomplishments. This, to be sure,
was a carefully carved inscription, a rather formal version of
the calling card. More familiar are the informal ones, the
random scribblings or graffiti ‘scratchings’, as they are called.
These too are of hoary antiquity; we have already encountered
examples that date from the thirteenth century b.c. (33 above).
The next oldest specimens we have were written in 591 b.c.
In that year Egypt’s pharaoh dispatched deep into the Sudan
an expedition of Egyptian troops stiffened with a foreign
legion, a contingent of Greek mercenaries. As the combined
army made its way upriver it passed the spectacular temple
of Ramses II at Abu Simbel with its four colossal seated
 —

SIGHTSEEING 275

figures in front (this is the temple that was recently cut away
and raised to the top of a cliff to avoid being submerged under
the waters backing up behind Egypt’s new high dam). On
the legs of the statues the commanding officers and some of
the men scratched things like: ‘When Pharaoh Psammetichus
came to Elephantine [near the First Cataract], was
this

written by those who sailed in the flotilla commanded by

Psammetichus, son of Theocles. . . . Potasimto commanded
the foreign legion,Amasis the Egyptians. This message was
inscribed by Archon, son of Amoibichos, and Pelekos, son of
Eudamos.’ Others, presumably from the ranks, just put down
their names. ‘Telephos of Ialysus [a city on Rhodes] wrote
5

this says one inscription; it was an ancient Greek soldier’s

,

way of saying ‘Kilroy was here’. Some four centuries later

troops dispatched by one of the Ptolemies added additional
signatures, including that of ‘Krateros, son of Leukaros,
elephant-hunter’. Elephants were the tanks of the Ptolemaic
armies, and expeditions were sent regularly into Africa to
catch them; we find a graffito recording ‘the soldiers of the
elephant hunt’ on a temple wall in Abydos; it was scribbled
no doubt when the men were passing through en route to or
from a foray. The names at Abu Simbel go right down the
centuries; even Ferdinand de Lessups, builder of the Suez
Canal, left his there.

The monument whose surfaces the tourist found absolutely

irresistible was Memnon. Over one hundred graffiti cover

whole of his legs and base; they range in time

practically the
—
about a third of them are dated from the reign of Tiberius
(a.d. 14-38) to a.d. 205. Most, as it happens, are no casual
scribblings but veritable inscriptions carved with care; they
were probably done by professional stonecutters who were
available for hire in the vicinity. Apparently only the elite were
allowed to leave these elegantly engraved mementoes. Heading
the list of notables who did so is Sabina, wife of the Emperor
Hadrian; she accompanied her husband on a trip to the famed
monument in a.d. 130 and attests that ‘during the first hour
27 6 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
[i.e., after sunrise] she twice heard Memnon’. Her husband
has no record; perhaps he was piqued because, as we
left

gather from some verses indited by a voluble poetess who

accompanied the royal entourage, Memnon had the bad taste
to fail to perform for his distinguished visitor. Before Hadrian’s
time the marvel had drawn quite a few high-ranking officials

no less than five governors of Egypt and any number of —

army officers, probably from units stationed in the neighbour-
hood or passing through. As the years passed, its attraction
grew steadily, among intellectuals as well as officials, reaching
a climax with the emperor’s own visit. While Hadrian was on
the throne Roman officialdom felt it was almost de rigueur to
go there and inscribe their names. Among the graffiti that date
from his reign are three left by governors of Egypt, three by
district governors, a scattering by lesser officials, one by a

judge, and at least three by self-styled ‘poets’. After Hadrian,

the inscriptions fall off sharply. By this time, with the total
going past the hundred mark, space was running short. The
latest that bears a date was done around a.d. 205. Septimius

Severus’ restoration presumably took place the next year or so.

These messages, left by wellnigh two centuries of visitors,
make it plain howwere the ranks of the sceptics and how
thin
full those of the true believers. For the writers attest not only
to their presence there but to their faith in the miracle as well.
and to the point; one has the feeling that they
Officials are curt
say what they have to say in the verbiage they use in their
formal reports: T, Lucius Funisulanus Charisius, mayor of
Hermonthis and Latopolis [two nearby villages], heard
Memnon twice, before the hour and at the first hour,
first

along with my wife Fulvia. 8 Thoth, 7th year of Hadrian, our

lord September a.d. 122].’ The intellectuals who flocked
[i.e. 5
there, poets and poetesses, professors, the literary-minded in
general, found prose too bald to express their feelings. They
turned to verse, usually archaic verse done in the style of
Homer — after all, was notMemnon a character from the legend
of Troy? One of the Roman governors of Egypt, obviously a
 : :

SIGHTSEEING 277

man of culture, combines both styles, the bureaucratic and the

poetic. ‘On the day before the Ides of March,’ he writes in
terse Latin, ‘16th consulship of Emperor Domitian Caesar
Augustus Germanicus [i.e. 14 March a.d. 92], Titus Petronius
Secundus, Governor of Egypt, heard Memnon at the first
hour and honoured him with the Greek verses inscribed
below:
Lord Memnon, thou spake loud and shrill
When struck by the rays burning hot
Of Apollo (for much of thee still

Sits in majesty here on this spot).’

Another official, who signs ‘poet and procurator’, is responsible

for what is probably the best metrical effort on the monument

O Thetis, nymph of the sea, know that Memnon

Still lives, still speaks to his mother aloud,
When warmed by her light, on the bank by the mount
Which the Nile cleaves from Thebes, gated city so proud,
While the voice of Achilles, thy battle-crazed boy,
Can no longer be heard either in Greece or at Troy.
Most of the versifiers rarely rise above the level of doggerel
a la Homer. Here, for example, are the words penned by a
certain Falernus who calls himself ‘professor and poet’ and
has no humble opinion of his talents

He has learned to orate, he has learned to keep quiet;

The words and of silence he knows.
force both of
At the sight of the dawn, of his saffron-robed mother,
He utters a sound, and more sweetly it flows
Than the clearest of speech ever voiced by another.
This poem did Falernus, Professor and Poet, infuse
With a quality worthy of a Grace or a Muse.

And Paeon, poet in attendance on Mettius Rufus, governor of

Egypt from a.d. 89 to 91, is hardly better:

Thou still hast thy voice, O great Memnon, e’en though

By destroyers thy body was smitten,
278 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
For Mettius heard it, and can say it is so.
This poem by Paeon was written.

Of the sixty-one graffiti in Greek, no less than thirty-five are

(Of the forty-five in Latin, only four are but we
in verse. —
must remember that Homer’s language was Greek.) The prose
messages, though not always as bare as the examples in quasi-
officialese cited above, rarely went in for more than a brief
allusion to the quality of the experience. Thus a certain
Artemidorus, a village clerk who paid a visit with his family,
writes: T heard the wonderful Memnon, along with my wife
Arsinoe and my children Ptolemaios and Ailurion, also called
Quadratus, 11 Choiak, 15th year of Hadrian Caesar, our lord
7 December a.d. 130]/
[i.e.

Memnon, with only legs and base available for inscriptions,

had to be selective about who was to sign on him. In
another set of monuments nearby of rather lesser note
there was space galore for tourists to relieve themselves of the
itch to scratch —
the underground tombs of the pharaohs in
the Valley of the Kings. Long before Greek and Roman times,
these had been broken into by robbers, stripped of their riches,
and left open. By the end of the first century b.c., at least forty
were known. And, in ten of these, six centuries of visitors have
left their mark.
The earliest graffiti go back perhaps to the third century b.c.,
but there are not many this old. The big tourist influx began
in the first century a.d. and reached its height in the second,
the great years of the Pax Romana. Visitors kept right on
coming until the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh
century finally put an end to the traffic. Unlike Memnon’s
carefully engraved and often lengthy messages, we find here
the short hurried notes that are typical of graffiti. The tombs
are all in the form of a long series of underground corridors
and chambers hacked out of the living rock the Greeks —
called them syringes ‘pipes’ because they resembled pipe-like
galleries —and this meant that writing had to be done under
 SIGHTSEEING 279

little or no natural light, which did not encourage lengthy or

careful composition. Most of the graffiti are clustered near the
entrances, where the sun penetrated, but there are quite a few
deep in the bowels, and these could only have been done under
the flare of torches.
There are over 2,100 inscriptions in the tombs. Inevitably
they are able to tell us much more Memnon’s select one
than
hundred-odd about the nature and ways of sightseers in
ancient times. They show that, even as now, tourists liked to

go about in company. Families travelled together, as we see

from the many instances in which fathers sign for their wives
and children as well as for themselves. People of like interests
travelled together; there are graffiti, for example, left by a
group of Neoplatonist philosophers who paid the site a visit
en masse Officials went with their entourages: a certain
.

Tatianus, governor of the district of Thebes, left signatures

in three different places, and nearby are those of at least two
secretaries, two assistants, and a friend. Many graffiti include
mention of home town, and these reveal that the fame of
a
the tombs was world-wide. The major districts of Greece are
represented, all the main islands of the Aegean and eastern
Mediterranean, many parts of Asia Minor, the Levant, Italy,
Sicily; one visitor came from as far east as Persia, two from as
far west as Marseilles. As we might imagine, the tourists were
largely from society’s upper crust, people who had time and
money for travel. No royalty ever took the trouble to see the
tombs, but at least six governors of Egypt did, quite a few
district governors, and the inevitable ubiquitous army officers.

For intellectuals the 'pipes’ seem to have had even more

appeal than Memnon: calling cards were left by judges,
lawyers, poets, prose writers, public speakers, professors,
doctors (no less than twenty-eight of these), and philosophers
of various persuasions — one Aristotelian, a number of Cynics,
and the contingent of Neoplatonists just mentioned. There
was a special reason for these last, revealed by one of their
number, a lawyer named Bourichios from Ascalon on the
280 travel in the ancient world
southwestern coast of Palestine, who pointedly says that ‘he
made was a commonplace among
his visit because of Plato’. It
Greeks that Egypt was the fount of much ancient wisdom,
and the man in the street would take it for granted that so
profound a philosopher as Plato had spent long years there.
On top of this, one of the most famous Platonic passages is
the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic ; conceivably people
like Bourichios thought they were beholding the very place

the master had written about. Though plenty of intellectuals

are recorded, there is not one manufacturer or merchant, but
this is hardly surprising: business was not a career one often
boasted about in the ancient world. Of the hundreds who
signed without indication of profession, a few at least must
have been merchants; two who came from distant
the
Marseilles, which carried on a good volume of trade with
Egypt, almost certainly were. The others no doubt represent
the spectrum of the middle-class folk who lived in the neigh-
bourhood or no great distance away.
A number of the graffiti are precisely dated, giving even
the month and day, and these indicate that the ancient ‘tourist
season’ in Egypt was just about what it is today, from
November to April, when the weather is relatively cool. Only
locals braved the midsummer sun, and not very many of them.
The itinerary seems to have started with a pre-dawn trip to
Memnon. He was the sight par excellence and, standing in the
level fields along the bank, was easy to reach. After he had
gone through his act, the ranks no doubt thinned, and only
those sufficiently enticed by the fame of the ‘pipes’ to tackle
the climb involved, followed the guides on to the Valley of the
Kings. Artemidorus, for example, the village clerk who
signed for his wife and two sons on Memnon, mentions only
his wife in the tombs; quite possibly he spared the children
the rugged walk and sent them back with an attendant. The
guides took all visitors to the feature attraction, the tomb of
Ramses VI. Not that it was so much more impressive than the
others; it owed its popularity solely to the widespread belief,
 —

SIGHTSEEING 281

which had somehow sprung up, that it was Memnon’s. Of

the more than two thousand known graffiti, almost half were
inscribed here. A good many people also saw the tomb of
Ramses IV, conveniently located near the entrance to the
royal cemetery. About a third of the graffiti are here, including
many left by Christians; for some reason the place seems to
have become a Christian cult centre in later centuries. The
tombs of Ramses X and Merneptah ran a poor third with 132
and 1 21 graffiti respectively. Six other tombs have a mere
sixty-odd signatures each or less. The rest apparently were
never or hardly ever visited. Most tourists were satisfied with
a tour through ‘Memnon’s’, quite a few did at least two
—
‘Memnon’ and Ramses IV while some did three or even
four. A certain Jasios and Synesius hold the record — in the
tomb of Ramses X they scribbled ‘This is the sixth “pipe” we
have seen’. Jasios had come all the way from Neocaesarea
near the south shore of the Black Sea, and he obviously was
not going to miss a trick. His name occurs in other tombs,
once with a note mentioning that he had also heard
Memnon.
At the entrance to a tomb the guides stopped to let the
visitors accustom their bodies to the cool and their eyes to
the semi-darkness after the glare of the sun. Very likely many
took advantage of these moments to whip out reed pen and
ink or a pointed instrument and leave their name; as men-
tioned, many graffiti are clustered near the entrances, including
the better part of the ones done in ink. Of these, about three
hundred are in black ink, some forty in red, and a scattered
few in green or brown; all the rest of the graffiti, some 1,750,
are scratchings. The guides then lit torches and led the way
into the depths. Disregarding the parts of the walls that were
covered with rows of hieroglyphs, they would stop in front
of the mural paintings to explain them. This was another
convenient time for writing, and many used it to scribble on
the blank spaces surrounding the figures in the pictures.
The visitor to the tombs felt compelled to record not merely
282 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
that he had been there but that he had been ‘amazed’. ‘I,
Palladius of Hermopolis, judge, saw and was amazed’; ‘I,
Alexander, Governor of the District of Thebes, saw and was
—
amazed and I, Isaac of Alexandria, his secretary, was more
than amazed at the wonderful work.’ Some are more expan-
sive: ‘I, Antonius, son of Theodorus, of Heliopolis in Phoe-
nicia,Honourable Minister of Finance, who have long resided
in Rome and gazed on the marvels there, have seen these here
too.’ Some were even ecstatic: ‘Unique, unique, unique!’ one
burbled. A Roman officer who writes in Latin apparently
wanted to be absolutely certain his amazement was noted, for
he recorded it no less than four times: in the tomb of Ramses IV
with the words, ‘I, Colonel Januarius, saw and was amazed at
the place along with my daughter Januarina. Greetings to all’;

in a corridorand an inner chamber of ‘Memnon’s’ tomb with

the words ‘I, Colonel Januarius, saw and was amazed at the
place’; and in the room that held the sarcophagus with the
customary minimum ‘I, Colonel Januarius, saw and was
amazed’. A ‘Marcus Volturius, Roman’, who signed himself
in Latin in the two favoured tombs, both times repeated the
message in Greek to make sure that all comers would be
able to read it. The record for scribbling goes to a certain
Amsouphis who visited four tombs and left a total of nine
signatures. Once he ‘was amazed’, once he left his ‘homage’,
once he signed his name with his profession ‘magician’, no
—
less —and six other times he just left his name. Some were so
impressed by the mystery all about them, particularly the
on the walls, that they elected
baffling hieroglyphic characters
to go in for mystery themselves and inscribed their names in
anagrams. ‘Onipsromse’, wrote one, which unscrambles easily
enough to Sempronios; ‘Onaysisid’ wrote another, which
unscrambles to Dionysias. Neoplatonistand lawyer Bourichios,
presumably adept at unravelling the secrets of the law or of
philosophic thought, was depressed in front of the inscrutable
hieroglyphs. ‘Having made my visit,’ he laments, ‘I blame
myself for not understanding the writing.’ ‘I did not accept
 :

SIGHTSEEING 283

that reproach from you, Bourichios!’ scribbled a sympathetic

friend right below.
Understandably, ‘Memnon’s’ tomb drew the most extrava-
gant expressions of amazement. ‘I saw the other “pipes” ’,

writes Hermogenes from Amasis in northern Asia Minor, ‘and

was amazed, but, when I visited this one of Memnon, I was
more than amazed.’ It even moved some to verse although,
working by dim light, they restrained their effusions to a few
lines

Everyone of the ‘pipes’ held Heraclius in thrall

But he says that King Memnon’s is most wonderful of all.

Not every visitor was quite so awestruck. In two places some-

one, tongue in cheek, scratched the children’s age-old chal-
lenge: ‘Does your mother know you’re out?’ A certain
Ephiphanius records grumpily that he ‘made the visit but was
amazed at nothing except the stone’ —presumably the feat of
hacking so great a structure out of living rock. saw the ‘I

madness, and I was amazed’, writes Dioscurammon. These

noncomformists made their visits in later centuries, and,
despite the name Dioscurammon (the Dioscuri were the
Greek gods Castor and Pollux, and Ammon was the chief
Egyptian deity), both may have been Christians, which
would account for their attitude. Christian visitors to the
tombs, reluctant to admit the achievements of pagans, rarely
mention amazement and simply sign their names, often with
an indication of their faith such as a cross or the abbreviation
for Christ.
The most accessible of Egypt’s noted tourist attractions
was the complex of pyramids and the great sphinx outside
Memphis, and it goes without saying that the ancient sight-
seers left their mark here. Many must have scratched messages
on the smooth outer skin of the sloping faces. However, since
the slabs that made it up were cannibalized over the centuries
for use elsewhere, the inscriptions have almost all been lost.

We have the text of only a few, copied down by pilgrims who

284 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
visited the site in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when
some of the skin was still in place. The most elaborate is a
six-line poem in Latin epic verse, the work of some melancholy
Roman lady. T saw the pyramids’, she writes, ‘without you,
dearest brother. Sadly I shed tears here —which was all I

could do for you —and mindful of our sorrow do I inscribe

this lament.’ A
number of tourists scribbled on a paw of the
sphinx, and their words have survived, including a few
effusions in poetry. One, in the archaic Homeric verse that
was comme ilfaut for such messages, runs:

This sphinx who lacks naught is a vision divine.

Ifyou ponder her shape you will note the sure sign
That her form is all made like a sacred apparition:
Above is she holy, her face of heaven’s rendition,
But a lion, king of beasts, in limbs, body, and spine.

Most, however, were satisfied just to record their respects to

the deity: ‘homage from Harpocration’, ‘homage from
Hermias’, and the like.
This formula and other similar ones are found also at the
temple of Isis on Philae, a tiny island in the Nile just above the
First Cataract. The temple still stands, but, after a dam was
raised at Aswan between 1899 and 1902, was submerged by
the waters that backed up behind; it can now be seen only
during the early summer months when the level of the Nile
—
drops to its lowest. Philae was remote foreigners who dis-
embarked at Alexandria had to sail upriver the length of Egypt
to reach it —
so visitors, other than locals or officers and men
from the troops stationed roundabout, were not too common.
Yet a few made it there in one wav or another. A certain
Heliodorus, native of a town in Syria, who left an inscription
on Memnon, went on to leave one at Philae, probably in the
early years of the second century a.d. An intrepid traveller of
roughly the same time who records that he came to Egypt
just to see the sights, and who included even the far-off
sanctuary of Ammon in the Libyan desert in his itinerary, paid
 SIGHTSEEING 285

a visit to Philae. Two Roman senators who travelled through

Egypt in 2 B.c. signed the walls there. Envoys from the King
of Meroe deep in the Sudan to the governor of Egypt at
Alexandria had to pass through Philae; some who were en
route in the mid-third century a.d. took advantage of the
occasion to visit the temple and scratch a message. Like
Memnon, Philae inspired many of its beholders to verse.
There are, for example, no less than three poems from a
Catilius who paid his visit in the last decades of the first

century b.c. In recording their respects to the deity of the

temple, the graffiti writers liked to include a plea for blessed
remembrance of others who could not be there or to record
the performance of a ceremonial act in their behalf. Thus an
Ammonius, son of Dionysius, who visited on 6 June a.d. 2,
writes that he, ‘made his prayer to Isis and Serapis and the
other gods dwelling here and rendered homage in the name
of my brother Protas and his children, of my brother Niger,
of my wife, of Demas and her children, of Dionys and
Anoubas’. And a certain Demetrius, who was there probably
on 4 February, 28 b.c., effuses in Greek verse:

I, Demetrius, having coursed the fruit-giving Nile,

Came whose power knows no end,
to Isis,

To ask of her blessed remembrance for my every

Child, brother, sister, and friend.

Such messages were not peculiar to Philae. They are found in

Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir-el-Bahari, in the Memnonion at

Abydos — indeed, they must have been an ubiquitous nuisance,

since Plutarch, in a blast against all who scribble in public
places, singles them out for special mention. ‘There is never
anything useful’, he storms, ‘or charming in what they write,
just things full of nonsense such as “So and so asks for blessed
remembrance for so and so”.’

Having visited a spot, watched whatever performances the

locals had to offer, perhaps added his name to the others,
286 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
scratched there, the tourist had one thing left to do: find an
appropriate souvenir.
Not very much information about shopping for souvenirs
is from the ancient world, just enough to reveal that
available
only the objects of the hunt have changed, that the tastes and
desires and purposes involved were much the same as now.
The religious-minded Roman lady touring in Egypt brought
back a container of Nile water to use in the service of Isis, just
as the visitor to Italy today returns with a rosary. The amateur
art lover came home from Athens with a replica in miniature
of the great statue of Athena by Phidias, just as we come back
from Florence with one of Michelangelo’s David. The wealthy
did not content themselves with miniatures; they ordered
full-scale reproductions to adorn their town houses and
country villas. Hadrian, most widely travelled of the Roman
emperors, not only monumental villa
filled his outside Rome
with masterful copies of famous statues he had seen, but, as
we noted earlier (232 above), devoted whole areas of it to
reproductions of entire sites that he had enjoyed, such as
Greece’s Vale of Tempe or the sanctuary of Serapis at Canopus
near Alexandria.
Inevitably the ancients had their versions of the cheap,
gimcrack souvenir. Thanks to the archeologists, we have
quite a few samples to show what these were like. In Afghani-
stan there was unearthed a glass vessel decorated with a scene
of the harbour of Alexandria; it must have arrived at that
far-off place in the luggage of some local who wanted a
memento of his long trek to the great metropolis. In the
second century b.c. shops in Alexandria sold a distinctive type
of cheap faience pot with a figure in relief on it of one of the
Ptolemaic queens; though intended primarily for the local
folk —most examples have turned up in Egypt — it also
appealed to visitors, who carried them off as souvenirs. The
Bay of Naples area, Rome’s favoured holiday area (139 above),
offered a typical tourist item, little glass vials (Fig. 19) bearing
pictures of the chief sights in the region identified by labels:
 SIGHTSEEING 287

‘Lighthouse’, ‘Palace’, ‘Theatre’, ‘Nero’s Pool’, ‘Oyster Beds’,

etc.At Antioch, which boasted one of the most popular statues
of the ancient world, a figure representing the city’s Tyche or
goddess of good luck, one could buy glass bottles about six
inches high made in the shape of the statue. Lucian, in his
recounting of the founding of an oracle by a quack (135 above),
avows that, as soon as visitors began to flock in, the quack had
his bogus deity reproduced in ‘paintings and models and
statuettes, either in bronze or silver’ for ready sale. In a sketch
describing a visit to the famed Aphrodite by Praxiteles at
Cnidus, Lucian has one of his characters remark that he could
not help ‘laughing at the obscene pottery; this was, after all,

Aphrodite’s town’; one probably had to run the gauntlet of

shops displaying such pieces all along the approach to the
building that housed the statue. When St Paul came to
Ephesus he had some uneasy moments because a certain
Demetrius, a silversmith who specialized in ‘silver temples of
Artemis’, called upon his fellow artisans to protest at the way
Christianity was hurting their business; his ‘silver temples’
were miniature models intended for the throngs who came to
see the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which ranked among
the Seven Wonders; customers bought them to offer as dedi-
cations, the way we offer plaques, candles, or the like.

Demetrius must have catered to the well-to-do, but cheap

terra-cotta versions were no doubt available for humbler
visitors; terra-cotta models of temples frequently turn up in
excavations.
Serious buyers would press past the pedlars and push-
carts with their tawdry gimcracks to make their way to where
the best shops were to be found. Here is a graphic picture,
drawn by the Roman satirist Martial, of shopping, particularly
for objets £ art ,
in a row of Rome’s fanciest shops toward the
end of the first century a.d. :

Along the shops in the old voting hall,

the places where Rome with the wherewithal
288 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
puts its money to work, Mamurra made
a long and leisurely promenade.

First call was at the slave blocks where

with expert eye he stopped to stare
not at the cheap goods all can see,
displayed for the likes of you and me,
but the luscious boys for sale inside,

and feasted his eyes till satisfied.

Next, tables and chairs —he had legs hauled down,

had tops uncovered, and with a frown,
after four times measuring, bemoaned his fate

that a tortoise-shell inlaid couch for eight

was a little too small, just wouldn’t be good
with his precious table of lemon-wood.
He consulted his nose in order to tell

the authentic Corinthian bronze’s smell;

took Polyclitus’ work to task;
got outraged because a crystal flask
had a tiny flaw; selected with care,
to be held aside in his name, five pair
of rare bowls; appraised old goblets and
anything he found from Mentor’s hand;
counted the emeralds on enamelled gold things,
and the oversize pearls on pendant earrings;
on each and all counters assayed every stone,
and put in his offer for the biggest ones shown.

At five p.m., all tired and hot,

he ended up buying a five-penny pot.

Mamurra was, and not some wide-eyed

to be sure, a native
stranger. But, during the course of his day, he doubtless
rubbed shoulders with any number of the latter on the look-
out, like himself, for bargains in antiques; Rome, capital of
the world and its wealthiest city, was the centre of the art
 SIGHTSEEING 289

trade. It is a trade that has not changed much in two thousand

years; a Roman poet is bitter about those ‘artists who . . .

contrive to get bigger prices for their latest works by

writing Praxiteles’ name on their sculpture, Mys’ on their
polished silver, Zeuxis’ on their paintings’.
In other cities there were the locally available products or
local specialties to shop for. Alexandria, lying at the end of
the sea routes from the Far East and Africa (129 above), was
middleman for all the exotic wares that came from there. Any-
one visiting Egypt had to pass through Alexandria, and con-
fronting him on all sides would be irresistible buys: silksfrom
China and cottons from India; spices, such as pepper and
ginger and cinnamon, from India and Indonesia; perfumes
derived from African myrrh. At the very least he would lay
in a supply of the paper manufactured from papyrus (22 1 above),
a plant that grew only along the Nile and its branches and
hence ensured for Egypt an unassailable monopoly over this
cheapest and most convenient type of ancient writing
material. The traveller to Syria could pick up Syrian glass or
Near Eastern carpets and embroidered textiles; Far Eastern
imports were available here too, since many of the caravan
routes that led from Asia passed through Syria. In Asia Minor
he could get fine woollens and linens. In Greece there were the
excellent fabrics woven at Patras. If he got no further than
Athens, he could settle for a jar of the prized Mt Hymettus
honey, or, if he happened to be in a sombre mood, with
thoughts of the inevitable future on his mind, he might make
the rounds of the coffin-makers; one of Athens’ specialties
during the Roman Imperial period was the production of
elaborate stone coffins, which could be ordered either fully
carved or with the carving just roughed out so that the detail
could be put in after delivery under the buyer’s own eye. We
have only few and vague references to the shopping habits of
the Greek or Roman traveller but they seem to indicate that
— —
he or his wife could no more pass by a local bargain than
we can. ‘If my health improves’, writes a Greek living in
K
290 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Egypt to a friend, in the mid-third century b.c., ‘and
go I

abroad to Byzantium [the modern Istambul], Fll bring you

back some fine pickled fish.’ Both tunny and turbot were
caught there, and either made as welcome a gift to someone
living in Egypt then as caviar to any of us today.
There was one factor which must have held shoppers'
enthusiasm somewhat in check: the portoria or customs
charges. The Roman Empire maintained stations not only at
all ports and frontiers but also at the boundaries between

provinces, since duty was payable even on goods crossing

from one province to the next. The traveller's instrumenta
itineris ‘materials for the voyage’ — that is, beasts of burden,
carriages, wagons, luggage containers, and the like —and
objects ad usum proprium ‘for personal use’ during the voyage
were exempt. Everything else was dutiable, right down to
corpses being transported for burial elsewhere. On most items
the rates were not stiff, only two to five per cent ad valorem,
but on the very things that tourists would find most enticing,
such as silks, perfumes, spices, pearls, and the other prized
luxuries imported from the Far East, it was twenty-five per
cent. Certain people, such as recognized benefactors of the
state, members of armed forces, from about a.d. ioo on
the
even veterans of the armed forces, had the privilege of
exemption from customs. This was, of course, only for goods
for their own use; it by no means gave them carte blanche to
bring in things for resale.

The customs agents, called portitores or publicani in Latin

and telonai in Greek, began by asking for the professio , or
customs declaration, on which a traveller put down in writing
everything he had with him. They were strictly business.

When wonder-worker and sage Apollonius, on

the celebrated
being asked the routine question of what he was taking with
him, answered loftily, ‘Continence, Justice, Virtue, Self-

Control, Valour, Discipline', all words feminine in gender,

the inspector snapped, ‘Let’s have the list of those slaves!’ (at

which point Apollonius observed that they were more his

 SIGHTSEEING 291

mistresses than his slaves). With hand they went

declaration in
methodically through all effects. ‘We get irritated and upset’,
writes Plutarch philosophically, ‘at the customs agents . . .

when they go through gear and baggage that is not their own,
searching for hidden items, yet the law allows them to do this.’
Even things worn on the body were subject to scrutiny;
lawyers wrangled over the issues involved if a married woman
— who by law could not be touched was carrying four—
hundred pearls in her bosom and the inspector insisted on
examining them and all she was willing to do was give him a
look. If an agent uncovered any objects that were inscripta
‘undeclared’, he confiscated them on sight. The culprit could
—
buy them back but at the price the agent reckoned as their
value, and, even if he set a reasonable figure, it meant at least
a doubling of the cost. Some things could not even be bought
back. If someone tried to sneak in a young slave by dressing
him up in citizen’s clothes and passing him off as, say, a
member of the family, and the slave revealed the truth, the
customs officer gave him his freedom on the spot. Whatever
irregularities a traveller could prove were genuine mistakes

and not attempts at fraud were treated leniently; he got off

with a fine equal to double the normal amount of duty.
As always, it helped to know the right people. ‘Send ... a
bathing costume as quickly as possible,’ writes a certain
Hierocles in 257 b.c. to Zenon, trusted agent of the Minister
of Finance of Egypt, ‘preferably of goatskin or, if not, of light
sheepskin. Also a tunic and cloak and the mattress, blanket,
pillows, and honey. You wrote me you were surprised that I
didn’t realize that all these items were subject to duty. I’m
aware of it, all right, but you are perfectly able to arrange to
send them without any risk whatsoever.’
 18

Baedeker of the Ancient

World

Wit, style, a keen and original mind, an eye for the unusual
these arewhat delight us in the travelogue writer. The compiler
of a guidebook, on the other hand, must be a totally different
kind of person. His job is to report the location, dimensions,
age, and life-history of monuments, and only incidentally, if
at all, the emotions or associations they arouse in his breast.
Wit and originality have no place in such an assignment; in
fact, they might very well get in the way. What he requires
above all are the matter-of-fact virtues of thoroughness,
diligence, and accuracy.
And these were the virtues par excellence of a certain
Pausanias who, between roughly a.d. 160 and 180, wrote a
Guidebook of Greece the sole guidebook that has survived from
,

ancient times. We
know about him only what we can glean or
deduce from his work. He obviously was a man of means; no
other would have had the and writing. His
leisure for travel
politics, conformably, were safe and sound: he was content
with Rome’s autocratic form of government (he lived under
Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, all, it so
happens, particularly able emperors), was convinced of the
beneficial qualities of Roman rule, and had the distrust of
democracy so commonly found in conservative members of
the upper class. He was godfearing. He believed in all the
 BAEDEKER OF THE ANCIENT WORLD 293

traditional deities, piously made sacrifices, and was so devoted

a member of the mystery cult at Eleusis — it was open to
initiates only and worshipped Demeter and Persephone in a
secret ritual — that he utters not a word about the rites, not
even a word about the precinct and its buildings. He believed
in oracles, in the gods’ power to intervene in the lives of
mortals, and especially in their power to reward the good and
punish the evil (inevitably he cites far more examples of
sinners than saints). The only thing he will not swallow whole
are the Greek myths. He is enough the child of his age to draw
the line occasionally. For example, he refuses to believe that
the Hydra, the serpent slain by Heracles, had many heads, or
that every time a sacrifice was made to Zeus on Mt Lycaeus
‘Wolf Mountain’ some man was transformed into a wolf (it
happened the first sacrifice only, he holds), or that Actaeon’s
dogs turned on him because of Artemis’ command (they were
suffering from rabies, he suggests).
His artistic tastes were, like his politics and religion,
thoroughly conservative. In painting his favourite was
Polygnotus, an old master was one, since he lived
if there ever
in the second half of the fifth century b.c., some six hundred
years before Pausanias’ day. In sculpture his favourites went
even further back, to the early fifth century b.c. Of the masters
of the fourth b.c., he has a few nice things to say about
Praxiteles, and he mentions Scopas and Lysippus —and that
just about ends it; all who come later hardly count.
He was born in Asia Minor, probably in Lydia; we do not
know this for certain but it seems a reasonable conjecture
considering the intimate knowledge he reveals of those parts.
We can only guess at the extent of his travels from remarks
that he drops. In the east he had been as far as Syria and
Palestine; he had seen Lake Tiberias, the Jordan River,
Jerusalem, and the Dead Sea. He did not get to Babylon —but
then again, as he informs us, he never met anyone who had.
He had visited Egypt, going all the way up the Nile to Thebes
to hear the miraculous Memnon and even making the trek
294 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
across the western desert to the Oasis of Ammon in Libya.
It goes without saying that he had been all over Greece and
theAegean islands. In the west he had seen Rome (where he
was most impressed by Trajan’s Forum and the Circus
Maximus) and some of the cities of the Campania, such as
Capua. He did not venture further west than Italy; after all,

a typical ancient tourist, principally interested in monuments

of the hoary past, would find little to engage his attention in
the relatively new centres that had sprung up in the wake of
Rome’s conquest of Gaul, Spain, and Britain.
The idea of writing a guidebook was certainly not original
with Pausanias (very little was); he had any number of
examples to follow. Unfortunately none of these have survived;
indeed, in most cases we know of them only through some-
one’s casual mention of their titles. Toward the end of the
fourth century one Diodorus (not the historian of the
b.c.,

same name) wrote on the towns and monuments of Attica.

A century or so later, the beginning of the second b.c., a
certain Heliodorus drew up a long guide to the works of art
on Athens’ Acropolis. The most prolific writer of guidebooks
was a younger contemporary of Heliodorus, Polemo of Ilium.
The Athenian Acropolis The Pictures in the Monumental Gate-
,

way [to the Acropolis], The Sacred Way [from the sanctuary
at Eleusis to Athens], The Painted Portico in Sicyon Spartan ,

Cities , The Treasure Chambers at Delphi, Settlements in Italy

and Sicily Guidebook to Troy are some of the titles credited to
,

him. Polemo was particularly enthusiastic about stelae, the

slabs of stone with official inscriptions carved upon them that
were to be seen in public places. He went about so assiduously
copying them that he was nicknamed stelokopas ‘inscription-
swallower’.
Though Pausanias owes the idea of a guidebook to these
various predecessors, he towers above them as a mountain
above a plain. They had written monographs on single places,
even single monuments; he had the grandiose notion of
compiling a guidebook for all the memorable places and
 BAEDEKER OF THE ANCIENT WORLD 295

monuments throughout the whole of Greece. It turned out to

be, as he probably knew it would, a lifetime’s work. He
published the first section — there are in all ten sections, or
books as we generally call them —soon after completing it.

The other nine took him at least ten years more, perhaps
longer than that.

‘There is but one entrance to the Acropolis: it admits of no

other, being everywhere precipitous and fortified with a
strong wall. The monumental gateway has a roof of white
marble, and for the beauty and size of the blocks it has never
yet been matched. . . . On the right of the gateway is a temple
of Wingless Victory.’ So begins Pausanias’ description of the
approach to Athens’ Acropolis; the visitor today can follow it

as easily as the comparable description in any contemporary

guidebook.
Pausanias’ next words are:

From this point the sea is visible, and it was here, they say,
that Aegeus cast himself down and perished. For the ship
that bore the children to Crete used to put to sea with black
sails; but when Theseus courageously sailed off to fight the
bull called the Minotaur, he told his father that he would
use white sails if he came back victorious over the bull.

However, after ridding himself of Ariadne he forgot to do

so. Then Aegeus, when he saw the ship returning with
black sails, thought that his son was dead; so he flung him-
self down and was killed.

This mythological digression, appended to the description of

the imposing entry to Athens’ finest sight yet running longer
than the description itself, brings into sharp relief the funda-
mental difference between the modern and Pausanias’ con-
ception of a guidebook.
His aim was to identify and describe all memorable
the
placesand monuments of Greece. So far so good; this is what
any Baedeker or Guide Bleu aims to do. Pausanias, however,
296 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
considered it equally his task to report the various mytho-
logical, historical, religious, or folk-loric traditions and stories
associated with each. Furthermore, the places and monuments
—and doubtless bulk of
that he the the tourists for whom he
wrote — considered memorable were those that bore witness
to Greece’s great past, and, of them, in his eyes the sacred
were infinitely more memorable than the profane. He could
not help, in guiding his readers through a city, but note the
marketplace, colonnades, law courts, government offices,

fountains, public baths, and so on, but he spends scant time on

them. It is when he gets to the sanctuaries and temples that
he lets himself go, telling us with lavish detail about the
buildings and their decoration, the altars, the votive statuary
and other offerings. Consider, for example, his description of
Acro-Corinth, the citadel that defends the city of Corinth. A
spectacular mass of grey limestone that rises sheer from the
plain, it is the greatest natural fortress in Greece, and the
Corinthians aided and abetted nature in impressive style by
running their city walls up its slopes to embrace the summit.
From the top one gets a breathtaking view that includes
the city at the foot, the gleaming waters of the gulf on
which Athens lies in one direction, the snowclad peaks of
Mt Parnassus and Mt Helicon in another. All of this Pausanias
passes over without a word. What he feels called upon to
report is the mythological story connected with the hill (it was

awarded to the Sun-God, who resigned it to Aphrodite) and

the various religious monuments located there.
As a matter of fact, when Pausanias includes a feature of the
countryside, it is almost always to point out some religious or
mythological association, hardly ever its natural beauty. He
will mention a mountain only to tell us which god is wor-
shipped on the top, a cavern to explain that it is the haunt of
Pan, a river to relate the mythological stories in which it

figures, a lake because through its waters one descends to the

underworld, a great cedar tree because it has an image of
Artemis hanging amid its branches. It is on the rarest of
 BAEDEKER OF THE ANCIENT WORLD 297

occasions that he will refer to nature for its own sake, and
then in but a casual phrase.
The first section of the work describes Athens and Attica.
The detail is thinner in this portion and the arrangement of the
material somewhat haphazard; you get the impression that
Pausanias was feeling his way, had not yet found a satisfactory
scheme. By the second book, devoted to Corinth, he is in his
stride, revealing an eminently workable plan for taking the
reader around the sights. He begins with an outline history,
long or short as the case may be, to introduce you to the area.
Then he takes the shortest road from the frontier to the
capital, noting whatever there is of interest along the way. He
continues straight to the centre of the city —
most cases the
in
marketplace —
describes what there is to see there, and then
works through the various streets that lead out from it.
Having finished with the capital, he turns to the rest of the
territory within its jurisdiction. He follows out and back each
chief road that radiates from the capital to its borders with
neighbouring city-states, pointing out the notable villages,
towns, and monuments that one passes on the way. When he
has followed the last such road to the frontier, he steps across
and begins all over again with an adjacent city-state. This is

the procedure he uses for Corinth and Argos in Book 2,

Sparta in Book 3, Mantinea and Megalopolis and Tegea in
Book 8, and Thebes in Book 9.
Inevitably the sites that bulk the largest in his narrative are
the threewhere the most and greatest monuments of the past
were clustered: Athens (Book 1), the great sanctuary of Zeus
at Olympia (Books 5, 6), the great sanctuary of Apollo at

Delphi (Book 10). Pausanias lingers longest over Olympia; in

the standard translation of his work his description covers
some seventy pages, while Athens fills forty-two and
that of
Delphi forty. As always, identification and description of the
memorabilia form only a part of the text, the rest being made
up of his recountings, often at exhaustive length, of their
mythological, historical, and religious associations.
298 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
So extensive is this added material —and sometimes so
peripheral — it leaves the impression that Pausanias introduced
it in the hope of interesting a wider circle of readers than just
tourists who needed a guidebook. At the very outset, for
example, in his description of the Senate House at Athens,
mention of a picture there portraying the Athenians resisting
an invasion of Gauls sends him off on a two-page history of
the Gauls. A little further along, a casual reference to two
kings of the Hellenistic period triggers a twelve-page survey
of Hellenistic history. There are disquisitions on natural
curiosities such as earthquakes, ocean tides, and the frozen
vastnesses of the north; there are allusions to exotic birds and
beasts — parrots, camels, the ostrich, the rhinoceros, India’s
huge Such digressions, together with the endless
serpents.
mythological and historical notes, often seem to overweigh
the guidebook proper. This is deceptive, however. If we were
to print Pausanias’ text in the manner of a modern guidebook,
with the historical introductions and lengthy descriptions set
off in small type and subordinate matter relegated to notes and
appendices, the sturdy skeleton of its arrangement and its
inherent consistency would be amply visible.

And it is a good guidebook, as accurate as could be expected

of a pioneering work compiled with the help of relatively
rudimentary research facilities. His mythological material
came from the older poets, especially Homer. For the historical
facts, he consulted all the available authorities, Herodotus,
Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and many others whose
works have not survived, including writers of local histories.
When confronted with contradictory accounts, he compared
them and judiciously picked the one he considered the most
plausible. Some information he drew from the inscriptions set
up in or about public buildings or sanctuaries; these, too, he
compared and analysed before arriving at conclusions. Other
information, such as measurements of buildings or little-

known local traditions,he must have obtained from guides.

Despite his healthy distrust of their chatter (cf. 266 above), he
 BAEDEKER OF THE ANCIENT WORLD 299

now and then let down his guard and accepted as gospel what
manifestly could not have been the case. But the heart of his
work, after all, are his descriptions of monuments and places,
and the vast majority of these he almost certainly visited in
person. Here he passes on to us what he saw with his own
eyes, and he was a keen and careful observer.

Undistinguished as writer or thinker but staid and sober and

thorough, tirelessly industrious, and with a deepseated respect
for accuracy, Pausanias marks a milestone in the history of
tourism. He is the direct ancestor of the equally sober and
unimaginative, painstakingly comprehensive and scrupulously
accurate Karl Baedeker, who, in turn, spawned the Guide
Bleus, and other guides that we clutch as we make the rounds
of sights today. And for Greece’s archeologists and historians
of art and architecture, his work is of indescribable value. As
his translator, J. G. Frazer, puts it: ‘Without him the ruins of
Greece would for the most part be a labyrinth without a clue,
a riddle without an answer. His book furnishes the clue to the
labyrinth, the answer to many riddles. It will be read and
studied so long as ancient Greece shall continue to engage the
attention and awaken the interests of mankind.’
To the Holy Lands

As Constantine approached Rome in a.d. 312 to struggle with

Maxentius for mastery of the city, he received a sign from
heaven, the sight of a gleaming cross in the sky. Victory
followed swiftly —and equally swiftly followed the victory of
Christianity over its various competitors; during Constantine’s
reign Rome was converted from a pagan to a Christian state.

Under paganism Rome had had no organized clergy. There

were, to be sure, professional priests, like those at Apollo’s
oracles or Isis’ shrines, but they and their like were relatively
few. Most liturgical were performed by part-time
duties
clergymen, civil magistrates, lay appointees and volunteers,
and so on. Christianity’s elevation, first to a recognized
religion and then to the religion, brought in its wake a vast
clerical structure, a sister bureaucracy to that which ran the
government.
And the new bureaucrats, like the old, did a good deal of
moving about. Governors of provinces, circuit judges,
soldiers, imperial dispatch riders and all the other traditional
users of Rome’s highways and sea-lanes were now joined by
prelates headed for the court at Constantinople, by junketing
bishops, by the Church’s financial agents and letter-carriers.
The travel itch seems to have particularly affected bishops.
They cavalierly left their flocks in the lurch to go off for
politics, business, or simply relaxation so often that the church
was forced to take action. An ecumenical council held at

Sophia in 343 decreed that no bishop was to appear at the

 TO THE HOLY LANDS 3OI

emperor’s court unless in answer to a summons, and added

that ‘those of us who live near a public road and see a bishop
en route will ask him the purpose of and reason for his
voyage If he has been impelled by frivolous reasons one . . .

must refuse to sign his letters [i.e., those authorizing travel

facilities] or communicate with him.’

What drew the greatest number away from their thrones at

any one time were the councils themselves. When Constantine
called the first in 325, there descended on Nicaea from all over
the empire some 300 bishops, each accompanied by a staff of
priests, deacons, acolytes. The council at Sophia brought out
170, one Rimini in 359 no less than 400. The delegates did
at

not have to put up with the ordinary discomforts of travel.

Constantine extended to them the right to use vehicles
belonging to the public post (182 above); he shrewdly played
no favourites, granting the privilege impartially to members
of schismatic sects as well as the orthodox. Subsequent
emperors went even further, issuing warrants not only for
transportation — saddle horses for riders, the customary reda
(183 above) for nonriders —
but also lodging and meals. Inn-
keepers were called upon to supply the travellers with bread,
eggs, vegetables, various meats (beef, suckling pig and pork,
lamb and mutton) and fowl (goose, pheasant, chicken),
cooking ingredients (olive oil, fish sauce, and a battery of
spices —cummin, pepper, cloves, spikenard, cinnamon, gum
mastic), desserts (dates, pistachio nuts, almonds), the inevi-
table salt, vinegar, and honey (for sweetening, in lieu of sugar,
which was virtually unknown), and wine or beer to drink.
Obviously no cleric on the move was expected to mortify the
flesh —
if the supplies were available and the personnel of the

public post were not out to make trouble. When Melania the
Younger was en route from Jerusalem to Constantinople in 436
with authorization to use the cursus publicus , a functionary at
Tripoli in Syria refused to issue her all the animals she needed
on the grounds that her warrant covered her alone and not
the rather sizable party she had along; it took a bribe of three
302 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
gold pieces to change his mind (later, thanks to prayers
offered to the local saint, hesaw the light, and ran seven miles
to catch up with the party and return the money).
Just as clerical over-indulgence in travel became a nuisance,
so did clerical over-use of the public post. Gregory of Nyssa
in the spring of 380 b.c. got a carriage from the cursus and not
only kept it during the whole of a voyage from Pontus in
northern Asia Minor as far as Palestine and Arabia but lived
in it, turning the vehicle into a sort of travelling chapel. ‘The
cursus publicus has been prostrated by the immodest pre-
5
sumption of certain people snarled Julian the Apostate in a
,

decree he issued in a.d. 362 to curb abuses; no doubt a good

5
many of the ‘certain people he had in mind were clergy. Basil
even tried to talk the authorities into letting a group of
Christians use the public post for bringing back thebody of a
relative who had died in some remote spot. And there was a
story about a chap with influence at court who, convinced he
was possessed by a demon, did not hesitate to ask the emperor
for a warrant so that he could get to St Hilarion and have the
offender exorcized.
In addition to clerics going to the court or councils or off
on other church matters, the intelligentsia of the Church, a
small but highly important group, restlessly moved from
centre to centre in their search for education. Basil studied
at Caesarea in Cappadocia, Constantinople, and Athens;
Gregory Nazianzen at Caesarea in Palestine, Alexandria, and
Athens; Jerome at Antioch, Constantinople, Rome, and
Alexandria; Origen at Antioch, Caesarea in Cappadocia,
Caesarea in Palestine, Athens, Nicomedia, Bostra, and
Tyre.
Sharing the roads and sea-lanes with the prelates and
intellectuals, but far outnumbering them, were the Church’s
business agents and letter-carriers, particularly the latter; they
were for ever shuttling back and forth from church to church,
bishop to bishop. The clergy had access to the cursus publicus
for travel only; except on rare occasions, the government
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 303

pouch was closed to their letters. So they had to use their own
personnel for carrying their mail, at and sub-
first lectors
deacons, then, by the fourth century, when the job had gained
some status, deacons and priests and monks. These had the
advantage of being enough abreast of events to fill out by
word of mouth the bare lines of a communication — or to
supply them in case the missive itself got lost. When no
Church personnel were available, Christian correspondents
did as the pagans had done (220 above) they used anyone they
:

could find going in the right direction. Augustine entrusted a

letter to a Roman procurator, John Chrysostom to a member
of the Praetorian Guard, Paulinus of Nola to a Roman soldier,
several of Jerome’s correspondents to a shipowner, Eusebius
and Ambrose and Basil to Roman officials of various grades,
high and low. Jerome, when Holy Land, could
living in the
look forward to a batch of mail brought by the pilgrims who
flooded in at Easter time.
The informal postal service, though useful, was too hap-
hazard for comfort, and so the Church supplemented it with
tabellarii, professional letter-carriers — reluctantly, for these
were far from ideal. They made a poor impression right on
arrival since they dressed as they pleased. Paulinus of Nola
could hardly bear to look at some he had to deal with: they
had wild hair-does and clothes that belonged on a swaggering
soldier; if only all letters, he laments, could have been delivered
by monks with their reassuringly pale faces, sober garments,
and shaven heads ! What is more, they grumbled about going
to far or difficult places, lingered at attractive places, and
seemed always to be in a hurry. Paulinus opens one of his
letters with the remark that ‘the bearer of this is right now

running for the boat’ (but then proceeds to indite no less than
ten well-packed pages). Even worse, they read communica-
were intended to be confidential. Ausonius suggests
tions that
to a correspondent with an over-inquisitive wife that ‘you
write your letters with milk. The paper, on drying out, will
conserve the characters invisibly, and ash will make them
304 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
reappear’, i.e. use invisible ink. Ecclesiastics might very well
have used it to circumvent over-inquisitive postmen.

The moving about of

multifarious business and professional
the clergy was one new aspect of travel ushered in by Rome’s
conversion to Christianity. A second was a new form of
tourism.
Greeks and Romans had beat a path to Troy to visit ‘Homer
country’; now the pious flocked to Palestine to see ‘Bible
country’. ‘Everywhere in the world we venerate the tombs of
martyrs . . . writes Jerome, ‘how can anyone think we should
neglect the which they placed the Lord!’ He felt that
tomb in
the Christian scholar had to see Jerusalem even as the Greek
scholar had to see Athens or the Latin scholar Rome. At times
he elevated a pilgrimage almost to a sacred duty. ‘It is part of
the faith’, he proclaimed in one letter, and in another pointed
out that the great figures of the church felt they had less

religion if they had not been to Jerusalem.

Even before the time of Constantine, a trickle of Christians
had voyaged to the venerable city to pay their respects to the
birthplace of their religion. In the second century, Melito,
bishop of Sardis, made a tour of the holy places, and, in the
third, Alexander and Firmilian, both bishops of Cappadocian
towns, Origen, and a growing number of humbler visitors.

The sights accessible to these pioneers were limited. They had

to be satisfied with the mementoes of Christ’s birth at Bethle-
hem, for those of his death at Jerusalem, along with many
another hallowed spot, were buried under the ruins left by
the sacking of the city in a.d. 70 or under the structures raised
by Hadrian when he built a new Palestinian centre, Aelia
Capitolina, upon the remains of the old.
In 326 Constantine turned his energetic attention to the
Holy Land, and the picture changed overnight. The rubble
was cleared from the hill of the Crucifixion uncovering the
cave where Joseph of Arimathea had laid Christ’s body to rest,
and masons started work on erecting over it the round
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 305

structure that the pilgrims called the Anastasis. In the same

year Helena, Constantine’s mother, made the celebrated trip
to Palestine that culminated in her discovery of the True Cross,
and she joined enthusiastically in the programme of building
and restoring. The basilica which the pilgrims refer to as the
Martyrium began to rise over the site of the Crucifixion and
the spot where the cross had been found. In 331 or 332 we
hear of visits to the Holy Land by Eusebius of Caesarea, father
of ecclesiastical history, Eusebius of Nicodemia, first bishop of
Beirut, and Theognis, bishop of Nicaea at the time of the great
council. By the end of the century the yen to make the pere -
grinatio ad loca sancta had spread to the four corners of the
Roman Some of the most dedicated pilgrims were
empire.
women. Paula, a wealthy widow from one of the best Roman
families, left Rome in 385; among other places she visited
Sareptah to see Elijah’s dwelling, Bethlehem to see Rachel’s
grave and Constantine’s new church over the cave of the
Nativity, Hebron to see the tree alleged to be Abraham’s oak
and the hut, supposedly Sarah’s, where what passed as Isaac’s
swaddling clothes were on display. She eventually settled
down at Bethlehem and financed there the erection of a
monastery, convent, and hospice for pilgrims. Melania the
Younger, another Roman lady of the highest connections,
left Rome Unable to
for a sojourn of seven years in Africa.
resist the allure of the Holy Land she continued on to

Jerusalem, stopping off at Alexandria on the way for a brief

visit. From Jerusalem she returned to Egypt for a compre-

hensive tour of the holy men living in the northern part of the
country. She eventually made her home on the Mount of
Olives, leaving it only once, to go to Constantinople in order
to convert her ailing pagan uncle before he died. The most
energetic sightseer of all, male or female, was a certain Etheria,
a lady ofmeans and position like the others, but not from
Rome, from some western province probably Gaul. From her
home she took the long slow overland route to the east. After
visiting Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine, she pushed on
30 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
to Egypt, going up the Nile as far as the district around Thebes
to visit the monks in their desert habitat. This was just a pre-
liminary for her next foray, into the blazing heat of the Sinai
peninsula, where she conscientiously did the sights of ‘Moses
country’. She made the climb to the very peak where he
received the tablets, and then descended to the valley; on the
way down she notes such memorabilia as the spot where
Aaron stood while Moses was being given the law, the burning
bush (apparently still alive and flourishing), the site of the
Israelite camp, the place where the golden calf had been made,

the rock on which Moses smashed the tablets, the place where
it rained manna, and so on. From Sinai she returned to Clysma

(Suez) and, after a much needed rest, set out to trace in reverse
the route of the Exodus. Somehow she talked the Roman
authorities into giving her an escort of Roman soldiers, since
the trip lay through a no-man’s land where anybody on the
road was fair game for bandits. Once back on the Nile, she
dismissed her guard, made her way to Pelusium, and then
took the age-old coastal highway from Egypt (26 above) back
to Palestine and Jerusalem. She now made Jerusalem into a
base for a series of excursions into eastern Palestine and
Jordan. First she took off for the Dead Sea and a visit to
Mt Nebo on the very point from which Moses got his
to stand
view of the Promised Land. Back to Jerusalem and off again
northward up the Jordan valley to Salem for a look at
Melchizedek’s church and city and a pool nearby where John
the Baptist performed his ministrations; then to Tishbe,
Elijah’s birthplace,where she saw the cave in which he used to
sit; and then across the Jordan to Karnaim to visit the burial

place of Job. Again back to Jerusalem, this time to start the

long trek home. After getting as far as Antioch, the temptation
of a side trip to Edessa with a chance to pray at St Thomas’
tomb and examine the letters that Abgar, the city’s ruler at the
time, had exchanged with Christ, was too much to resist. Off
she went, and was taken about Abgar’s palace, was shown the
city gate by which the postman had entered, and had Abgar’s
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 307

letter and Christ’s reply read to her. From Edessa she pushed
on was ‘Abraham country’, and here she
into the Haran. This
visited the church built upon the site of Abraham’s house,
Rebecca’s well, and the well at which Jacob had watered the
flocks of Laban. By now even this indefatigable tourist had
had enough and Anally set a course for home.

Constantine’s handsome new churches and other buildings

only enhanced the Holy Land’s allure. Its prime attraction, as
Etheria’s itinerary reveals, were the sites, monuments and
buildings, real and fancied, that were hallowed by their
association with the Bible.
For the main lines of the tour we have a precious source of
information, a guidebook for Christian pilgrims drawn up by
an anonymous citizen of Bordeaux who paid his visit in 333.
As Etheria was to do a half-century or so later, he took the
overland route to the east, traversing southern Gaul, climbing
the Alps, and passing through northern Italy and the Balkans
to get to Constantinople. From here he went south across
Asia Minor to Syria and then followed the Phoenician coast to
Caesarea. Up to this point he gives scant attention to sight-
seeing; he merely lists the towns, mansiones and mutationes
(184 above) one passes through, pausing no more than four
times or so to point out special sights: between Chalcedon and
Nicomedia he indicates the spot where Hannibal was buried,
at Tarsus he mentions that it was the birthplace of Paul, at

Sareptah he shows where Elijah had asked the widow for food
and drink, and at Mt Carmel where the prophet had sacrificed.
At Caesarea he left the shore and turned inland to follow the
road to Jerusalem, and here his guided tour of the Holy Land
really begins, the sights now come thick and fast. Stradela
(Jezreel) where King Ahab’s palace stood, where Elijah
is

prophesied, and where David slew Goliath (in point of fact,

the battle was fought nowhere near here but miles further
south in Judah); Shechem (Nablus) offers Joseph’s tomb,
Jacob’s well, and a row of plane trees that Jacob had planted;
308 travel in the ancient world
Mt Gerizim is the site of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (only
according to the Samaritans, who inhabited the region; the
Israelites liked to place on the holy rock covered by the
it

temple in Jerusalem); Bethel is where Jacob had his dream

and the fight with the angel.
Twelve miles from Bethel and we are at the gates of
Jerusalem. Notable are a pair of grand pools, built by
Solomon, that once flanked his temple, and, further inside the
city, the twin pools of Bethesda whose water is ever in motion
and has the power to heal the sick. The remains of Solomon’s
palace include the room where the great king composed the
Book of Wisdom (actually written some eight centuries after
he died). In the temple, on the marble before the altar is the

blood of Zachariah and, as if imprinted in wax, footprints of

the soldiers who killed him. Near the temple there still stand
statues of the Roman emperors Hadrian and Antoninus;
Helena had allowed them to remain from them
there. Not far

is a ‘pierced stone’ where the Jews come yearly on the anni-

versary of the destruction of the city to lament and rend their

—
garments in other words, the ‘wailing wall’ of the day.
At the mouth of the valley that runs through Jerusalem is
the pool of Siloam; it flows, we are told, only on weekdays,
miraculously switching off on the Sabbath. The sights of
Mt Zion include the site of the house of Caiaphas, the column
of the Flagellation, remains of the house of David, ruins of the
praetorium where Pilate interrogated Christ, and the most
awesome sight of all, Golgotha, now adorned with the nearly
completed churches Constantine had ordered to be raised over
the cave of the Entombment and the site of the Crucifixion.
Leaving the city by the eastern gate we cross the Valley of
Jehoshaphat for the Mount of Olives where we see ‘the rock
where Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ’, the palm tree that was
stripped for fronds to cast in Jesus’ path as he entered
Jerusalem in triumph, and, a stone’s throw away, tombs
allegedly of Isaiah and Hezekiah (they belong to neither, and
the one of them that is today called Absalom’s no more covers
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 309

his bones than it does Isaiah’s). The Mount of Olives boasts

another of Constantine’s new churches. A mile and a half to
the east lies Bethany, site of the resurrection of Lazarus.
Next, an excursion to the Jordan. En route to Jericho we
see the sycamore that Zacchaeus climbed to get a look at
Christ during his triumphal entry and the fountain that Elisha
cured of making women sterile. In Jericho is Rahab’s house.
The tour continues to the Dead Sea and to the point, five miles
up the Jordan, where John baptized Christ and where there is
on the bank a little mound from which Elijah was raised to
heaven.
Another excursion, this time to Bethlehem and beyond.
Nearing the town we pass the tomb of Rachel. In town is still
another Constantinian church, one marking the site of the
Nativity, and a multiple tomb containing the remains of
‘Ezekiel, Asaph, Job, Jesse, David, and Solomon, whose
names can be read in Hebrew characters on the walls of the
staircase leading to the funerary crypt’. There surely was a
tomb there which had a Hebrew inscription, and surely the
guides were giving this their own free translation. From
Bethlehem we push on to the terebinths near Hebron where
Abraham spread his tent (another Constantinian church here),
and then to Hebron itself for a look at the common grave,
marked by a square tomb of stone, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. Here the tour of the Holy Land
comes to an end. From this point on our guide, as he had done
on the way out, simply lists the names of the towns and
stopping places along the route back to the west, with a very
occasional gloss for the sightseer (e.g. Philippi is noted as the
spot where Paul had been imprisoned, the mutatio of Euripides’
‘

as the poet’s resting place, Pella as Alexander’s birthplace).

As time went on, the number of tourist attractions bur-
geoned. At Bethany pilgrims saw not only Lazarus’ tomb but
also the house shared by Mary and Martha and Simon the
Leper, at Hebron not only the house of Sarah but David’s as
well, at Nazareth not only the house of the Annunciation but
310 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
also a cave where Christ had lived. The list of hallowed caves
in particular grew steadily longer: where Moses had once
dwelled, where the angels had appeared to the shepherds to
announce the birth of Christ, where Christ had washed the
Apostles’ feet, where he had taught the Apostles. Imaginative
guides no doubt played the major role in multiplying the
number and extending the range of sacred memorabilia. A
certain Antoninus of Piacenza, who made his visit in 570,
two and a half centuries after the Bordeaux pilgrim, gives a
starry-eyed report of the wondrous things he was shown: at
Nazareth the bench on which Jesus had sat as a schoolboy and
the very copybook in which he had written down his ABCs;
outside Jericho the ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah, still
covered by a dark cloud smelling of brimstone, and the pillar
—
of salt that Lot’s wife had been turned into not in any way
diminished by the licking of animals as reported, but in its

pristine condition; in Jerusalem the dried blood of Christ on

the rock where the Crucifixion had taken place, the imprint
of his palms and fingers on the column of the Flagellation, the
lance, the crown of thorns, a clutch of the stones that had been
used in the stoning of Stephen, and the column that supported
the cross on which Peter had been executed (how it was
supposed to have got to Jerusalem from Rome is anybody’s
guess).
The guides in Egypt were even worse —they had the
effrontery to pass the pyramids off as Joseph’s silos. And
there were plenty of people to hear their outrageous tales,
since Egypt was second only to the Holy Land in attracting
pilgrims. Here the appeal was not biblical associations but
something equally holy and a good deal more dramatic the —
monks who dwelt in the deserts flanking the valley of the Nile.
As early as the first half of the third century, a trickle of
Egyptians had left their homes to escape either grinding
poverty or the equally grinding Roman exploitation and had
settled down to a hermit’s life in the lonely lands roundabout.
One of these, Anthony, became the most renowned hermit of
 1

TO THE HOLY LANDS 3 1

the day and a founding father of Christian monasticism. He

retired to the desert at the early age of twenty or so, at first

living in partial solitude and then totally alone in an abandoned

fort near Arsinoe in the Fayum. When, two decades, he
after

finally emerged, the fame of his holiness drew other solitaries

to settle down in some caves nearby. Fy 305 or so a community

had grown up with Anthony acknowledged as head. Soon
similar groups sprang up elsewhere, the members living either
by themselves or in twos and threes but forming a definite
society under the leadership of a particularly venerated
member. The barren Wadi Natrun, roughly one hundred
miles west-northwest of Cairo, became a favoured location;
in 330 Macarius retired to the wastes here to found one
important community and, in 352, Ammonas another.
What drove the Egyptian anchorites together was, more than
anything else, the kind of regimen they pursued. Over and
above denying all the pleasures of the senses, the solitary
insisted on limiting himself to the barest minimum of food
and drink, frequently fasting for days on end, and, as if this
was not enough, added injury to hunger with self-inflicted
physical torments. In a famished, often half-delirious state,
opening his eyes either to the gloom of a cave or the blinding
glare of the desert, he inevitably was visited by hallucinations,
saw apparitions —and these he held to be the most awful
ordeal of all, was convinced they were the fiendish
for he
snares of the Devil. In his ceaseless combat not to weaken,
not to be tricked into going astray by the arch-enemy’s
temptations, he found it a towering comfort to have a comrade-
in-arms nearby. By the end of the fourth century, there were
thousands of solitaries clustered in the Wadi Natrun alone.
The movement overflowed the borders of Egypt into Palestine,
Syria, and other parts of the Near East. In Syria it spawned
its most bizarre version, the pillar saints, who took refuge

from the everyday world by retiring not to a cave but the top
of a column. The most famous of them was Simeon Stylites
‘Simeon of the pillar’. In 423 he set up residence about thirty-
312 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
five miles from Antioch on a stone block about three feet high.
As time went on he kept gaining altitude until he finally
settled on a platform six feet square atop a sixty-five-foot
pillar. Here he lived for thirty years, praying and performing

so many continuous obeisances that one observer who tried

to keep count gave up after 1,244.
The pillar saints am other anchorites outside of Egypt
never matched in numbers the veritable armies within. The
scorched wastes on either side of the Nile valley apparently
offered the most appropriate setting for their chosen way of
life. The solitaries for some reason favoured north and middle

Egypt. The south, however, was not neglected. Here arose a

different form of monasticism, considerably less dramatic but
destined to be far more significant in the history of Christianity.
It began in 320 to 325 at Tabennisi near Denderah in upper
Egypt. A hermit named Pachomius, abandoning the life he
had been carrying on until then, brought together a group of
kindred spirits who, though living separately, agreed to take
their meals in common. As time went on they expanded their
shared activities until they became a genuine cenobitic com-
munity. Eventually Pachomius put into flourishing operation
no less than nine monasteries and, with the aid of his sister,
two convents. Anthony’s or any other anchorite group needed
only a cluster of contiguous caves or the like; Pachomius’
required a complicated assemblage of buildings. Normally
there were several dormitories each housing about twenty
monks in cells that accommodated one to three, a church,
refectory, kitchen, cellar, garden, and hospice for guests. And,
since barbaric tribesfrom the Sudan were constantly spilling
over the border to maraud, the whole was encircled by a
powerful wall. Anthony’s followers spent all their days in
prayer, meditation, and similar religious pursuits; Pachomius’
spent a good part of the time in useful work, such as cultivating
gardens or weaving reed baskets.
The pilgrim to Egypt was usually content with a visit to

the communities of the north, particularly those in and around

 TO THE HOLY LANDS 313

the Wadi Natrun. The anchorite monks there were not only
more spectacularly holy with their gauntness, nondescript
clothing, unkempt and beards, they were also a good deal
hair
more accessible; visitors were spared the rigours and dangers
of a journey into the blistering and bandit-ridden upper
reaches of the Nile. Etheria, Paula, Rufinus, Melania the Elder
and Younger, Jerome — of all these distinguished visitors to
Egypt, only the intrepid Etheria ventured south to the
Thebaid. The rank and file of the anchorites generally extended
guests a warm welcome; the gruff and crusty senior members,
on the other hand, who were the ‘fathers’ were not always
quite so charming. When Archbishop Theophilus visited a
community near the Wadi Natrun and arrived ill, the monks
there asked their ‘father’ to say something which would help
the invalid. ‘If he doesn’t get any benefit from my silence’,
was the retort, ‘he’ll get even less from my talk.’ By and large,
however, the reception was so cordial and the way of life so
uplifting that many a pious visitor elected to stay on for a
spell. One of the best contemporary accounts we have of the

monks of the Nile was written by a certain Palladius who,

arriving in Egypt in 388, spent more than a dozen years in
monasteries in the Wadi Natrun and around Alexandria. John
Cassianus put in seven years in them, Rufinus six, Melania
the Elder half a year.
Another prime Egyptian tourist attraction was the grave of
Menas, a martyr who fell during Diocletian’s persecutions in
295 and was buried at a spot about midway between Alexandria
and the Wadi Natrun. People went there only secondarily
because of the saint’s fame; the main attraction was the
magical healing powers attributed to the local water. ‘Take the
all-beneficial water of Menas —pain flees’, is the pregnant
message scratched by some visitor on from the
a wall not far
crypt. Toward the end of the fourth century an imposing
basilica was erected near the grave. In the fifth, still another was
added and, along with it and connected to it, a bath complex
complete with cisterns, pools, dressing-rooms, and so on,
314 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
where pilgrims could immerse themselves in the miraculous
water; for those who merely wanted to drink or carry some
off, pipes supplied two fountains in the nave of the church.

People flocked here right up to the ninth century, when the

Arabs destroyed the sanctuary.

The peregrinatio ad loca sancta , then, for the truly

,
devout
involved Egypt as well as the Holy Land proper. In both
places most moving about was perforce done by land. For
the long voyage out to the Near East, however, the pilgrims
took advantage of the choice open to them of travelling by
land or by sea.

As always
(149 above), the sea offered the quickest and most
comfortable transportation. This is the way Jerome elected to
go in 385. His vessel, setting sail from Ostia at the mouth of the
Tiber, passed through the Straits of Messina and then shaped
a course across the Aegean through the Cyclades and Ionian
islands; after a stop at Cyprus, he finally docked at Antioch,
the major port in the Levant for direct overseas traffic. Paula,
following a month later, took a commercial galley that more
or less stayed close to shore. She too went south to the Straits
of Messina, then crossed the Ionian sea to Methone, coasted
south of the Peloponnese, threaded a way through the Cyclades
to Rhodes and then from there to the coast of Asia Minor at

Lycia, stopped at Cyprus, and eventually put in at Seleuceia

and Antioch, where she joined forces with Jerome. From here
they went in a party to Jerusalem by land, Paula riding
donkeyback. Similarly, in 372 Melania and Rufinus chose to
go by sea from Ostia to Alexandria, a well-established run
(158 above), and by land from there to Jerusalem. Melania the
Younger went by ship from Sicily to the African coast
opposite, and eventually continued by ship to Jerusalem, with
a stop en route at Alexandria. Antoninus of Piacenza sailed

from Constantinople to Syria, with a stop at Cyprus.

Others, like the Bordeaux pilgrim or Etheria, preferred to
stay away from boats despite their speed and comfort. The
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 315

land route followed major highways used by the cursus

publicus , so presumably the traveller had no great trouble
finding food, lodging, animals, and vehicles along the way.
Moreover, pilgrims who were either highly placed or knew
the right people could count on the services of the cursus .

With or without its help, the going was slow. The Bordeaux
pilgrim reckoned that he covered about 3,400 Roman miles
between Bordeaux and Jerusalem, and it took him 170 days;
this works out to twenty a day, which was a good average
for travel by land (189 above). Melania the Younger, leaving
Constantinople at the end of February and anxious to reach
Jerusalem in time for Easter, pushed on relentlessly and,
despite bitter cold and mountainous terrain, managed to do
twenty-six miles a day. The trip took her forty-four in all;
she might have made it in no more than ten, had she been
willing to risk a winter sailing. She was not alone in preferring
land to water for travel between Constantinople and Syria;
for some reason a good many others also did and not merely
in winter.
A third way was combine land and water (cf. 150 above).
to
One could leave Rome by the Appian Way, travel its length
to Brindisi, take ship there for Corinth, cross the isthmus,
take another ship for Ephesus, and go on from Ephesus either
by ship or foot. All sorts of similar combinations were possible
and no doubt used.
From the last decades of the fourth century on, when
pilgrimage to the Holy Land was in full swing, the critical
problem for the traveller was more danger than hardship. The
emperors of Rome no longer wielded the strong military and
naval arm they had during their halcyon days. In the west,
Vandals, Visigoths, and others were tearing great rents in the
fabric of the empire. All over the Mediterranean pirates were
back in operation; the navy had been one of the casualties
of the tumultuous third century, and the well-organized
flotillas that used to conduct regular patrols were a thing of
the past. On land the main highways by and large were safe
31 6 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
enough. Libanius, for example, who conducted an extensive
correspondence from Antioch during the middle of the fourth
century, appears serenely confident that all his letters will
reach their destination, and, as a matter of fact, he never
once mentions the loss of any through attack by bandits.
Yet there were times when even here armed guards were
advisable. John Chrysostom, for a trip from Antioch to
Constantinople, had a soldier as escort supplied by the local
governor. And was a veritable no-man’s-
the back country
land. Chrysostom’s movements there were often menaced by
Isaurian brigands, and Etheria had to be wary of marauding
Arabs. The last were a particular threat, to judge from an
incident that Jerome puts into the mouth of the monk Malchus:

When you go from Beroea (Aleppo) to Edessa, near the

highway is a wasteland where Arabs are forever on the
prowl, camping now here and now there. Travellers in the
area, anticipating this, gather in groups so as to reduce the
menace by standing by each other. My party included men,
women, young, old, children, about seventy in all. Lo and
behold, suddenly Arabs riding on horses and camels swooped
down on us. They had long hair bound with headbands,
were half naked, and trailed cloaks and long sandals. Quivers
hung down from their shoulders, and they brandished
unstrung bows and carried their long spears they had come, —
you see, not to fight but to rob. We were captured, split
up, and carried off in different directions. I along with . . .

one other, a girl, fell to the lot of one master. We were led
off — —
or rather carried off atop camels. We hung more than
sat on our way across the vast desert, in constant fear of

destruction. Our food was half-raw meat, our drink camel’s

milk.

The story is fiction, not fact, but it still reflects well enough
the sort of thing a traveller could encounter in deserted parts.
One excursion that brought a pilgrim deep into such parts
 :

TO THE HOLY LANDS 317

was to Mt Sinai to see ‘Moses country’. By the end of the

fourth century, when Etheria visited it, communities of monks
were already in existence there, and in the sixth century
Justinian founded St Catherine’s, which still flourishes today.
Arabs as well as Christians regarded the area as sacred, so it

inevitably became a site that, despite the remoteness and

dangers, drew a steady stream of visitors. We know this not
only through the reports of Etheria and others but also
through a rather uncommon source of information, a few
casual lines in some matter-of-fact business papers; in their
way, they are more eloquent than the rhapsodies of pious
pilgrims.
In 1936 by great good fortune a batch of papyrus documents
was discovered in the ruins of Nessana (Auja), a town in the
Negeb which stood on the main ancient road to the south. It
was the last community of any size that travellers passed on
the way from Palestine to Sinai; beyond it stretched more or
less open desert. From the middle of the fifth century, the

Roman government, followed subsequently by the Arabs,

maintained a fort and garrison in the place to protect the
borders of southern Palestine from inroads by marauding
bands of Bedouins. Three of the documents in the find
furnish precious details about the trip to the ‘Holy Mountain’,
a term used at the time for either Mt Sinai and its neigh-
bouring hills in general or the monastery of St Catherine in
particular. One is an account of expenses, business transactions,
and other similar matters kept by the agent of a caravan of
camels and donkeys that, sometime in the last half of the
sixth century or the first of the seventh, made a trip across the
Negeb. Their route took them to the Sinai peninsula, for, in
the middle of the account we come across the following
entries

Paid to the Arab escort who took us to the

Holy Mountain 3! solidi
Turned over to us by Father Martyrius 270! solidi
3 1 8 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
We went to prayers in the Holy Mountain
and made an offering of i solidus
Expenditures for you [i.e. the principals of
the parent company of the caravan], also
purchase of fish and almonds i solidus
Donation to the monastery on behalf of the
group from your town io solidi

The Arab to guide them to Mt

agent, in other words, hired an
Sinai —
not just any country bumpkin but a skilled professional,
as we can tell from his fee; a comparison with other entries
shows that it amounted to half the cost of a camel. At the
monastery a Father Martyrius, very likely the abbot, entrusted
to the agent a sizable sum of money; perhaps it was to be
deposited with his principals for purchasing supplies which
the caravan would bring on a return trip. The agent and his
staff took advantage of their presence in this sacred area to

attend a service and put a modest donation in the collection

box. They also made some purchases for the company’s
account, including provisions for the next leg of the journey.
On departure they left a quite generous contribution in the
name of the company.
Later in the account, after the guide had presumably been
dismissed, we come across an entry that reads ‘reimbursement
for the camel which the Arabs, the bani al-Udayyid, took’.
Was it a raid or just a theft? Did the caravan pay the guide so
large a fee because he not only led the way but also guaranteed
safe-conduct, i.e. ensured proper behaviour on the part of his
brethren? The two other documents that mention Mt Sinai
seem to confirm this. One, dated 5 December, 683, reads:

In the name of Almighty God

Abu Rashid, Governor, to the people of Nessana.

Thanks be to God, etc. When my wife Ubayya comes to

you, furnish her a man who is to guide her on the road to
Mt Sinai. Also furnish the man’s pay.
 —

TO THE HOLY LANDS 319

The other, dated March 684 and couched in almost the same
language, is addressed to the chief administrative officer of
Nessana rather than the people in general, and the guide is

required for a certain Abu ’l-Mughira, a mawla or convert to

Islam. We are now well into the age of the Arab conquest
Nessana and its environs were probably over-run as early as
633 —and so the area is under the jurisdiction of Arab officials;

the Abu Rashid who issues these orders was very likely the
local governor resident at Gaza. The first, dated in December,
is for his wife, and she must have been just a sightseer, taking
advantage of one of the coolest months of the year for her
trip and of her husband’s position to travel at government
expense. The Moslem convert of the second may have been a
tourist or perhaps an agent on government business. In both
instances one gets the feeling that the guide was needed to
ensure safe-conduct as much as to show the way.

So much met on the road. Let us

for the hazards Christians
turn to a second problem they had, where to put up for the
night.
When on open highway, they had no alternative: like
the
the Bordeaux pilgrim, they stopped at whatever mansio or
mutatio they had managed to reach by nightfall. However,
once they found themselves in a place where the church
enjoyed strong local support, things looked up considerably.
There travellers of wealth or position, as their pagan counter-
parts before them (197 above), could count on elegant accom-
modations in the homes of friends or of the local authorities.
Melania the Younger, for example, during her stay in Con-
stantinople, lived in the palace of Lausus, chamberlain to
Theodosius II, meant abandoning much of her
even though it

customary austerity (and no doubt blushing every time she

passed the nudes in his collection of Greek statues; his piety,
though outstanding, was not quite up to getting him to
renounce his artistic treasures). Paula was invited by the
governor of Palestine to put up at his mansion in Jerusalem,
 3 20 travel in the ancient world
but she turned down the offer in favour of a tiny
humble cell
in Bethlehem. Bishops had a reciprocal understanding: each
could count on a room in a fellow bishop’s palace whenever
he passed through.
The rank and on the other hand, had to stay at inns
file,

and the average ancient inn, as we have seen

(204 above), was
hardly a proper place for the godfearing.
Paulinus of Nola a
man of understanding and sympathy for human
failings,
could not help flying into a rage at the
sight of the row of
talernae that stood in a line near the
basilica of St Felix and
disgorged a constant procession of drunks
to stagger past the
martyr s tomb. The Apostolic Constitutions
forbade the use
of inns except in cases of urgent necessity.
However, when
the Council of Laodicea met in
363 it was able to ban their
use absolutely, for, by that time, the
Church could pride
itself on having provided proper
accommodations just about
wherever they were seriously needed.
was the great Basil of Caesarea who
It
conceived and
promoted the idea of setting up hospices for
Christian travellers.
In fact, such a foundation was at first called a basileias and
only later by the name that was to become standard in the
Greek-speaking world, xenodocheion ‘place for receiving
strangers’. The Council of Nicaea gave what Basil had begun
tie force of law, and not long
afterwards every Christian
community of any consequence was able to boast a hostelry.
Their size and style varied from place
to place. In big centres
particularly where bishops took
pride in the service and
even
gave up some of their perquisites to
put money into it, they
were ample and very good. If we
may take the word of
ntoninus of Piacenza, who is rather
given to exaggeration,
y 570 Jerusalem had
or women
a pair of hostels —one for men, the other
-whose combined capacity totalled
3,000. Mon-
asteries were in the forefront of
taking care of travellers: each
ad at least some beds available for
guests, and eventually a
u - edged hospice became an
indispensable feature of almost
every complex. Private citizens here
and there added their bit.
A M •
5 M Jk :
-
P t L ! K • V l UA
/!^Sv£l

19 on glass vials sold as tourist souvenirs in Baiae and Puteoli.

Pictures
The first was found at Populonia on the northwestern coast of Italy.
The left half shows Baiae with an artificial pool ( stagnum ), a palace
( palatium )
with oyster beds ( ostriaria ) in front, and beyond the palace
another pool. The right side shows the pier (ripa ) at Puteoli built on
arches (the squiggles represent water running through them) and bearing
a building, two columns ( pilae ) topped by statues, and an arch topped
by a monument with four seahorses. The second, found near Lisbon,
shows only Puteoli: its two amphitheatres, solarium or arcaded promenade,
theatre ( theatrum ), a temple with its god portrayed before it, baths
(thermae — or therme as spelled here), arcades ( jani ), the pier. The third,
found near Rome, shows Baiae: its lighthouse ( faros ), artificial pool built
by Nero ( stagnum Neronis ), oyster beds, another artificial pool, wooded
park (silva).
20 Pilgrim souvenirs. Above, clay flask with the Annunciation scene;
the Greek letters give part of Luke 1.28: ‘Hail, thou that art highly
favoured, the Lord is with thee.’ Below, a Menas flask (see p. 327).
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 321

At Der Siman, for example, near the site of Simeon’s pillar

and a mecca for tourists after the saint’s death in 459, several
localsfounded and maintained hostels; these were no vast
complexes, to be sure, but they were able to put a roof over
at least dozens of pilgrims’ heads, and, to judge from the
remains, no humble roof at that. Even the state helped out.
In Constantinople a whole succession of rulers Theodosius —
II, Justin, Justinian and Theodora —
established xenodocheia.
The story is told that at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, a town
swarming with monks, the local magistrates, eager to do their
share, used to post men at the city gates to buttonhole and
take in any stranger who looked down at the heels and, for
extra consolation, underwrite all his expenses.
The members of the
xenodocheia existed to receive only
faith, not travellers in general. Consequently some reliable

system had to be devised to screen out imposters. As early

as Apostolic times Christians on the move were armed with
letters of recommendation which enabled a stranger in town

to introduce himself to his local co-religionists and request

lodging or other assistance. Paul prided himself on being so
well known that, as he reported to the Corinthians, he had no
need of such documents. Later, during the years of the per-
secutions, they were more important than ever as a means of
identifying authentic seekers of refuge or bearers of messages.
By the fourth century, when Christianity was the reigning
religion, they retained their usefulness as a way of keeping
the unauthorized, heretics as well as pagans, out of the hospices.
The ordinary traveller carried a simple ‘letter of peace’, as
it was called, one that presumably entitled him to the standard
hospitality available. Clerics were given an actual letter of
recommendation, a document of a higher order that brought
its possessor favoured treatment. At first priests were per-

mitted to give them out, but this led to abuses; too often
nonclerics were able through money or position to get their
hands on letters of recommendation. By the fourth century
only bishops could issue them.
L
322 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
With a letter in his hand, a traveller could knock on the
door of any hospice, day or night, and be assured of a reception.
Each arrival was greeted with the ‘sacred kiss’, and hustled
off to have his feet washed, in some places even anointed with
oil. The sexes, as we have
were lodged separately. Meals
seen,
were simple, varying with the means of the establishment or
the degree of austerity it affected. In the Wadi Natrun, a
visitor shared the Spartan menu of bread and water. Elsewhere
he could usually count on getting some local fruit (cf. 193

above) in addition, and, in certain well-to-do places, even fish,

vegetables, and a cup of wine. The quarters must have varied

even more widely, although so few examples have survived
that it is hard to be sure. A few sanctuary or monastery
hospices are preserved in northern Syria, and, as it happens,
these are quite different in design from the traditional ancient
inn with its central courtyard surrounded on all sides by a
line of individual chambers (203 above). They are oblong
structures, two storeys high, without any court and with most
of the space on each floor given over to a large dormitory;
adjacent are a few smaller rooms which must have served for
dining, for offices, and the like. At Turmanin there was a
single large hospice whose dormitories, measuring forty feet
by seventy-six, could pack in some 400 guests. At Der Siman
there were two moderate sized hospices which together could
accommodate just about a third of that number. All three were
impressive stone buildings surrounded by high porticoes of
massive piers.

Hospices offered a whole range of services in addition to

bed and board. If the traveller arrived sick, they furnished
medicines and a doctor; if in worn clothes, they furnished
replacements. They gave him guides to show him around the
sights. They even gave him money if he had run short,
although here there was the sticky problem of weeding out
those who were seeking it sub specie peregrinationis ‘on the
pretext of being a pilgrim’. Above all the traveller’s soul was
well cared for; even the poorest monastery, whatever it may
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 323

have lacked to satisfy his bodily needs, provided richly for

his spiritual, offering him ample opportunity for meditation
and prayer.
For all this physical and mental sustenance there was no
formal charge. However, it was assumed that those who could
afford it would leave donations, as the caravan from Nessana
did at St Catherine’s in Mt Sinai, and these were gratefully
accepted. In the Wadi Natrun visitors who stayed for long
periods were expected to work. The contributions of guests,
whether in money or gifts or labour, inevitably covered only
on the foundations
a fraction of the costs; the lion’s share fell

themselves. In Egypt the monks turned over surpluses from

their work to the abbot to help support the hospices; else-
where monasteries budgeted a tenth of their income. Charitable
bequests were a great help; Justinian’s Code contains a
provision that if a will names ‘the poor’ as legatee with no
further qualification, the sum is to go to the local hospice.
Not only was a considerable amount of money required,
but of time and effort as well. Though hospitality was a
Christian virtue which prelates and monks undertook un-
questioningly, it is clear that they often smarted under the
strain of entertaining a steady stream of guests. Jerome
resignedly used to put off his work until the still hours of
night, particularly the long winter nights, but he could not
resist a brief aside, to the effect that receiving pilgrims was a job
for the young and not the old, who no longer had the energy
for such doings. The monks of the Wadi Natrun insisted
on silence in the guests’ quarters until noon. Some solitaries
kept visiting hours, like Simeon on his pillar; he received only
after 3 p.m.

Hospices were located with an eye to keeping possible in-

convenience to a minimum. Monasteries, for example, often
put them by the entrance and away from the rest of the com-
plex. At the Wadi Natrun, the quarters were hard by the
church so that guests could quietly step in for prayers without
distracting the community. In sanctuaries where martyrs and
324 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
saints were buried, the hospice stood as close to the tomb as
possible, since having a saint as near neighbour, being his
guest as it were, was a crowning joy for a pilgrim. Melania
the Younger, on her first visit to Jerusalem, stayed in a
chamber in or near the Anastasis, the church over the cave
of the Entombment. When Paulinus settled down at Nola he
moved into one of the cells reserved for pilgrims visiting the
burial place of the martyr Felix. Pilgrims waiting to board
ship at Carthage used to take shelter in a waterfront church
near the grave of St Cyprian. Many a pilgrim preferred
sleeping under an open portico that surrounded a venerated
tomb more comfortable night in a hospice. The experience
to a
was exalting, and no donations were expected.
The monastery hospices were generally run by selected
monks responsible to their abbot, the church hospices by
priests responsible to their bishop. The arrangement, as it

worked out, left much to be desired. These clerical hotel

managers, in the nature of the case operating independently

of the organization to which they belonged, tended to create
a state within a state and, as will happen, resented attempts at
supervision or control. The bishop or abbot’s only recourse
was to pick the right men for the job, men of particularly
saintly reputation. For the rest of the staff — clerks, doctors,
cooks, maintenance personnel —they favoured bachelors or
spinsters, people who, from family
free ties, could be expected
to devote full attention to their work.

The Christian tourist, after dutifully following his guides

about and eagerly lapping up what they had to say, tall stories

and all, felt no less than his pagan brother the irresistible
compulsion to leave his mark, to scribble somewhere an
eternal record of his fleeting presence. ‘We came to Cana’,
writes Antoninus of Piacenza, ‘where our Lord attended the
wedding, and we sat down on the very couch, and there I’m —
—
ashamed to admit it I wrote the name of my parents.’ He
must have inscribed the sort of message found so often in the
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 325

tombs of the pharaohs and elsewhere, one that lists for re-
membrance relatives and friends who are not present (285
above). I have already mentioned the pilgrim who scratched
his accolade to Menas’ magical waters on the wall of a building
in the saint’s sanctuary on the way between Alexandria and
the Wadi Natrun. In the Holy Land itself, pilgrim graffiti
have survived only on rather remote monuments ; well-known
monuments have either disappeared or were protected against
such defacing. An artificial grotto at the foot of Mt Carmel
that —
was considered sacred it was first a church and then a
—
mosque has on the soft rock of its walls a vast tangle of
scribbled signatures left by its myriad visitors over the years.
The remains of the church on the site of Abraham’s oak at
Mamre near Hebron still retain a few out of what must have
been a mass of pilgrim scratchings. ‘O Lord God’, reads the
best preserved, ‘help Paregarios your servant.’
. . .

Lastly, again like his pagan brother, the Christian visitor

could not leave without acquiring a suitable memento. But in
his case no tawdry gimcrack would do. It had to be something
that in a tangible way partook of the sanctity of the places he
had visited. Pilgrims enthusiastically carried off pebbles or
pinches of dirt from hallowed areas, pieces of fruit or twigs
from sacred groves, bits of wax from the candles that burned
in sanctuaries, drops of water from a stream where a saint
had refreshed himself or blades of grass from where his feet
had trod, and so on. At the Sanctuary of the Ascension on the
Mount of Olives, for example, where a portion of the floor
was left unpaved to recall Jesus’ last footprints before his
miraculous departure, so many visitors helped themselves to
the earth and sand that the custodians had to shovel in replace-
ment continually. Some went after bigger game such as the
ingenious souvenir-hunter who came away with the prize of
all time, a splinter of the True Cross: on Good Friday, when
worshippers were allowed to kiss the wood, he managed to
bite off a mouthful. Henceforth sharp-eyed deacons stood
guard there —and presumably anywhere else that offered
326 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
a similar temptation — to make sure that it never happened
again.
In a monastery at Farfa some ten miles north of Rome
there is a whole collection of typical Holy Land mementoes,
very likely deposited by the monks who founded the place, a
group that migrated from the orient about a.d. 700. The
various items are now in little silk sacks but originally they
were wrapped in pieces of white cloth and carefully tied and
labelled. Some of the labels are still preserved, and we can
5
read on them such inscriptions as ‘From Mount Calvary ,
5
‘From the Rock of the Mount of Olives ‘From the Table ,

Where He Ate with the Disciples ‘From the Tomb of Our

5

,
5

Lord ‘Twig of the Tree That Furnished the Branch with

,
5
Which Moses Divided the Red Sea One sack contains some .

reddish earth which is identified as ‘Soil Drenched with the

5
Blood of Christ another some particles of plaster or the like
,

which came ‘From the Spot Where the Angel Announced

5
Death to the Virgin Mary (presumably from the house at
Gethsemane that was supposed to be hers), still another a few
scraps of wood ‘From the Wood of Paradise
5
One sack .

encloses a glass vial about four inches high which held ‘Oil
5
of the Holy Saturday from Jerusalem i.e. from the lamp at ,

the Holy Sepulchre which was reputed to light up by itself

each year on Holy Saturday.
This last is an example of what was a favourite Holy Land
souvenir, a few drops of oil from the myriad lamps that
burned about the tombs of the various saints and martyrs.
To hold the precious liquid visitors could purchase special
containers, miniature flasks decorated with appropriate illustra-
tions and inscribed with appropriate sentiments. For the well-
to-do pilgrim there were flasks of silver some seven inches in
diameter with both faces displaying scenes from the New
Testament tastefully done in relief. He had an ample selection
of subjects to choose from: Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity,
Adoration of the Shepherds and Magi, Baptism, Crucifixion,
Resurrection, Ascension, Christ Walking the Waters, Doubt-
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 327

ing Thomas. The inscriptions were more limited. A flask

with a relief of the Annunciation reads ‘Blessing of the Mother

of God’, one showing the Resurrection with the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre beneath reads ‘Blessing of the Lord of the
Holy Places’, and so on.
But flasks of silver were hardly for everybody. The economy-
minded were able to purchase more modest containers of
glass. Dozens of little jugs and bottles, a standard type some

three to seven inches high, hexagonal in shape and decorated

with crosses, have been found; they were manufactured for
the pilgrim trade by a shop in Jerusalem that was in operation
about a.d. 600. But even glass was too expensive and fragile
for the rank and file of pilgrims. For them there were available
cheap crude flasks of terra cotta that could be turned out from
moulds by the thousands (Fig. 20). One big centre of pro-
duction was in Alexandria, another near Smyrna, and there
were active workshops in Jerusalem and other Palestinian
centres. Though intended primarily for lamp oil, the flasks
could of course take any liquid that was valued as a souvenir,
and, as it happens, those we know best, because so many
specimens have survived, held water. They were sold at the
sanctuary of Menas, described above, whose springs were
thought to have curative powers. For carrying off the precious
fluid souvenir flasks were available in two grades. The more
expensive was larger —some 5J to 6f inches high and 4 to
6J broad — and generally was more elaborately decorated; the
cheaper was smaller —3J
high and 2§ to 3J broad and
to —
could bear as decoration no more than a flower or a cross or
at most a head of Menas. The preferred decoration for both
sizes (Fig. 20b) was a full-length picture of the saint with
arms outstretched in an attitude of prayer and with camels
kneeling near his feet to recall that, according to the tradition,
when facing martyrdom he had asked that his corpse be put
on a camel and buried wherever the animal stopped. Both
sizes were sometimes inscribed ‘Blessing of St Menas’.
The word ‘Blessing’ here and on the silver flasks is
328 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
significant. It reveals that these were much more than just
containers for mementoes, that they were amulets as well:
carried on a string about the neck, they ensured by virtue of
the saint’s benediction the bearer’s good fortune. Some of
the Menas flasks have on the back a picture of a boat; they
were probably for pilgrims who returned by sea. For those
who wanted an amulet more compact than a flask, medallions
with a ‘Blessing’ inscription and appropriate picture were
available made of pressed earth. For those who wanted a
compact amulet-cum-memento, there were ‘Blessing’ medal-
lions made of hallowed materials such as earth from the Holy
Sepulchre.
Lastly a word about Jewish pilgrims. Before the destruction
of Jerusalem by the Romans, Jews had always flocked there,
particularly during the Passover season. Numbers of them
continued to do so, making the pilgrimage like their Christian
brethren. Indeed, the very shop that manufactured glass
souvenir jugs and bottles put out a line for Jewish customers,
the identical containers decorated with the seven-branched
candlestick instead of the cross. And synagogues, like the
Christian foundations, maintained quarters to accommodate
Jewish travellers.

So, each year thousands of pilgrims, their medallions or flasks

about their necks, left the sacred soil for the long trek home,
probably so exalted by the experience that they gave scant
thought to the rigours that lay ahead —or the reality that lay
behind. To was sadly apparent that
those with eyes to see, it

tourism was no respecter of sanctity, that it was giving the

cities of the Holy Land more the air of Sodom and Gomorrah

than of Eden. ‘Do not imagine that your faith is in any way
lacking because you have not seen Jerusalem’, wrote Jerome
in a bitter moment to Paulinus of Nola in 394-95, almost a
decade after his first sight of it, ‘and don’t think us better off
because we live here. ... If the site of the Cross and the
Resurrection were not in a terribly crowded city which has its
 TO THE HOLY LANDS 329

government building, its barracks, its prostitutes, troups of

actors, clowns, and all the rest just like any other town, or
if it were reserved for bands of monks alone, then surely all

the monks in the world should try to settle down here. But
now it is the height of stupidity to renounce the world, leave
your fatherland, abandon the cities, and take the vows in
order to live far from your home amid denser crowds than
you would in your own country! They flock here from the
four corners of the universe. The city is full of all sorts of
people, there is such a packed mob of men and women that,

whereas elsewhere you can escape certain things, here you

have to put up with everything’.
It is a pity that others did not share Jerome’s view. The
world would have been spared much bloodshed.
Abbreviations

AJPh American Journal of Philology

:

AM: L. Casson, The Ancient Mariners (New York 1959)

Anderson: J. Anderson, Ancient Greek Horsemanship (Berkeley and
Los Angeles 1961)
AP: Anthologia Palatina
Ath. Mitt,.: Mitteilungen des deutschen archaologischen Instituts
Athenische Abteilung
Balsdon: J. Balsdon, Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome (London
1969)
Behr: C. Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales (Amsterdam 1968)
Breasted, ARE: J. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago 1906)
!
Cabrol-Leclerq: F. Cabrol and H. Leclerq, Dictionnaire d drcheologie
chretienne et de liturgie (Paris 1907—53)
Cary-Warmington: M. Cary and E. Warmington, The Ancient Ex-
plorers (New York 1929)
Chr. d’Eg.: Chronique d’Lgypte
CIG: Corpus inscriptionum graecarum
CIL: Corpus inscriptionum latinarum
Crook: J Crook, Law and Life
of Rome (London 1967)
D’Arms: J. D’Arms, Romans on the Bay of Naples (Cambridge, Mass.
1970)
De Ruggiero: E. de Ruggiero, Diqionario epigrafico di antichita romane
(Rome 1886 —
DS: C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques
et romaines (Paris 1877-1919)
Edelstein: E. and L. Edelstein, Asclepius (Baltimore 1945)
Enc. Arte Ant.: Enciclopedia del! arte antica (Rome 1958—66)
ESAR: T. Frank and others, An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome
(Baltimore 1933-40)
Evans, PM: A. Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos (London
I
9 2I— 35)
Fliche-Martin: A. Fliche and V. Martin, Histoire de V Lglise iii (Paris

03 6 )
Forbes: R. Forbes Studies in Ancient Technology ii (Leiden 1965)
Frazer: J. Frazer, Pausanias’s Description of Greece (London 1898)
Friedlander: L. Friedlander, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte
Roms i (Leipzig 1922)
Fustier: P. Fustier, La route (Paris 1968)
Gardiner: A. Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (Oxford 1961)
Geyer: P. Geyer, Itinera hierosolymitana , saecula iii-viii (Corpus
scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, vol. 39, Vienna 1898)
 1

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 33 1

Gorce: D. Gorce, Les voyages, F hospitalite et le port des lettres dans le

monde chretien des iv e et v e siecles (Paris 1925)
Gorce, Melanie: D. Gorce, Vie de Sainte Melanie (Sources chr6tiennes
90, Paris 1962)
Grenier: A. Grenier, Archeologie gallo-romaine. Deuxieme partie:

F Archeologie du sol, les routes (Paris 1934)

Homo: L. Homo, ‘Les musees de la Rome imperiale’, Gazette des
Beaux Arts 61 (1919) 21-46, 177-208
Homo, Urb.: L. Homo, Rome imperiale et Furbanisme dans F antiquite
2
(Paris 1 97 )

How and Wells: W. How and J. Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus

(Oxford 1912)
IEJ : Israel Exploration Journal
IG: Inscrip tiones graecae
IGRR : R. Cagnat and others, Inscriptions graecae ad res romanas
pertinentes (Paris 1911— 27)
ILS : H. Dessau, Inscriptions latinae selectae (Berlin 1892—1916)
Jahres .: Jahreshefte des osterreichischen archaeologischen Instituts
JDI : Jahrbuch des deutschen archaologischen Instituts
JEA : Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
JHS: Journal of Hellenic Studies
JRS: Journal of Roman Studies
Kaibel: G. Kaibel, Epigrammata graeca (Berlin 1878)
Kleberg: T. Kleberg, Hotels, restaurants et cabarets dans F antiquite
romaine (Uppsala 1957)
Levi: A. and M. Levi, Itineraria picta. Contributo alio studio della
Tabula Peutingeriana (Rome 1967)
Liebeschuetz: J. and Imperial Admin-
Liebeschuetz, Antioch. City
istration in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford 1972)
Meissner: B. Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien i (Heidelberg 1920)
Muller, FHG C. Muller, Fragmenta historicorum graecorum (Paris
:

1841-70)
Needham: Needham, Science and
J. Civilisation in China , vol. 4, parts
ii-iii (Cambridge 1965, 1971)
Not. Sc.: Accademia dei Lincei, Rome: Notifie degli scavi di antichita
Oppenheim, Letters: A. Oppenheim, Letters from Mesopotamia
(Chicago 1967)
Pfister: Der Reliquienkult im Alter turn (Religionsgeschicht-
F. Pfister,
liche Versuche und Vorarbeiten, v. Band, Giessen 1909)
Pflaum: H. Pflaum, Essai sur le cursus publicus sous le haut-empire
romain (Memoires presentes par divers savants & TAcademie des
inscriptions et belles-lettres xiv, Paris 1940)
332 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
PG: J. Migne, Patrologia graeca
P. Giss . : Griechische Papyri im Museum des oberhessischen Geschichts-
vereins { u Giessen (Leipzig 1910— 12)
P. land.'. Papyri Iandanae (Berlin and Leipzig 1912 —
PL: J. Migne, Patrologia latina
P. Lips.: L. Mitteis, Griechische Urkunden der Papyrussamlung pu
Leipzig (Leipzig 1906)
P. Lond.: F. Kenyon and H. Bell, Greek Papyri in the British Museum
(London 1893 —
P. Mich.: H. Youtie and others, Michigan Papyri (Ann Arbor 1931 —
P. Oxy.: B. Grenfell, A. Hunt, and others, Oxyrhynchus Papyri
(London 1898 —
Pritchard, ANET: J. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating
2
to the Old Testament (Princeton 1955 Supplement 1969)
,

P. Ryl.: A. Hunt and others, Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the

John Rylands Library at Manchester (Manchester 1891 —

PSI: Papiri greci e latini (Florence 1912 —
P. S trass.: F. Preisigke, Griechische Papyrus der kaiserlichen Universi-
tats- und Landesbibliothek pu Strassburg (Strassburg and Leipzig
1906-1920)
RA: Revue archeologique
Ramsay: W. Ramsay, ‘Roads and Travel in the New Testament’, in
Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible , Extra Volume (London 1904)
RE: Paulys Real- Encyclop adie der class is chen Alter tumswissenschaft
REA: Revue des etudes anciennes
REG: Revue des etudes grecques
RhM: Rheinisches Museum fur Philologie
Rom. Mitt.: Mitteilungen des deutschen archaologischen Instituts,
Romische Abteilung
Salonen, Hippologica: A. Salonen, Hippologica Accadica (Annales
Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Ser. B, Tom. 100, Helsinki 1955)
Salonen, Landfahr^euge: A. Salonen, Die Landfahr^euge des alten
Mesopotamien (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Ser. B,
Tom. 72, 3, Helsinki 1951)
SB: F. Preisigke, F. and others, Sammelbuch griechischer
Bilabel,
Urkunden aus Agypten (Strassburg, Berlin and Leipzig 1913 —
SEHHJV: M. The Social and Economic History of the
Rostovtzeff,
Hellenistic World (Oxford 1941)
SEHRE: M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the
Roman Empire (Oxford 1957 2 )
Sel. Pap.: A. Hunt and C. Edgar, Select Papyri (Loeb Classical Library
1932-1934)
 e

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 333

SHA : Scriptores historiae augustae
Singer: C. Singer, A History of Technology i-ii (Oxford 1954, 1956)
Spano: G. Spano, ‘La illuminazione delle vie di Pompeii Atti della
reale accademia di archeologia , letter 9 e belle arti di Napoli 7 (1920)
3-128
SSA IV: L. Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Prince-
ton 1971)
TAPA: Transactions of the American Philological Association
Thomson: J. Thomson, History of Ancient Geography (Cambridge
1948)
TLL: Thesaurus linguae latinae
Tobler: T. Tobler, Itinera hierosolymitana et descriptions Terrae
Sanctae (Geneva 1879)
Vermeule: E. Vermeule, Greece in theBronze Age (Chicago 1964)
Vigneron: P. Vigneron, Le cheval dans V antiquite greco-romaine
(Annales de l’Est, publiees par la Faculte des Lettres et des Sciences
de TUniversite de Nancy 35, Nancy 1968)
Wachsmuth: D. Wachsmuth, Pompimos Ho Daimon: Untersue hung qu
den antiken Sakralhandlungen bei Seereisen (Doctoral Dissertation,
Berlin 1967)
Warmington: E. Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman
Empire and India (Cambridge 1928)
W. Chrest.: L. Mitteis and U. Wilcken, Grundfige und Chrestomathie
der Papyruskunde. Erster Band (Leipzig and Berlin 1912)
Wilkinson: J. Wilkinson, Egerias Travels (London 1971)
Notes
21- to Chapter i

2 First seagoing vessels, SSAIF 17, 20-2. Seagoing commerce

in the late third millennium b.c., W. Leemans in Journal of the Economic
and Social History of the Orient II (1968) 215-16; he argues (225) that the
ships in the Mesopotamia-India trade were Indian since, among other
22- Mesopotamia had no ship-timber whereas India had its abundant
things,
supplies of teak. ‘When the Nile’, Herodotus 2: 97. Egyptian and Meso-
potamian rivercraft, SSAJV 16-24, 29. Buoyed rafts and coracles, 4-6.
‘Aboard a live donkey’, Herodotus 1: 194.
5 Donkeys known in Mesopotamia as early as 3000 b c . .

and horses and mules about 2300, Salonen, Hippologica 12, 46, 71.
Earliest four-wheel and two- wheel vehicles, Salonen, Landfahrieuge

155-6, 1 60-1. Drawn by oxen, 29. Remains of wagons, 157-8. Horse as

draught-animal, Hippologica 22-4. Chariots, Evans, PM iv, 807-25;
Salonen, Landfahrieuge 163-4; Singer i, 724-8; Needham iv, 2, 246.
Construction of chariots, Vermeule 261-2; A. Lucas and J. Harris,
4
Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries (London 1962 436, 438 (a )
surviving Egyptian chariot with yoke and handrail of elm, pole of
willow, axle of ash, spokes of plum; all except the willow had to be
imported). Diomed, II. 10: 504-5. Harness, Singer i, 719-21. Indian
bronze models, Singer i, 719, fig. 518B; S. Piggott, Prehistoric India
(London 1950) 178-9. Piggott suggests on the basis of bronze models of
oxen which have been found that oxen were put into the shafts; if so,
that would round out the circle: the Near East used horses in a harness
suitable for oxen, and India oxen one suitable for horses. Shafts in
in
China, Needham iv, 2, 246-50. Covered wagon, J. Pritchard, The Ancient
Near East in Pictures (Princeton 1954) no. 169. Joseph’s wagons, Genesis
45: 17-19, 46: 5. Travellers’ use of donkeys, Meissner 338. Litters, Salo-
nen Landfahrieuge 144-5 (mention of light litters of fibres or reeds;
the clay model of a palanquin of c. 1700 b.c. found on Crete [Evans,
PM ii, 157—8] reproduces a heavy type probably used in processions).

25-7 Shulgi’s hymn, Pritchard, ANET

584-6. Hammurabi’s letter,
A. Ungnad, Babylonische Briefe aus der Zeit der Hammurapi-Dynastie
(Leipzig 1914) no. 15. ‘Way of the land’, Exodus 13: 17. Processional
way of the Hittites, W. Andrae, Alte Feststrassen im Nahen Osten (Leipzig
1941) 15-16 and plate 1. No bridges in Mesopotamia, H. Schmokel,
Kulturgeschichte des alten Orients (Stuttgart 1961) 84. Ferries: cf. the
scenes on later Assyrian reliefs of chariots being ferried across streams,
e.g. R. Barnett and W.
Forman, Assyrian Palace Reliefs (London i960)
nos. 16-20 (BM 124540). Very likely body, axle, and wheels were so
put together that they could swiftly and easily be taken apart; cf. Singer
 1

NOTES 335
i, Road on Crete, Evans,
717-18. PM
ii, 60-92, esp. 62, 71; viaduct,

28-
93-102. Roads in Greece, 91, note 1; Vermeule 263. Wall painting from
Tiryns, 261-2 and 192, fig. 33c. See also AJA 77 (1973) 74-7.
9 Travelling functionaries, J. Yoyotte, ‘Les pelerinages dans
l’figypte ancienne’, Les pelerinages (Coll. ‘Sources Orientals’ iii, Paris
i960) 24, 37-8, 52. ‘I reached Elephantine’, 38 (= Breasted, ARE i,

nos29-
611-13). Travellers to Sinai, Pritchard, ANET 229-30. Harkhuf,
Breasted, ARE nos 333-6, 353. ‘To open up’, Gardiner 99-100. Extent
i,

of Harkhuf ’s travels, Gardiner 100-1. Egyptian voyages down the Red

Sea, AM 9-14.
31 Levantines leading donkeys, Singer i, 706. On the well-
organized caravan trade between Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, see M.
Larsen, Old Assyrian Caravan Procedures (Istanbul 1967); Leemans,
above) 171-215. ‘Thirty years ago’, Oppenheim, Letters 74.
op. cit. (334

Hammurabi’s regulations, Pritchard, ANET

170. Mesopotamian cargo
financing, A. Oppenheim, ‘The Seafaring Merchants of Ur’, Journal of
the American Oriental Society 74 (1954) 6-17. ‘The Egyptians’, Herodotus

2: 59-60.
32-4 Egyptian tourism, Yoyotte, op. cit. (see 28-9) 49-53. ‘Had-
nakhte’, C. Firth and J. Quibell, The Step Pyramid. Vol. i, Text (Cairo
1935) 82-3. ‘Came to contemplate’, Yoyotte 57. ‘Scribe So-and-So’ and
‘in the view’, 53. Pennewet and Wia, Firth-Quibell 84-5. ‘The scribe of

clever fingers’, 81. ‘Hurry and bring’, Gardiner 58-9. ‘I have never’,
Oppenheim, Letters 87.
35-8 ‘Commands have been sent’, Breasted, ARE i, no. 354.
Shulgi, Pritchard, ANET 585. On the nature of travel in Mesopotamia,
cf. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia (Chicago 1964) 1 19-120.
A.
Government post of Lagash, T. Jones and J. Snyder, Sumerian Economic
Texts from the Third Ur Dynasty (Minneapolis 1961) 293-302. Minoan
hostel, Evans, PM ii, 103-39. On private hospitality in Mesopotamia, cf.

Oppenheim 78.Town inns in Sumer and Babylon, T. Jacobsen, Toward

the Image of Tammu
(Cambridge, Mass. 1970) 349; G. Driver and J.
Miles, The Babylonia Laws i (Oxford 1952) 202. Female tavernkeepers
cited in the recently published fragments of the law code of Ammisaduqa
(1646-1626 b.c.), Pritchard, ANET 528. Tavern regulations, 170 and
Driver-Miles i, 202-8; J. MacQueen, Babylon (New York 1965) 71-2.
‘If a man urinates’, Gelb and others, The Assyrian Dictionary (Chicago
I.

1964 — ) s.v. astammu. ‘I am now sending’, Oppenheim, Letters 86.

38-9 ‘This land was reached’, Pritchard, ANET 229. On dangers in
Mesopotamia, Meissner 338-9. Compensation, 338. ‘Men sit’, Gardiner
cf.

109. Guard stations in Crete, Evans, PM

ii, 66, 78. Wenamon, Pritchard,

ANET 25-9.
33 6 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Notes to Chapter 2
44-6 For a convenient recent summary of the end of the Bronze
Age in Greece, see M. Finley, Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Ages
(London 1970) chapters 1-6; for the age that Homer describes, see pages
81-9. Phoenicians, AM
67-72. ‘Phoenicians, famed for their ships’, Od.
15 : 4 I 5 -1 ^*
46-8 Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, Od. 13: 70-6. Telemachus’
voyages, Od. 2: 414-18, 15: 282-6. Pylos to Sparta, Od. 3: 478-4: 2.

Sparta to Phthia, Od. 4: 8-9. Mules, II. 23: 115-23 (hauling wood from
Mt Ida). Priam, II. 24: 266-7. Nausicaa, Od. 6: 72-88. Telemachus’
gifts,Od. 15: 114-29. Gifts from king and queen of Thebes, Od. 4: 126-
50-
32. Sleeping accommodations, Od. 4: 296-305,
3: 397-403, 7: 344-47.
‘Stranger’, Od. 14: 56-8. ‘Pay no heed’, Od. 9: 275-6.
48-9 ‘You’re out of’, Od. 18: 327-9. Lot, Genesis 13: 13, 19: 1-11.
Levite, Judges 19. Jacob, Genesis 28. Shunammite, II Kings 4: 24.
Kings and nobles on mules, II Samuel 13: 29; I Kings 1: 38. Return of the
ark, I Samuel 6: 7-12.
51- 1 Xenophon’s Greeks, Anab. 10-11. took my chariots’,
3: 4: ‘I

D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia (Chicago 1926)

i, no. 222. Assyrian chariots, Salonen, Landfahr^euge 166— 67. Battering
rams, Barnett-Forman, op. (334 above) no. 23 (BM 124536). Assyrian
cit.

roads, Meissner 340-41. Paved sanctuary roads at Assur and Babylon,

Andrae, op. cit.(334 above) 19-43. Paving at Babylon, R. Koldewey,
Das wieder erstehende Babylon (Leipzig 1913) 25. Bridge at Babylon,
Herodotus 1: 186. Remains, Meissner 342. Assyrian post, Meissner 339.
2 Horse as riding animal, J. Wiesner, Fahren und Reiten
(Archaeologica Homerica, Band i, Kapitel F, Gottingen 1968) 110-28;
Anderson 10-14. ‘Mounted the horses’, II. 10: 529-31. Chariots in China
till the Han period (200 b.c.-a.d. 200), Needham iv, 2: 247-8. Bit and

bridle, Anderson 40-78.

53-4 Persian ‘royal road’, Herodotus 5: 52-3 and How and Wells
ad loc. Persian post, Pflaum 4-17. ‘There is nothing*, Herodotus 8: 98.
Harmamaxa , DS s.v. ‘Well, first’, Aristophanes, Ach. 68-71. Alexander’s
hearse, Diodorus 18: 26-8. Camels, Salonen, Hippologica 84-90; Forbes
193-208.
 NOTES 337

Notes to Chapter 3
59-61 Carthaginian blockade, ESAR
Greek knowledge of
i, 6-8.
the Mediterranean, Thomson 47. The Atlantic, Cary-Warmington 30.
Celts and Danube, Thomson 52. Russia, Thomson 56-64. India and
Arabia, Thomson 78-82; Cary-Warmington 61-2. Africa, Thomson 65-7.
61-3 Circumnavigation of Africa, Thomson 71-3; Cary-Warming-
ton 87-97. Hanno, Thomson 73-7; Cary-Warmington 47-52.

Notes to Chapter 4
65-6 ‘Frogs*, Plato, Phaedo 1096. Figures preserved show how astro-
nomically high were the costs of land transport. Stones, for example,
which sold for 61 drachmae in Corinth were worth over ten times that
— —
much 705 drachmae when delivered to Delphi. The construction
records of a building at Eleusis, near Athens, show graphically why:
to haul a single column drum from a quarry just fifteen to twenty miles
away took three days and required thirty-one span of oxen. See H.
2
Michell, The Economics of Ancient Greece (New York 1957 ) 252; C.
Roebuck, ed., The Muses at Work (Cambridge, Mass. 1969) 14; W.
Burford, ‘Heavy Transport in Antiquity’, Economic History Review
Second Series 13 (i960) 1-18, esp. 14. Greek trade, AM
108-24. Ships,
SSAW 169-82. Thanks for safe crossing: In comedies of the time, when
a returning merchant comes on stage, his first words are often fervent
thanks to the gods for a safe arrival. ‘Father Neptune!’ says Theoproprides
in The Haunted House (431-7), re-written by Plautus from a comedy of
the late fourth century b.c., ‘Many thanks for letting me off and sending
me home still alive. But believe me, if you ever hear of my getting
within a foot of the water hereafter, you can go right ahead and finish
what you started to do this last trip. Just keep away from me, far away,
from now on. I’ve trusted in you all I’m ever going to.*
67-8 Going by foot, Xenophon, Mem. 3: 13: 5 (Socrates, discussing
with some one obviously well-to-do the difficulties of travelling from
Athens to Olympia, a five- to six-day walk, talks only of the right attitude
to take toward such a walk, never of using an animal or cart). Accompany-
ing servant, Xenophon, Mem. 3: 13: 6 (Socrates reminds a traveller who
complained of arriving tired that he carried only a cloak whereas his
slave was burdened with the bedding and other gear). Pack-animals, DS
s.v. asinus , clitellae , mulus , sagma. Litters and sedan-chairs, DS
338 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
s.v. lectica. Reaction to Demosthenes, Deinarchus, Against Demosthenes
3 6. Vehicles, Enc. Arte Ant. s.v. carro; H. Lorimer, ‘The Country Cart
of Ancient Greece’, JHS 23 (1903) 132-51.
68-72 Greek roads, Forbes 140-4. Pausanias’ comment about the
road to Delphi, 10: 5: 5. ‘Impossible for vehicles’, Pausanias 2: 11:3. The
Ladder, 8: 6: 4. Staff-Road, Frazer iii, pages 87-8. ‘For six miles’,
Frazer page 547. Hadrian’s improvements, Pausanias 1: 44: 6. Carriage
ii,

road from the Peloponnese, Plutarch, Mor. 304c. Greek rut roads,
Forbes 142-3; Singer ii, 499. The prehistoric tracks in Malta, often cited
among the earliest examples of rut roads, were simply casual grooves
formed by the dragging of slide cars (cars of two shafts, supported at the
front end by an animal while the rear end drags on the ground); see J.
Evans, The Prehistoric Antiquities of the Maltese Islands: A Survey
(London 1971) 202-4. A splendid example of a work road with ruts is
the diolkos the road built in the sixth century b.c. across the Isthmus of
,

Corinth for dragging ships from one side to the other; see N. Verdelis
in Ath. Mitt. 71 (1956) 51-9 and plates 33-7. Projection barring the way,
E. Curtius and J. Kaupert, Karten von Attika, Heft ii (Berlin 1883) 45.
‘I walked along’, Oed. Rex 801—13. Hermeia, DS s.v. Hermae. In Egypt,

Strabo 17: 818. ‘The superstitious man’, Theophrastus, Char. 16: 5.

Description of tourist route, Muller, FHG ii, 256-61; cf. Frazer i, pages
xlii-xlvii.

72-6 Demosthenes’ cases,Demosthenes, Against Nicostratus 6-7,

Against Callippus 5. Plot of comedies, H. Ormerod, Piracy in the Ancient
World (London 1924) 263-4. ‘Is the sort who’, Theophrastus, Char. 25: 2.
‘Was murdered’, Lucian, Dial. Mort. 27: 2. Senseless taking of life for
the pleasure of it was not unknown to the ancient world and posed yet
another hazard for the traveller. Plutarch tells {Mor. 304c) of a group of
families making a sacred pilgrimage from the Peloponnese to Delphi
who bedded down in their wagons for the night along a body of water, and
some drunken toughs who happened to come by tipped the wagons into
the water drowning most of the people in them. Precious bowls, Demos-
thenes, Against Timotheus 31. Money-changing, R. Bogaert, Banques et

hanquiers dans les cites grecques (Leiden 1968) 314-26. Greek clothing,
M. Bieber, Griechische Kleidung (Berlin and Leipzig 1928); Anderson
85-7. ‘As for the length’, e.g. Herodotus 1: 72. The precise cut and shape
of the Greek garments mentioned varied of course from age to age and
place to place. The Greek terms cited are as general in their meaning as
our words ‘shirt' or ‘coat’.
77-9 Spartan attack, Thucydides 5: 49. The Spartans argued that
their attack had been launched before the ‘truce-bearers’ actually arrived
in Sparta to make the announcement and refused to pay. The Eleans held
 NOTES 339
that the trucewas in force from the moment it had been proclaimed in
Elis. On the Olympic games in general, see L. Drees, Olympia (English

trans., London 1968). Wealthy making a show: The painter Zeuxis

turned up at one Olympic festival wearing a cloak with his name em-
broidered in gold (Pliny 35: 62). Alcibiades, Plutarch, Alcibiades 11-12.
Aqueduct, Lucian, The Death of Peregrinus 19; the Greek multimillion-
aire,Herodes Atticus, footed the bill. The events, Drees 66-86. Formal
readings: There was an apocryphal story that Herodotus had recited his
history at one of the Olympics and ‘everybody got to know him much
better than the Olympic victors themselves’ (Lucian, Herodotus 2). By
the Middle Ages the story had acquired picturesque details —Thucydides
while still a boy, it was said, had heard the readings and been moved to
tears; cf. How and Wells 6. Addresses on vital issues, cf. Drees 59-60.
Demosthenes, for example, at the Olympics of 324 b.c. engaged in a
debate on the pros and cons of rule by Alexander the Great (Plutarch,
Demosthenes
81- 9: 2). Displays of art, Lucian, Herodotus 4. Spectators
bareheaded, cf. Lucian, Anacharsis 16. ‘Don’t you get scorched’, Epictetus,
Diss. 1: 6: 26; although Epictetus lived in the first century a.d., con-
ditions at the games were no doubt very much the same as they had been
five centuries earlier. Threatening a slave, Aelian, Var. Hist. 14: 18.

Thales died of thirst and heat prostration while watching athletic games
(Diogenes Laertius 1: 39).

2 Criticism of the government: The Athenians had a second

82-
somewhat less important festival for dramatic competitions, the Lenaea,
which took place in mid-winter when was at an almost
sea-borne traffic

complete standstill. Aristophanes presented his next play, The Acharnians ,

at this festival and pointedly remarked ( Ach 502-5), ‘This time Cleon.

can’t accuse me of running down the state in the presence of strangers:

it’s the Lenaea; we’re by ourselves.’ Athens’ theatre, A. Pickard-Cam-
bridge,The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens (Oxford 1946) and The
Dramatic Festivals at Athens (Oxford 1968 2 ). Example of brazen effron-
tery, Theophrastus, Char. 9: 5.
5 The fundamental work on the cult of Asclepius is E. and L.
Edelstein, Asclepius (Baltimore 1945). ‘On these tablets’, Pausanias 2:
27: 3. For the text of the tablets, see Edelstein i, 229-37; those cited are
Nos. For a description of the site,
17, 20, 30. see Frazer iii, 236-57. Inn
at Epidaurus, W. Dinsmoor, The Architecture of Ancient Greece (London
3
1950 ) 251. ‘A great many Greeks’, Herodotus 3: 139. Solon, Aristotle,
Ath. Pol. ii : you’ve never’, Lysippus 7 (= Muller, FHG ii, 255).
1. ‘If

Plato’s attitude toward travel was uncompromisingly totalitarian: in his

Laws (950-1 a) he limits travel by and on state business,
large to people
who, moreover, are to be at least forty years old and on their return are
340 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
to ‘teach the young that the political institutions of other states are inferior
to their own’. For sightseeing at Delphi, cf. Euripides, Ion 184-236.
5

85-9 ‘Stand back’, Aristophanes, Ach. 616-17. City streets,

Forbes 166-7. ‘My master said’, Plautus, Pseudolus 596-7, 658. ‘You
know that house’, Terence, Brothers 581-4. See also
Urb. 589-93. Homo,
Street signs and house numbers are quite recent inventions; Paris
introduced the first in 1729 and the second in 1512 but not in a thorough-
going fashion until 1800 (Homo, Urb. 588-9). On private hospitality,
cf. Diodorus’ account (13: 83) of a certain Tellias, a wealthy man of

Acragas toward the end of the fifth century b.c., who posted servants
before his door to invite any and all strangers; once he took in 500 cavalry-
men who arrived in town in a winter storm and not only fed them but
sent them off with a change of clothing. Such open-handed hospitality
was already looked on as old-fashioned by this time. Theophrastus
characterizes as a typical boaster the man who lives in hired lodgings but
tells strangers that it is his ancestral home and that he is selling it because it
does not have enough room for guests {Char. 23: 9). Putting up all

visitors from certain places: Inscriptions found at Delphi reveal that a

certain Craton who lived there kept up the custom, long current in his
family, of always making his guest room available to any Thebans who
came to town (E. Ziebarth, ‘Gasthauser im alten Griechenland’, Eis
mnemen Spyridonos Lamprou, Athens 1935, 339—48, esp. 340). Xenon,
Diodorus 13: 83 (Tellias had numerous xenones); Diogenes Laertius
5: 14 (Aristotle’s will mentions a xenon on a garden that seems to have
been a separate lodge). Invited to host’s table, Vitruvius 6: 7: 4. Inns:
There are numerous other terms for inn besides pandokeion, e.g.
katalyma, katagogion, katalysis. Inns along major routes, cf. the ‘abun-
dance of inns’ between Athens and Oropus mentioned earlier (72 above).
‘Landladies with the fewest bedbugs’, Frogs 1 14-15. Landlady of the inn
inHades, 549—78. Other examples of landladies, Plutarch Mor 412c;
Dio Cassius 46: 6: 4. Courtyard, see A. Furtwangler in Melanges Nicole
(Geneva 1905) 159-64 (vase of fourth century b.c. with picture of inn-
court). Sharing rooms, see Ziebarth 342 (inn at Epidaurus which seems
to have had seven 7-bed rooms). Furniture, cf. Aristides, Or. 27: 15 = ii,
455 Keil (Aristides was ushered into a ‘chamber and was furnished with a
pallet and clean spread, both most welcome since I didn’t have a thing
with me’); although Aristides wrote in the second century a.d., things
must have been much the same centuries earlier. Buying food,
Plutarch, Mor. 234e-f, 995b-c, and cf. 21 1 above. Rates including board,
Polybius 2: 15: 5-6, referring to Lombardy in the second century b.c.

Public inn in Epirus (at Kassope near Preveza), JHS 73

(1953) 120-1, 74
(1954) 1 59, 75 ( 1 955) Archeological Reports p. 1 3 76 ( 1 956) Archeological
,
 NOTES 34I

Reports p. 19. For a public inn maintained for Romans at Sparta in the
second century b.c., see RhM 64
(1909) 335-6. For leschai in this age,
see Diogenes Laertius 9: 17; Pausanias 10: 25. 1 (the famous lesche in
Delphi decorated with murals by Polygnotus, the greatest painter of the
-
fifth century b.c.). Baths, DS s.v. balneum , pp. 648-51. Robbing garments,
Aristophanes, Clouds 175-9 (a j°ke to the effect that Socrates, finding
himself one day without the price of dinner for himself and his disciples,
improvised a pair of calipers and with them solved, not a geometry
problem, but the food problem by hooking somebody’s himation from
a dressing-room); Diogenes Laertius 6: 52 (Diogenes the Cynic’s
crack to a thief at the baths: ‘Are you here for an oiling ( aleimmation)
or a cloak (alV himation ) ?’ or, more freely, ‘Are you here for rubbing or
robbing?’). Byzantium husbands, Athenaeus 10: 442c.
90 1 Temple inns, IG ii
2
,
1638 A
30 (Delos), Diodorus 11: 89: 8
(Palike, in eastern Sicily). Plataea, Thucydides 3: 68 (two-storey inn
-
covering a circuit of 200 feet along each side, and if we assume the rooms
were cubicles ten feet square, there were some 150 of them). Banquet
halls,- A. Frickenhaus in JDI 32 (1917) 114-33. Hostelry at Olympia,

see W. Dinsmoor, op. cit. (339 above) 114 and fig. 44; an inscription
records that it was erected by one Leonidas of Naxos. Renting of temple
lodgings, cf. Syl? 1106 §§ 1, 12-13, inscription of 300 b.c. dealing with
the setting up of a religious foundation with xenones for rental to provide
revenue (their use is expressly denied to the foundation personnel).
Well-to-do use tents: At
Olympics of 388 b.c., Dionysius I, ruler
the
of Syracuse, housed himself and his entourage in tents of gold cloth
(Diodorus 14: 109: 1). The authorities occasionally tried to cut down on
such invidious extravagance; an inscription has been uncovered which
deals with an important festival at the town of Andania in Messenia and,
among the provisions, is one limiting the size of the tents to be used and
3
the value of their furnishings ( Syl . 736: 34-9; early first century b.c.).

Temporary shelter at international games, Aelian, Var. Hist. 4: 9 (Plato,

incognito, shared a tent with strangers at the Olympic games); Schol. to
Pindar, 01 . 10.55b (shelters for crowds at Olympic games set up at Pisa,
a third of a mile or so from Olympia). At Atargatis’ sanctuary in Hiero-
polis in Syria, city-states appointed locally resident nationals to put up
any of their citizens who came as pilgrims (Lucian, de Syria dea 56).
91 2 Wine shops in Corinth, O. Broneer in Archaeology 7 (1954)
74-81. A building at Olynthus may have been an elegant gambling
casino; see W. McDonald in Studies Presented to David Moore Robinson
i (St Louis 1951) 365-73. ‘Earrings and a rug’, Lucian, Dial. Mer. 14: 3.
92 3 Proxenos, DS
s.v. Proxenia. The text of the resolution that

appointed Heracleides {Syl. 3 304) nicely illustrates the reasons why a man
342 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
was chosen proxenos and the perquisites that were attached to the
position:
Whereas Heracleides of Salamis has continuously shown his dedication
to the interests of the People of Athens and done for them whatever
benefactions lay within his power, viz.
on one occasion, during a period of scarcity of grain, he was the
first of the shippers to return to the port, and he voluntarily sold
the city 3,000 medimni [4,500 bushels] at a price of 5 drachmas per
measure [the market price was probably in the neighbourhood of
16], and
on another occasion, when voluntary contributions were being
collected, he donated 3,000 drachmas [some £6000 or $15,000 in
purchasing power] to the grain purchase fund, and
in all other respects he has continually shown his goodwill and
dedication to the people,
be it resolved that official commendation be extended to Heracleides,
son of Charicleides, of Salamis, and
that he receive a gold crown for his goodwill and dedication
to the interest of the People of Athens,
that he and his offspring be declared Proxenos and Benefactor
of the People of Athens,
that they have the right to own lands and buildings [foreigners
were normally forbidden the ownership of real estate at
Athens] subject to the limits of the law, and
that they have the right to undertake military service and the
payment of property taxes in common with Athenian citizens.

Be it further resolved that the secretary currently in office have a

record of this motion and others ancillary to it inscribed on a stone
slab and set up on the acropolis, and that the treasurer provide for
purpose 30 drachmas from the appropriate funds.
this

Another passage of the resolution reveals that the crown cost 500
drachmas (c. £1,000 or $2,500 in purchasing power) but no doubt the —
cash value meant little to Heracleides who would keep the gift as an
heirloom.

Notes to Chapter 5

95-6 ‘At a place’, 4: 81. ‘As an eye- witness’, 2: 29. ‘I didn’t see it*,

1: 183. Artemisia, 8: 88. Herodotus’ life, Howand Wells 1-9.

97-103 Interest in religion: Cf. the trouble he went to for information
about Heracles (102 above). ‘Sea shells’, 2: 12. ‘Especially inaccurate’, 2:
 NOTES 343

22. Interest in river craft, i: 194 (cf. SSAJV 6), 2: 96 (cf. SSAW 14, 335).
Dnieper fish, 4: 53. Egyptian linen, 2: 105. Hemp cloth, 4: 74. Tamarisk

syrup candy 7: 31. ‘They lay out’, 4: 196. Herodotus’ travels, How and
Wells 16-20; J. Myres, Herodotus, Father of History (Oxford 1953)
1-16. ‘Square in shape’, 1: 178-80. ‘In the middle’, 1: 181. ‘The walls are
full’, 2: 148 (of the Labyrinth). ‘It was large’, 2: 143. ‘Just about as big’,
2: 124. ‘There is an inscription’, 2: 125. ‘We saw the upper’, 2: 148; on
the identification of the building, see How and Wells, note ad loc. Lake
Moeris, see How and Wells, note to 2: 149: 1, and, on the present size,
Guide Bleu: Egypte (Paris 1950) 675-6. ‘Wanting to learn’, 2: 44.
Priests washing, 2: 37. Apis bull, 2: 38-9. Bulls sacrificed to Isis, 2: 40.
Pigs unclean 2: 47. Foods taboo for priests, 2: 37. Festivals, cf. 31 above.
Sacred animals, 2: 65. Embalming, 2: 86-8. Greek gods derived from
Egyptian 2: 43, 145-G
103-6 Croesus’ gifts, 1: 50-1; cf. 241 above. Temple of Hera, 2: 182.

Fetters at Tegea, 1: 66. Tomb of Alyattes, 1: 93. Battlefield, 3: 12.

Grandson of Spartan hero, 3: 55. Sounding with the lead, 2: 5. Persian

words 1: 192, 2: 6. Egyptian words, 2: 69, 77, 81, 96. Scythian words,
4: 23, 27. Guides, e.g. 2:125. Priests as guides, 2: 143. ‘The Egyptians were
the first’, 2: 123; cf. J. Wilson in Scholae Adriani de Buck Memoriae
Dicatae (Leiden 1970) 8-1 1. Description of hippopotamus, 2: 71.
Eating out-of-doors, 2: 35. Egyptian women’s one garment, 2: 36.
Phoenix, 2: 73. ‘I myself didn’t observe*, 2: 156. ‘That’s what they say’, 1:
182. was nonsense’, 2: 13 1.
‘It

106-11 Account of Babylon, 1: 178-99. Account of the Scythians,

4: 5-82. Ethiopians, 3: 17, 20, 114. Gold-digging ants, 3: 102-5; cf.

How and Wells, note ad loc. where gold is fished, 4: 195. Donkeys
Island
with horns, dog-headed men, headless men, 4: 191. One-eyed men, 4: 27.
Goat-footed men, hibernating men, 4: 25.

Notes to Chapter 6
H5 _I 7 Alexander’s goals, his successors’ goals, Greek emigration,
SEHHW 262-63, 323-32, 472-82,
"
1054-57. Cosmopolitan culture,
SEHHIV 1045-53.
1 17-9 Pytheas, Cary-Warmington 33-40; Thomson 143-51. Arab
shipping and the monsoons, G. Hourani, Arab Seafaring (Princeton 1951)
17-28. Eudoxus, Cary-Warmington 70-1, 98-103; Thomson 175-6,
185; for an imaginative fictional reconstruction of his voyages, L.
Sprague de Camp, The Golden Wind (New York 1969). Arabia and
344 travel in the ancient world
Somaliland produced both frankincense and myrrh. The first was used
as incense and a drug (to stop bleeding, to aid healing), the second as
incense, a drug (as an ointment, e.g. for haemorrhoids), and cosmetic
(mixed with neutral oil to make anointing oil); see G. van Beek, ‘Frankin-
cense and Myrrh’, The Biblical Archaeologist 23 (i960) 70-95. Exclusion
of Greeks, Warmington 10-13; Hourani 21-2; the predecessors of
Ptolemy VIII as a consequence favoured the overland routes (
SEHHW
386-8). Bombay and Thomson 173-4. Greek knowledge of
Patna,
India, Cary- Warmington 152-3; Thomson 130-1.
120-1 Greek knowledge of east Africa, Cary- Warmington 67-71;
Thomson 136-9.
122 Roman coinage, SEHRE 181.Roman law, Crook 283-5.
122-6 Knowledge of northern Europe, Thomson 233-47. Denmark
and Scandinavia, 246. Fairy tales, 237-8. Russia, 250-3. Overland silk
route, Needham iv, 3, 17-18; Thomson 177-81, 306-12; J. Miller, The
Sp ice Trade of the Roman Empire (Oxford 1969) 119—36. The sea routes,
Warmington 35-51. Routes and products, Thomson 298-301. India
and Malay bottoms, Warmington 65-66. China’s sea trade, J. Mills,
‘Notes on Early Chinese Voyages’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
(1951) 3-25, esp. 6 (not before the fifth century a.d.). Settlements in
India,M. Wheeler, Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers (London 1954)
133, 145-50. Voyages beyond India, Cary- Warmington 82-4. Cloves,
Warmington 199-200. ‘The ninth year’, W. Schoff, The Periplus of the
Erythraean Sea (New York 1912) 276. Objects of trade, Miller 193-215;
Schoff 284-9. Increased geographical knowledge, Thomson, figs 54-8.
Hearsay, Cary- Warmington 83. ‘Honest in their transactions’, Schoff
276. Knowledge of Africa, Cary- Warmington 173-8; Thomson 271-7.
Source of the Blue Nile, Thomson 138. Nero’s expedition, Cary-Warm-
ington 174-6. ‘Tribes without noses’, Pliny 6: 187-8.

Notes to Chapter 7
128-9 ‘I built myself’, Petronius 76. Flavius Zeuxis, IGRR 4: 841-
Irenaeus, Sel. Pap. 113. Egyptian grain fleet, SSAW 188, 297-9. ‘The
whole mob’, Seneca, Ep. 77: 1. Roman trade, 223-39. Transport by
land in Roman times, C. Yeo in TAPA 77 (1946) 221-5. Stationes,
L. Moretti in Athenaeum N.S. 36 (1958) 106-16.
130-4 ‘In the case of tuberculosis’, Celsus 3: 22: 8. Sanctuaries of
Asclepius, Edelstein ii, 242-50 (history and location), 252 (admission to
 NOTES 345
Rome), 253-5 (Epidaurus, Cos, Pergamum). Pergamene sanctuary,
Behr 27-30 (facilities and sleeping arrangements), 32-4 (ritual). On the
medicine practised in the sanctuaries, see Edelstein’s detailed discussion,
ii, 139-80. ‘It was night’, P. Oxy. 1381. Aristides’ illnesses and cures,
Behr 26, 37-49, 162-70. End of the sanctuaries, Edelstein ii, 256-7.
134 Silver vessels from Vicarello, Fried lander 327-8. Coins from
Vicarello, RhM 9
(1854) 20-8. Coins found at other baths, 4 (1847) RA
410 (Amelie-les-Bains); RE
s.v. aquae 294 (Schwalheim, Nauheim).

Hot springs in Sicily, Strabo 6: 275. ‘Many Diodorus 5: 10.

people’,

135 Trophonius, Pausanias 9: 39: 5-14. Temple of Fortune at

2
Praeneste, Cicero, de Div. 2: 41: 85-6. ‘It is a fine looking horse’, C/E i

2177 (cf- 2173-89). Oracle of Heracles, Pausanias 7: 25: 10. ‘The fame of
the shrine’, Lucian, Alexander 30.
136-7 ‘One could hear’, Dio Chrysostom, Or. 8: 9. Spartan boys,
Cicero, Tusc. Disp. 2: 34; Philostratus, Vita Ap. 6: 20; Plutarch, Lycurgus
18: 1; Libanius, Or. 1: 23. Nero’s debut, Tacitus, Ann. 15: 33. ‘Three
times I put on’, Res Gestae 22. Racing, gladiatorial shows, and other
entertainment at Rome, Balsdon 244-339.

Notes to Chapter 8

138 ‘I intend’, ad Att. 2: 8: 2. Peregrinatio , D’Arms 45. Spring

the start of the season, 48. Cicero’s villas and his relations with his
neighbours, 198-200. His lodges, 49. Cicero’s death, Plutarch, Cicero
47-8. Pompey’s villas were scattered up and down the Italian boot
from Etruria to Tarentum in the instep; see W. Drumann and P. Groebe,
Geschichte Roms iv (Leipzig 1908 ) 542-3.
2
On villas and vacation times,
see also Balsdon 193-2 13.
139-41 Villas of Republican times, D’Arms 171-201. Horace’s
observation, Carm. 3: 1: 33-7. Augustus’ step-father, D’Arms 189-90.
Lucullus, 184—6. ‘Xerxes etc.’, Plutarch, Lucullus 39. Villas of Imperial
D’Arms 202—32. Nero, Tacitus, Ann. 14: 4—8. Vedius
times, Pollio,
D’Arms 125; he apparently made his money as one of Augustus’ agents.
Location and style of villas, 45-6, 127-31. Fishing from the bedroom,
Martial 10: 30: 16-18; cf. Pliny, Ep. 9: 7. Wall-painting, Enc. Arte Ant.
s.v. Pompeiani stili. For a brilliant reconstruction of the decoration in a
Neapolitan of the second to third centuries a.d., see K. Lehmann-
villa

Hartleben in The Art Bulletin 23 (1941) 16-44. Plantings, Martial 3: 58:

1—3. Piscinae, D’Arms 41-2. Pollio’s use of human flesh, Pliny 9: 77.
346 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
When Augustus was once a guest, Pollio was ready to throw in a slave
who had dropped a crystal goblet; the slave begged the emperor for
mercy, and Augustus not only granted it but ordered all the crystal in the
house smashed and filled up the fishponds with the fragments (Seneca
de Ira 3: 40).
141-4 The social round, D’Arms 49-51. Oyster cultivation, D. and
P. Brothwell, Food in Antiquity (London 1969) 65-6. Lucrine oysters and
their possible connection with the transfer of the base, D’Arms 136-7.
‘When the fashionable crowd’, Ammianus 28: 4: 18. Pursuits of the
ordinary vacationer, D’Arms 52, 135-8; fig. 19 (amphitheatres, park);
Seneca, Ep. 77: 1-2 (watching ships come in; cf 129 above). Baiae,
Friedlander 405-8; D’Arms 42-3, 139-40. ‘With luxury palaces’,
Strabo 5: 246. Shady women {adulterae), Seneca, Ep. 51: 12. Bathing in
the nude {procaces natatus ), Symmachus, Ep. 8: 23: 3. ‘Filled the lakes’,

Seneca, Ep. 51: 4. ‘Unmarried girls’, Varro, Sat. Menipp. fr.

44 —
Nonius
154: 4. ‘Why must I look’, Seneca, Ep. 51: 4. ‘Squabbles of nocturnal
serenaders’, 51: 12. ‘Her debauchery’, and ‘amid those crowds’, Cicero,
pro Caelio 35, 49. ‘The wife, even worse’, Martial 1: 62. Augustus’
attitude toward Baiae, D’Arms 77. Puteoli, 13 8-9. Naples, 36 (Greek dress),
142-6 (cultural centre), 150-1 (Greek contests). Romulus Augustulus,
108. Eruption of Vesuvius: Pliny the Elder, admiral of the fleet based at
nearby Misenum, set out for Pompeii with a squadron partly in answer
to a frantic call for help from the owner of a seaside villa right under the
mountain, but, when he arrived, the place had already been buried; cf.
D’Arms 222-3. ‘I’ve passed a few days’, Symmachus, Ep. 8: 23: 2-3.
144-7 Transfer to the hills, D’Arms 48-9. Villas at Tusculum,
Friedlander 397. Cicero and his villa, J. Pollitt, The Art of Rome c. j53
B.C.—33J A.D. Sources and Documents (Prentice-Hall 1966) 76—9. Hill
villas: cf. e.g. the description of Pliny’s near the Tuscan-Umbrian border

in Ep. 5: 6. Heated pool, Ep. 2: 17: 11. Hadrian’s villa, G. Mancini,

Hadrian s Villa (Ministero della Pubblica Instruzione, Direzione generate
delle antichita e belle arti: Guide Books to the Museums and Monuments
in Italy 34). ‘Is he homeward’, Martial 3: 47: 15. Martial’s cottage, 6: 43,

9: 18. ‘So,* Pannychus’, Martial 12: 72.

Notes to Chapter 9
149 ‘What greater miracle’, Pliny 19: 3-4. Cotton, Warmington
210-12.
150-2 Finger’s breadth of plank, SSAIV 204. Farewell poems,
Horace 1: 3 (to Virgil on his departure for Greece), 3: 27; Statius, Silvae
 NOTES 347
3.2. These propemptika as they were called, though a standard type of
,

poem inherited from the Greeks, reflect quite distinctly Roman nervous-
ness about the sea. Sailing season, SSAJV 270-73. Chief entrepots and
routes, J. Rouge Recherches sur l’ organisation du commerce maritime en
Mediterranee sous V empire romain (Paris 1966) 85—97. War galleys at
disposition of officials, Rouge in REA 55 (1953) 295-7. Cicero’s voyage,
ad Att. 5: 1 1 4, 5: 12, 6: 8: 4, 6: 9: 1. Voyage from Rome to Alexandria
:

and back, Casson in TAPA 81 (1950) 43-51. Pliny’s trip, Ep. 10: 15-17.
152-4 Sailing rig, SSAJV 229-43. Speed, SSAJV 281-96. ‘In
Constantinople’, Libanius, Or. 1: 31. St Paul at Caesarea and Myra,
Acts 27: 1-6. On Ostia’s piazza, the so-called Piazzale delle Corpora-
zioni, see R. Meiggs, Roman Ostia (Oxford i960) 283-8, esp. 287.
Provisions, Synesius Ep. 4: 165 (because of two storms that delayed
cf.

arrival a number of days, Synesius ran out of food). Passengers on

Venetian galleys to the Holy Land in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
went on board with their own bedding and generally fortified with
155-
provisions, since the ship’s food included in the passage price was notably
scanty; see J. Les messageries maritimes de Venise aux XIVe et
Sottas,
XV e
siecles (Paris 1938) 168. Officers and crews SSAJV 314-20. Ac-

commodations, 175-81. Exit passes, ESAR ii 593-94, 715 (Nos. 64, ,66
68 ).
6
Waiting at the waterfront, Augustine, Confessions 9: 10.
Herald announcing departures, Philostratus, Vita Ap. 8: 14. Superstitions,
Wachsmuth 299 (ill-omened days, citing Macrobius 1: 16. 18), 119-26
(sacrifice, citing, e.g. E. Wiist in RE s.v. Poseidon 505), 188 (sneezing,
citing Plutarch, Them. 13. 3, Polyaenus 3: 10: 2), birds (197, citing, e.g.
Plutarch, Cicero 47: 8, Horace 3: 27: 1, 11, 15-16), 182-3 (words, citing,
e.g., Artemidorus 3: 38, Cicero, Div 2: 40: 84), 183 (wreckage, citing
Seneca, Controv. 7: 1: 4). See also I. Hermelin, Zu den Briefen des
Bischofs Synesios
156-
(Uppsala 1934) 31-5 (end of month ill-omened).
Dreams, Artemidorus 2: 12 (goats, boars, bulls), 2: 17 (gulls), 2: 23
(anchors), 2: 27 (turbid waters), 2: 36 (face in the moon), 2: 68 (flying on
your back), 3: 16 (walking on water), 3: 54 (key), 3: 65 (owls). Birds
mean land, Wachsmuth 190 (citing, e.g. Velleius Paterculus 1: 4: 1,

Pomponius Mela 1: no). Hair and nails, 302-3 (citing Petronius 103: 5,
104: 5). Blasphemies, 289 (citing, e.g. Libanius, Ep. 178: 1). Dancing, 289
(citing AP 9: 82: 5). Death, 278-9 (citing Plutarch, Cato Min. 15: 4,
Dio Cassius 47: 49: 2).
8 Number of passengers, SSAJV 172. Chair on the poop,
Lucian, Jup. Trag. 47. Codexes useful for travelling, Friedlander 342-43.
Handling the ship, SSAJV
224-8 (steering oars), 176 (bailing), 248-9
(ship’s boat). St Paul’s ship in storm, Acts 27: 19, 38. Ship’s boat’s
inadequacy as lifeboat, cf. Acts 27: 30; Achilles Tatius 3: 3-4. Sacrifice,
348 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
SSAW 182. Tugs, SSAJV 336-7. Acts of ill omen, Wachsmuth 289,
Gregory Nazianzen, Carm. I, II, 33: 105-7 ( PG 37: 995).
citing
158-60 ‘From Brindisi to Syria’, Philo, In Flaccum 26. Alexandria-
Rome grain ship, Lucian, Navigium 5. ‘And we were in all’, Acts 27: 37.
Vespasian preferred merchantment, cf. Josephus, BJ 7: 21. Synesius’
voyage, Ep. 4. ‘Our shipowner, etc.’, 4: 160, 162-4.

Notes to Chapter 10
163 Etruscan roads, J. Ward-Perkins in Melanges Grenier (Col-
lection Latomus 58, Brussels 1962) 1636-43.
164-5 Date of the Via Aurelia, H. Herzig in Epigraphica 32 (1970)

50-65; T. Wiseman in Epigraphica 33 (1971) 27-32 argues that it goes

back to 241 b.c. The Roman road system: DS
s.v. via 790-817 provides a

useful survey. Each year brings new information; see the annual volumes
of Fasti Archaeologici s.v. topography Alpine passes,
. W. Hyde, Roman
Alpine Routes (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society ii,

Philadelphia 1935) 137-41 (Brenner), 185 (summary of passes used).

166-7 ‘The roads were carried’, Plutarch, Gaius Gracchus 7. Roman
road-building, Grenier chapter x; Fustier passim. British roads, Forbes
155. Tools, Fustier 78-9. Wheelbarrow, Needham iv, 2, 258-74; Singer
16
ii, 546. Cliff at Terracina, Baedeker’s Central Italy (1930 ) 556. Tunnel
on the Via Flaminia, 149. Other tunnels, Baedeker’s Southern Italy { 1930 17 )
106. Raising of roads, Fustier 83-4. On sides of valleys, 68-9.
168-70 Surveying instruments and uneven segments, Fustier 74-8.
Erroneous view: Proposed by Nicolas Bergier (1557-1632), who was in
part misled by the remains of some of the roads he examined. Often
multiple layers were present because the original road had been re-
surfaced many times after being laid, each new surface being placed over
the old; Bergier and his followers jumped to the conclusion that that
was how it had been built originally (Grenier 317-27; Fustier 109-10,
1 15, 269-71). No and
use of cement, Fustier 115. Choice depends on soil

terrain, Grenier 387-9; Fustier 95. Paving, Grenier 331-45. Nature of

paving stones, Fustier 103. Size, Grenier 334-6, who cites examples of
oblong stones measuring as much as 55 by 35 J by 20 inches. Joining con-
tiguous pieces from the quarry, Fustier 103. ‘Prepare the underbody’,
Statius, Silvae 4: 3: 44—6; he is describing an extension to the Via Appia
built by Domitian (a.d. 81-96). Paving set right on the ground, Fustier
100 and fig. 38, 104 and fig. 43 bis. Road-bed, Grenier 327-31; Fustier
 1 ,

NOTES 349

105-8, 1 from elsewhere, no. Terrace walls, 117-18.

10-15. Use of fill

Road-bed in marshy land, Fustier 108-9. Crown, tilting, 84-5. Stone

border and paths, Grenier 342-5; Fustier 85, 103. Mounting stones,
Plutarch, Gaius Gracchus 7; Fustier 13 1. Fossae , 85.
170-2 North Africa routes, Fustier 95. Cutting in rock, 96. Artificial
ruts, Grenier 368-77, who points out that the space between the ruts
varies, indicating the use in different regions of vehicles with different
sized wheel-base. First-quality segments followed by poor, Fustier 67.
Widths, Friedlander 319-20; Grenier 365-7; Fustier 85 and fig. 32 on
page 87; DS s.v. via 786. Mountain roads, Forbes 155; Friedlander 322-3.
Grades, 323. Fords, Fustier 118-20. Bridge at Narni, Singer ii, 508;
16
Baedeker’s Central Italy (1930 ) 109. Pont du Gard, Baedeker’s Riviera
and South-Eastern France (1931) 126-7. Access ramps, Fustier 123-5.
Paving only on approaches to towns, etc., Grenier 341. Gravel and
dirt roads, 345-54; Fustier 68, 83 and fig. 26, 97-9.
172-3 Administration, O. Hirschfeld, Die kaiserlichen Verwaltungs -
beamten (Berlin 1905) 205-11; G. Walser in Epigraphica 31 (1969) 102-3.
Repairs, Grenier 354-65. Milestones, Plutarch, Gaius Gracchus 7; DS
s.v. via 790—2. Miliarium aureum , E. Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of
2
Ancient Rome ii (New York 1968 ) 64. Names from milestones, Grenier
251-4. Religious monuments, 224-34.
174-5 Chinese roads, Needham
1-3 1, esp. 7 (gravel surface,
iv, 3,

width), 14 and 21 (straightness, bridges). Needham’s suggestion (7)

that the Chinese anticipated the macadam road cannot be taken seriously;
the essence of a macadam road is the use of cut stones of the same size,

and there is no mention in Chinese records of that. Roads and bridges in

the Middle Ages, Fustier 161-8. Renaissance, 178-84. Seventeenth
century use of earth, 207. McAdam, 251-3.

Notes to Chapter 1

176-8 Land travel in winter: Aristides frequently travelled about

Asia Minor in December and January (Behr 23, 63, 67). For Melania the
Younger’s 315 above. St Basil, living in remote and mountainous
trip, see

Cappadocia, complained of the shutdown in communications during the

winter (Ramsay 377) but not always justifiably (cf. M. Fox, The Life and
Times of St Basil the Great As Revealed in his Works Washington 1939,
1-4). Clothing, L. Wilson, The Clothing of the Ancient Romans (Baltimore
350 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
1938) 72-3 (underwear), 87-95, IO°~4> 112-29 (capes). The Greek east,
in addition to its traditional clothing (cf. 75 above) adapted many
Roman garments. Pocket sundials, RE s.v. horologium 2423-4; R. Tolle,
‘ Eine spatantike Reiseuhr ’, JD 1 , Archaologischer An^eiger 84 (1969)
309-17. ‘Bring your gold jewellery’, P. Mich. 214 (a.d. 296). Theophanes’
accounts, P. Ryl. 627-8, 630-8. Inventory of his baggage, 627: 1-64.
‘When you come’, P. Mich. 214. Theophanes’ extra supplies, P. Ryl.
630-8: 462-3, 465-66. Use of vehicles, cf. Pflaum 36 (carriages used on
the cursus publicus almost from the outset), Juvenal 3: 10 (household
effects carried from Rome to Cumae in a reda ), Fig. 13. Use of pack-
animals and porters, Vigneron 140-9. Dreams, Artemidorus 77
1:

(narcissi), 2: 8 (air), 2:12 (donkeys, boars, gazelles), 2: 28 (marshes), 2:33

(moving statues), 2: 36 (stars), 2: 37 (gods), 3: 5 (quail), 3: 65 (owls).
178-80 Transporting luggage, cf. Juvenal 3: 10-11 (the baggage of
someone leaving Rome was loaded on a wagon outside the Porta
Capena, where the Appian Way began). Sidewalks, see TLL s.v.
crepido 2b, margo 1 ; respectable members of society were expected to use
vehicles or animals and not walk (cf. Synesius, Ep. 109). Various types of
vehicles, see DS s.vv.; M. Cagiano de Azevedo, I trasporti e il traffico
(Mostra Augustea della Romanita, Civilta Romana Rome
1938) 10-14;
4,
Vigneron 15 1-2, 167-70. The Greek-speaking east continued to use the
traditional Greek terms (68 above) and also the general term ochema
‘vehicle*. Lubricants, cf. Cato, de Agr. 97 (olive dregs). Livery stables:
The cisiarii ‘carriage handlers’, ‘wagon handlers’ and iumentarii ‘animal
handlers’ are attested in many cities, usually with quarters at the town
gate (Friedlander 330-1; Pflaum 52); the first presumably offered vehicles
for hire, the second horses, mules, and donkeys. Ancient hired drivers
shared their modern counterparts’ bad habit of driving too fast: ‘If a
driver (cisiarius)*, states one of Rome’s legal authorities, ‘while trying to
overtake, turns over the carriage and crushes or kills a servant, my
opinion is that he is liable, since it was his obligation to maintain a
moderate speed’ (Dig. 19: 2: 13 pr.). Springs: Though the great wagon
that carried Alexander’s body from Babylon to Alexandria seems to
have had some form of springing (54 above), springs are never heard of
again until the tenth century a.d.; see L. White, Jr, ‘The Origins of the
Coach’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 114 (1970)
423-31. In earlier four-wheeled vehicles both axles were fixed i.e. the —
front wheels w ere
r
unable to pivot —and it is often asserted that Roman
vehicles were made the same way (Singer ii, 545; Fustier 82; cf. Vigneron
1 14-15, who leaves the question open). This may have been true of

rough-hewn farm carts but almost certainly not of those used on the
highways; cf. Cagiano de Azevedo 17. The Celts used pivoting front
wheels as early as the first century b.c.; Singer ii, plate 73 a. Litters, DS
 ; , ,

NOTES 351

s.v. lectica Balsdon 214-15. Travelling in the grand style and special
carriages, Friedlander 341-3. Horace’s ridicule, Sat. 1: 6: 107-9.
181-2 by cob or mule, Friedlander 340. Stirrups, Vig-
Travelling
neron 86-8. Saddles: Rigid saddles were used by barbarian horsemen as
early as the fifth or fourth century b.c., but not by Greeks or Romans
until shortly before the beginning of the Christian era, when they were
adopted by the Roman army; cf. DS s.v. sella equestris. Horseshoes,
Vigneron 44-50 and pis. 10-13. Harness, Singer 552-5; Vigneron pis.
ii,

42, 43, 46, SI, 53. Shafts, Vigneron pis. 54, 55; Singer ii, 544, 553-4—
the date of third century a.d. given here for the earliest example is wrong,
since Fig. ii dates from the early second; see G. Becatti, Scavi di Ostia.
iv, Mosaici e pavimenti marmorei (Rome 1961) 40. Shafts had long been
in China (25 above). Chinese post, Needham iv, 3, 34-38.
use in
Ptolemaic post, Pflaum 18-21; E. Van’t Dack in Chr. d’ Eg. 37 (1962)
338-41.
183-4 Augustus’ founding of the cursus publicus, Pflaum 22-48.
Gravestone of a speculator Rostovtzeff in Rom. Mitt. 26 (1 9 1 1) 267—83;
E. Ritterling in Bonner Jahrbucher 125 (1919) 23-5. Couriers and diplo-
mata, Pflaum 122-48. Otho, Tacitus, Hist. 2: 54. The cursus publicus
after Severus, Pflaum 91-121; Levi 103-6; and, for its complications, T.
Zawadzki in REA 62 (i960) 89-90. Evectio and tractoria. Cod. Theod.
8: 5: 9, 8: 6. Stopping places, Pflaum 149-91. The terms mansio , statio,
etc., were used very loosely; cf. Levi 109-10. The Chinese post-stations
thatwere placed every eleven miles offered change of horses and couriers,
food and lodging, and the added refinement of cells for prisoners being
moved under guard, Needham iv, 3, 35-6.
185-8 From Aquileia over the Alps, Pflaum 180-84. Praetoria
Levi no. Services available, De
Ruggiero s.v. Cursus Publicus 1413-14.
Costs of the cursus publicus Pflaum 62, 92-93, 1 19-21. Abuses, cf. T.
,

Zawadzki in REA 62 (i960) 92-3. Rules against abuses, Cod. Theod.

8: 5: 1, 3, 6-7, 10, 24-5, 50, 53. Regulations, Cod. Theod.
14, 16, 18,
8:5: 27, 35, 40 (number of animals); 8:5: 17, 30 (size of wagons); 8:5:8,
17, 28 (maximum loads); 8: 5: 34 (number of drivers); 8: 5: 47 (weight of
saddles); 8: 5: 2 (whips); 8: 5: 31 (tips). Connection of the itineraria and
the Tabula Peutingeriana with the cursus publicus , Levi 97—124. esp.
119-24. Meaning of the symbols, Levi 66-93, uo-n.
Speed of the
couriers, Pflaum 192-200; C. Eliot in Phoenix 9 (1955) 76-80; A. Ramsay
in JRS 15 (1925) 63-5.
188-9 ‘My lord’, Pliny Ep. 10: 120. ‘The
had hopes’, Libanius,man I

Or. 1: 14. ‘I found the government post’, Sidonius, Ep. 1: 5: 2. Misuse:

The future emperor Pertinax, when a newly fledged army officer, in
going to join his unit used the public post without authorization and was
caught; he was punished by being made to do the whole journey on foot
352 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
( SHA Pertinax i: 6). Regulations against unauthorized use, Cod. Theod.
8: 5: 4, 8, 12, 41 (death for sale or purchase of post warrants or for giving
or taking bribes), 54. On the use of the public post by ecclesiastics, see

302 above. Superiority of the inns of the cursus publicus plaque found A
at Ombos, a tiny Egyptian village twenty-five miles north of Aswan, is
eloquent on this point. Inscribed in the sixth or seventh a.d. and affixed to
a local hostel, it announced to the prospective guests that there had been
‘carried out a complete cleaning of the public building [i.e. the hostel]
and of the vast amount of dung accumulated over so long a time . . . The
whole place was renewed and rebuilt from the ground up for the shelter-
ing of strangers and those with no rights of requisition’ 7475, and (SB
cf. G. Rouillard in Melanges Schlumberger, Paris 1924, 85-100, esp. 88).

In the days before the cleaning, diploma-less voyagers must have done
their best to avoid spending a night at Ombos. Average speed of land
travel, Ramsay 386-8; L. Hunter in JRS 3 (1913) 78. Travelling hard:
Aristides at one time did 320 stades, i.e. c. 35 \ miles in a long day, at
another 400 stades, i.e. day of non-stop riding that
c. 44J miles in a
ended at midnight (Or. 27: 14, 17 =
ii, pp. 455-6 Keil); the messenger

who brought the news of Roscius’ murder from Rome to Ameria

‘travelling by cisia [179 above] at night dashed 56 miles in 10 hours’
(Cicero, pro Roscio Amer. 7: 19). Chinese couriers seem to have averaged
120 miles in 24 hours (Needham iv, 3, 36). Stops between Toulouse and
Carcassonne and over the Alps, Grenier 203-4.
190-1 Theophanes’ party P. Ryl. iv, p. 106. Speed outward, p. 107.
Expenses and itinerary from 19 July to 6 August, P. Ryl. 630-8: 203-506.
193-4 Aristides’ journey, Or. 27: 1-8 ii, pp. =
452-4 Keil, and
cf. W. Ramsay in JHS 2 (1881) 44-54. Horace’s journey, Sat. 1: 5.

Notes to Chapter 12
197-200 ‘God willing, expect us’, Sel. Pap. 140. Owning lodges at
intervals: Cicero had a lodge (deversoriurri) at Anagnia to use when going

to his property at Arpinum, and lodges at Lanuvium and Sinuessa for

on the shore (D’Arms 49). Guests quarters, Vitruvius
the trip to his villas
6: 7: 4, describing Greek mansions of the third to second centuries b.c.
Quarters answering to his description have been found in the more
elegant homes at Pompeii, such as the Casa del Fauno, Casa del Labirinto;
A. Maiuri in Accademia Na^ionale del Lincei ser. 8, Memorie 5 (1954) ,

461-7. Herod’s palace in Jerusalem had chambers for a hundred guests;

Josephus, BJ 5.178. Elegant camping out, Friedlander 343. Cato the
 I ;

NOTES 353
Younger, Plutarch, Cato Min. 12. ‘Lucius Memmius’, Sel. Pap. 416. ‘In
accordance with your letter’, 414. Visit of governor to Hermopolis, IV.
Chrest. 415. Performing dolphin at Bizerta, Pliny, Ep. 9: 33. Letters of
recommendation, cf. Liebeschuetz 17-18.
200-3 In n at Bovillae, Kleberg 67. Place-names derived from inn-
names, 63-5; Grenier 284. Inn at Styria, Jahres.
27 (1932) Beiblatt 194-222.
Inn on Little St Bernard, Not. Sc. (1924) 385-92. Inn on road from
Aquileia, Jahres. 27 (1932) Beiblatt 206-7. A
very similar inn has recently
been uncovered at one of the stations (Vindolanda, the modern Chester-
holm) just behind Hadrian’s wall in northern England. It boasted two
heated public rooms, six bedrooms, lavatories, and even own bath
its

complex, all set out around a central court ( The Sunday Times 28 Novem-
,

ber 1971). On the Greek terminology for inns, see 340 above. In Graeco-
Roman Egypt, the common term pandokeion for some reason is never
used, the rather unusual word apanteterion being preferred, at least in
later centuries (PS 175:5; P • land. 17: 3-4; SB 7475. 22-3); it occurs
in inscriptions as well (L. Robert in Hellenica 11-12, i960, 16). Khan at
Umm el-Walid, R. Briinnow and A. Domaszewski, Die Provincia Arabia
ii (Strasbourg 1905) 87 and figs 668-70; khan of about the same size at
Kurnub, IEJ 16 (1966) 147; khan near Haifa, IEJ 19 (1969) 248. Inns
at Olympia, Olympiabericht vi (Berlin 1958) 30-8, 55-67, and plates 6-7.
204-8 Hotels between Alexandria and Canopus, Strabo 17: 800-1;
Ammianus 22: 16: 14. St Paul in Rome, Acts 28: 30. ‘If you’re clean’,
ILS 6039; the plaque was found at Tarragona in Spain. Hospitium,
deversorium, caupona , Kleberg 5-7, 14, 27-8. Legislation concerning
caupones, Crook 226-8. ‘He did not’, 227. Inns at city gates, cf. Plautus,
Pseud. 658-9; Kleberg 49. Stabulum, 18, 28. Burning lamps, Spano 29-32.
Inn signs, Friedlander 347; Kleberg 65-6; Archaeology 20 (1967) 36
(reproduction in colour). Decoration of facades, Kleberg 116-17.
‘Here Mercury’, ILS 6037;
Kleberg 115. ‘Traveller, listen’, CIL xii 5732;
Kleberg 119. ‘The Walls of Thebes’, Kaibel 1049. Lady innkeeper
hawking, Virgil, Copa. ‘Innkeeper, let’s reckon’, ILS 7478; Kleberg
118-19 an d Stabulum at Pompeii, Kleberg 34-5. Inns in town,
fig* 7*

32-3. House near Rome’s forum, G. Lugli, Monumenti minor i del Foro
Romano (Rome 1947) 139-64, especially 139-41, 157-8. Terminology,
Kleberg 87—9, 113. The word for ‘bartender’ may have been deversitor
see G. Bagnani in AJPh
79 (1958) 441-2. ‘Summertime creatures’, Pliny
9: 154. ‘I say unto you’, Acta Ioannis 60-1 in M. James, The Apocryphal
New Testament (Oxford 1924) 242.
209-11 ‘Vibius Restitutus’, CIL
2146; Kleberg 33. ‘Innkeeper’,
iv,
CIL iv,
4957; Kleberg 113. Goodbye to Puteoli, CIL iv, 2152; Kleberg
33. Names on wall, CIL iv, 2147, 2149, 2154-5. lixa, Kleberg 14-16, 44.
Inns near baths, 51-2. Seneca’s lodgings, Ep. 56: 1-2. Noise at night,
M
354 travel in the ancient world
Martial 4: 64; Juvenal 3: 235-8; 359 below. New brothels, Tertullian,
cf.

Apologeticus 35: 4. Inns as brothels, Kleberg 89-91. Country inn: cf.

Horace’s experience in one (196 above). Using one’s own food, Kleberg
98-100. Room service: One of Petronius’ characters, staying at an inn,
has the women in charge of rooms send up a dinner presumably from the
inn’s kitchen; Satyricon 90: 7, 92: 1, 95: 1 and cf. H. Rowell in Classical
Philology 52 (1957) 217-27, esp. 221-3.
21 1-4 Location of bars and restaurants, Kleberg 49-53. Main
street (Via dell’Abbondanza) with twenty eating establishments, 52.
Taberna 37—8. Popina 36-7. Typical popina A. Mau, Pompeii: Its Life
, , ,

and Art , trans. F. Kelsey (New York 1902 2 ) 402. Popina with grape
arbour, Archaeology 20 (1967) 36-44. Chairs and couches, Kleberg 114;
cf. Martial’s scornful reference (5: 70: 3) to sellariolae popinae ‘eating

joints with seats’. ‘Cup of Setian’, CIL iv, 1292; Kleberg 108. Hedone,
CIL iv, 1679; Kleberg 107. Imported wines, 108-9. Beer, no. Toddies
and sale of hot water, 104-5. Mixed drinks, 109-10. Cups with inscrip-
tions, CIL xiii, 10018: 59, 103, 105, 13 1, 135, 152; the word translated
‘bartender’ is caupo (204 above), who usually was busier issuing drinks
than rooms. The cups come from Gaul and Germany and are dated
fourth century a.d. ( CIL xiii, 1001 8 praef.).
214-8 Watering wine, Kleberg m-13. ‘May you soon’, CIL iv,
3948; Kleberg 112. ‘Your wine is watered’, Isaiah 1: 22. ‘The rains this
year’, Martial 1: 56. ‘Ravenna barman,’ Martial 3: 57; the following
epigram dealt directly with the scarcity of drinkable water at Ravenna:
At Ravenna I’d sooner invest
in cisterns than the vine,
Since a man makes more money up there
Selling water than wine.

‘Knows of many’, Galen, de simpl. medic. 10: 2: 2 (Kuhn, vol. 12, p. 254).
Meats served, Kleberg 100-1. Hours of business, Kleberg 120-1. Prosti-
tutes, 89-90. Erotic decorations, 90. Intercourse with the proprietress,
CIL 8442; Kleberg 90. ‘Serve him wine’, Copa 37. ‘This way’, M. della
iv,
3
Corte, Case ed abitanti di Pompei (Rome 1965 ) 81-3 and Kleberg, figs.
18-20. Clientele, Kleberg 92-4. ‘You will find him’, Juvenal 8: 173-6.
Popina at Catania, G. Manganaro in Helikon 2 (1962) 485-93, esp. 490-3.
The text runs: xvii k(alendas ) Septem(bres') } feridius Cereris Dominae.
Hie sibi suabiter fecerun(t) tres adulescentes quorum nomina lege: Onesimus
et L. Valerius Ersianus et Filumenus. Unus cum mulier(e), extremus.
Legislation restricting restaurants, Kleberg 10 1-2. Popina of the Seven
Sages, G. Calza in Die Antike 15 (1939) 99-115. Church regulations,
Kleberg 94-5. Brothels, see H. Herter in Jahrbuchfur Antike und Christen-
tum 3 (i960) 85-8.
 ..

NOTES 355

Notes to Chapter 13
219—20 Day-runners and herald-runners, hemerodromi, dromokerykes
The best known hemerodromos is Pheidippides, who covered the distance
from Athens to Sparta, some 150 miles, in two days to ask for Sparta’s
help against the Persians at Marathon (Herodotus 6: 105-6). Tabellarii,
see, e.g. Cicero, ad Att. 6: 2: 1, 8: 14: 1. ad
‘For many days’, Cicero,

Quint.fr. 3: 1:7: 23. ‘You have preposterous couriers’, Cicero, ad Fam.

15: 17: 1. ‘Finding someone going’, P. Mich, viii, 490. ‘I was delighted’,
Sel.Pap. 15 1. ‘I sent you’, 107. Synesius used to take his letters to the
harbour and give them to the oarsmen aboard the merchant galleys ( Ep
129). ‘Have Acastus’, Cicero ad. Fam. 16: 5: 2; cf. ad Quint.fr. 2: 12: 3

(use of a Roman
gentlemen), ad Att. 5: 15: 3 (a friend), Plautus, Miles
Glor. 129-32 (use of a passing merchant to carry a letter from Ephesus
to Naupactus). In Cicero’s day, the only organized postal service was the
one maintained by the Roman financiers who bought from the govern-
ment the right to collect taxes in the provinces; even provincial governors
found it at times the best way to get letters delivered (see J. Ooteghem in

Les etudes classiques 27 (1959) 192—3.

221 On the making and use of papyri, see E. Turner, Greek Papyri:
An Introduction (Oxford 1968), chapter 1, esp. pp. 2-5, and Greek Manu-
of the Ancient World (Oxford 1971) plate 1. Papyrus paper was
scripts
made by taking the triangular lower stem of the papyrus reed and peeling
off strips from the pith, then laying the strips side by side with each
slightly overlapping its neighbour, then placing a second layer of strips
over the first at on one face ran horizontally,
right angles (thus the strips
on the other vertically). After a few blows from a wide-surfaced mallet,
and without any adhesive, they stuck together to form a solid sheet.
The sheet was left to dry and then rubbed smooth with pumice. The
ordinary papyrus letter was usually rolled into a cylinder. A convenient
way to seal it was to rip loose a strand of papyrus from one of the strips,
wrap it about the cylinder, and fix it with a blob of clay, which was
then impressed with a seal. Papyrus, though in general the cheapest and
most convenient writing material for letters, was not the only one. The
Romans also used wax tablets or sheets of parchment or of leather; see
RE s.v. pugillares (xxiii. 2, cols. 2515-16). ‘To Apollinarius’, Sel. Pap.
IX 3*
221—2 On the speed of Cicero’s correspondence from nearby
places, see W. Riepl., Das Nachrichtenwesen des Alter turns (Berlin 1913)
141-2. Letters sent in the morning from Rome
Tusculum, to the villa at
some 17 miles away, got an answer that night; letters between Rome and
Anzio, some 35 miles away, arrived the same day; letters from Rome
35 6 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
could reach Arpinum, some 70 miles away, in two days; letters between
Rome and the Naples area took four to six days (one arrived in three
sane celeriter ‘mighty fast’, as Cicero remarks, ad Att. 14: 18: 1). Letters
from Rome ad Fam. 16: 21: 1 (46 days), 14: 5: 1 (21 days).
to Athens,
From Patras to Brindisi, ad Fam. 16: 9: 2. From Africa, ad Fam. 12: 25: 1.
Syria to Rome, ad Fam. 12: 10: 2 (50 days), ad Att. 14: 9: 3 (sent 31
December and arrived sometime around 17 Apr., 44 b.c.).
222-5 ‘Having arrived on Italian soil’, P. Oxy. 2191. ‘Dear Mother’,
Sel. Pap. hi. ‘Grateful thanks to the god’, 112, second century a.d. ‘Just

as we were’, P. Strass. 233 and Chr. d’ Eg. 39 (1964) 150-6. ‘Dear Mother,
first and foremost’, P. Oxy. 1773 m
G. Ghedini, Lettere Cristiane (Milan
1923) no. 8. ‘Dear Mother, I am writing’, P. Lips. no. ‘Dear Zenon’,
Sel. Pap. 93. ‘Send for me’, 115, second century a.d. ‘I’m disgusted’,
97, 168 b.c. ‘A fine thing’, P. Oxy. 119.

233-
Notes to Chapter 14
229-31
234- Paulus’ journey, Livy 45: 27-8. ‘Phidias has sculpted’,
Plutarch, Paulus 28: 2.
231—2 Cool to nature, Friedlander 459-65. Seven wonders, 444.
4 Mythological sights, Friedlander 418, 450-3, 463; Pfister 63-4,
93, 107, 156, 219, 221, 280-1, 286, 336, 347-5°, 362-4, 368, 454;
Pausanias 4: 36: 2 (Nestor’s cave).
5 Historical sights, Friedlander 450, 454-6; Pfister 233, 237,

352, 456; Pausanias 9: 23: 2 (Pindar’s tomb); Strabo 17: 794 (Alexander’s
tomb); Virgil, Vita Donatiana 36 (Virgil’s tomb); Plutarch, Demosthenes
7: 3 (underground chamber), Alexander 69: 4 (Indian’s tomb), 7: 3
(Aristotle’s school).
236 Battlefields, Friedlander 408-9, 454-5; Pausanias 9: 40: 10
and Frazer’s note (Chaeronea).
236-7 Art, Friedlander 457-9; Anth. Pal. 9: 715, 721, 730, 734
(Myron’s cow); Cicero, Verr. 2: 4: 135 and cf. J. Pollitt, The Art of
Greece 1400—31 B.C. Sources and Documents (Prentice-Hall 1965) 59,
128, 133, 166-7, 177.

Notes to Chapter 15
238—9 Shutruk-Nahhunte, E. Unger, Assyrische und bahylonische
Kunst (Breslau 1927) 62-3; CAH ii 3 , chapter 31, section 1 and chapter
32, section 1. Assyrians, Unger 63. Nebuchadnezzar’s museum, 63-6;
Unger, Babylon , die heilige Stadt (Berlin and Leipzig 1931) 224-8.
 NOTES 357
240-2 Treasury of the Corinthians, Herodotus 1: 14, 50-1; Frazer
v 295-6. Temple of Hera, Pausanias 5: 17-20: 1 and Frazer iii 593-620.
Herondas’ sketch, Mim.
20-95; f° r a translation of the skit, see above,
4:
268-70. Figures at entrance to Delphi, Pausanias 10: 9: 5-7, 10: 10: 1.
Colonnade, Pausanias 10: 11: 6. Erechtheum, 1: 27: 1. Pindar’s chair,
10: 24: 5. Artaxerxes and Amasis, C. Blinkenberg, Lindos , Fouilles de
Vacropole , ii: (Copenhagen 1941) no. 2, C xxix and xxxv.
Inscriptions
Each thread of the linen corselet was reputedly made up of 360 or 365
243- and so many doubting Thomases had to feel it to make sure
strands,
that, by the first century a.d., it was almost all worn away (Pliny 19: 12).

Alexander’s gear, Pausanias 8: 28: 1.

4 Mythological mementoes, Friedlander 450-1; Pfister 322,

331-4. Lindos inventory, Blinkenberg, op. cit. (see previous note) no. 2 B
iii-xiv. Lindos fire, no. 2, D 39-42. The fire left only dedications made
after about
244- 330 b.c., and these were far less varied or interesting, being
chiefly armour and weapons deposited by Hellenistic kings, and oxheads
or ox horns from their sacrificial offerings (no. 2, C xxxvii-xlii). Helen’s
stool, Plutarch, Solon 4. Her cup, Pliny 33: 81. Same relics in different
places, Friedlander 451; Pfister 341-5.
246-6 Physical remains, Pfister 208, 321, 410, 424. Giants’ bones,
247—
Pfister 426-7; Frazer iv, 314-15. Miscellaneous oddments, Friedlander

447-8; Pfister 324-5. Indian ants, Pliny 11: iii . Marvels, Friedlander
449; Polybius 16: 12 (statues of Artemis); Pliny 2: 228 (torch-lighting
fountain), 2: 231 and 31: 16 (wine fountain). The altar of the shrine of
Venus at Paphos on Cyprus was also weatherproof (Tacitus, Hist. 2: 3).

7 Attalids’ collection, JDI 6 (1891) 49-60.

9 Roman looters, Pollitt, op. cit. (346 above) 32, 44-8. Verres,
66-74. Cicero as collector, 76-9. Picture galleries in villas, s.v. DS
pictura , p. 471; K. Lehmann-Hartleben in The Art Bulletin 23 (1941)
16-44. ’Banished as exiles’, Pliny 35: 26. Masterpieces in Rome, Homo
21-46, 177-208. Polyclitus, Pliny 34: 55-6. Myron, Strabo 14: 637;
Pliny 34: 57-8. Phidias, 34: 54. Praxiteles, 36: 20-3. Scopas, 36: 25-6, 28.
Lysippus, 34: 40, 61-5; Velleius Paterculus 1: 11: 3-4. Apelles, Pliny
35: 27, 93-4. Windows in
Zeuxis, 35: 66. the Temple of Concord,
Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 5 (1925) 73. Baths of Cara-
calla, Homo 199.
2 49“5° Oddments in Roman temples, Friedlander 447-9. Museum
in the temple of the Deified Augustus, K. Lehmann, ‘A Roman Poet
Museum’, Hesperia 14 (1945) 259—69.
Visits a
251-2 Churches as museums, J. von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und
Wunderkammern der Spatrenaissance (Leipzig 1908) 12-16; P. Salmon,
De au musee (Brussels 1958) 27-9. Sixtus IV, W. Heckscher,
la collection

Sixtus IIII Aeneas insignes statuas romano populo restituendas censuit

358 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
(The Hague 1955) 46-7; E. Muntz in RA 43 (1882) 24-36. Earliest schol-
arly collections, D. Murray, Museums, Their History and Their Use
i (Glasgow 1904) 24-9.

Notes to Chapter 16
-
253-4
-
‘We travel long roads’, Pliny, Ep. 8: 20: 1-2. Pausanias never
inBabylon, Pausanias 4: 31: 5. Provincials visit Rome, Friedlander 395.
Monuments of Rome, E. Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome
2
(New York 1968 ); Homo, Urb. 305-24. Found a city of brick, Suetonius,
Aug. 28: 3.

255 6 Sights of Sicily, Friedlander 408-9, 458. Sights of Corinth,

412-13; Cicero was among the number who went to see the ruins at
Corinth Disp. 3: 53). The diolkos , 338 above. Sights of Epidaurus,
( Tusc .
Friedlander 413. Desolation in Greece, 410; Dio Chrysostom 7: 39.
At Thebes, Pausanias 9: 7: 6. At Pisa, 6: 22: 1. Sights of the islands,
Friedlander 414-16. Samothrace, K. Lehmann, Samothrace. Vol. 2,
Part 1:The Inscriptions on Stone (New York i960) 16-17.
256 7 Homer country and Asia Minor, Friedlander 417-20. Paris’
lyre, Plutarch, Alexander 15. Armour, Arrian, Anab. 1: 11: 7. Cnidus,

Lucian, Amores 11-15.

257 61 On the usual itinerary in Egypt, see J. Milne in JEA 3 (1916)
76-80; Behr 16-18 (Aristides’ itinerary); and the papyrus cited 360
below. Apollonius, Philostratus, Vita Ap. View of the lighthouse,
5: 43 .
Josephus, BJ 4: 613. Alexandria, Friedlander 429-38. The Museum, E.
Parsons, The Alexandrian Library (London 1952) 166-74. ‘They
worship’, Friedlander 433, note 5. Alexandrians’ musical ear, Athenaeus
4. 176c. Heliopolis, Strabo 17: 805-6. Memphis, 17: 807. ‘Upon receipt

of’, SB 7263. Philae, Strabo 17: 818. The indomitable Aristides got as
far as Pselchis, about sixty miles beyond Aswan (Behr 18). Only troops
or exploring parties went further (126 above).

Notes to Chapter 17
262-3 Investigatory walk: cf. Lucian, Amores 8-9, where the narrator
in the sketch reports that, when he arrived at Rhodes, ‘after checking
into a room right across from the temple of Dionysus, I took a leisurely
 NOTES 359
stroll’. In the course of it, he ‘met up with the greatest profit one gets out
of being abroad —some old friends’. Street lights at Pompeii, Spano
22-3. Public lights at intersections, 99-104. Illuminated masks, 102-5
and, for an illustration, R. Calza and E. Nash, Ostia (Florence 1959)
fig. 84. Spano argues (99-106) that such lighting goes back to Hellenistic

times. Ammianus (14: 1: 9), describing the events of a.d. 353 at Antioch,
mentions ‘the brightness of the lights that shine all night’, which certainly
sounds like street lights. Constantinople had them without question in
the sixth century a.d.; Procopius (Anecd. 26: 7) refers to Justinian’s
refusal to light them. Rome seems to have had a system of lighting along
main streets by the early third century a.d. (Homo, Urb. 583-4). Until
the use of street lights, after the shops were closed or on side streets
walkers were helpless without torches; Petronius (Sat. 79) tells how his
heroes would never have found the way back to their inn at night had
not one of them foresightedly marked the posts and columns along the
route with white chalk. Traffic dangers: Caesar’s regulations for Rome,
passed in 45 b.c., included one (ILS 6085. 56-67) which banned all

wheeled traffic during the first ten hours of the day, with certain under-
standable exceptions, such as carts carrying in construction materials
for temples or hauling off rubble from public demolitions, garbage
wagons, carts needed for the games on the days these took place, carriages
used by the Vestal Virgins and other high clergy on holidays, etc.
Claudius issued an edict banning passenger vehicles from all the cities of
Italy at all times (Suetonius, Claud. 25: 2); travellers were limited to
‘feet, sedan chair, or litter’. Various similar regulations continued to be
laid down during the ensuing three centuries (cf. SHA, Marcus Antoninus
23: 8). ‘There are shysters’, Muller, FHG ii, 255.
264 Tourist portraits: Miniaturists were available, e.g. around
naval bases to do portraits of the sailors to send to the folks back home
(AM 212). It is only a guess, but a reasonable one, that they were
available at tourist sites.
264-7 Guides, Frazer i, lxxvi-vii; Friedlander 451-2. ‘I was going
around’, Lucian, Amores 8. ‘Guides showed us’, Ver. Hist. 2: 31. ‘Zeus,
protect me’, Varro, Men. 34 in Nonius 419:4. ‘The guides went through’,
Plutarch, Mor. 395a. Dinning again, 396c. Barbecue spits, Mor. 40of.
Stolen art at Syracuse, Cicero, Verr. 4: 59: 132. ‘Your guide amid’,
Aristides, Or. 25: 2 (ii, 72 Keil). Aristides at the pyramids, Or. 36: 122
(ii, 301 Keil). Temple of Ephesus, Pliny 36: 32. Geryon’s remains,
Pausanias 1: 35: 7-8. Argive guides, 2: 23: 5-6; at least four different
places in Italy claimed to have the Palladium (244 above). ‘Abolish foolish
tales’, Lucian, Philops. 4. Mucianus, H. Peter, Historicorum romanorum

reliquiae (Leipzig 1906) 101-7; Pliny 7: 159 (Mt Tmolus), 8: 6 (learned

elephant), 13: 88 (letter).
360 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
267-71 Herondas’ sketch, Mim. 4: 20-90. Hanging of shields,
Pausanias 10: 19: 4 (on the architrave), 5: 10:4 (in the gable), 5: 10: 5
(along the frieze). Placing of statues, M. Jacob-Felsch, Die Entwicklung
griechischer Statuenbasen und die Aufstellung der Statuen (Waldsassen,
Bayern 1969) 19-21, 43-5, 58-9, 69-75, 84-7, 101-3. Back door at
271-
Cnidus, Lucian, Amores 14. Temple-robbing, Homo 204-6; cf. Lucian,
Jup. Trag. 10.
2 Shinnying up the pyramids, Pliny 36: 76. Cleaning crocodiles’
272-
teeth, Plutarch, Mor. 976b. Feeding the Suchus crocodile, Strabo 17:
811-12; cf. the letter cited 198 above. Shooting the rapids, Strabo 17:
817-18; Aristides, Or. 36: 48-50 (ii, 279 Keil).
8 On Memnon in general, Friedlander 439-41. Strabo’s account,
17: 816. Pausanias’ 1: 42: 3. Explanation of the sound (rather unlikely) in
Friedlander 441; Hohlwein in Chr. d ’Eg. 29 (1940) 274-5; Frazer ii
530-1. Henu, Breasted, i nos. ARE
427-33. Graffiti at Abu Simbel,
REG 70 (1957) 5 (‘When Pharaoh Psammetichus’), 16 (‘Telephos’), 29
(‘Krateros’), 42 (De Lessups). ‘Soldiers of the elephant hunt’, P. Perdrizet
and G. Lefebvre, Les Graffites grecs du Memnonion d’Abydos (Paris
1919) no. 91. The Memnon graffiti, A. and E. Bernand, Les inscriptions
grecques et latines du colosse de Memnon (Cairo i960) 25—30; A. Bataille,
Les Memnonia (Institut frangais d’archeologie orientale. Recherches
d’archeologie, de philologie et d’histoire, tomexxiii, Cairo 1952) 153-68.
Carefully carved, Bataille 163. A piece of papyrus found in Egypt con-
tains what appears to be the wording for an inscription which some
traveller drew up presumably to give to a stonecutter; see P. Lond. iii,

854, re-edited by W. Cronert in Raccolta di scritti in onore di Giacomo

Lumbroso (Milan 1925) 481-97, esp. 486-7, 492, 495-6. It reads:
Since many go on voyages] and even set forth upon the
[these days
sea to Egypt to visit the artistic creations of man, I made a voyage.
Embarking upon the journey upstream, I came to Syene, from whence
(the part of the river called) the Nile flows, and to Libya, where Ammon
oracles to all men, and I visited The Cuttings, and for my friends, by
name, I there engraved in the holy places an eternal record of their
homage.

The date is first or second century a.d. The

went upriver to
writer
Syene, the modern Aswan. From there he must have gone back down-
stream to Memphis or the vicinity, whence he took off for the oracle of
Ammon at the Siwah Oasis in the Libyan desert, a place so renowned
that even Alexander the Great made a flying visit to it. Thence he
returned to Egypt and went to see ‘The Cuttings’, a puzzling term (cf.
Cronert 486) which may possibly refer to the rock-cut tombs in the
Valley of the Kings. On various temple walls he scratched messages on
 NOTES 361

behalf of his friends such as the ones we find at Philae and elsewhere
(285 above). Sabina, Bemand no, 32. Memnon’s bad taste, no. 30 (he
eventually did perform for Hadrian; see no. 28). Latest dated graffito,
no. 60. Funisulanus, no. 18. Petronius Secundus, no. 13. ‘Poet and
procurator’, no. 62. Falernus, no. 61. Mettius, no. 11. Statistics of verse
vs. prose, Bernand, p. 15. Artemidorus, no. 34.
278-83 On the graffiti in the Valley of the Kings, J. Baillet, Inscriptions

grecques et latines des tombeaux des rois ou Syringes a Thebes (Memoires

de l’institut frangais d’archeologie orientale, tome 42, Cairo 1920-6);
Bataille, cited in the previous note, 168-79. Forty tombs known, Strabo
17: 816. Ten with graffiti, Baillet viii. Dates of graffiti, xx-xxiv. The
term syringes, Bataille 168. Travelling in groups, Baillet xii-xix. Tatianus,

Baillet nos. 1118, 1380, 1512. His staff, nos. 1693 and 1826 (secretaries),
1680 and 1844 (assistants), 1520 (friend). Geographical origin of tourists,
Baillet xxviii-xxx; Tod in JEA 11 (1925) 258. Officials and army officers,

Baillet xxxiii-xxxix and xliv-xlvii. Intellectuals, xlviii-lxiv. Neoplatonists,

lvi-lvii; Bataille 182. Bourichios, Baillet no. 1279. Merchants, Baillet

lxv; Bataille 171. Tourist season, Baillet xxvii. Artemidorus, no. 1535.
Distribution of graffiti in tombs, ix. Jasios, xi and nos. 13, 777. Graffiti
near entrances and around pictures, ix-x. Statistics of those in ink,
lxxxvi and p. 597. Palladius, no. 1814. Alexander, no. 1733. Antonius,
no. 1249. ‘Unique’, no. 602. Januarius, nos 468, 1504, 1585, 1620.
Volturius, nos 283, 588, 2003-4. Amsouphis, Anagrams, nos 424, xi.

1386; Bataille 175. Bourichios’ lament, Baillet no. 1405. Hermogenes,

no. 1283. Heraclius, no. 1732. ‘Does your mother’, nos. 1222, 1986 and
cf. Tod in JEA 11 (1925) 256. Epiphanius, no. 1613. Dioscurammon, no.
1550. Christians, lxxii-lxxviii. Graffiti with a cross, nos 820, 2017; with
abbreviations of Christ, nos 206, 706.
284—5 Roman lady, F. Buecheler, Carmina latina epigraphica i

(Leipzig 1895) no. 270. ‘This sphinx’, Harpocration, Hermias, C1G iii
add. 4700b, e, f. Graffiti on Philae, A. and E. Bernand, Les inscriptions
grecques de Philae (Paris 1969). The
53-4; ii 22-6. Heliodorus,
visitors, i

no. 170. Intrepid traveller, see papyrus cited 360 above. Senators and
Sudanese envoys, Bernand nos. 147, 180-1. Catilius, nos 142-4. Ammon-
ius, no. 150. Demetrius, no. 130. Hatshepsut’s temple, A. Bataille, Les

inscriptions grecques du temple de Hatshepsout a Deir-el-Bahari (Cairo

1951) xxvii. Abydos, Perdrizet and Lefebvre, op. cit. (360 above) xiv.
Plutarch’s blast, Mor. 520c. Visitors’ signatures were by no means the
only graffiti the ancient world knew. Then
now, scribbling on theas
walls ran the gamut from philosophical utterrance through jokes to mere
doodling. One wag signed himself on a wall of Hatshepsut’s temple
‘Amun, son of Nile, crocodile’ (SB 151). A certain Plenis scratched on a
mountainside between Deir-el-Bahari and the Valley of the Kings
362 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
‘Love that reasons is not love’ and, not far away, he desultorily wrote out
the Greek alphabet, once from alpha to omega—with two mistakes—
second time from both ends at once (AZBYCX, etc., as it were), and
three other times the right way but never getting past the seventh letter;
see Bulletin de I Institut francais d’ archeologie orientale 38 (1939) 133, 150.
Scribbling the alphabet seems to have been a common way of making
time pass. Dozens of examples have been found on walls of houses in
Pompeii and Herculaneum ( CIL iv 2514-48, suppl. 10707-17). For
graffiti at Clitumnus, see Pliny, Ep. 8.8.

286-9 Nile water, Juvenal 6.526-9. Miniature replicas: Examples are

on display in many museums. For replicas of, for example, the famed
Athena Parthenos, see Frazer ii, 313-15 and Enc. Arte Ant. s.v. Fidia (iii,
656); for replicas of the Tyche of Antioch, see below. Hadrian’s villa:
The sites reproduced, besides those mentioned, included the Lyceum,
Academy, Prytanaeum and Painted Porch at Athens (,SHA Hadrian ,

26). On the art in the villa, see H. Winnefeld, Die Villa des Hadrian bei
Tivoli (Berlin 1895) 142-68. Glass vessel from Afghanistan, J. Hackin,
Recherches archeologiques a Begram (Memoires de la delegation archeo-
logique fran9aise en Afghanistan Paris 1939) 43 and figs 38, 39.
ix,

‘Queen vases’ of Alexandria, E. Breccia, Iscriqioni greche e latine (Cata-

logue general des antiquites egyptiennes du Musee d’Alexandrie, lvii,

Cairo 1911) iii-vii; B. Brown, Ptolemaic Paintings and Mosaics (Cam-

bridge, Mass. 1957) 47-8. Glass flasks from Puteoli, C. Dubois, Pouiqoles
antique (Paris 1907) 190-2 12; G. Picard in Latomus 18 (1959) 23-51.
Tyche of Antioch, T. Dohm, Die Tyche von Antiochia (Berlin i960)
13-26. The statue was copied not only in glass but in marble, alabaster,
clay, bronze, and silver. Those in metal were about 3-5 in. high, the
smallest being 2 in. high; the marbles varied from 12 J in. to three times
that size. The quack, Lucian, Alexander 18. Obscene pottery, Lucian,
Amores 11. Demetrius of Ephesus, Acts 19: 24-7. Miniature temples as
6
offerings, W. Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire (London 1900 )
1 2 1-9. Shopping in Rome, Martial 9:
59 (objects of Corinthian bronze,
an alloy of gold and silver and copper, were collectors’ items; Polyclitus
was arenowned Greek sculptor of the fifth century b.c.; Mentor, fifth or
fourth century b.c., was the Cellini of the ancient world). ‘Artists who . . .

contrive’, Phaedrus 5, praef. 4-7 (Mys was a famous smith of the fifth
century b.c., Zeuxis a famous painter of the fourth century b.c.).
289 Products for sale at Alexandria, etc., ESAR v 282-7, 293-4.
Sarcophagi, J. Ward-Perkins, ‘II commercio dei sarcofagi in marmo fra
Grecia e Italia settentrionale’, Atti del I Congresso Internationale di
Archaeologia dell ’ Italia Settentrionale (Turin 1963) 119—24. ‘If my
health’, Sel. Pap. 170 (259-7 b.c.).

290-1 Roman customs, S. de Laet, Portorium (Bruges 1949) 305-10

 NOTES 363

and 450-1 (rates of duty), 425-30 (what was exempt and what dutiable),
438 (professio ), 431-5 (classes of people exempt; those who crossed a
frontier to attend a festival were exempt — if they were carrying religious
symbols to prove that that, indeed, was their destination). Apollonius’ story,
Philostratus, Vita Ap. 1.20. ‘We get irritated’, Plutarch, Mor. 5i8e.
Argument over the pearls, Quintilian, Declam . 359. Confiscation and
cost of recovery, de Laet 438-42. ‘Send a bathing costume’, Sel. Pap. 88.

Notes to Chapter 18
292-3
294- Pausanias’ politics and religion, Frazer i, pp. xlix-lx. Hydra,
2: 37: 4, Mt Lycaeus 8: 2: 3-6, Actaeon 9: 2: 3-4. Pausanias’ artistic
tastes, Frazer i, pp. lx-lxvi. Similarly, the older editions of Baedeker’s
guides give short shrift to baroque art and architecture. Pausanias*
295-
birthplace and travels, Frazer i, pp. xix-xxii. Babylon, 253 above.
5 Pausanias’ predecessors, Frazer i, pp. lxxxii-lxxxiv. Titles of
Polemo’s works, L. Preller, Polemonis periegetae fragmenta (Leipzig
1838) 18-19. Book 1 published separately and dates of composition,
Frazer i, pp. xvi-xix.
6 ‘
There is but one’, 1: 22: 4-5. Pausanias’ aim and bias, Frazer
i, pp. xxii-xxxii. Description of Acro-Corinth, 2: 4: 6-7. Pausanias on
natural features, Frazer i, pp. xxx-xxxi.
297 Pausanias’ method, Frazer i, pp. xxiii-xxiv. Olympia, Frazer
i, pp. 244-316; Athens, pp. 2-44; Delphi, pp. 507-47.
298-9 Interest a wider circle of readers, Frazer i, pp. xxiv-xxv.
History of the Gauls, 1:3: 5-4: 6. Survey of Hellenistic history, 5-
1: 5:

13: 9. Pausanias* sources, Frazer i, pp. lxxii-lxxvii. Monuments and

places describedfrom autopsy, Frazer i, pp. lxxvii-xcvi.
299 Guidebooks were not the only form of travel literature being
turned out. Some, following in Herodotus’ footsteps, wrote travelogues.
Though no examples are extant in their entirety, extensive fragments of
a travel book on Greece written by an anonymous author probably in
the second century b.c., have survived. Here is a brief sample of its
nature, part of the description of Boeotia:

From there [i.e. Plataea] to Thebes is eighty stades [c. 9 miles]. The
road is through a flat the whole way. The city stands in the middle of
Boeotia. Its circumference is 70 stades [c. 8 miles], its shape circular.
The soil is dark. In spite of its antiquity the streets are new, because as the
histories tell us, the city has been thrice razed to the ground on account
364 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
of the morose and overbearing character of the inhabitants. It is excellent

for the breeding of horses; it is well-watered and green, and has more
gardens than any other city in Greece. ... So much for the city. The
inhabitants are and wonderfully sanguine, but rash,
high-spirited
insolent, and overbearing, ready to come to blows with any man. . . .

As for justice, they set their face against it. Business disputes are settled
not by reason but by fisticuffs, and the methods of the prize-ring are
transferred to courts of justice. Hence lawsuits here last thirty years at
the very least. Murders are perpetrated on the most trifling
. . .

pretexts. The women are the tallest, prettiest, and most graceful in
. . .

all Greece. Their faces are so muffled up that only the eyes are seen.

All of them dress in white and wear low purple shoes laced so as to show
the bare feet. Their yellow hair is tied up in a knot on the top of the
head. . . . They have pleasing voices, while the voices of the men are
harsh and deep (trans. by Frazer i, p. xlv; for another selection from the
same writer, see 72 above).

Obviously had discovered new paths

travel writers to follow since
Herodotus* day. His charming and easy-paced narrative is here replaced
by a breathless flood of statements spiced with crotchety pronuncia-
mentos.

Notes to Chapter 19
300-2 Junketing bishops, Gorce 35-40. Council of Sophia’s restric-
tions, 36-7. Attendance at Councils, 28. Use of public post, 41-57.
Constantine, 41-2. Saddle horses and redae , 52-3. Provisions, 54.
Melania’s troubles, Gorce, Melanie 226-9. Gregory of Nyssa’s travelling
chapel, Gorce 48. ‘Th ecursus publicus has been etc.’, Cod. Theod. 8: 5: 12.
Basil and Hilarion, Gorce 45-6.
302—3 The intelligentsia, Gorce 14-20. Government pouch closed,
205-6. Use of lectors and subdeacons, 210. Use of deacons, priests, and
monks, 211-16. Casual letter-carriers, 222-4. Flashily dressed letter-
carriers, 238-9, quoting Paulinus of Nola, Ep. 22: 2. Grumbling, and
lingering, 232-3, Being in a hurry, 226-8. ‘The bearer of this’, Paulinus
of Nola, Ep. 50: 1. Read confidential mail, Gorce 234-6. ‘Write your
letters with milk’, Ausonius, Ep. 28: 21-2; presumably dried milk would

have a certain and shaking very fine ash over the paper would
stickiness,
cause some to adhere and make the writing stand out in grey. Cf. Ovid,
Ars amat. 3: 627-30, Pliny 26: 62.
 NOTES 365

304-7 ‘Everywhere in the world’, Ep. 4 6 : 8. Christian scholars, 46: 9 .

‘It is part of the faith’, 47: 2. and third-
‘Less religion’, 46: 9. Second-
century visitors, Fliche-Martin 364. The Anastasis and Martyrium, L.
Vincent, II Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme (Bergamo 1949) 38—41;
Wilkinson 39-46. Constantine’s building programme and early fourth-
century travellers, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Pelerinages aux lieux saints 75—76;
Wilkinson 10-13. Paula, Tobler 29-40. Melania, Gorce, Melanie 166-9,
190—203. Etheria, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Etheria\ Wilkinson 91-122.
307-10Bordeaux pilgrim, Geyer 3-33; Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Itineraires
1855—8, Pelerinages aux lieux saints 76—8; Pfister 370—3. Pierced stone,
Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible s.v. Jerusalem 589. Memorable houses
and caves, Pfister 355-6, 375. Starry-eyed report, Antoninus of Piacenza,
in Geyer 159-218, esp. 161 (Nazareth), 169-70 (Sodom and Gomorrah),
71-7 (Jerusalem). Joseph’s silo’s, Pfister 351, citing PG 38: 534, 546.
310-3 Early solitaries, Fliche-Martin 302-3. Anthony, 329-30.
Wadi Natrun, Macarius, and Ammonas, 322-6. Regime and temptations
of the anchorites, 330-6. Simeon, RE s.v. Simeon 140-1. Pachomius,
Fliche-Martin 338-41. Dangers of a visit to the Thebaid, 311. Visitors
to Egypt, 366-7. ‘If he doesn’t get’, 318. Palladius, 315-17. John Cassia-
nus, 317. Rufinus, 324. Melania the Elder, PL 21: 86C. Menas, Cabrol-
Leclerq s.v. Menas 345-73. ‘Take the all-beneficial’, 364.

314 Though the Holy Land was far and away the most important
pilgrim goal during the early centuries of Christianity, it was by no
means the only one. Runner-up was Rome, especially on the birthdays
of Peter and Paul or Lawrence or Hippolytus; then the town was
thronged with visitors, mostly from Italy but with sizable representations
from Gaul, Spain and North Africa (Gorce 4-5). The key sight was the
catacombs, which, under Pope Damasus (a.d. 366-84) in particular, had
been fixed up to receive parties of tourists: openings had been punctured
to let in light, stairways had been built, inscriptions provided, and some
of the tombs given an elegant setting glistening with silver and marble
(Gorce 6). There were other attractions as well, such as the numerous
—
hallowed houses the one in which Paul had lived for two years; Pudens’,
where Paul and Peter had been received; Aquila and Prisca’s, where
Paul held his first assembly; the palace where Helena had lived, and so on.
314-6 Jerome’s route and Melania the Elder’s, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v.
Pelerinages aux lieux saints 82—5. Paula’s route, Tobler 30-1. Melania the
Younger, Gorce, Melanie 166-9, 190-3. Antoninus, Geyer 159. Bordeaux
pilgrim’s route and distances, Geyer 3-9, 25-33. Melania’s voyage and
speed, Gorce 76; Gorce, Melanie 238—41, 274. Land travel between
Constantinople and Syria, Liebeschuetz 75. Trouble in the West, cf.
Sidonius Apollinaris, Ep. 3:4: 1. Recrudesence of piracy, C. Starr, The
Roman Imperial Navy (Cambridge i960 2 ) 192-8. Libanius, Liebeschuetz
366 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
1 2 1-2. Chrysostom’s escort, Gorce 55. Isaurian and Arab maurauders,
Gorce 88-9. Malchus, PL 23: 57B-58A.
317-9 Monasteries at Sinai, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Sinai 1472-8.
Besides Etheria, Antoninus Martyr has left a report of a trip to Sinai
(Geyer 182—5); Cabrol-Leclerq Pelerinages aux lieux saints 144—5.
Nessana’s garrison, C. J. Kraemer, Excavations at Nessana. Vol. iii,

Non-literary Papyri (P. Colt ) (Princeton 1958) 16-23. ‘Paid to the Arab,
etc.’, P. Colt 89: 22-5. ‘Reimbursement, etc.’, 89: 35; see Kraemer’s
introduction to the document and his notes to the lines in question. ‘In
the name etc.’, P. Colt 73. Abu ’
1 -Mughira, P. Colt 72.
319-21 Putting up in private houses, Gorce 137-41. Tabernae at
Nola, 144—5. -Apostolic Constitutions 54 (cf. Gorce 145). Council of
Laodicaea, Gorce 145. Basil, 146-7. The word xenodocheion significantly
derives from the Greek term for a private host, not an innkeeper, who in
Greek was called a pandokeus ‘one who receives all guests’; cf. RE s.v.
Xenodocheion 1489-90. Xenodocheia and their spread, Gorce 146-55.
Three thousand beds in Jerusalem according to Antoninus of Piacenza,
(Geyer 175). Privately endowed hostels at Der Siman, Cabrol-Leclerq
s.v. Hopitaux etc. 2757; L. de Beylie, L habitation Byzantine (Paris 1902)
3

45-6. Imperial foundations, Gorce 153; RE s.v. Xenodocheion 1499.

Oxyrhynchus, Gorce 154 (the story comes from Palladius; see PG
65.447). Xenodocheia for Christians only, 172. This was the fourth-
century attitude; by the sixth we find, for example, a hostel for pilgrims
visiting St Eulalia at Merida in Spain expressly welcoming non-Christians
(RE s.v. Xenodocheion 1502).
321—4 Gorce 172-4. Paul, 2 Corinthians
Letters of recommendation,
3: 1. Reception and meals, Gorce 175—7. Turmanin, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v.
Hopitaux , etc. 2751-6. Der Siman, H. Butler, Early Churches of Syria
(Princeton 1929) 105-7; one of the dormitories here measures i6£ by 29^
feet. A few inns for transient merchants have also survived in northern

Syria. They are rectangular buildings with a portico in front, and are
two storeys high, the ground floor being given over to stables, the upper
to bedrooms; see G. Tchalenko, Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord;
Le massif duBelus a V epoque romaine (Beirut 1953—8) i, 21—5. At Qal’at
Siman similar buildings were used for pilgrims to the sanctuary of
Simeon Stylites, in this case both floors being given over to bedrooms;
Tchalenko 250. Services, Gorce 178-84. No charges, 184. Contributions,
185-6. Sources of income, RE s.v. Xenodocheion 1493-4. ‘The poor’ as
legatee, Cod. lust. 1: 3: 48: 3. The provision has in mind chiefly hospitals,
but in many same building served as both hospital and hospice.
places the
If there was more than one establishment in the town involved, the money
was to go to the neediest. Hospitality a time-consuming affair, Gorce
187-9. Jerome’s aside, Ep. 52: 3. Simeon’s visiting hours, Gorce 188.
 NOTES 367
Location of monasteries, 156-61. On the quarters available at the
Anastasis, see Gorce, Melanie 192—3. Hospice staff, Gorce 164—8.
324-8 ‘We came to Cana’, Geyer 161. Graffiti in Palestine, Cabrol-
Leclerq 1495-8; see 1459-77 for the mass of pilgrim graffiti
s.v. graffites

in Rome’s catacombs. Holy Land souvenirs, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Ampoules

1722; A. Grabar, Ampoules de Terre Sainte (Paris 1958) 64. Sanctuary of

the Ascension, B. Bagatti in Orientalia Christiana Periodica 15 (1949) 138.
Splinter of cross, Wilkinson 137. Farfa, I. Schuster in Nuovo Bullettino
di Archeologia Cristiana 7 (1901) 259—68; Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Ampoules
_
I 735 7- Oil as souvenir, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Ampoules 1722. Silver
flasks, Grabar passim Glass . flasks, D. Baraq in Journal
of Glass Studies
12 (1970) 35-63, 13 (1971) 45-63. Alexandria and Smyrna as centres of
production of terra cotta flasks, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Ampoules 1733-34.
Jerusalem, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Pelerinages aux lieux saints 127. Nazareth,
IEJ 16 (1966) 73-74. Menas flasks, Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Menas 381-85
and Ampoules 1725—6; C. M. Kaufmann, Die Ausgrahung der Menas-
s.v.

Heiligtiimer in der Mareotiswiiste (Cairo 1906—1908), 1. Periode 92— 102.

Amulets, Grabar 63-7; Bagatti 143, 165-6; L. Rahmani in IEJ 20 (1970)
105-8. Menas flasks with picture of boat, A. Koster, Das antike Seewesen
(Berlin 1923) pi. 9; Sefunim (Bulletin of the Maritime Museum, Haifa)
2 (1967-8) pi. iv. 3-4; Cabrol-Leclerq s.v. Menas 387. Passover visitors,
Josephus, BJ 2: 10, 6: 421-8. Guest quarters in synagogues, RE s.v.
Xenodocheion 1489—90; The Excavations at Dura-Europos. Final Report
VIII, Part I (New Haven 1956) 7-1 1.

328 ‘Do not imagine’, Jerome, Ep. 58: 4 {PL 22.582).

INDEX

Aaron 306 Alexandria 54, 116-17, 128-30,

Abonoteichos 135-6 M9-5 6 >
i 6 5> i88 > i
98?
Abgar 306 204, 223, 225, 232, 235, 246, 255,
Abraham 305, 307-9, 325 257-9, 282, 284-6, 289, 302, 305,
Absalom 308 313-14, 325, 327
Abu Simbel 274-5 Alexandria Troas 257
Abusir 32 Algeria 165-6
Abydos 28, 104, 260, 275, 285 Alyattes 103
Achilles 46, 234, 243, 246, 257, Amasis 103, 242, 283
273, 277 Ambracia 247
Aero- Corinth 296 Ambrose 303
Actaeon 293 Amenemhet II 28
Aegeus 233-4, 295 Amenemhet III 102
Aelius Gallus 273 Amenhotep III 52, 272-3
Aemilius Lepidus 164 Amineum 214
Aemilius Paulus 229-32, 236, 247 Ammon 283-4, 293
Aeneas 233, 243, 256, 266 Ammonas 31
Afghanistan 31, 286 Amphitryon 234
Africa 61-4, 109, 118, 120-1, 126- Anastasis 305, 324
127, 129, 165-6, 170, 222, 245, ancilla 208
254, 258, 275, 289, 305 Annam 125
Agamemnon 229-30, 234 Anshi 124
Agricola, Georg 252 Anthony 310-12
Agrippa (minister of Augustus) Antibes 206
248 Antigonids 115
Agrippa (Jewish prince) 158 Antinoe 223
Ahab 307 Antioch 99, 116-17, 150, 169, 177,
Aix-en-Provence 134, 173 188, 190, 193, 287, 302, 306, 312,
Ajax 233-4, 257 314, 316
Alcibiades 78, 93, 234 Antium 136, 138
Alcmene 234 Antoninus of Piacenza 310, 314,
Aleppo 316 320, 324
Alexander 54, 92, 115, 119, 121, Antoninus Pius 292, 308
235, 242, 246, 248-9, 258, 309 Apamea 166
Alexander (bishop) 304 Apelles 237, 246, 248-9, 268-9
 1

INDEX 369

apene 68 Asclepius 82-4, 94, 130-4, 193-4,

Aphrodite 178, 236-7, 248, 257, 230, 242, 245, 255
270, 287, 296 Asia Minor 26, 30, 37, 44, 52, 55,
Apis 102, 259 58-9, 74, 84, 96, 98-9, 104, 1 15,
Apollo 79, 84-5, 135-6, 206, 233, 128, 131, 135, 151-3, 165-6,
240, 243, 248, 250, 256-7, 277, 198, 232-4, 236, 240, 243-5,
296-7, 300 254, 256-7, 261, 266-7, 279, 283,
Apollonius of Tyana 258, 290 289, 293, 302, 307
Apostolic Constitutions 320 Assur 30, 37, 239
Apoxyomenos 248 Assurbanipal 239
Appius Claudius 164 Assyria 44, 49“53> 55“6 > 5 8 > 219,
Aquileia 165-6, 185, 202 239
Arabia 21, 60-1, 118-20, 302 Astarte 245
Arabian Gulf 30 Aswan 261, 272, 284
Arabs 316-17 Athena 46, 230, 243-4, 246, 248,
Arcadia 242 2 5°> 255, 265-6, 269, 286
Ares 248 Athens 58-9, 65-70, 74, 8c^2, 85,
Arethusa 255 95, 97, 1
17, 150-1, 153, 188, 221,
Arezzo 251 229-31, 233-4, 236-7, 242, 244,
Argos 68, 90, 230, 234, 243-4, 260, 249, 255, 262-5, 286, 289, 294-8,
266, 297 302, 304
Ariadne 234, 295 atriarius 208
Aricia 194, 200, 244 Attalids 246-7
Aristeas 108 Attalus II 246-7
Aristides, Aelius 133, 190, 193-4, Augustine 303
266 Augustus 1 2 1, 134, 137, 1 40-1,
Aristophanes 54, 81, 87 J43 , i82~3> x 94> 201, 219, 234-5,
Aristotle 235; Aristotelians 279 237, 248, 250-1, 254, 259
Arles 150, 190 Auja 317
Armenia 22 Aulis 229
Arpinum 138-9 Ausonius 303
Arsinoe 198, 260, 271, 31
art 79“ 8o > i 45 _(^j 23 1, 236-7,
240-2, 246-9, 250-1, 265-6, baggage 67, 75-6, 154-5, 176-7,
270-1, 319; galleries 247-8, 180, 183, 193, 205, 208, 290-1
250-1 Balkh 124
Artaxerxes 242 ballantion 176
Artemis 229, 232, 244, 246, 255, bandits: see robbery
287, 293, 296 Basil 302, 320
Artemisia 96-7 hasileias 320
Asaph 309 bastagarius 185
Ascalon 192, 279 Bath 134
370 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
baths, bathing 36-7, 79, 89, 146, Brindisi 150, 158, 164, 188, 194,
209-10 196, 222, 315
Baths of Caracalla 249 Britain 60, 118, 122-3, r 34> x 66,
Babylon 22, 26, 50, 54, 96, 98-9, 250, 294
106-7, 1 16, 232, 235, 239-40, brothels 208, 21 1, 215, 218
2 53> 2 93 Bug 96, 109
Babylonia 26, 49, 55, 58, 238-9 Bushmen 62
Baghdad 34 Busiris 271
Baiae 140, 142-4 Byblus 41, 19
barmaid 213 Byzantium 90, 152, 165, 188, 290
bars 205, 211-13
bedbugs 208-9 Cadiz 46, 149—50, 165, 266
Bedouin 63 Cadmus 243
Beirut 26, 66, 192 Caesar 121, 134, 140, 237, 248-50,
Beneventum 196 2 54, 2 5 6 > 2 7i
Bengal, Bay of 125 Caesarea (in Cappadocia) 302
Beroea 316 Caesarea (in Palestine) 150, 153,
Bethany 309 192, 224, 250, 302, 307
Bethel 308 Caiaphas 308
Bethesda 308 Cairo 235, 259, 311
Bethlehem 304-5, 309, 319 Calauria 234
Bethshemesh 49 Caligula 158
Bible 48-9, 52, 55, 102, 159, 214, Calvary 326
304-29 Calydonian boar 245
Birket-el-Karun 102 camel 54-7, 178, 183, 223, 258,
birota 179 317-18
birrus 176 Cameroon, Mt 64
Bissagos Bay 63 camping: see tents
Black Sea 59-60, 66, 99, 108, 123, Cana 324
135, 281 Canaan 25, 44
boats: see ships Canary Islands 122
Boeotia 27, 72, 85, 90 candelabrum 208
Boethus 241, 268 Canopus 204, 286
books 264 Capitoline 248, 250, 252, 271
Bordeaux 189, 307, 315 Capri 140, 235
Bordeaux Pilgrim 307-10, 314, 319 Capua 164, 195, 294
Bosporus 59, 165 Caracalla 249
Bostra 302 Carales 153
Bovillae 200 Carcassonne 189
Brenner Pass 165 Carmel, Mt 40, 307, 325
bridges 26-7, 50-1, 56, 106, 168, carpentarius 185
171-2, 174 carpentum 179
 1

INDEX 37I

carriages 54, 71, 170, 178-81, 183- Cicero 136, 138, 143, 145, 151, 200,
184, 201, 290, 302 216, 220-2, 236, 237, 247-8, 266
car rue a 163, 179 Circe 244
carruca dormitoria 179 Circei 243
Cartagena 150 Circus Flaminius 248
Carthage 46, 59-60, 63-4, 98, Circus Maximus 248, 294
116-17, 121, 150, 152-3, 166, cisium 179
2 45 > 3 2 4 Clarus 135
carts 23-4, 47, 49, 51, 56, 67-9, Claudius 180, 217, 234
178-81, 193-4, 201, 290; covered Cleon (sculptor) 241
carts 67 Cleopatra 121
Caspian Sea 60 Clodius 200
Cassandra 233-4 clothing 75-6, 79, 176-7, 183
catabolensis 185 Clysma 306
Catania 217 Cnidus 237, 257, 270, 287
Cataract, First 28, 59, 96, 261, 272, Cnossus 27, 36, 39
2 75 , 2g 4 coins in fountains 134, 231
Cataract, Second 29, 98 Colophon 257
Cato the Younger 198 Colosseum 137
Caucasus 233 Commodus 18
caupo 204 Concord, Temple of 249
caupona 204, 208 Constantine 186, 300-1, 304-5,
cella 208 307-9
Celsus 130 Constantine (city) 166
Celts, 60, 267 Constantinople 153, 188, 209, 300-
Ceres 217 3° 2 3°5> 3°7, 314-16, 319, 321;
>

Cesalpino, Andrea 252 see also Byzantium

Ceylon 119 consuls 93-4
Chaeronea 235-6 copa 208
Chaerophon 85 copo: see caupo
Chalcedon 307 Coptos 244
Chalcis 229 coracles 26, 98, 107
chariot 23-4, 26-7, 45-6, 49~5 2 > Cordoba 165
54 Corinth 59, 65, 68, 80, 90-2, 136,
China 24-5, 61, 123-6, 167, 174, 150-2, 230, 234, 240, 247, 255,
182, 289 296-7, 315? 32i
^
Chios 78 Cos 13 1, 237, 242, 267
Chiron 233 covinnus 179
chiton 75 Crete 24, 26, 36, 39, 152, 233, 295
chlaina 75 Crimea 59, 108, 244, 260
chlamys 74, 144, 176 Crocodilopolis 198, 259—60
Christians 281, 283, 287, 300-29 Croesus 103, 241
372 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
crumena 176 Dionysus 80-2, 84, 87, 92, 103,
Cumae 138-9 no, 178, 241, 246, 264, 267
curator viarum 172 Dioscuri 178
cursor 179 diploma 183—5, 188—9
cursus clabularis 184 Djerba 244
cursus publicus 182—90, 197, 203, Dnieper 96-7, 109
301-3, 314; see also post, public Dodona 84, 240
customs duties 290-1 Domitian 277
Cyclops 48, 59 Don 109
Cynics 279 donkey 22-3, 25, 28-9, 49, 51-2,
Cyprian 324 S5-* 6 7, 78, 108, 178, 317
5.

Cyprus 42-3, 67, 93, 234, 314 Dor 40-1

Cyrene 98, 117, 159, 220 Draa 63
Cyrus the Great 107 drinks 37, 66, 78, 88, 91, 153, 177,
Cyzicus 75, 1 18, 133 185, 190-3, 196, 212-14, 3°i,
3l6, 322
Danae 250 drivers: see mulio
Danube 60, 109, 165, 232 Durazzo 164
darics 75 duty: see customs
Darius the Great 58, 60, 75, 95,
108-9, 240 Edessa 306-7, 316
David 49, 307-9 Egypt 21-2, 25-6, 28-9, 31-2, 38-
Dead Sea 203, 293, 306, 309 39, 42, 44, 54-5, 58-9, di, 71, 85,
Deir-el-Bahari 285 96-103, 149-5°, 154 , i5 8 , i6 5,
de Lessups, Ferdinand 275 177, 182-3, 190-3, 197-9, 206,
Delgado, Cape 126 220, 222-5, 239, 253, 257-61,
Delos 109, 135, 151, 256, 261 271-86, 289-91, 293, 305-6,
Delphi 68-70, 79-80, 84-5, 103, 310-14, 321, 323
135-6, 229-30, 240, 242-4, 246, Ekron 49
255, 262, 264-5, 267, 294, 297 Elam 238-9
Demeter 103, 293 Elephantine 28, 96, 275
Denmark 118, 123 Eleusis 69, 73, 293-4
Demosthenes 67, 72-3, 93, 234 Elijah 305-7, 309
Der Siman 321-2 Elis 70, 77, 108
deversorium 204, 208 Elisha 49, 309
Diana, Temple of 249 Ensisheim 251
Didyma 135, 257 entertainment 91-2, 137, 14 1-3,
Diocletian 313 i
5 6~7, 195, 207, 209, 211-12,
Diodorus 134 215-18, 271-2
Diodorus (guidebook writer) 294 Epeius 243
diolkos 255 Ephesus 78, 99, 15 1-2, 166, 208,
Diomed 24, 52, 243 232, 257, 266, 287, 315
 INDEX 373

Epictetus 79 fortified posts on roads 39, 50, 53,

Epidaurus 83-4, 88, 13 1, 230, 255 56
Epirus 89 Forum Appii 194-5, 200
Eratosthenes 117 fossa 170
Eros 248-9 France 166, 168, 188, 202, 213,
Erymanthian boar 245 2 94, 3°5> 3°7
^
Erythrae 245 Fulvius Nobilior 247
essedum 179
Etheria 305-7, 313-14, 316-17 Galen 131, 215
Ethiopia 29, no, 120, 126, 273 Gallus, Aelius 273
Etna, Mt 232, 255 games: see festivals
Etruscans 163-4, 170 Ganymede 257
Euboea 229, 231, 256 garbage 86-7
Eudoxus 118-20, 259 Gaul: see France
Euphrates 21-2, 51, 98-9, 106-7, Gaza 319
122 Genoa 164-5
Euripides 309 geographical knowledge 59-64,
Euripus 229, 231-2 117-27
Europa 237, 250 Gerizim, Mt 308
Eusebius 303, 305 Germany 123
evectio 184 Geryon 244, 266
exegetes 264 Gethsemane 326
Exodus 306 Gibeah 49
exploration 60-4, 1 17-21, 126-7 Gizeh 32
Ezekiel 309 gladiators 137, 142
Golgotha 308
Goliath 307
Falernian 213 Gomorrah 310
Fano 164 Gracchus 166
Farfa 326 graffiti 32-3,209,214,216,274-85,
Felix 320, 324 313, 3 2 4-5
ferries 26, 38, 53, 56 grammatophoros 219
festivals 31, 76-82, 90-9, 94, Greece 24, 27, 44-5, 49, 58-9, 65-
136-7, 147 94, 9 8 , I28 , !35, !5°, i<5 5, 2I 3,
Firmilian 304 229, 253-6, 26l, 279, 289, 294
Flaminius 164 Gregory Nazianzen 302
food 66, 87-8, 91, 141, 153-5, Gregory of Nyssa 302
177-8, 185, 190-3, 196, 199-200, grooms 185
207, 210-13, 2I 5> 2I 7? 3 0I > 3 i6 > Guardafui, Cape 120-1, 126
322 gubernator 153
foot travel 25, 36, 49, 67, 178-9 guest rooms 87, 89, 198
Formiae 138, 195 guidebooks 263-4, 292-9
374 travel in the ancient world
guides ioo-i, 104, 257, 264-7, Herondas 242, 267, 270
298, 318-9, 322 Hezekiah 308
Guinea 62-3 Hierapolis 128, 232
Gyges 240 highwaymen: see robbery
Hilarion 302
Hadrian 69, 146, 232, 234, 249, himation 75
275-6, 278, 286, 292, 304, 308 Himera 134
Halicarnassus 96-7 Hipparchus 117
hamaxa 68 hippocomus 185
Hammurabi 26, 30, 38-9, 238 Hippocrates 13 1, 267
Hannibal 307 Hippolytus 233-4
Hanno (explorer) 63-4, 120, 245 hire of vehicles 179
Haran 307 Hittites 26, 44
Harkhuf 28-9, 34-5 Homer 24, 45-8, 59, 61, 79, 206,
harmamaxa 54 256—7, 260, 276, 278, 298
Harmonia 266 Horace 139, 146-7, 180, 190, 194-
harness 24, 52, 67, 181-2 196, 200, 213
Hatshepsut 285 horse 23-5, 51-2, 56, 67, 108, 170,
health, travel for 82-5, 94, 130-4, 174 , i 79“ 8 °, 3 QI
147, 193-4, 3 I 3 _I 4 horse collar 174, 181
Hebron 305, 309, 325 horseshoe 52, 18
Helen 47, 143, 234, 243-5 Hortensius 139
Helena 305, 308 hospes 208
Helicon 296 hospices 305, 312, 320-4, 328
Heliodorus (guidebook writer) 294 hospitium 204, 208
Heliopolis (in Egypt) 235, 259 hostels 35-6, 184-6, 192, 196, 202;
Heliopolis (in Phoenicia) 282 see also mutatio
Hellespont 59, 152, 257 house numbers 86, 263
Henu 274 Hyacinthus 250
Hera 90, 103, 241 Hyperboreans 108-10
Heracles 87, 102-3, 108, 135, 233,
243-5, 248-51, 266, 293
Herculaneum 203 ianitor 208
Hercules, Temple of 250 Ilium 256-7
hermeia 71 India 21, 24-5, 31, 45, 60-1, 111,
Hermes 71, 173, 178, 241 118-20, 124-5, I2 9, J 49, 2 35,
Hermopolis 199, 223 245, 250, 254, 258, 289, 298
Hermus 193 Indian Ocean 21, 60-1, 109
Herodotus 21-2, 31, 51, 53, 60-2, Indonesia 122, 125
75, 85, 95-1 11, 1 15, 1 19, 123, innkeepers 37, 87-8, 206-8, 214,
182, 219, 230, 240-1, 253, 266, 216
298 inn names 205-6
 INDEX 375
inns 36-7, 53, 57, 87-91, 155, 184- Jordan River 293, 309
190, 194, 198, 200-11, 319-20; Joseph 25-6, 307, 310
see also hospices, hostels, mansio , Joseph of Arimathea 304
mutatio Josephus 156
inscrip ta 291 Judas 308
In-Shushinak 239 Julian the Apostate 302
institor 208 Julier Pass 165
instrumenta itineris 290 Jupiter, Temple of 249, 271
Io 233 Justin 321
Iphigeneia 234, 244 Justinian 317, 321, 323
Iran 31, 52 Juvenal 216
Iraq 30
Isaac 305, 308-9 Kakulima, Mt 63
Isaiah 214, 308-9 kapeleia 91, 21 1, 213
Isis 102-3, I
59> 2 44, 2 5°, 284-6, Karnaim 306
300 Kashgar 124
Israel 49 khans 203
Israelites 26, 44, 52, 55, 306, 308 koine 116
My 59? 6 7, 97, 99, Io8 , I28 , *3°, Kurdistan 22, 50
134, 149, 166, 168, 172-3, 178, kybernetes 153
185, 202, 213, 220, 266, 279, 286,
2 94 Laban 49, 307
Ithaca 46 Labyrinth (in Egypt) 10 1-3, 199,
itineraria 51, 186 259-60
lacerna 176
Jacob 49, 307, 309 Lacus Palicorum 255
Janus, Temple of 254 Lagash 36
Java 125 Lanchou 124, 153
Jericho 309-10 language 104, 116, 122,222,276—
Jerome 302-4, 313-14, 316, 323, 277, 282-3
328 Laodicea 19 1, 208
Jerusalem 189, 214, 293, 301, 304- Laodicea, Council of 320
3° 8 3 IQ 3M-I5,
, , 3 I
9-20 , 3 2 <H> Larsa 26, 38
Jesse 309 Lausus 319
Jesus 304-10, 324-7 law 30, 122, 204-5
Jews 328 Lazarus 309
Jezreel 307 Leah 309
Job 306, 309 Leander 250
John the Baptist 306, 309 Lebadea 135
John Cassianus 313 Lebanon 22, 39-42, 66, 191-2
John Chrysostom 303, 316 lectica 180
Jordan 306 lectulus 208
376 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
lectus 208 Malaya 124-5
Leda 266 Malchus 316
Leochares 241 Malea, Cape 128
Lesbos 78, 243 Maloja Pass 171
lesche 48, 89 Malta 152
letters 30, 34, 37-8, 128, 138, 144, Mamre 325
197-8, 219-25, 260, 302-4 mansio 184-5, 189, 201, 319
letters of recommendation 200, Mantinea 297
3 21 Marathon 103, 236
Levant 21, 26, 28, 59, 279 Marcellus 247
Libanius 137, 153, 188, 316 Marcus Aurelius 125, 292
Licinius Mucianus: see Mucianus Mardonius 242
lighthouse 232, 258 Mark Antony 121, 138, 140, 216
Lindos 243 Marmora, Sea of 118
Lipari 134 Mars, Temple of 249, 271
litters 25, 67, 138, 141, 147, 178, Marseilles 59, 117, 150, 165, 173,
180 279-80
Livy 229 Marsyas 233, 243
lixa 210 Martha 309
lodges 138, 197 Martial 143, 146, 214, 287
lodgings 89-90, 204 Marty rium 305
Lot 48, 310 marvels 60-1, 106, no, 123, 196,
lubricants 179 246, 267, 308, 310
Luceria 243 Mary 309, 326
Lucian 73, 92, 136, 158, 264-5, matella 208
267, 287 Mausoleum 232
Lucrinus, Lake 14 1-2, 145 Maxentius 300
Lucullus 139-40, 144 McAdam, J. L. 175
Luneburg 251 Medea 234
Lybia 293 Mediterranean 21, 45, 56, 59, 61,
Lyons 166, 173, 206 ^5, 1 17
Lysippus 248, 293 Medusa 244
Megalopolis 297
Megara 234
Macarius 31 Melania the Elder 313-14
Macedonia 164, 235, 247 Melania the Younger 301, 305,
Maeander 232 3*3> 3i5, 3*9> 3 2 4
Maecenas 194-6 Melchizedek 306
magister navis 153 Meleager 245
Magnesia 234 Melito 304
mail: see letters Memmius 198
mail, speed of 221-2 Memnon 260-1, 272-8, 284-5, 2 93
 INDEX 377
Memnonion 285 Mt Cenis Pass 165
Memphis 22, 28, 32-3, 104, 132, Mt Genevre Pass 165
244, 259, 283 Mount of Olives 305,308-9,325-6
Menas 313, 325, 327-8 mountain passes 165, 185, 190, 202
Menelaus 47, 234, 243 mountain retreats 145-7
Mentor (artist) 288 Mucianus 267
Mentuhotep III 274 mule 23, 47, 49, 51-2, 67, 108,
Mercati, Michele 252 178-82, 195
merchants 29-30, 72, 76, 85, 87, mulio 179, 185
92, 94, 98, 125-9, 144, 280 mulomedicus 185
Mercury 173, 206 Mummius 247
Merida 165, 172 Museum at Alexandria 258
Meriones 243 museums 238-52, 268
Merneptah 281 mutatio 184, 189, 192, 202, 309,
Meroe 285 319
Merseburg 251 Mycenae 233-4
Merv 124 Mycenaeans 27, 45, 47
Mesopotamia 21-3, 26, 29-30, 34, Myra 153, 159
36-7, 44, 54-6, 59, 100, 104, 1
15, Myrina 193-4
122, 124, 126, 182, 239, 253 Myron 236-7, 248
Metapontum 235 Mys 289
Methone 314
Mettius Rufus 277 Nablus 307
Midas 240 Nabonidus 240
Milan 164, 166, 190 Naples 129, 134, 136, 138-48, 150,
milestones 173 169, 221, 232, 234, 245, 255, 286
Miletus 65-6, 84 Naram-Sin 238
miliaria 173 Narbonne 152-3, 165, 201
miliar ium aureum 173 Narni 172
minister 208 natural history 245-6, 250-1, 298
ministra 208 nature 231-2, 296-7
Minoans 27, 36, 45 Naucratis 22
Minos 243 Nazareth 309-10
Minotaur 295 Nebo, Mt 306
Misenum, Cape 139-41, 232 Nebuchadnezzar 51, 106, 239-40
Mithridates 235, 250 Necho 61-2
Moeris, Lake 102, 259 Negeb 317
Moluccas 125 Negroes 126-7
monasticism 310-13 Neocaesarea 281
money 73-5, 122, 176-7 Neoplatonists 279, 282
monsoon winds 119-20 Nero 126, 136, 140, 144, 208, 216-
Moses 22, 306, 310, 317, 326 217, 249, 287
378 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Nerva 254 Pachomius 312
Nessana 317-19, 323 paenula 176
Nestor 234 Palatine Hill 254
Nicaea 117, 305 Palazzo dei Conservatori 252
Nicaea, Council of 301, 320 Palestine 21, 23, 44, 49, 99, 115,
Nicias 93 I
53, 15 8 , 177 , I 9°"~3> 253, 280,
Nicomedia 302, 307 293, 302, 304-29
Niger 64 Palladium 244, 266
nightclubs 204, 258 Palladius 313
Nile 21-2, 26, 28, 31, 44, 59, 61, pallium 144
97-8, 104, 126, 182-3, 198-9, pan 296
232, 2 57-6 i, 277, 284-5, 286, pandocheion 87
289, 293, 306, 313 Paochi 123
Nineveh 49 papyrus 22, 221, 289
Niobe 248 Paris (Trojan prince) 234, 257
Nippur 25 Parium 234
Nitocris 106 Parnassus 296
Nola 320, 324 Parthenon 85, 246
Nomentum 147 passports 154
North Sea 118 Patras 220-2, 289
Norway 118 Patroclus 257
Paul 122, 153, 157, 159, 200, 204,
287, 3 ° 7 3 ° 9 32 i
> >

Odessa 99 Paula 305, 313-14, 3*9

Odysseus 45-6, 48, 52, 233, 243-4, Paulinus of Nola 303, 320, 323,
246 328
Oedipus 70-2, 234 Pausanias 68, 83, 253, 264, 266-7,
Olympia 70, 76-9, 90, 136, 203, 273, 292-9
230, 232, 234, 236, 241, 255, 262, paving 26-7, 50, 56, 86, 164-5,
265, 297 168-71, 174
onager 23-4 Pelion 233
oracles 84-5, 134-6, 147, 257 Pella 309
Orestes 234, 244 Pelops 244
Origen 302, 304 Pelusium 190, 193, 306
Oropus 229-30 Penelope 48, 143, 233
Orpheus 243-4 peregrinatio 138
Osiris 28 Pergamum 13 1, 166, 193-4, 246
Ostia 149, 153, 203, 216-17, 254, periegetes 264

3 M Persephone 293
Otho 184 Perseus (King of Macedon) 247
oxen 24, 179, 181 Persia 53-6, 58-60, 65, 95-6, 99,
Oxyrhynchus 223, 321 104, no, 124, 182, 236, 242, 279
 INDEX 379
Persian Gulf 21, 53, 60 Polygnotus 248, 293
petasos 75 Pompeii 143-4, 203, 207-9, 21 1_
Peter 310 216, 262
Petesouchos 199; see also Suchus Pompey 140-1, 250
Petronius 128, 140 Pontus 302
Petronius Secundus (governor of popina 211—18
Egypt) 277 popino 215
Peutinger Table 186-8 porters 178, 185
Piacenza 164 Portico of Octavia 248-9
Pilate 308 Portico of Philip 249
Pindar 234-5, 242 portitor 290
piracy 72-3, 94, 122, 149, 315 portoria 290
Piraeus 65, 67, 90, 158, 230 ports 86
Pisa (in Greece) 256 Poseidon 80, 136, 155, 160
Pisa (in Italy) 252 Posillipo 140
Phaeacians 46 post, public 29,
35-6, 51, 53-4,
Phaedra 233-4 130, 182-93, J 97> 20I > 219-20,
Phaselis 243 301—2; see also cursus publicus
Phidias 79, 231-2, 236-7, 246, 248, postmen 219-20, 302-4
286 potisteria 91, 211, 213
Philae 261, 284-5 Praeneste 135, 147
Philip of Macedon 92 praetoria 185
Philippi 309 Praxiteles 236-7, 241, 248, 250,
Philistines 26, 49, 52 257, 268, 270, 287, 289, 293
Phoenicia, Phoenicians 44-6, 59, private hospitality 37, 47-9, 87,
61-2, 102 104, 194-5, i 9 8 > 319- 20
phoenix 106 professio 290
Phrygia 233, 240 Prometheus 233
piscina 141 prostitutes 37, 78, 92, 204, 207,
Plato 235, 259, 280 21 1, 215, 263; see also brothels
plaustrum 179 Protesilaus 257
Plautus 86 Protogenes 237
Pliny the Elder 149, 181, 245, 248, proxenos 93—4, 129
267 Psammetichus 275
Pliny the Younger 152, 188, 200, Ptah 102, 259
253 Ptolemies 1 15-17, 120, 182-3, 260,
Plutarch 137, 166, 198, 265, 267, 275, 286
285, 291 Ptolemy I 246
Polemo (guidebook writer) 294 Ptolemy II 260
Polybius 298 Ptolemy VIII 118
Polyclitus 248, 288 Ptolemy, Claudius 64, 123
Polycrates 249 publicanus 290
380 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
puer 208 Rome (city) 12 1-2, 128-9, 134-5,
Puteoli 129, 139-40, 142-5, 209, 137-8, 149 -53 . 1 55-6. I5 8 . 164,
254 166, 168, 173, 187-8, 194, 200,
Pylos 27, 47, 234 204, 208, 220-3, 2 33 — 5, 244, 247-
pyramids 22, 32-3, 100-1, 103, 25°. 254, 257, 259, 282, 286-8,
232, 258-9, 266, 271, 283-4, 310 294, 300, 302, 304-5, 310, 315
Pyrenees 60 Romulus 254
Pythagoras 235 Romulus Augustulus 144
Pythagoras (sculptor) 237 routes 21, 29, 30-1, 56, 65-6, 120,
Pytheas 117-18, 123 123-6, 129, 150-1, 153, 254-5
rubbish: see garbage
Rufinus 313-14
Rachel 305, 309 Russia 52, 60, 65, 96, 98, 108, 123
Rahab 309 rut roads 69-71, 170
Ramses II 274
Ramses IV 281-2
Ramses VI 280 Sabina 275
Ramses X 281 ‘sacred truce’ 77
Raphia 192 saddles 67, 181, 186
Ravenna 215 sailing 22, 151-62
Rebecca 307, 309 sailing season 1 50
reda 163, 179, 183, 196, 301 St Bernard Pass 165, 202
Red Sea 29, 60-1, 118-20, 154, St Catherine, Monastery of 317,
274, 326 323
Remus 254 St Gotthard Pass 165
resort hotels 204 Salamis 233
restaurants 207, 210-18 Salem 306
Rheims 166 Saloniki 164
Rhine 188, 232 Samos 103, 15
Rhinocoloura 192 Samothrace 243, 256, 261
Rhodes 15 1-2, 232, 234, 237, 242- sanctuaries 83-5, 88, 90-1, 147,
243,256, 261,275,314 193-4, 229, 240-1, 296
Rimini, Council of 301 Sarah 305, 309
roads 25-7, 38, 46, 49“5° ? 53 > 5 6 . Sardinia 153
68-72, 163-75; administration Sardis 53, 99, 103, 304
172-3; road building 166-75; Sareptah 305, 307
road maps 186-8; road signs Saudi Arabia 30
50, 56, 71 and see also mile- Saveme 201
stones Scandinavia 118, 123
robbery 30, 38-41, 46, 68, 72-3, Scillus 234
89, 94, 122, 205, 223, 263, 271, Scopas 248, 293
315-16 Scotland 122-3, 244
 INDEX 381

Scylas no Simplon Pass 165

Scythians 60, 99, 104, 108-10 Sinai 28, 38, 306, 317-18, 323
Sea Peoples 44-5 Siwa Oasis 284, 293
seaside resorts 138-48 IV 252
Sixtus
Segesta 134 Smyrna 133, 151, 193, 257, 327
Seleuceia 314 Socrates 85, 234
Seleucids 115-16 Sodom 48, 310, 328
Selinus 134 Solomon 45, 49, 308-9
Semele 266 Solon 85, 234
Semiramis 106 Somalia 29, 120
Seneca 143, 210 Sophia, Council of 300-1
Senegal 62-3 Sophocles 70, 81
Septimius Severus 184, 186, 273-4 Sorrento 139, 143
276 souvenirs 34, 286-91, 325-8
Serapis 258, 285-6 Spain 59, 149, 165, 172, 213, 243,
servants 49, 66-7, 76, 79, 91-2, 294
153-4, 178, 180, 183, 190-3, 263 Sparta 46-7, 69-70, 77, 103-4,
Servius Tullius 249 136, 230, 233-4, 242-4, 255, 294,
Sesostris 273 297
Seti 260 spas 134, 142
Setia 213 speculatores 183
Seven Wonders 79, 232, 236, 258, speed, on land 25-6, 53, 188-9,
287 191-6, 315; on the sea 151-2
Seville 251 sphinx 32, 283
shafts 24-5, 182 Spliigen Pass 165
Shechem 307 spurs 52
Sherbro Sound 63 Stabiae 143
ships 22, 46, 66, 94, 98, 152-62 stabulum 205, 207
shock absorbers 54 staters 75
shopping 34, 286-91 statio 129, 184
Shulgi 25-6, 35, 37, 39 Stephen 310
Shutruk-Nahhunte 238, 240 stirrups 52, 181
Sicily 59, 99, 134, 152, 216, 233, Strabo 71, 142, 247, 272-3
255, 261, 279, 294 Stradela 307
Sicyon 68, 230, 243, 245, 294 Straits of Gibraltar 46, 59-64, 117,
Sidon 26, 41, 192, 224 I5 2
Sidonius Apollinaris 188 Straits of Messina 149-50, 255, 314
Sierra Leone 63 strator 185
silk route 123-6 street lighting 86, 262-3; street
Siloam 308 names 86; street signs 263
Simeon Stylites 311-12, 321, 323 Styria 201
Simon the Leper 309 Suchus 259, 271
382 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Sudan 28, 34, 126, 261, 274, 285, Thebes (in Egypt) 39, 43, 47, 104,
3 12 239, 260-1, 272 - 83 , 293, 306
Sumatra 125 Thebes (in Greece) 72, 93, 234-6,
superstitions 155-6, 158, 178 2 44, 2 97
Susa 53, 238-9 Themistocles 234
Syene: see Aswan Theodora 321
Symmachus 144 Theodosius II 319, 321
Synesius 159-62 Theognis (bishop) 305
Syracuse 65-6, 93, 117, 236, 247, Theophanes (Roman official) 177,
255, 266 i9°-3
^
Syria 21, 23, 39, 43-4, 56, 99-100, Theophilus (archbishop) 313
104, 1 15, 124, 158, 165, 169, Theophrastus 71-2, 82
222, 253, 267, 284, 289, 293, Thermopylae 103
301, 307, 3 11 * 3i4-i5> 3 22 Theseus 233, 295
syringes 278—83 Thespiae 249
Thessaly 27
tabellarius 219, 303 Thetis 277
Tabennisi 312 Thomas 306, 327
taberna 211— 12 Thucydides 298
Tabula Peutingeriana 186-8 Thule 1 18
Tagus 172 Thurii 97, 99
Tana, Lake 126 Tiberias 129, 293
Tantalus 244 Tiberius 140, 217, 234-5, 275
Tarim Basin 124 Tibur 146-7, 180, 232
Tarragona 150, 165 T’ienshui 123
Tarsus 129, 307 Tiglath-Pileser I 50
taverns 37, 91-2, 194, 200, 211-12, Tigris 21-2, 49
320 tipping 186
Tavers 201 Tiryns 27
Tebessa 166 Tishbe 306
Tegea 103, 242, 245, 297 Titus 137, 235
Telamon 233 Tmolus, Mt 267
Telemachus 46-7 tolls 70, 290-1
Telephus 243 touchstones 74
telones 290 Toulouse 189
Tempe 232, 286 tourists 32-3, 44, 57, 76-82, 85,
tents 90, 154, 180, 198, 200 94, 103-4, 147, 200, 255, 259,
Terence 86 Part Three passim ; tourist sea-
Terracina 167, 194-5, 213 son 280, 319
Teucer 233, 243 towing 22, 195
Thasos 102 tractoria 184
theatre 80-3, 137 traders: see merchants
 INDEX 383

traffic 178, 210— 1 1, 263 Vespasian 159, 217, 254

Trajan 137, 172, 188, 234-5, 254, Vesta, Temple of 254
294 Vesuvius 139, 144
Tralles 129 Via Aemilia 164
transport, by land 25, 27, 30, 36, Via Appia 146-7, 164, 167-8, 171,
38-9, 46, 56, 65, 67-73, 94, 129- 194-6, 200, 315
130, 176-96, 314-15; by sea 21, Via Aurelia 164, 187
3°, 56, 65-6, 94, 104, 130, 149- Via Egnatia 164-5
162, 257, 314 Via Flaminia 164, 167-8, 172
trap elites 74 via glarea strata 172
Tres Tabernae 200-1 via silice strata 168
Tripoli (in Syria) 301 via terrena 172
Troezon 90, 233-4 Vicarello 134
Trophonius 135, 229 Vichy 134
Troy 229-30, 233-4, 243, 256-7, villas 138-48, 195, 197, 232, 248,
261, 264, 267, 273, 276-7, 294, 286
3°4 v inaria 208, 213
Tunis 1 16 Virgil 195, 206, 215-16, 232, 234
Tunisia 59, 166, 244, 249
tunnels 167 Wadi Hammamat 274
Turkistan 124 Wadi Natrun 311, 313, 322-3, 325
Turmanin 322 wagons 23-4, 26, 47, 49, 51, 56,
Tusculum 138-9, 145 68-9, 178-81, 184, 193-4, 201,
Tutankhamen 24 wagons
207, 290, 301; covered
Tyche 287
25, 179
Tyre 26, 41, 102, 191-2, 235, 302 Wenamon 39-43
wheel 23-4, 50, 67
Ur Wiesbaden 134
25, 239
Wuwei 124

vacationing 138-48
xenodocheion 320—4
Valley of Jehoshaphat 308
xenon 86, 89
Valley of the Kings 260, 272,
Xenophon 49, 234, 298
278-83
Xerxes 95-6, 140
valuables: see money
Varro 143
Vasco da Gama 62 yachts 141

Vedius Pollio 140-1 yoke 24-5, 181

Venice 166 Yugoslavia 122, 185, 202
Venus, Temple of 250
Verde, Cape 63 Zabern 201
Verres 247-8, 266 Zacchaeus 309
384 TRAVEL IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Zachariah 308 248-9, 257, 265, 293, 297
Zanzibar 122, 126, 129 Zeuxis 248-9, 289
Zaragoza 165 Zion, Mt 308
Zeus 48, 77-8, 80, 84, 103, 123, lona 176
136, 231-3, 236, 240, 243, 246, lone 75
 BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

Boston Public Library

Copley Square

General Library

The Date Due Cl i in the poc cet indi-

cates the date on r" before whidh this

book ;hould be returned to the Library.

Please do not remove cards from this
pocket.