From Caesar to Commodus wheeled vehicles were forbidden in Rome by day; people then walked, or were carried in slave-borne chairs or litters. For longer distances they traveled on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages or chariots. Travel by public stagecoach averaged some sixty miles a day. Caesar once rode by carriage 800 miles in eight days; messengers bearing the news of Nero’s death to Galba in Spain covered 332 miles in thirty-six hours; Tiberius, hurrying day and night, rode in three days 600 miles to stand beside his dying brother. The public post, by carriage or horse at all hours, averaged one hundred miles a day. Augustus had modeled it on the Persian system, as indispensable to imperial administration. It was called cursus publicus as serving the res publica, or commonwealth, by carrying official correspondence. Private individuals could use it only by rare and special permission through a government diploma (“double-folded”) or passport entitling the bearer to certain privileges and introducing him en route to persons of diplomatic importance. A more rapid means of communication was sometimes arranged by semaphores flashing signals from point to point; by this primitive telegraph the arrival of the grain ships at Puteoli was quickly made known to worried Rome. Nonofficial correspondence went by special courier or merchants or traveling friends; some traces suggest the existence, under the Empire, of private companies arranging to transmit private mail. Fewer letters were written than now, and better. Nevertheless, the movement of intelligence over western and southern Europe was as rapid in Caesar’s day as at any time before the railway. In 54 B.C.. Caesar’s letter from Britain reached Cicero at Rome in twenty-nine days; in 1834 Sir Robert Peel, hurrying from Rome to London, required thirty days.20
Communication and transport were immensely aided by the consular roads. These were the tentacles of Roman law, the members by which the mind of Rome became the will of the realm. They achieved in the ancient world a commercial revolution comparable in kind with that which the railroads effected in the nineteenth century. Until steam transportation came, the roads of medieval and modern Europe were inferior to those of the Empire under the Antonines. Italy alone had then 372 main routes, and 12,000 miles of paved thoroughfares; the Empire had 51,000 miles of paved highways and a pervasive network of secondary roads. Highways ran over the Alps to Lyons, Bordeaux, Paris, Rheims, Rouen, and Boulogne; others to Vienna, Mainz, Augsburg, Cologne, Utrecht, and Leiden; and from Aquileia a road skirted the Adriatic to connect with the Via Egnatia to Thessalonica. Magnificent bridges replaced the ferries that had crept across a thousand impeding streams. At every mile on the consular roads stone markers gave the distance to the next town; 4000 of these survive. At intervals seats were placed for tired travelers. At every tenth mile a statio offered a stopping place, where fresh horses could be hired; at every thirty miles was a mansio—an inn that was also a store, a saloon, and a brothel.21 The main halting points were the civitates, cities, usually equipped with fair hotels, which were in some cases owned and managed by the municipal government.22 Most innkeepers robbed their guests whenever convenient, and other thieves made the highways unsafe at night despite a garrison of soldiers at each statio. “Itineraries” could be bought, showing routes, stations, and intermediate distances.23 Rich men, disdaining the inns, brought their equipage and slaves with them, and slept in their guarded carriages or in the homes of friends or officials on the way.
Despite all difficulties, there was probably more traveling in Nero’s day than at any time before our birth. “Many people,” says Seneca, “make long voyages to see some remote sight”;24 and Plutarch speaks of “globe-trotters who spend the best part of their lives in inns and on boats.”25 Educated Romans flocked to Greece and Egypt and Greek Asia, scratched their names on historic monuments, sought healing waters or climates, ambled by art collections in the temples, studied under famous philosophers, rhetors, or physicians, and doubtless used Pausanias as their Baedeker.26
These “grand tours” usually involved a voyage on one or more of the merchant vessels that cut the Mediterranean with a hundred routes of trade. “Look at the harbors and seas,” exclaimed Juvenal, “filled with great keels, more peopled than the land.”27 Rome’s rival ports, Puteoli, Portus, and Ostia, were alive with fabri navales building ships, stuppatores calking them, saburarii loading sand into them as ballast, sacrarii unloading grain in sacks, mensores weighing it, lenuncularii operating tenders between large ships and the shore, and urinatores diving for goods fallen into the sea. Of corn barges alone twenty-five were drawn up the Tiber every working day; if we add the transport of building stone, metals, oil, wine, and a thousand other articles, we picture a river teeming with commerce and noisy with loading and carrying machines, with dockmen, porters, stevedores, traders, brokers, and clerks.
Ships were driven with sails, aided by one or more banks of oars. They were larger, on the average, than before; Athenaeus describes a grain cargo vessel as 420 feet long with a fifty-seven-foot beam;29 but this was highly exceptional. Some vessels had three decks; many took 250, several took a thousand, tons of freight. Josephus tells of one that carried 600 persons—passengers and crew;30 another carried an Egyptian obelisk as large as that in Central Park, New York, together with 200 sailors, 1300 passengers, 93,000 bushels of wheat, and a load of linen, pepper, paper, and glass.31 Nevertheless, voyages except along the coasts were still dangerous, as Saint Paul found; between November and March only a few vessels ventured across the open Mediterranean, and in midsummer eastward voyages were made almost impossible by the etesian winds. Night sailing was now frequent, and every harbor of any pretense had a good lighthouse. Danger of piracy had almost disappeared from the Mediterranean. To discourage it, and starve rebellion, Augustus had stationed two main war fleets at Ravenna on the Adriatic and at Misenum on the Bay of Naples, besides minor squadrons at ten other points in the Empire. We may judge what Pliny called “the immense majesty of the Roman peace” by the fact that for two centuries we hardly hear of these fleets.
Passenger schedules were largely indefinite, as sailings were determined by weather and commercial convenience. Rates were low—e.g., two drachmas ($1.20) from Athens to Alexandria; but passengers brought their own food, and probably most of them slept on deck. Speed was as moderate as the fares, and varied with the winds, averaging six knots per hour; one might cross the Adriatic in a day, or, like Cicero, take three weeks from Patrae to Brundisium. A swift cruiser might make 230 knots in twenty-four hours.32 With favorable winds, six days carried one from Sicily to Alexandria or from Gades to Ostia, and four from Utica to Rome.33 The longest and most dangerous voyage was the six-month sail from Aden, in Arabia, to India, for monsoons forced vessels to hug the pirate-breeding coast all the way. At some time before A.D. 50 an Alexandrian Greek skipper, Hippalus, charted the periodicity of the monsoon winds and found that in certain seasons he could sail directly and safely across the Indian Ocean. The discovery was almost as important for that sea as the voyage of Columbus was for the Atlantic. From Egyptian ports on the Red Sea ships thereafter sailed to India in forty days. About A.D. 80 another Alexandrian captain, of unknown name, wrote a Periplus of the Erythrean Sea as a handbook for merchants trading along the east African coast and with India. Meanwhile other mariners had developed routes through the Atlantic to Gaul, Britain, Germany, even to Scandinavia and Russia.34 Never before in human memory had the seas borne so many vessels, products, and men.