A Culture of Movement

The affairs of empire were responsible for the bulk of traffic on the road in Late Antiquity. The state and fiscal bureaucracy, as well as the military, were dependent upon communication, and communication rested entirely upon the movement of bodies. Couriers and lesser officials crossed the empire bearing letters, decrees, reports, and gifts (Bagnall 1993: 162-3). The army’s constant need for communication insured that, at any given time, several soldiers in every military unit would be away serving as couriers (Sherk 1974; Austin and Rankov 1995; Kolb 2001: 98-9).

A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1

Members of the governing elite traveled to take up positions in the military and in the provinces. Emperor and governors oversaw campaigns, inspected cities, and met with subjects.

Legal business often necessitated travel. Manumitted slaves had to present themselves before the provincial governor to receive their official grant of freedom. Every petition had to be hand-delivered (J. L. White 1986: 194-6, 215-18). When summoned, a person had to travel to the place of the assizes. By the later third century, the imperial law courts were no longer stationed in Rome, but had become roving entourages (Salway 2001: 59-60). It is indeed possible that the traveler we know as the Bordeaux pilgrim undertook the bulk of his journey for legal reasons: that he traveled to Constantinople, where the emperor Constantine was in residence from October ad 332 to May ad 333, before embarking on his religiously motivated journey to Jerusalem (Salway 2001: 36).

The most conspicuous group of travelers was undoubtedly the military, and every major road was engineered to accommodate personnel and baggage wagons. The deployment of troops entailed mass movement. Wherever the military went, fleets of vehicles and pack animals followed as well as crowds of servants, grooms, porters, and women. Careful planning was required to supply the needs of troops on the move. An often quoted passage from the Historia Augusta suggests that an itinerary, complete with dates and stopping places, was published two months ahead of time to insure adequate provisioning (SHA, Alex. Sev. 45. 2-3; see Ambrose, Exp. Ps. 118. 5. 2). Army recruits journeyed to Rome for induction and assignment to their individual units (Adams 2001: 146-52). Even when not on active duty, individual soldiers traveled and arranged for family members to visit. Tariff inscriptions indicate that soldiers’ wives and prostitutes paid higher tolls for their road use, presumably because the state wanted to profit from this group of regular travelers (Philostr. VA 1. 20).

Business affairs spurred other travelers. While large-scale importers and exporters preferred to use shipping routes, given the crushing cost of moving goods overland, small merchants shuttled between their sources of supply and their markets. According to Apuleius, trade ‘‘in honey, cheese, and other foodstuffs of that kind used by innkeepers,’’ kept one man traveling through Thessaly, Aetolia, and Boeotia (Apul. Met. 1.5). Tollbooth receipts show that donkey and camel caravans regularly traveled through the western and eastern deserts in Egypt (Adams 2001: 150; see Salway 2001: 26, 59). Effective agricultural exploitation demanded mobility as well as the use of migrant labor (Suet. Vesp. 1; Horden and Purcell 2000: 385-6). Wealthy landlords like Pliny, or his delegates, needed to visit their distant estates on a regular basis (Pliny, Ep. 3. 19. 4; 1. 3. 2; 9. 15. 3; 4. 14. 8). Artisans and entertainers traveled throughout the empire to ply their distinctive trades (Laurence 2001: 169; Grey 2004). Other mobile specialists included mercenaries, pirates, and robbers (Horden and Purcell 2000: 387-8). Severe economic pressure also fed population redistribution through the practices of tax evasion and slavery (De Ste Croix 1981: 216).

Family matters often prompted travel. Letters from the period suggest that the presence of a large number of expatriates in an area insured a steady flow of potential couriers (Llewelyn 1994: 26-9). The notes they carried back and forth often contained requests for further travel: that relatives come to celebrate birthdays and festivals, to attend funerals, or to look after the sick (Adams 2001: 148-50).

For the sake of higher education, elite students traveled to centers of learning like Athens, Antioch, or Beirut (Llewelyn 1998: 117-21; Watts 2004; see Cribiore, ch. 16). Many of these students would later travel to lecture or to take up positions. Augustine, for example, went first to Rome and then to Milan (August. Conf. 5.8;

5.  13). Research interests prompted Galen to travel to the Greek island of Lemnos to investigate a particular kind of soil (Gal. De simplicium medicamentorum temper-amentis 9). Sightseeing was another educational enterprise enjoyed by the moneyed (Lucian, Peregrinus 35; Apul. Met. 2. 21; Aelius Aristides, Or. 36; Chevallier 1976: 147; Salzman 2004).

Religion also fostered mobility. From its foundation, travel was one of the hallmarks of Christianity. Individual churches were founded by itinerant preachers and depended upon subsequent visits for material and ideological support (Didache 11-15; Llewelyn 1998: 54-7). Even after ecclesiastical authority became vested in local bishops and deacons, clergy still traveled on missionary voyages as well as to church synods and councils and, upon occasion, to disciplinary hearings (Wood 2001; Euseb. Vit. Const. 3. 6; see Sotinel 2004; Palladius, Dial. 7. 87-9; Socrates, Hist. eccl. 6. 15; Sozomen, Hist. eccl. 8. 16). The press of ecclesiastical travel provoked Ammianus Marcellinus’ complaint about the ‘‘throngs of bishops hastening hither and thither on the public mounts’’ (Amm. Marc. 21. 16. 18).

In Egypt, the practice of ‘‘cutting loose and taking off’’ (anachO)resis) was so common that it became the technical term for religious withdrawal. Recent studies have sharpened our awareness of monastic mobility, identifying travel as a widespread ascetic practice (Caner 2002; Dietz 2005).

Among the reasons for Christian travel, pilgrimage merits particular attention. Not that it was unknown in the ancient world: hope had long urged the sick to make their way to healing shrines and pilgrims to holy sites (Kotting 1950: 33-53). Arguably the most famous of these, Aelius Aristides, traveled to various Asclepian shrines in search of ‘‘comfort’’ from his multiple afflictions - a concept that combined the hope of healing with that of religious experience (Sacred Discourses 2. 49-50; 3. 6-7; 4. 83;

6.  1; see Pliny, Ep. 5. 19). In the wake of Constantine’s ambitious building program, however, the phenomenon of Christian pilgrimage grew tremendously in scope and importance.

While a few pilgrims had come to Palestine ‘‘for prayer and investigation’’ in the third century (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 6. 11. 12; Wilken 1992: 109), it was the lure of being ‘‘on the very spot’’ that brought Egeria to the Holy Land in the following century, and caused John Chrysostom to wish for the leisure and bodily strength to travel to Philippi to kiss the chains that had imprisoned Paul (Egeria, It. 4. 6; Chrysostom, Hom. in Ep. ad Ephes. 8. 2). So powerful was this sense of place that Jerome could promise Marcella that if she came to Palestine she would see not simply the sites of scriptural stories, but the actual events themselves. Together, he assures her, they will ‘‘see Lazarus come forth tied up in winding bands... and perceive the prophet Amos sounding the shepherd’s horn upon his mountain’’ (Ep. 46. 13; see

Ep. 108. 10). To be in the place of revelation was to be in the time of revelation (Wilken 1992: 120).

For others, the goal of pilgrimage was a person rather than a place (Frank 2000). So many visitors traveled to hear ‘‘a word’’ from the solitaries of Egypt that Apa Arsenius feared that the sea would become a highway (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 28). Other monks, however, welcomed these visitors, and monastic houses sprang up at convenient intervals along the main pilgrim routes precisely in order to supply the needs of pilgrims (Hunt 1982: 62-6; Hirschfeld 1992: 55-6). Along with food and lodging (for up to a week, according to Palladius, Hist. Laus. 7), they provided a certain amount of tour guidance. Their confidence in being able to identify the places where scriptural events had occurred rested, according to Egeria, upon a ‘‘tradition... handed down to them by their predecessors’’ (Egeria, It. 12. 2-4). Their hospitality was not wholly disinterested, as pilgrimage had become an increasingly common prelude to entering the monastic life. Certainly, the record of people who passed through Jerome’s monastery in Bethlehem constitutes a virtual Who's Who of the late fourth-century Christian world (Clark 1992: 28-33).

Not all early Christian travel was voluntary. Both Paul and Ignatius were compelled by the state to go to Rome and their death. During the Decian persecution, Cyprian, along with other clergy, went into exile. His place of exile was no more remote than the suburbs of Carthage, but from that remove he penned (in his De lapsis) a defense of flight that contained the seeds of a theology for refugees. Others had to travel much farther. When Constantine banished Athanasius from Alexandria, he sent him to Gaul, in what was to be only the first of five exiles (Brakke 1995: 8). Banished from Gaul, Hilary traveled east to Constantinople.

In the face of the Germanic migrations of the fifth and sixth centuries, many were forced to take to the road. The sack of Rome in ad 410 initiated waves of migration to Africa and the eastern provinces (Jerome, Ep. 128. 5). And in the sixth century, Africans fled to Spain from their Vandal-occupied homeland (Dietz 2005: 22-3).

In sum, Late Antiquity was an astonishingly mobile society, profoundly marked by displacement. Soldiers, government officials, and the well-to-do, as well as artisans, entertainers, pilgrims, Christian clergy, and small merchants, readily undertook longdistance travel. Regional travel was regularly undertaken by farmers, pastoralists, and migrant workers. Ascetics were often wanderers. Litigation, persecution, and social unrest compelled rich and poor alike to engage in evasive behavior. But, no matter what the circumstances or motivation, all travelers used the same network of roads and shipping routes that spanned the empire. To the details of this impressive infrastructure we now turn.