It's lovely to be back at Novel
Adventurers! Last time I was here I wrote about whether it's possible to
get a visa to the ancient world (here). Because, you see, I write murder mysteries
set in ancient Greece. My heroes are Nicolaos, the elder brother of
Socrates, and Diotima, the greatest lady philosopher of her age, who just
happened to be Socrates' teacher. Ancient history is an interesting
subject for many people, but for me, it's also a job skill.
That includes knowing how people
traveled about. A lot of us equate rapid and distant travel with the
modern world. It's not true!
I once took the ferry from Bodrum on
the coast of Turkey, to Crete, in the Mediterranean Sea, halfway to Egypt.
(There's an amazing Crusader castle at Bodrum, by the way). The
trip took about the same time as a trireme would have taken, two and a half
millennia ago.
Of course, anyone who's ever
traveled on Greek ferries knows that getting to the destination per schedule
isn't necessarily part of the ticket. A more telling example is that the
overnight train from Athens to Istanbul is no faster today than a rider with a
spare mount could have managed in the ancient world. The Persians had by
then created a system called the King's Messengers, which was a relay system of
super-fast riders on quality mounts. Those guys could move a message from
one side of the Persian Empire to the other in three days, and that was the
largest empire the world had yet seen. Three days isn't up to internet
speed, but we're talking about written letters, and that sort of time is on a
par with a modern postal service.
If you wanted to travel about, there
was no one to stop you. No passports. No visas. No border
guards. (City guards were another matter). Also, no highway patrol.
If you traveled far from home and got attacked and killed, then your body
would be left to rot in some ditch by the road. No one back home was ever
going to know what happened to you. Nor would locals necessarily care
except to complain about the smell as they passed by. Self-defence skills
were at a premium! Another minor problem was being attacked and enslaved
by pirates, or held for ransom. This actually happened to the famous
philosopher Plato. He was captured on a return trip from Sicily, and his
friends had to buy him back.
The funny thing is, everything I
just listed is something that can happen to you today, if you stray into the
wrong parts.
Greek shipping went a considerable
distance. It's a little known fact that the French city of Marseilles was
originally the Greek colony of Massalia. Incredibly, there've been grave
goods found in Britain that are almost certainly from Mycenaean Greece. They're
all in Cornwall--at the Rillaton Barrow in fact--so it's likely some Greek
trader got his boat past Gibraltar and up the Atlantic coast, and then took off
across the English Channel. The earliest Greek who we know for absolute
sure got that far was a fellow called Pytheas, who came from Massalia. He
reported landing on an island called Pritannia. It's no coincidence that
today we call the same place Britannia. Pytheas continued on to Norway,
where he saw the midnight sun.
Going in the other direction, there have
been scraps of silk found in the grave of a German warrior dated to 700BC.
That's way early for the Silk Road to be open, but by the time of
Nicolaos and Diotima, the road is open at least as far as Persia. It was
therefore possible, in theory, for someone in Nico's time to make it from
Britain to China. And everywhere you went, there'd be different
languages, different foods, and wildly different cultures. Which is all
to the good if you happen to be me and writing that period. I often think
that to be an adventurer in that time must have been like living in an epic
fantasy.
