INTRODUCTION



CAESAR: Let me have men about me that are fat,

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’nights:

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

—William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

This was an eagerly awaited journey, designed to follow as closely as possible the ancient routes of three Roman roads: the Via Appia and the Via Traiana in Italy and the Via Egnatia across the Balkans and through four countries. I would follow several travelers, most prominently Julius Caesar on his way to wage war with his onetime son-in-law and lost friend, Pompey. This three-month-long journey had to be launched despite the reality that a pandemic was roaring its way around the globe. After a year’s delay waiting for the proper vaccines and for key countries such as Italy and Greece to reopen after requiring all their citizens to isolate, the trip could finally be planned for the fall of 2021.

In crossing a handful of borders, eight Covid tests were required, some from pharmacies within two days of crossing, others at border stations performed by customs officials poking long-stemmed, cotton-tipped sticks through car windows. Paperwork had to be presented at each stop so officials could track me down if anyone I was around during these transits came down with the disease. It was unnerving knowing that despite two vaccinations and a booster, I could still get sick and be forcibly isolated, unable to travel to do my work. But the tests—some costing heavy fees, some free at a couple of borders—were always negative. Masks were worn everywhere, especially in Italy, and businesses were rigorous in checking this American’s CDC proof of vaccination card. Only one uninformed restaurant worker, after I had visited dozens of such establishments over three months, refused to acknowledge the CDC card and turned me away. Fortunately, in the tiny village of Nemi, south of Rome, there was another restaurant nearby that understood the card was all that American travelers could have. And its food was excellent! We foreigners did not have access to the digital Green Pass system available to Italians.

These hurdles aside, the trip worked out well. With one major exception. Albania, which has a nice selection of preserved Via Egnatia segments, was open to travelers midpandemic during the beginning of this journey. In early November, the plan was to go by ferry with my Brindisi friend, Danny Vitale. He had offered to use his Italian-registered vehicle during a three-day visit since my French rental car was not allowed in that country. That mobility would allow us to visit the battlefield near Dyrrachium, today the port city of Durrës, where Pompey defeated Caesar and chased him into Greece. Then, in neighboring Greece at the Battle of Pharsalus, Caesar eventually destroyed his rival.

Our plan was to make our base in Elbasan, a city in the middle of this section of Albania. In Roman times, when the province was known as Illyricum, this city harbored a big way station, a “mansion,” along the Via Egnatia that eventually grew into a rather sizable city. The drive across this west-east section—Durrës to the North Macedonian border—would take only three hours, so distances are short and easily doable in a series of day trips in the time we had set aside.

But the pandemic in that eastern Balkan nation grew, and our tickets were canceled. The ferry service let only commercial truckers on board. Commerce must still be allowed to flow, pandemic or not. Tourists—even working travelers—were blocked. Maybe it was a blessing. After three months of travel, I never tested positive in the handful of tests I took. Perhaps going to Albania would have been my downfall, and Danny and I would have been forced into isolation for ten days, a disaster for both our schedules.

* * *

For this book’s purposes, I have chosen out of habit to use B.C. and A.D. for ancient dates. They correspond to BCE and CE used by other writers. For the three-month journey, I have told the story in a sequence starting in Rome and ending in Brindisi for the Via Appia. Then, I jumped across the Adriatic to North Macedonia, down into Greece, and on to Istanbul in Turkey. Many places were visited out of sequence. To keep things simple, I wrote about them as if they were taken in order. For example, I wrote about the Egnatia segments to Philippi that I had missed my first time through and then experienced on my return trip from Turkey. And I wrote about Sinuessa, Minturno, and Itri as I was returning to Rome. Discovery is the crucial element of a journey like this, and I would sometimes learn about places and their roles along the Via Appia and the Via Egnatia after I had passed through and was headed elsewhere. Such places were worth a return trip, and those visits became key elements in the story.

Last, I visited places near the Via Appia but not on it, places such as Bari on the Adriatic coast and Troia and Herdonia farther inland. These were towns and ruins on the Via Traiana, a road ordered built by Emperor Trajan three hundred years after the Via Appia. And I had longed to see the ancient ruins of Cannae, overlooking the plain where Hannibal handily defeated a massive Roman army. Since Hannibal had driven his Carthaginians along portions of the Via Appia in Southern Italy and is written about elsewhere, I felt Cannae was important.

And during a short drive away from the Via Appia, I visited the Golfo di Pozzuoli, where the towns of Bacoli, Baia, and Pozzuoli are located. Pozzuoli, known in ancient times as Puteoli, is where Saint Paul came ashore to face his Roman captors. This bay was a common spot where travelers, diplomats, and armies would disembark from ships and head, on secondary roads, to join the Via Appia at Capua or Sinuessa to begin a journey to either Rome or points southeast.

All these places are a cherished part in this story. But to keep the sequences in order, I tell their stories in the final chapter.

* * *

Of course, an undertaking of a book of this magnitude could not have been accomplished without a lot of help. I met most of these good folks while traveling, simply by asking a lodgings host if they knew someone who was an expert or who could help me solve a particular problem. Almost none of them were lined up in advance. They fell generously into place as I went from town to town and were eager and willing to help. It is a long list, and I wish I could describe in detail how each contributed.

I need to start with my wife, Connie Disney, who tolerates my solo working travel and is always available for consoling and advice. She will occasionally meet up for a few weeks’ stretch. But the pandemic threats kept her at home this time. I also need to recognize friends, both accomplished historians, who reviewed my manuscript to weed out any errors or to force me to control any speculations. They are Dr. Leonard Chiarelli of Salt Lake City, Utah, a leading authority on Muslims in Sicily who has helped me with more than one book, and Lou Mendola of Palermo, Sicily, who with his wife, Jacqueline Alio, are authorities on the Kingdom of Sicily that includes much of Southern Italy. The writings of these good folks were an invaluable part of my research.

And I am grateful to the website Poetry in Translation for granting permission to use its translations of the Roman poet Horace’s Satires and the ancient writer Virgil’s Georgics.

Others who helped:

EMILIANO BOMBARDIERI, Ariccia

FRANCESCA GNANI, Albano

STEFANO ACETELLI, Campagnano di Roma, guide for Rome segment of the Via Appia

ROBERTO D’OTTAVI, Terracina, host

SABINA MAGLIOCCO, University of British Columbia, folklorist

ANTONIO IANNIELLO, Santa Maria Capua Vetere, host

ANTONIO ROBERTO, San Nazzaro, host

ROBERTO PELLINO, San Giorgio del Sannio, guide

MARIA GRAZIE MAIONE, San Giorgio del Sannio, interpreter

DANNY VITALE, Brindisi, guide and friend

MARCO CAZZATO, Brindisi, B&B owner

CHRISTIAN NAPOLITANO, Muro Tenente, archaeologist

SONJA PENDIKOSKA, Ohrid, North Macedonia, host

VALENTINA GODOROSKA, the Via Egnatia south of Struga, North Macedonia, guide

VIKTOR BUSHINOSKI, Heraclea, North Macedonia, guide

GEORGIA DELIMPANIDOU AND GEORGE RAPTIS, Edessa, Greece, hosts

MAKIS KONIDIS, Edessa, Greece, amateur historian and pilot

HARIS TSOUGARIS, Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece, archaeologist

ALEXANDROS LAMPRIANIDIS, Philippi, Greece, guide

SOULA TSOLAKI, Kavala, Greece, guide

LÜTFI BAYDAR, Turkey, guide

ANGELOFABIO ATTOLICO, Bari, author

NICO MOSCATELLI, Foggia, authority on Herdonia and the Via Traiana

THE FAMILY OF GENNARO OPERA; wife, Silvia Damiani; daughter, Anna Opera, Bacoli, for hospitality

ARIANNA CASTIGLIA, Bacoli, guide

GINO PEZZULLO, Piscina Mirabilis, Bacoli, guide

GENNARO RIPA, Minturno, the Via Appia, historian

MARGARET STENHOUSE, Ariccia, author of The Goddess of the Lake

MARIA GUNILLA, Nemi, B&B owner



2A BEGINNING

Leaving great Rome for Aricia, a modest inn

Received me: the rhetorician Heliodorus

Was with me, most learned of Greeks: to Forum Appii,

Then, crammed with bargemen and stingy innkeepers. We

Took this lazily in two days, though keener travellers

Than us take only one: the Appian’s easier taken slow!

—Roman poet Horace

In the early fall of 2021, as the poet Horace did roughly 2,060 years before, I left “great Rome” for Aricia, today’s Ariccia, a mere twenty miles distant, following as closely as possible his route, known today as the Strada Statale 7, or SS7. He knew the stones beneath his feet only as the Via Appia, which, beginning in 312 B.C., was hammered across wide plains, chiseled through valleys, cut through deep woods, and built up along the muddy edges of marshes almost three hundred years before his journey, likely undertaken sometime between 40 and 37 B.C. He doesn’t go into much detail about why he was making the journey, but history tells us it was part of a diplomatic mission ordered by Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, to help mend his tenuous political relationship with his former co-ruler Mark Antony.

With a diverse assortment of friends and fellow diplomats, Horace traveled along the Via Appia’s well-laid-out route, leaving it at Beneventum where his party turned eastward and followed a rough collection of undeveloped and soggy footpaths to the Adriatic coast. At the tiny fishing village of Barium, they headed south toward their destination, the port city of Brundisium in southeast Italy.

More than a century later, under the emperor Trajan, this muddy divergence from the Via Appia would be remade into the Via Traiana. Historians differ in judging the time it took travelers to make this Rome-Beneventum-Barium-Brundisium journey; best guesses range from thirteen to seventeen days. They did it on foot, riding in carts, and on horseback. The mostly level divergence eastward to the coast would have saved the exhausted travelers one or two days. This route avoided the rolling hills found along the traditional Via Appia passage from Beneventum south to Horace’s birthplace of Venusia, and then turned eastward at Tarentum on the inside of Italy’s heel.

Why did Horace write about this journey? And for which meeting between Octavian’s and Antony’s negotiators was the journey undertaken? Historians disagree, and we can only speculate. Today, Horace’s Fifth Satire is likely viewed as a work of fiction, based loosely perhaps on a real journey at some point between 40 and 37 B.C. Some, including the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, believe he intentionally treated lightly a trip of such diplomatic importance “to convince his enemies that his thoughts and occupations on the road were far from being of a serious or political nature.” After all, Horace was a poet not a historian like Livy or Tacitus.

The various negotiations that resulted in at least two major treaties followed a love-hate relationship between Julius Caesar’s grandnephew and designated heir, Octavian, and Octavian’s close ally Antony. The pair had teamed up to defeat, in 42 B.C., Caesar’s murderers, Brutus and Cassius, at Philippi in Northern Greece. They already, a year earlier, had divided the then-vast Roman Republic into three parts, much like Caesar had done decades earlier with his future enemy Pompey and the general who had defeated Spartacus, Crassus. Following Caesar’s murder, Octavian and Antony, along with the lesser-known Roman general Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, carved up the soon-to-become empire: Octavian controlled the empire’s west, Antony took over the east, and Lepidus was handed North Africa. Octavian eventually shoved aside Lepidus, who was exiled to Circeii (modern Circeo), a prominent mountain on the Tyrrhenian coast south of Rome.

This left just Octavian and Antony to squabble. Originally, in 40 B.C., in a gesture of continued goodwill, the Treaty of Brundisium included the marriage of Octavian’s sister, Octavia, to Antony. (Likewise, Antony, a few years later, handed over his stepdaughter Claudia to become Octavian’s bride in what reportedly was a short, unconsummated marriage.)


Copyright © 2023 by John Keahey