The Roads to Rome

 

"The Roads to Rome

By Catherine Fletcher

Pegasus, 400 pages, $32

Sometime in 1934, a little east of Vienna, an 18- or 19-year-old Englishman named Patrick Leigh Fermor said goodbye to a car-owning friend and resumed the transcontinental trek he had determined to make on foot. As he approached the quiet village of Petronell, a distant object steadily rose on the horizon. "It turned out to be a Roman triumphal gateway," he later wrote in "A Time of Gifts" (1977), "standing in the middle of a field like a provincial version of the Arch of Titus; alone, enormous, and astonishing." Leigh Fermor had stumbled on the ruins of ancient Carnuntum, a Roman legionary camp from the time of Augustus onward that grew into an important city. For several centuries, Roman soldiers were posted here to keep an eye on the Danube and the barbarians beyond it.

You don't have to be an adventurer in Leigh Fermor's league to have had this sort of experience -- the frisson of finding something monumental and incongruent in a forlorn place, the intimacy of treading where so many nameless others walked before. Explore Europe beyond the big cities, slow down and look carefully, and serendipity will take over. The traces of the Romans, and especially their road network, are everywhere, as Catherine Fletcher reminds us in "The Roads to Rome."

Ms. Fletcher, a historian at Manchester Metropolitan University, puts road-building at the center of Rome's imperial project. Empires and roads have always gone hand in hand. Centuries before the Romans, the ancient Persians relied on an extensive road system (the so-called Royal Road) spanning some 8,000 miles to govern their vast empire. Halfway around the globe, the Inca Road running from Quito to Cuzco to Santiago covered over 5,000 miles, forming the nerve system of the largest pre-Columbian empire in the Americas. The Inca achievement is in its way the more impressive. The only world empire to cover more than 1 million square kilometers without the use of horses, the Inca employed trained runners, chasqui, to relay important information instead. No roads, no empire; know roads, know empire.

As Ms. Fletcher demonstrates, there is really nothing like the Roman road network. However you count, it ran for hundreds of thousands of miles. From northern England to interior Morocco, from the desolate eastern desert of Egypt to the Hungarian plain, roads were an adjunct of Roman power, a symbol and mechanism of imperial assimilation. "The art of road-making ranks high in the means of civilization," wrote Lady Morgan, a 19th-century Irish republican and traveler featured by Ms. Fletcher. Sometimes the Romans paved over pre-existing highways and byways, but even so, always to a higher technical standard -- remarkable for its consistency in a far-flung ancient empire. Bridges, tunnels and straight highways were imposed on the landscape, natural features be damned. Roman feats of civil engineering were meant to awe their defeated subjects -- and to facilitate the rapid deployment of the legions when such "soft power" failed.

In Rome's case, all roads led to one place. The proverb is medieval, but the idea is ancient. Early in his reign, Augustus installed the milliarium aureum, the golden milestone, in the Roman Forum. We don't know exactly what this monument was, but Plutarch and other writers claim that somehow "all" the roads, at least those of Italy, met at this point. The symbolism was potent then, and destined to remain so across millennia.

Ms. Fletcher's subtitle, "A History of Imperial Expansion," is inexcusably misleading. The book is in part a breezy history of Europe seen through the prism of how people remembered the ancient Roman road network; it is also a memoir of the author's own journeys across these roads. Thankfully, Ms. Fletcher has a knack for identifying the poignant and the picaresque, which keeps the book unpredictable and entertaining.

"The Roads to Rome" is primarily about the afterlife of Rome's roads and the variety of political and cultural meanings that have attached to them. Maintenance and upkeep faltered after the empire fell, but the network remained a unifying force nonetheless. Throughout the middle ages, the old Roman roads carried pilgrims, traders and crusaders. In the Renaissance and early modern times, painters and poets found inspiration on the road, not least on the Grand Tour. Emperors and would-be emperors, from Charlemagne to Napoleon to Mussolini, have variously emulated and tried to outdo the Roman example. Ms. Fletcher's ruminations on the fascist use and abuse of civil engineering are especially rich.

It is a shame that, for obvious security reasons, Ms. Fletcher could not travel the giant eastern and African circuits of Rome's system; consequently, half the story is lopped off, and the book is a study of the memory of Roman roads in Europe. In some ways, it was simpler to travel the non-European routes during the pax Romana than it is today.

The passages of first-person travel memoir are not exactly on a par with Patrick Leigh Fermor. It is a matter of taste whether one wants to read about trains running behind schedule because of cattle on the tracks, about Roman teenagers "snogging beneath the pine trees," or about the author's counsel to a "highly groomed American" regarding the squat-style toilets. Still, Ms. Fletcher is a charming writer. In Bucharest, a hotel manager "tells me I have a BBC accent, which I do, on account of occasionally working for the actual BBC." There are plenty of memorable scenes and evocative images. If you are stuck at home but wish you were walking along some ancient thoroughfare that is today off the beaten path, "The Roads to Rome" will keep you company.

---

Mr. Harper is a professor at the University of Oklahoma and a member of the Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute." [1]

1.  Paths Of Power. Harper, Kyle.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Dec 2024: A.15.