According to the Acta, Ignatius took ship at Dyrrachium and sailed through the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas to Portus Augusti, the new har- bour completed by Trajan at the mouth of the Tiber: he desired to land at Puteoli, but strong wind would not permit. There can be little doubt that this voyage, like that from Seleucia to Smyrna, is a pure invention: the short passage to Brundisium would be preferred as the natural and ordinary conclusion of the march along the Egnatian Way.
The truth is, as Hilgenfeld has seen (though Lightfoot * argues against him), that the writer of the Acta, who possessed no authority except the letters (of which he made very little use), and who had extremely little knowledge of roads and geography, tried to model the journey on St. Paul’s so far as the few facts known to him per- mitted. He took the journey to Seleucia from Ac 134: there he made the martyr embark for Smyrna, 7.e. on board a ship ‘to sail by the coasts of Asia’ (Ac 27”), and afterwards on another which sailed close to Puteoli (Ac 28"), but was blown past it to the great harbour (which the writer had heard of in his own time, but which had prob- ably not been completed when Ignatius died). He speaks as if Ignatius exercised as much authorit on this ship as St. Paul did on his (Ac 27%), which is evidently absurd. The brethren come forth from Rome to greet the martyr, as they did to welcome St. Paul (Ac 28%). Everything is fanciful and invented ; and all is the invention of a person who had only rather vague ideas of the journey.
The distances by land on this route may beroughly estimated as follows, according to the Itineraries :—
Rome to Brundisium 360 miles Brundisium to Dyrrachium or Aulona : 2 days
Dyrrachium or Aulona to Neapolis 381 miles Neapolis to Troas . : . about 3 days Troas to Antioch by Philadelphia
and Julia . , 880 miles
Troas to Antioch by Laodicea 9300 Antioch to Cesarea - 365 ee Ceesarea to Alexandria . ; ASD yere
Total: Rome to Alexandria by Nea- polis, Troas, and Julia, 5days and 2420 _,, Rome to Alexandria by Neapolis,
Troas, and Laodicea . 5 days and 2470 _,, Dyrrachium or Aulona to Callipolis 630 miles Callipolis to Lampsacus . 2 hours Lampsacus to Troas : 60 miles
Total: Rome to Alexandria by Lamp-
sacus . . 2 days and 2730 or 2780 ,,
Dyrrachium or Aulona to Constan-
tinople . : : 5 . pee OOl ss Constantinople by Ancyra to An- tioch OM 5
Total: Rome to Alexandria by An- cya. : : 2 days and 2660 ,, ix. DURATION OF JOURNEYS ON THE POST-ROAD BETWEEN ROME AND THE EAST, —The time re- * Ignatius and Polycarp, ii. p. 389.
386 ROADS AND TRAVEL (IN NT)
ROADS AND TRAVEL (IN NT)
quired to travel by the overland route requires a much more complicated investigation than is the case with the sea routes; the time would vary within very wide limits, according to the taste and character and equipment and physical powers of the individual traveller; as a rule, the govern- ment couriers went most rapidly; ordinary tra- vellers in carriages came next to them, and some- times equalled them; travellers on foot were of course much slower, and travelled shorter daily stages. But on the whole we shall find reason to think that current views, which are all founded on Friedliinder, exaggerate the speed of travelling, and neglect the practical facts which restrict the rate over a long journey ; the eminent authority just named takes exceptional cases (which are mentioned because they were exceptional, whereas the ordinary cases are not recorded, just because they were ordinary and familiar) as examples of the regular practice.
(a) Travellers on foot seem to have accomplished about 16 or 20 Roman miles per day. This estimate of 20, as stated in the present writer’s Church in the Roman Empire, p. 65, was founded on ex- perience and observation in the country. It is confirmed by a fragmentary itinerary of a journey through the Cilician Gates, dating from the Ist cent., in which the daily stages vary from 18 to 22 Roman miles,* and by the principle of Roman law (mentioned by Friedlander, p. 25) that the number of days’ grace allowed by the pretor to parties at a distance was reckoned at the rate of one day for each 20 miles. The estimate may seem short, but a consideration of the distances, mutationes and mansiones, on the Bordeaux Pilgrim’s Itiner- ary would suggest that the average daily stage was even shorter, viz. 16 to 18 Roman miles ;*+ and this shorter estimate is in accordance with the following unbiassed testimony. Sir H. Johnston, in the Nineteenth Century, 1902, pp. 728, 729, speaking of the rate of travel on foot, suited for the presumably hardy and strong African work- men going to the Transvaal mines, says: ‘It should be laid down as an absolute rule that not more than 15 miles [7.e. 16 or 17 Roman miles] are to be accomplished in one day.’
It may therefore be confidently assumed that the ordinary rate for a long journey on foot was about 17 Roman miles per day. At this rate the distance from Antioch to Rome would be com- pleted by the party in which Jenatius travelled in about ninety - five days continuously: eighty - six being spent in walking, seven on shipboard between Smyrna and Neapolis,t and two between Dyrr- achium and Brundisium. To this some days must be added for detention in Smyrna and Troas, where evidently some halt was made, and there may possibly have been some other such stops by the way, especially in Tarsus, for the officer in command to report to the Roman governor of Cilicia,—say, about 104 days from start to finish.