‘Smart Gaulish professors are training the lawyers of Britain; even in Iceland there’s talk of hiring rhetoricians’
Juvenal, Satire XV,
2nd century AD
Stand in ancient Alexandria in the summer, close your eyes and breathe in, and what you might have noticed, above all, was the smell. The smell was wonderful. Or, to be more precise, the smell of Alexandria was not wonderful; the smell was not appalling – and that, in itself, was wonderful.
Ancient cities stank. Rome might be famous today for the engineering brilliance of its sewers, for the magnificent architecture of the Cloaca Maxima, for drains so broad you could boat along them and sewers so wide you could drive a fully laden wagon of hay along them.1 But even they were not enough to stop the stench of this city of a million bodies.* Rome’s streets, as its satirists made clear, were a symphony of smells.
There was the smell of anxious men, sweating under their heavy woollen togas in the heat of the day; there was the stink of similarly sweaty animals, of horses and oxen, straining up streets, dragging carts of marble; there was the smell of food wafting from the pots – ancient takeaways – carried on the heads of slaves as they ran along, bringing hot meals to their masters; and there was the far less appealing smell of decomposing animals.2 In the summer, things only got worse, as the air in cities filled with the heavy, dank smell of lakes and rivers as they dried out, their edges turning marshy in the heat, as everything, everywhere, started to rot.3
There was another kind of stale water to be smelt, too: that of the urine that swilled in massive jars at street corners. The jars were kept for cleaning – nothing whitens a toga like urine – but, when they occasionally smashed, they merely added to the general filth, shattering and splashing entire streets (and unfortunate passers-by) in piss.4 Richer citizens might try to smother such stenches with perfume, with cinnamon and lavender – but they filtered through nonetheless.5
But Alexandria was different. Admittedly, it still had bodies and filth and piss. But, despite its size – perhaps half a million inhabitants – and despite being constructed with its buildings so close together that they seemed to stand almost ‘another on another’, Alexandria didn’t suffer from the stifling, stinking airs that made life in other cities so unbearable. Standing with its face to the Mediterranean and its back to a great lake topped up by the Nile, the air in Alexandria was always fresh, always moving. Sea breezes passed along its broad marble streets all summer long. As the geographer Strabo noted with admiration, ‘the healthiness of the air is also worthy of remark’, and, as a result of it, ‘the Alexandrians pass the summer most pleasantly.’6 Everyone considered the city to be a ‘fount of health’.7
There were smells here, too – but pleasant ones. You could smell the world in this single city since, every day, by camelback and horseback, by boat and by barge, from India and Arabia, Somalia and China, a world of spice and scent was brought into Alexandria, filling its air with perfume.8 Frankincense smouldered, constantly, on a thousand altars, and ‘censers, filled with spices, breathed out a divine smell.’9
But, according to one fourth-century writer, there was yet another smell in Alexandria – the foetid stench of moral decay. Read the ferocious writings of a fourth-century Christian author and bishop named Epiphanius, and what you find is not an account of a city of handsome buildings and refreshing breezes, but of a place that is far darker, a place that demands such words as ‘dirt’, ‘uncleanness’, ‘pollution’ and ‘defilement’.10 Because, when he was a young man, Bishop Epiphanius had met a group of people in Alexandria whom he would remember for the rest of his life with horror. In his usual florid style, he described them as like ‘fruit from a dunghill’; they were like scorpions; they were like a swarm of insects.11 They were also sexually very attractive – and, given what happened next, that mattered.
Epiphanius’ encounter with the dunghill had begun innocuously enough – even pleasantly. One day in Alexandria, he had been approached by some women who were, he writes, ‘very lovely in their outward appearance’.12 The attraction seems to have been mutual, for, as Epiphanius somewhat immodestly records, the women ‘wanted me in my youth’.13 However, their flirtation was – or so Epiphanius later said – far from innocent.
Precisely what happened next between Epiphanius and these women is difficult to say: we only have Epiphanius’ record of it, and extracting information from the insults and the insect similes is not easy. One thing is clear: the sort of things the women got up to were things he considered to be so awful, so dangerous, that the outraged bishop felt he had to warn others about them. He would not, he writes, ‘dare to utter the whole of this if I were not somehow compelled to.’14 Still, having felt himself so compelled, the good bishop then braves the topic with detail, vigour and no lack of the word ‘emission’.15 And what slowly becomes clear is that, on that long-ago day in Alexandria, Epiphanius had stumbled on a secret sect.
In his breathless account, he explains what happens at a typical meeting. First, the women would lure young men in, with ‘whichever is prettier flaunt[ing] herself as bait.’16 As the gathering begins, the men and women – some of whom are married couples – first greet each other with a secret signal in which they ‘clasp hands in supposed greeting’, then ‘men give women and women give men a tickling of the palm.’17 Once everyone has been welcomed in, all the men and women would begin eating and drinking – the food at such events was always ‘lavish’, while the drinking (naturally) took the form of a ‘bout’.18 Such feasting was merely the start. The real action in this secretive ceremony only began once the ‘overstuffed veins’ of these worshippers had become warm with wine. That, Epiphanius wrote, was when these people would ‘get hot for each other.’19 At that moment, ‘the husband will move away from his wife and tell her – speaking to his own wife –’ to get up and ‘perform The Love with the brother.’20 This new ‘wretched’ couple then had to stand and, in front of the entire assembled group of worshippers, make love. According to Epiphanius, that was the very least of it. For these people then went on to do even worse things – some of which he reveals in revolting detail, and some of which he spares the reader. But then, the Bishop of Salamis – suddenly prudish – shuts down his narrative. There are, he says, some ‘obscenities’ that he will not go into.21
His disgust at the people performing this ceremony is not merely because their actions are, to him, repulsive. Almost more disturbing to him is the religion that they professed. For these perverted men and women considered themselves not to be part of any obscene unknown cult, nor any debauched Roman religion; nor were they members of any other pagan group.
Instead, they considered themselves to be Christian.
When Christians came to tell the story of how their tiny sect conquered the world, it would have two beginnings. There was the first beginning: the moment when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of a virgin. But then, almost as important, Christianity had a second, more bureaucratic, beginning, which came with the conversion of a Jewish tent-maker named Paul. At first, Paul was (famously) not entirely convinced by the Christian message. His initial reaction to this new sect was to persecute it, vigorously. Which was why, one day in around AD 40, Paul had set out to Damascus: he was hoping to find followers of Jesus, bind them and bring them back to Jerusalem. In the magnificent words of the King James Version, he was ‘yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord’.22
But Paul never carried out this particular persecution. For, while he was on the road to Damascus, ‘suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’23 God had spoken; Paul was converted; Christianity was changed forever. After this dramatic encounter, Paul went blind for three days, and was led into Damascus and taken to a house on Straight Street; when he recovered, he set out to spread the word with the zeal of the convert. To this day, Christians walk in his footsteps, marvel at his dedication, wonder at how far he travelled. And they are right to, for it has been calculated that Paul travelled 10,000 miles over land and sea to spread the Christian word.24
And yet, only to marvel at Paul’s travels is also to miss the point. What was almost more remarkable than Paul’s journeys was the breathtaking rise in infrastructure and transport that enabled him to make them: in other words, the roads, grain ships, seaways and highways of the Roman Empire. Read the accounts of Paul’s travels one way, and they are a chronicle of awesome faith; read them another, and they are a chronicle of the even more awesome efficiency of Roman transport networks.
Paul might be famous for those 10,000 miles but, as the historian Wayne Meeks has pointed out, that distance is puny in comparison to the distances that others travelled in this period: the gravestone of a merchant found in Phrygia, in modern Turkey, records that he had travelled seventy-two times to Rome – a trip that is perhaps 2,000 km in either direction.25 This is not to say that travel was wholly safe: it wasn’t. People consulted interpreters of dreams about travel anxieties almost more than anything else, and not without cause: as the parable of the Good Samaritan clearly shows, being beaten up and left for dead while on the road was a well-known hazard.26 But, nonetheless, in this period travel was being revolutionized. Within the empire, Meeks writes, people ‘travelled more extensively and more easily than had anyone before them – or would again until the nineteenth century.’27
The Roman Empire was on the move, by land and river and sea. Not all of it: most people lived local, even parochial lives.* But those who did travel could go far. The white-flecked waters at the mouth of the harbour of Alexandria were passed, day and night, by the white sails of Roman ships. The boats might themselves be unglamorous but they were weighed down with the wealth of the world: with grain and linen, wine and oil, and, most precious of all, fragrance. Read a list of ancient trade tariffs and, through the dry legal prose, you can all but smell the empire’s love of scent and exoticism: there you will find cinnamon and white pepper, myrrh and ginger, Indic spice and aloe, Barbary leaf and Babylonian furs; there is ivory and Indian iron, sardonyx and pearls, and emeralds and diamonds, as well as Indian lions (‘and lionesses’), panthers (‘male and female’), leopards, eunuchs and, finally, ‘Indian hair’.28 Bulky and big-bellied, these merchantmen were not as fast as the other ships, but they were more reliable. They were so stable that even emperors, with the entire imperial navy at their disposal, sometimes preferred to set to sea in them. ‘Don’t travel by galleys,’ the emperor Caligula – in unusually helpful mood – had once warned a client king who was setting out to Palestine, ‘but take one of our direct Italy–Alexandria merchant ships.’29
Roman writers tend to be surprisingly underwhelmed by all this. Feeling awed by those Roman roads that run across fields like, as Thomas Hardy had it, ‘the pale parting-line in hair’, tends to be a modern habit; Romans were not, in general, given to going into ecstasies over their transport infrastructure.30 You are far more likely to find Roman authors expressing irritation with the shortcomings of this road, or the noise of that one, than breathless admiration for the whole system. But even the Romans could, occasionally, be moved to praise their roads and not blame them. The construction of one new arterial road in Campania was, for example, so welcome that it moved one Roman author named Statius to poetry. He listed the builders’ tasks: how they first dug furrows and trenches, then ‘prepare[d] a basin . . . so that the foundations do not wobble.’31 They are lines that have, admittedly, found their way into few ancient anthologies.
But there are far sillier things to eulogize than a nice firm road. Just as writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century reveal a people marvelling at a world that is speeding up – at steamers that race across the oceans; at trains that can travel faster than fairies, faster than witches – so, just occasionally, do Roman writers express admiration for how their empire’s infrastructure was changing the world. Statius sent the above poem to his friend with a note explaining that it should arrive more swiftly than usual. The marvellous new road meant that ‘the very irksome delay’ that used to affect all post, caused by the heavy sandy ground in that region, had now gone.32 No longer did the hapless traveller have to drag along his cart as ‘malignant Earth sucked in his wheels’; instead a route ‘that used to wear out a solid day barely takes two hours.’33
Whether or not most Romans paused to think much about it, the scale of the trade that travelled through their empire by land and by sea was staggering. Archaeologists, who have used the number of shipwrecks found at the bottom of the Mediterranean as a guide to the number of ships that once sailed on its surface, suggest it was not until the nineteenth century that Mediterranean trade regained its Roman levels.34 Greco-Roman traders gained such detailed knowledge of other lands that they could write authoritative guidebooks on the quality of the water in Indian ports and what sold well there (Italian wine was, apparently, considered a particularly exotic delicacy). International trade with the subcontinent grew so much that Roman writers fretted about the trade deficit that existed between it and Rome. ‘At the very lowest computation, India, the Seres, and the Arabian Peninsula, withdraw from our empire one hundred millions of sesterces every year,’ wrote Pliny, adding, primly, ‘so dearly do we pay for our luxury and our women.’35
The number of coins in circulation increased in this period, as did the production of metal. Analysis of the ice caps of Greenland show that air pollution, caused by the smelting of such metals as lead, copper and silver, would not reach Roman levels again until the sixteenth or seventeenth century.36 Another measure of the high levels of trade in this era is the amount of ancient packing material that remains – in other words, of Roman pots. Amphorae, which in Roman times were used to transport more or less everything, were produced on a colossal scale. To understand quite how colossal, travel to Rome, walk southwards down the Tiber from the Colosseum, and you will see a mound, patchily covered in grass. This fifty-metre-high hillock – which is known as Monte Testaccio – is made entirely from broken oil amphorae. Inside the mound lie the fragments of an estimated fifty-three million amphorae, in which an estimated six billion litres of oil were imported into Rome.37
Not only did people travel far; they also travelled fast. The speed of Roman travel, particularly for the wealthiest, was astonishing. Early in its imperial history, Rome’s emperors had set up the Roman imperial post – probably in imitation of similar systems that had been read about – and envied – in ancient accounts about Persia. This was not a post system as modern minds might imagine it, to be used by everyone, but was for imperial messengers, and its infrastructure duly demonstrated imperial ambition and grandeur: every twenty-four miles or so was a rest station; at each station, forty of the finest, swiftest horses were stabled, along with a proportionate number of grooms. A courier could therefore arrive, switch horses and set off again, and travelling in this way might cover ‘a ten days’ journey in a single day’ – in other words, it is now thought, 160 miles.38
As the historian Procopius explained, emperors had set such a system up so that if there was a war, mutiny or any other disaster anywhere in the empire, the news could reach Rome fast – and it seems to have worked. The evidence for this is unusually good, because, while such disasters may have been unpleasant for the emperor experiencing them, they have been splendidly useful to later historians, since imperial deaths and assassinations tend to appear in histories with careful time stamps. They can thus be used to calculate how fast ancient travel could, in extremis, be. And the answer is: very fast indeed. After the death of Nero, for example, a messenger travelled from Rome to Northern Spain (a distance overland of around 1,800 km) in a breathless seven days. Probably that messenger did the bulk of the journey over the sea. Nonetheless, it is very, very fast.39
The results of all this travel could be seen everywhere. Stand in second-century Rome and – at least according to the rather xenophobic poet Juvenal – you would be hard-pressed to spot a native Roman there. Rome, he wrote, was a city full of foreigners. See that customs official over there? Egyptian. That slave over there, who’s made millions? Another Egyptian. Remember that man who pipped you to the post when you applied for a job? He’s a Greek. Then there were the Syrians, the Jews, and yet more Greeks who ‘flock in from high Sicyon, or Macedonia’s uplands, from Andros or Samos, from Tralles and Alabanda . . .’40
It wasn’t just people who were on the move, either. Head to a fancy Roman dinner party and the supper on your plate could easily be as international as the guests reclining at your side, for, as one satirist put it, the ‘bottomless gullet’ and ‘tireless gluttony’ of Rome was perpetually on ‘eager quest of dainties from all quarters’. A single gourmand might, for their dinner party, source ‘a peacock from Samos, a woodcock from Phrygia, cranes of Media, a kid from Ambracia, a young tunny from Chalcedon, a lamprey from Tartessus, codfish from Pessinus, oysters from Tarentum, cockles from Sicily, a swordfish from Rhodes, pike from Cilicia, nuts from Thasos, dates from Egypt, acorns from Spain . . .’41
The plates such food was eaten off showed similarly international taste, and pottery made in Roman-era Tunisia has turned up in Iona, in Scotland.42 Such volumes of trade could not take place without changing culture. And, looking at the writings of Romans from the first century BC onwards, there is clear evidence that it did. Diners from North Africa to Iona did not merely eat off the same plates as each other – increasingly, their conversation started to converge, too. The more affluent started to speak Latin – and to act Roman. Once, every place had been a world unto itself. Now, observed Juvenal, ‘things are different: the whole world has its Greco-Roman culture. Smart Gaulish professors are training the lawyers of Britain; even in Iceland* there’s talk of hiring rhetoricians.’43 Later, diseases would show similar internationalism by moving along the same routes: one reason that the plague of Justinian spread so quickly in the sixth century is because it had Roman grain ships to board and Roman merchants to transport it.
Paul’s divinely inspired journeys were immeasurably helped – and at many points entirely enabled – by this revolution in transport. When, in around AD 60, St Paul wished to set out on one of the longest legs of his journey, from Turkey to Rome, there is, as one historian has written, ‘little doubt’ that he travelled on a boat from a special fleet of Roman grain ships, ‘designed and constructed by the Romans expressly to transport grain from the fertile land of the Nile to Italy, particularly to Rome’.44 Similarly, as the Cambridge historian Tim Whitmarsh points out, when Paul headed into Galatia to convert the Galatians, his route – at least as recorded in the Bible – precisely followed the route of the Via Sebaste, built by the emperor Augustus.45 God might be all-powerful, but his message has, historically, been considerably helped on its way by well-paved roads and fine merchant sailing fleets.
Christians tend to praise St Paul for spreading Christianity. Understandably: humans tend to look for human causes of things. If you were to ask one of those Gaulish professors what he was doing in Britain, doubtless he would have answered by explaining that he wished to bring Roman law to the benighted barbarians there; similarly, had you asked a Roman rhetorician why they were in Iceland, they would no doubt have offered their own personal reasons.
But such accounts would slightly miss the point. Laws, customs and diseases – all were transforming the world in this era. But they were only able to do so because Roman roads and Roman transport and Roman peace were opening the world up in a way never seen before. Globalization was underway. And one of the things that globalized fastest of all in this period was religion. Lighter than spice, more profitable than gold, gods were spreading along the arteries of empire.