Travel in classical antiquity
The Odyssey, for example, relates the tale of Odysseus’ travel home to Ithaca over a ten-year period; later, the Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas' flight from Troy.
Elsewhere, travel narratives from authors such as Herodotus and Caesar form more grounded examples of how individuals moved throughout the ancient world.
The primary motivation for the development of travel and infrastructure to support it in both Egypt and the Near East was conquest and subsequent rule, a trend that continued in Greece and Rome.
There is evidence, however, of travel motivated by tourism in Egypt, with visitors and scribes coming to view and record the pyramids and other religious monuments.
Due to the lack of roads in ancient Greece, the most efficient way of shipping large amounts of goods, such as olive oil, was over the sea.
Despite reliance on favourable weather, relatively little effort went into short sea voyages beyond the packing and management of the ship, although there was the danger of pirates and kidnapping for ransom.
For the same reasons that roads in Greece were poorly and rarely constructed, there was essentially no oversight by official forces, and as such travelers were prone to being accosted by highwaymen.
They suffered from lack of maintenance, at least during the Roman Republic due to the fact that more visible projects (new city-centric construction, such as aqueducts, and arena games) took precedence.
This lack of attention to detail is contrasted with the uniform stone highways that generally existed near major urban centers, typically built by soldiers overseen by army engineers.
Contrasted with Greece, the danger of violence was less pronounced on Roman roads, due to the strong central military present in Rome.
[citation needed] Scholars remain split as to whether or not the Greeks and Romans produced representative maps to serve as guides, and, if so, the level of their sophistication.
Greek maps were often either localized, intended to demonstrate the shapes of specific cities, or to represent abstract concepts, such as the realm of the oikoumene, or known world.
[15] Although not used for travel, there is evidence of maps created after surveys by the Roman government, in a process known as centuriation in which the land was reduced to grids for cultivation.
Sections of the work are devoted to geographic and ethnographic descriptions of the territories encountered during his travels, which ranged from Egypt to the Persian Empire.
Strabo also compiled his travels into a major work, Geographica, which outlined his conceptions of the world and the geographies of regions such as what are today Spain and India.
In a non-mythological context, xenia provided for the equitable treatment of foreign dignitaries, traders, and guests while visiting alien city-states through the office of the proxenos.
Some scholarship suggests that although the proxenos was tasked with diplomacy, they also may have occasionally engaged in subterfuge or intelligence gathering in order to grant their native city the upper hand in conflicts.
Ancient travel was motivated by reasons as diverse as trade (including postal communications), religious pilgrimages, warfare, and tourism.
Trade was sophisticated enough in Rome that a system similar to that of the proxenos emerged, with offices backed by different governments representing the interests of their private citizens in cities throughout the Mediterranean.
The established routes of the cursus publicus are sometimes argued to be outlined in the Tabula Peutingeriana, a surviving illustrated itineraria from the 4th century, although this claim is disputed.
[28] The cursus publicus differed from a conventional, modern postal service in that it was not universal (it was only available in more developed provinces) and in that deliveries were made at the government's discretion, rather than on a regular schedule.
Travelers visited sanctuaries associated with deities or gods and specific phys, such as the Greek one at Epidaurus, in the hopes of curing illness and disease.
[33] These revolved around the performance of artistic and athletic feats to honor individual deities, and continued to be celebrated after Rome's conquest of Greece.
Lodgings available to the general public at festivals ranged from crude huts or tents to elaborate inns reserved for the Greek and Roman elite.
The influxes of tourists, particularly in Athens, created temporary economies, with vendors, prostitutes, and guides providing goods and services to the visitors.
The pinnacle of travel in name of warfare in Hellenistic society was under Alexander, but his efforts to conquer the world were preceded by a general Greek and specifically Athenian colonial process that led to the foundation of cities throughout the Mediterranean.
There were few restrictions (except in wartime) on the ability of individuals and families to migrate and subsequently settle in cities, and despite stratification, there was still some level of upward mobility in Roman society.
