This article is taken from the March 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10.
If you’ve ever wondered how letters were delivered in the ancient world, you could do worse than to read Procopius’s Secret History. Every bit as scandal-filled as Donna Tartt’s classic campus novel of the same name, it describes life in the court of Justinian, Byzantine emperor from AD 527 to 565, but digresses brilliantly on the intricacies of the Roman postal service.
It is hard to think of another historian who applies such a scientific approach to ancient history
The cursus publicus was hailed for its efficiency, at least until Justinian got his hands on it. Procopius claimed that a message entrusted to the system could cover ten times the distance of an individual in a single day. It worked by running couriers between a series of stations arranged along established routes. Each was equipped with 40 horses and an equivalent number of grooms and, in some cases, overnight accommodation.
There was not, as you might have imagined, a changeover of courier, but rather of horses. The same tireless postie covered between five and eight stations by horse-drawn carriage per day or, by the calculation cited in this book, up to 120 kilometres if the missive was particularly pressing.
Stephenson, a prolific scholar of Byzantium, has a wonderfully sharp eye for data and detail. His book examines the journey by which the Roman Empire progressed from being ruled from several different cities in the fifth century, among them Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Rome itself, to just Constantinople, home to Procopius, and the “New Rome” of the book’s title.
I sat down expecting a narrative history of the fall of Rome, but was pleasantly surprised to find a portrait of the changing empire populated by statistics and technical hypotheses of a kind one would usually encounter in a copy of the Economist. The first ten pages alone contain references to cosmogenic radionuclides, the Maunder Minimum and the Early Anthropocene. I confess I needed a dictionary.
It is hard to think of another historian who applies such a scientific approach to ancient history, except perhaps the Stanford professor Josiah Ober, who has applied political theory and modern economic modelling to informa
