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Old Roads and New Roads
Old Roads and New Roads
PREFACE
Gentle Reader,
If you look to move through this little volume in a direct line, after the present fashion of Railway Travelling, you will be signally disappointed. Nothing can well be more circuitous than the route proposed to you, nor more eccentric than your present guide. This book aspires to the precision of neither Patterson nor Bradshaw. Let men “bloody with spurring, fiery hot with speed,” consult those oracles of swiftness and rectitude of way: we do not belong to their manor. We desire to beguile, by a sort of serpentine irregularity, the occasional tedium of rapid movement. We move to our journey’s end by sundry old-fashioned circuitous routes. Grudge not, while you are whirled along a New Road, to loiter mentally upon certain Old Roads, and to consider as you linger along them the ways and means of transit which contented our ancestors. Although their coaches were slow, and their pack-saddles hard as those of the Yanguesan carriers of La Mancha, yet they reached their inns in time, and bequeathed to you and me – Gentle Reader – if we have the grace to use them, many pithy and profitable records of their wayfaring. The battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift: neither is the most rapid always the pleasantest journey. Horace accompanied Mæcenas on very urgent business, yet he loitered on the way, and confesses his slackness without shame —
“Hoc iter ignavi divisimus, altius ac nos
Præcinctis unum: minus est gravis Appia tardis.”
It was, he says, more comfortable to take his time. Is our business more pressing than his was? It can hardly be, seeing that he wended with a company whose errand was to prevent the two masters of the world from coming to blows. In comparison with such a mission, who will put the buying of a cargo of cotton, or arriving an hour before a public meeting begins, or catching a pic-nic party just in the nick of time? St. Bernard rode from sunrise to sunset along the Lake Leman without once putting his mule out of a walk; so much delectation the holy man felt in beholding the beauty of the water and the mountains, and in “chewing the cud of his own sweet or bitter fancies.” And good Michel Seigneur de Montaigne took a week for his journey from Nice to Pisa, although his horse was one of the smartest trotters in Gascony, merely for the pleasure he felt in following the by-lanes. And did not Richard Hooker receive from Bishop Jewell his blessing and his walking-staff, and yet with such poor means of speed he thought not of the weary miles between Exeter and Oxford, but trudged merrily with a thankful heart for the good oak prop, and the better blessing? Much less content with his journey was Richard when he rode to London on a hard-paced nag, that he might be in time to preach his first sermon at St. Paul’s. And was not this, the hastier of his journeys, the most unlucky in his life, seeing that it brought him acquainted with that foul shrew, Joan, his wife, who made his after-days as bitter to him, patient and godly though he were, as wormwood and coloquintida? Are not these goodly examples, Christian and Heathen? Let the Train rush along, you and I will travel at our own pace.
Neither shall you, if you will be ruled by your present guide, saunter along the roads of Britain alone, or on known and extant ways only. Are there not roads which never paid toll, roads in the waste, roads travelled only in vision, roads once traversed by the feet of myriads, yet now overgrown by the forest, or buried deeply in the marsh? Shall we not for awhile be surveyors of these forgotten highways, and pause beside the tombs of the kings, or consuls, or Incas, who first levelled them? The world has moved westward with the daily motion of the earth. Yet, in the far East lie the most ancient highways – whose pavements once echoed with the hurrying feet of Nimrod’s outposts or the trampling of Agamemnon’s rear-guard. It were well to mark how that ancient chivalry sped along their causeways.
Nor, on our devious route, shall baiting-places be wanting. Drunken Barnaby stayed not oftener to prove the ale than we will do: —
“Ægre jam relicto rure
Securem Aldermanni—bury
Primo petii, qua exosa
Sentina, Holburni rosa
Me excepit, ordine tali
Appuli Gryphem Veteris Bailey:
Ubi experrectum lecto
Tres Ciconias indies specto,
Quo victurus, donec æstas
Rure curas tollet mæstas:
Ego etiam et Sodales
Nunc Galerum Cardinalis
Visitantes, vi Minervæ
Bibimus ad Cornua Cervi.”
Our inns may not always be found at the roadside; and we may possibly ever and anon seem to have missed the track altogether. Yet we will come into the main line in the end, and, I trust, part with kindly feelings, when the time has come for saying
SISTE VIATOR
OLD ROADS AND NEW ROADS
We have histories of all kinds in abundance, – and yet no good History of Roads. “Wines ancient and modern,” “Porcelain,” “Crochet work,” “Prisons,” “Dress,” “Drugs,” and “Canary birds,” have all and each found a chronicler more or less able; and the most stately and imposing volume we remember ever to have turned over was a history of “Button-making:” you saw at once, by the measured complacency of the style, that the author regarded his buttons as so many imperial medals. But of roads, except Bergier’s volumes on the Roman Ways, and a few learned yet rather repulsive treatises in Latin and German, we have absolutely no readable history. How has it come to pass that in works upon civilization, so many in number, so few in worth, there are no chapters devoted to the great arteries of commerce and communication? The subject of roads does not appear even on that long list of books which the good Quintus Fixlein intended to write. Of Railways indeed, both British and foreign, there are a few interesting memorials; but Railways are one branch only of a subject which dates at least from the building of Damascus, earliest of recorded cities.
Perhaps the very antiquity of roads, and the wide arc of generations comprised in the subject, have deterred competent persons from attempting it; yet therefore is it only the more strange that incompetent persons have not essayed “this great argument,” since they generally rush in, where their betters fear to tread. A history of roads is, in great measure indeed, a history of civilization itself. For highways and great cities not merely presuppose the existence of each other, but are also the issues and exponents of two leading impulses in the nature of man. Actuated by the one – the centripetal instinct – the shepherd races of Asia founded their great capitals on the banks of the Euphrates and the Ganges: impelled by the other – the centrifugal instinct – they passed forth from their cradle in the Armenian Highlands, westward as far as the Atlantic, and eastward as far as the Pacific. We have indeed indications of roads earlier than we have accounts of cities. For ages before Arcadian Evander came as a “squatter” to Mount Palatine, was there not the great road of the Hyperboreans from Ausonia to Delphi, by which, with each revolving year, the most blameless of mankind conveyed to the Dorian Sun-god their offerings? And as soon as Theseus – the organizer of men, as his name imports – had slain the wolves and bears and the biped ruffians of the Corinthian Isthmus, did he not set up a direction-post, informing the wayfarer that “this side was Peleponnesus, and that side was Ionia”? Centuries of thought and toil indeed intervened between the path across the plain or down the mountain-gorge and the Regina Viarum, the Appian Road; and centuries between the rude stone-heap which marked out to the thirsting wayfarer the well in the desert, and the stately column which told the traveller, “This is the road to Byzantium.”
In the land of “Geryon’s sons,” the paths which scaled the sierras were attributed to the toils of Hercules. In Bœotia, at a most remote era, there was a broad carriage-road from Thebes to Phocis, and at one of its intersections by a second highway the homicide of Laius opened the “long process” of woes, which for three generations enshrouded, as with “the gloom of earthquake and eclipse,” the royal house of Labdacus. We have some doubts about the nature, or indeed the existence, of the road along which the ass Borak conveyed Mahommed to the seventh heaven: but we have no grounds for questioning the fact of the great causeway, which Milton saw in his vision, leading from Pandemonium to this earth, for have not Sin and Death been travelling upon it unceasingly for now six thousand years?
From that region beyond the moon, where, according to Ariosto – and Milton also vouches for the fact, – all things lost on earth are to be found, could we evoke a Carthaginian ledger, we would gladly purchase it at the cost of one or two Fathers of the Church. It would inform us of many things very pleasant and profitable to be known. Among others it would probably give some inkling of the stages and inns upon the great road which led from the eastern flank of Mount Atlas to Berenice, on the Red Sea. This road was in ill odour with the Egyptians, who, like all close boroughs, dreaded the approach of strangers and innovations. And the Carthaginian caravans came much too near the gold-mines of the Pharaohs to be at all pleasant to those potentates: it was
– “much I wis
To the annoyance of King Amasis.”
But it is bootless to pine after knowledge irretrievably buried in oblivion. Otherwise we might fairly have wished to have stood beside King Nebuchadnezzar when he so unadvisedly uttered that proud vaunt which ended in his being condemned to a long course of vegetable diet. For doubtless he gazed upon at least four main roads which entered the walls of Babylon from four opposite quarters: —
“From Arachosia, from Candaor east,
And Margiana, to the Hyrcanian cliffs
Of Caucasus, and dark Iberian dales:
From Atropatia and the neighbouring plains
Of Adiabene, Media, and the south
Of Susiana, to Balsara’s havens.”
We pass over as a mad imperial whim Caligula’s road from Baiæ to Puteoli, partly because it was a costly and useless waste of money and labour, and partly because that emperor had an awkward trick of flinging to the fishes all persons who did not admire his road. It was a bad imitation of a bad model – the road with which Xerxes bridled the “indignant Hellespont.” Both the Hellespontine and the Baian road perished in the lifetime of their founders; while the Simplon still attests the more sublime and practical genius of Napoleon. We should have also greatly liked to watch the Cimbri and Ambrones at their work of piling up those gigantic earth-mounds in Britain and in Gaul, which, under the appellation of Devil’s-dykes, are still visible and, as monuments of patient labour and toil, second only to the construction of the Pyramids.
The physiognomy of races is reflected in their public works. The warm climate of Egypt was not the only cause for the long paven corridors which ran underground from temple to temple, and conducted the Deputies of the Nomes to their sacerdotal meeting in the great Labyrinth. It was some advantage, indeed, to travel in the shade in a land where the summer heats were intense, and refreshing rains of rare occurrence; but it was a still greater recommendation to these covered ways that they enabled the priests to assemble without displaying upon the broad highway of the Nile the times and numbers of their synods. The pyramidal temples of Benares communicated by vaulted paths with the Ganges, as the chamber of Cheops communicated with the Nile. The capital of Assyria was similarly furnished with covered roads, which enabled the priests of Bel to communicate with one another, and with the royal palace, in a city three days’ journey in length and three in breadth. Civilization and barbarism, indeed, in this respect met each another, and the caves of the Troglodyte Æthiopians on the western shore of the Red Sea were connected by numerous vaulted passages cut in the solid limestone, along which the droves of cattle passed securely in the rainy season to their winter stalls from the meadows of the Nile and the Astaboras.
Of the civil history of Carthage we know unfortunately but little. The colonists of Tyre and Sidon are to the ages a dumb nation. All we know of them is through the accounts of their bitter foes, the Greeks of Sicily and the Romans. It is much the same as if the only records of Manchester and Birmingham were to be transmitted to posterity by the speeches of Mr. George Frederic Young. Yet we know that the Carthaginians alone, among the nations of antiquity, made long voyages, – perchance even doubled the Cape three thousand years before Vasco de Gama broke the silence of the southern seas; and we are certain also that their caravan traffic with Central Africa and the coasts of the Red Sea passed along defined and permeable roads, with abiding land-marks of hostelry, well, and column. And we know more than this. The Romans, who jealously denied to other nations all the praise for arts or arms which they could withhold, yet accorded to the Carthaginians the invention of that solid intessellation of granite-blocks which is beheld still upon the fragments of the Appian Road. The highways which conveyed to the warehouses of Carthage the ivory, gold-dust, slaves, and aromatic gums of Central Libya ran through miles of well-ordered gardens and by hundreds of villas; and it was the ruthless destruction of these country-seats of the merchant-princes of Byrsa, which forced upon them the first and the second peace with Rome.
The Grecian roads, like the modern European highways, represented the free genius of the people: they were often sinuous in their course, and, respecting the boundaries of property, wound around the hills rather than disturb the ancient landmarks. Up to a certain point the character of the Grecian Republics was marked rather by rapid progression than by permanence. Their roads were of a less massive construction than the Roman, consisting for the most part of oblong blocks, and were not very artificially constructed, except in the neighbourhood of the great emporia of traffic, Corinth, and Athens, and Syracuse. Sparta possessed two principal military highways, one in the direction of Argolis, and another in that of Mycene; but the roads in the interior of Laconia were little better than drift-ways for the conveyance of agricultural produce from the field to the garner, or from the farm-yard to the markets of the capital and the sea-ports.