I went to the local post office today to pick up a packet. The USPS had tried to deliver it the day before, but finding noone at home, left a calling card and returned the packet to the sorting office. Modern post offices fill me with dread. As sad as dentists' or doctors' waiting rooms but without that handy pile of magazines to wile away the hours, customers lives seem to be put on hold while they wait for service. After queuing for 15 minutes, I reached the ironically named 'quick pick-up' counter. Mine was a 'restricted delivery' from England, which, explained the man at the window, meant only I could collect it. After showing my driver's licence, writing in my address and signing the card, the postman handed over the packet.

There was nothing particularly notable about this normal process, which takes place hundreds of times across the United States. And then I reflected, how would it be twenty centuries ago, say in Mediolanum, modern Milan?

The Romans did have what we would recognise as a postal service. It was called variously the cursus publicus or cursus vehicularis (1). Augustus set up the system as an imperial courier service to connect the military and provincial government to the administration in Rome. A series of relay points (stationes) provided horses to dispatch riders, usually soldiers, and vehicles (calbulae) for state officials. It consisted of thousands of stations placed along the main roads. Local communities had to supply fresh horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen, as well as carts, food, fodder, and accommodation. Official ID in the form of a 'diploma' or certificate issued by the emperor himself was necessary to use the service. Predictably, there were abuses of the system, for governors and minor appointees used the diplomata (or stolen or forged copies) to give themselves and their families free transport. That there were abuses of the system is demonstrated by, of all the unexpected things, by a coin. Emperor Nerva freed the people from this burden of paying for the system by assuring that the cost of the government’s communication network was assumed by the government. Nerva celebrated his popular reform on a sestertius, which is inscribed VEHICVLATIONE ITALIAE REMISSA (2). On this sestertius we see two mules and their accoutrements in detail. An upended high-wheeled cart is shown behind the mules, its pole-and-harnesses trapping resting upright. The animals graze and the vehicle is out of commission.

So if you were not a military or civil administration official, what were your options? Most likely, you had to find someone and ask them to carry the message. That somone had to be heading to the same location where the intended recipient lived. Wealthy villa owing society could afford to despatch freedmen to ensure delivery in the manner of UPS, "as sure as taking it there yourself". You could trust your mail to a traveller heading in the same general direction and hope he passed on the message to someone else whose final destination was the recipient's; or perhaps to an itinerant merchant going from city to city. To far-flung destinations involving a sea crossing, a passenger might agree to take letters. It all seems remarkably informal and the sender obviously had to trust the courier to deliver the mail. But it worked. Letters survive from sites in Britain and Egypt, which had originated elsewhere.

From studies, it has been calculated that the cursus publicus or cursus vehicularis covered about 50 miles a day. That journey to Mediolanum from, say, Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (modern Cologne), a distance of some 560-odd miles would take 11 days. A ship with a calm sea and a steady wind might cover 120 miles in a good day. Bad weather, of course, slowed movement down. The very unpredictability of travel meant written instructions might arrive too late to have effect - as one official carrying his letter of appointment and credentials found out. By the time he arrived, the emperor had changed and he found he had been replaced by another appointee.

When the courier finally arrived at the destination, how would he find the addressee? While the main roads from Rome bore the names of their patrons, such as the famous via Appia, it is not clear from the surviving evidence if streets within towns and cities were given names. The main roads in military forts from three gates forming a T-junction at the HQ building (principia) bore the names via Praetoria and via Principalis. Perhaps towns, often founded and laid out by army engineers, used these names for 'main street' and an intersecting steet, with the forum and basilica at the centre? My suspicion is that locals referred to streets by the shops or houses or temples that lined them, so for instance, the street of the temple of Minerva, or the street of the bakery of Iucundus. A courier bearing a letter might have to stop a local and inquire, "excuse me, but do you know where I will find the house of L. Pompeius Paulus?" On arriving and knocking at the front door and being greeted by the household slave, the courier might be received with due courtesy, offered refreshment and quizzed about his journey. Since correspondence was often unexpected, it was probably a high point in a day. Not the sort of reception the postman or woman from Fedex expects today. The pace of the Roman world was slower than ours, regulated not by the tick of a clock, but by the weather and the seasons. (It's a theme I will return to in a later blog).

So, next time I have to go the post office to pick it up a redirected letter or parcel, I must remember to stand patiently in line and reflect on the marvel that the modern postal system really is and just how much we take it for granted.

References: