Set out along Roman roads, rivers, and sea lanes, where every journey depended on weather, money, cargo, animals, documents, and local knowledge. This episode explains how roads were surveyed, drained, paved, repaired, and marked, while most travelers still moved on foot or with donkeys, mules, horses, carts, and wagons. Inns, hospitality networks, messengers, the official cursus publicus, private letters, ports, barges, merchant ships, and seasonal sailing connected distant communities. Ostia and Portus helped feed Rome, but storms, theft, delay, sickness, and shipwreck remained part of travel. Soldiers, merchants, students, officials, migrants, pilgrims, families, and enslaved captives experienced the same infrastructure in very different ways. A slow, restful journey through an empire connected by movement but never made easy by distance. This episode includes AI-generated content.
