Ground-Truth
“We’ll start today,” said Caesar firmly. “It’s—what? Forty miles from here? We won’t do it in one ride.”
“We’ll go by ship,” said the King, who loathed traveling.
“No, we’ll go overland. I like to get the feel of terrain. Gaius Marius—who was my uncle by marriage—told me I should always journey by land if possible. Then if in future I should campaign there, I would know the lie of the land. Very useful.”
This quotation, from one of the best historical treatments of the Roman Republic ever written, might not be an actual transcript of a conversation between Gaius Julius Caesar and King Nicomedes of Bithynia. No matter. It might as well be, and it sums up the philosophy of our trip.
Travel today is insulated. Airplanes let us cover vast distances with no notion of the terrain below us. The Deluxe Motorcoach whisks tourists from site to site far above the surface of the road in a climate-controlled bubble. Even many shoes have such thick, stiff soles it’s impossible to feel the shape of the ground.
But geography is destiny, history is geography, and it’s impossible to fully understand ancient life if you have no notion of what that life was like on the ground. Greece is a steep and abrupt country. Mountains rise to block you most of the time. If it’s not mountains, it’s water. Paths are rocky and lined with a variety of very spiky plants.
Historians describe ancient journeys in a few words. “The 300 Spartans, led by King Leonidas, marched from Sparta to Thermopylae to confront the Persians.” All well and good, until you consider what that might have involved.
Sparta is NOT CLOSE to Thermopylae. If you were to drive it today using the fastest route through the Isthmus of Corinth, it would take the better part of a day. And what you might well not notice on that drive is all the mountains.
It seems likely that Leonidas led his crew the way we drove back to Athens from Sparti, through the broad plain of eternal summer in the central Pelopponese, perhaps past Nauplion, through the Isthmus, past Athens and to the route of the current A1, which would take them to the Hot Gates, perhaps with a stop at what is now the beachfront town of Kamena Vourla. On foot, carrying armor and weapons and several weeks’ worth of food, this would have taken many days.
Even for the toughest guys in the world, the so-called “goat path” must’ve been a challenge for Xerxes’ army as it outflanked Leonidas’ 300 Spartans.
We wanted to get at least an inkling of what it all was like. So we planned to travel with as little insulation as possible between us and the land and sea. If we could walk, we would walk. Otherwise, we drove ourselves. If we had to cross water, we did it on boats. No airplanes once we arrived in Greece, and no Deluxe Motorcoaches. We weren’t quite returning to the 18th century, but at times it felt like we’d at least returned to the 1950s.