Ernle Bradford - Paul the Traveller

Ernle Bradford

The Traveller

In the autumn of A.D. 59 a small coaster came alongside in the port of Myra. She was bound up north to Adramyttion, a town at the head of a long gulf near the island of Lesbos. She had left the famous city of Sidon about two weeks before, but because of the prevailing northerlies that sweep this section of the Mediterranean ,had been forced to creep around the southern coastline of Asia Minor, seeking a lee. Now she had found her way into a comfortable river-mouth where she could discharge local cargo and wait for a favourable wind to boost her on her way through the island-studded Aegean to her home port.

Myra was one of the most important towns in southern Asia Minor. It lay a few miles inland, in the delta between two rivers, one of which, Andracus, flowed through a busy port some three miles away. It was a place like many others at that time, where the worlds of Greece and Rome met with those of Asia, Syria and the Near East. Nothing now, an obscure village in Turkey, Myra in the first century A.D. was a thriving little city. Coastal traders running between the Levant, the Aegean, Byzantium and the Black Sea thronged the quays. Large grain-carrying vessels also waited here before taking the long route that led past Crete, up the eastern coast of Sicily, through the Messina Straits and on to Puteoli in the Bay of Naples.

Aboard this coaster there was, apart from travellers and traders taking passage to Myra, Adramyttion, and other ports of call, a Roman Lieutenant of the Augustan Regiment named Julius. He was in charge of a group of prisoners on their way to Rome, either to be tried oras men who had already been condemned to deathto serve as part of the spectacle in the arenas. (Criminals were constantly dispatched from different areas of the empire to satisfy the never-ending taste for blood that was part and parcel of The Grandeur that was Rome.) The regiment to which Julius belonged acted as a kind of imperial messenger force. Apart from escorting prisoners to the capital city, they served as guards on grain ships, and as a general police force working with provincial garrisons in the maintenance of the imperial peace. A man like Julius was probably commissioned from the ranks. As such he was even more probably a devotee of Mithras, the Persian Sun-God whose cult, with its advocacy of manliness and the military virtues, had been widely adopted throughout the army. He had no doubt been called Julius after the great Julius Caesar, as a sign that his parents honoured the Julian House, whose current ruling descendant was the Emperor Nero.

The Lieutenant was looking for a passage to Rome for himself, his soldiers, and his prisoners. The coaster had only been an intermediate method of transport until he reached Myra. It was near the end of the traditional sailing season, for few deep-sea vessels ventured out after mid-September. Some three hundred years later a Roman expert on military affairs, Vegetius, was to write that From mid-September until the 3rd day before the Ides of November [10 November] navigation is uncertain. He added that, after this date, the seas are closed. Except for urgent troop movements, or the necessary use of dispatch vessels in case of emergency, the whole Mediterranean went to sleep until the end of May.

The Lieutenant was eager to get his prisoners safely delivered to Rome, and was counting on finding a late-sailing merchantman whose owner or master was set on catching the winter grain market. The reason he was fairly confident of finding a suitable ship at Myra was that the prevailing westerlies in this part of the sea often caused ships from Alexandria to make their way up northas the coaster had just doneand wait at Myra for a favourable wind to boost them on to Rome.

He found his ship. She was an Alexandrian grain-carrier destined for Puteoli and carrying a number of passengers, some of them no doubt Romans who had been to Egypt on a sight-seeing tour, to marvel at the Great Pyramids (still faced in those days with marble), among other things. There were, as well, dancers, slaves and entertainers bound for the palaces of Rome. The ship was probably one of the imperial mercantile fleet. The Lieutenants arrival with his prisoners would have occasioned little comment; criminals under escort were a common enough sight on the imperial highways and seaways. One prisoner, however, might have commanded some attention, for it was clear that he was a man of consequence. The Lieutenant not only treated him with deference but listened with great interest to whatever he said. His manner, too, showed that he was used to people paying attention to him, and he would sometimes preface a remark with a rhetorical gesture, a wave of the hand that seemed to command silence. He had two travelling companions with himslaves, it would be assumed. Both were Greek and, while one appeared to be a physician, the other attended him in the capacity of a body-servant.

There was something strangely compelling about the man, even though his physical appearance was scarcely attractive. Certainly he was neither young nor good-lookingprobably in the middle or late fifties, a fellow voyager would have guessed. He was almost totally bald, but heavily bearded with a sprinkling of grey. His face was volatile, an alive and slightly smiling expression, the nose long and aquiline. A Levantine faceprobably a Jew? There were enough of those scattered throughout the empire. The really compelling thing about the man was his eyes, very bright and grey, and framed under shaggy, overhanging eyebrows that met in the middle. He was slight in stature and stooped a little. His face, his manner and his whole appearance suggested a man of authority, one who perhaps had travelled widely and to whom this ship and this projected voyage were no more than repetitious experiences in a life that had known many of the same. But at this early moment, while the merchantman still lay at the quay, and while the passengers were concerned about themselves, their private affairs, keeping an eye on their goods and bedding, and buying additional stores to make sure that they were adequately fed on the voyage, few would bother to speculate much about one Levantine under escort. Time was getting on, they were late, and all, for their varying reasons, were eager to reach Puteoli and the gracious Bay of Naples. Business or pleasure called them. The customary affairs and concerns of the worldno different then from nowoccupied their dreams as well as their waking life.

Quite apart from the crew, the master, the pilot and other officers, there were 276 passengers. It is probable that the ship could have accommodated a great many moregrain-carriers of her type sometimes carried as many as 600 passengers. But it was a late-season sailing and most travellers would have caught earlier transport to avoid the dangers of being caught at sea during the autumn, when the Mediterranean weather often becomes rapidly unstable. A grain-carrier of this type was likely to have been about 340 tons. This was the size that the Roman imperial government preferred, and ship-owners who built a vessel of this tonnage for use in government transport were automatically exempt from compulsory public service. It was, then, clearly to the advantage of wealthy ship-owners to contribute one ship of such a size to the government. Their design followed the basic pattern that had been evolved by those master-mariners the Phoenicians centuries before, in their