Stephenson, a prolific scholar of Byzantium, has a wonderfully sharp eye for data and detail. The same tireless postie covered between five and eight stations by horse-drawn carriage per day or, by the calculation cited in this book, up to 120 kilometres if the missive was particularly pressing. There was not, as you might have imagined, a changeover of courier, but rather of horses. Each was equipped with 40 horses and an equivalent number of grooms and, in some cases, overnight accommodation. It worked by running couriers between a series of stations arranged along established routes.

Procopius claimed that a message entrusted to the system could cover ten times the distance of an individual in a single day. The cursus publicus was hailed for its efficiency, at least until Justinian got his hands on it. It is hard to think of another historian who applies such a scientific approach to ancient history Every bit as scandal-filled as Donna Tartt’s classic campus novel of the same name, it describes life in the court of Justinian, Byzantine emperor from AD 527 to 565, but digresses brilliantly on the intricacies of the Roman postal service. If you’ve ever wondered how letters were delivered in the ancient world, you could do worse than to read Procopius’s Secret History. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10. This article is taken from the March 2022 issue of The Critic.

The secret history byzantium