Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

234 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
nect separate communities like Pylos and Sparta, which are separated
by the Taygetos mountains. (It was only in the second half of
the twentieth century that a highway was constructed through the
Langadha Pass, linking Sparta to Kalamata.) Horses, too, were useless
for long-distance travel, mainly because the custom of nailing
metal shoes on their hooves was unknown. In addition, stirrups
and saddles had not been invented, which made horseback riding
over bumpy ground extremely painful and hazardous.
It follows that most Greeks would have been accustomed to
walking considerable distances, often in the company of a slave
who would carry their baggage. In Xenophon’s Memoirs of Sokrates
(3.13.5), Sokrates talks nonchalantly of the journey from Athens to
Olympia, which is over one hundred miles, as a five- to six-day
walk. Most of that journey would have been accomplished on welltrodden
or not-so-well-trodden paths. The going was tough and
quite dangerous at times, with brigands and footpads preying on
the vulnerable. The story of the angry altercation that takes place
between Oedipus and Laios on the way from Delphi, which leads
to the death of Laios and some of his entourage, is clearly based on
reality: travelers had every reason to be suspicious of those whom
they encountered along the way. That is why a favorite theme of
Greek myth is the “culture hero,” who cleared the roads of various
unsavory individuals, as Theseus did for the stretch between Megara
and Athens. The safest time to travel was when a large number
of people were on the move, as when a Panhellenic festival like the
Olympic Games was being celebrated. We do not know whether
travel became substantially safer over the course of time.
None of Greece’s rivers is navigable, and only a few have estuaries
wide enough to serve as ports. The most common means of
transporting goods over land was by a two-wheeled cart or a fourwheeled
wagon, both of which had been invented by the third
millennium b.c.e. Wagons and carts were mostly pulled by oxen,
especially if the load was heavy. The top speed of an ox is about
one and a half miles an hour, and the maximum distance that it can
travel in a day is about eleven miles, so once on land goods traveled
extremely slowly. Teams of mules and donkeys were somewhat
faster but could only convey much lighter loads. Horses were
rarely used partly because they were very costly and partly because
the horse collar had not been invented.
Although roads only extended a few miles at most, road- building
techniques were by no means unsophisticated. There is evidence of
ramps, switchbacks, and pull-offs even in the Archaic Period. All
roads, however, were local. There were none that joined one com-