Robert A. Kaster

I really like this book much better than Fletcher's The Roads of Rome. Kaster, a distinguished Latinist, focuses on one road, the Via Appia, first and greatest of Roman roads, leading from Rome to Capua, thence to Brindisium. Many have written of this road, not least Horace in his Satire I.5, a journey from Rome to Brindisium.

You have to like a book that begins its preface with a quote from Vonnegut on how Tralfamdorians view time and the universe (as a continuum all at once) to describe show more looking at the Via Appia through history. And then the first chapter proper with "What the hell are we doing here?" as the Roman traffic whizzes perilously close.

Kaster describes how the road was built, the materials, the labor. There is a good diagram showing the layers of the road, a couple of maps, and many black and white photos of road itself, countryside, towns, archaeological remains. He provides many historical vignettes, both ancient and more recent, descriptions of towns and their inhabitants, stories of Appius Claudius Caecus (builder of the road), Cicero and others. He describes Roman burial customs, the uniquely Roman institution of freedmen (liberti), the pomerium (the sacred boundary of Rome), and much else. Not all is ancient; there is a quite interesting digression of the southern Italian "purgatory" churches of the counter-Reformation, of which I had never before heard.

One of the more delightful instances of local pride comes from Beneventum, in the heart of the old Samnite country that the Romans conquered in the fourth century BC. The local university is the Università degli Studi del Sannio, the University of Samnium; the local museum, the Museo del Sannio. Beneventum is near the site of the battle of the Caudine Forks, where the Romans were defeated and humiliated by the Samnians in 321 BC. "And 2,300 years later, it still gave the gentleman on the Ponte Leproso reason to exult and gloat: 'Benevento prima di Roma!'" As Faulkner observed, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." show less

Princeton classics professor Kaster takes on the ancient Appian Way for the Culture Trails series. Kaster and his wife traveled the Appian way from Rome outwards to the ninth milestone, then started from its opposite end in Brindisi and traveled through southern Italy back to Rome. Along the way, Kaster reflects on the ancient history of Rome as well as the tribes that populated various regions of southern Italy. Each successive civilization has left its mark on the landscape, and Kaster show more peels back the layers for readers. This book is full of interesting historical facts, but they’re not assembled in a way that makes me long to visit these sites in person. show less