ABSTRACT
In antiquity, news travelled no faster than people. In our age of instantaneouscommunication, the reality of a world in which a letter from Syria to Rome might spend one hundred days in transit (Cicero, Epistulae ad Familares 12.10.2) seems almost unimaginable. But to early Christians, a lag between an event and its report was so inevitable that Anthony can attribute the apparent ability of demons to foretell the future to the speedy thinness of their bodies. Having seen a person start out on a journey, or the rains beginning in Ethiopia, they can race ahead and, arriving well in advance of human messengers, astonish people with accurate predictions of an unexpected visit or the flooding of the Nile (Athanasius, Life of Anthony 31-2). Holy bodies shared this uncanny agility. After Apa Ammonathas, for example, had promised to travel to Alexandria to petition the emperor that monks be exempted from the poll-tax, the brothers were ‘dissatisfied’ when two weeks later (apparently the expected time for such a trip) they had not seen the old man stir from his cell. But on the fifteenth day, he came bearing a letter with the emperor’s seal. In response to their query, ‘When did you get that, Apa?’ he replied, ‘That very night I went to the emperor, who wrote this decree, then, going to Alexandria, I had it countersigned by the magistrate.’ Hearing this miraculous feat, the brothers were appropriately ‘filled with fear’ (Apophthegmata Patrum, Ammonathas 1 [PG 65. 1367]). The gift of instantaneous communication was given only to the holy. Sitting on his mountain, Anthony knew the moment that Amun had died as he saw him being led up to heaven. When the brothers from Nitria arrived with the news 13 days later, they were stunned to learn that Anthony had already known of Amun’s death (Life of Anthony 60; cf. Jerome, Life of Paul 14). Such stories of exceptional mobility and immediate knowledge simply underscore the expected slowness with which news and people regularly travelled. In the face of this overwhelming physical fact, the bulk of any chapter on communication in the early Christian world of Late antiquity must focus on travel: its modes, impediments and facilities.
