IF YOU’VE EVER WONDERED how letters were delivered in the ancient world, you could do worse than to read Procopius’s Secret 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.
The cursus publicus was hailed for its efficiency, at least until Justinian got his hands on it. Procopius claimed that a message entrusted to the system could cover ten times the distance of an individual in a single day. It worked by running couriers between a series of stations arranged along established routes. Each was equipped with 40 horses and an equivalent number of grooms and, in some cases, overnight accommodation.
There was not, as you
