Image having this kind of grudge
(midwest.social)
The Picard Maneuver
History MemesThe lead probably helped.
Tfw marc antony made a mess of rome for the 282939473728 time and you gotta come back from raping the new and unknown world:
I think the long travel made them just angier.
What a noob. I can do years without even breaking a sweat.
You really have to consider at the halfway point if the grudge is still worth it or if forgiveness has set in.
As one would still need to return home, so the costs have got to be easy to add up at that point (3x more than was spent already, assuming a constant cost). I just might have a "vision" telling me whomever was sorry or died.
Could you imagine the blowback if you turned around after wasting weeks, and god knows how many supplies?
You would 100% keep going just to save face. At worst - so you could afford the trip back.
If you're halfway there, just keep marching. It'll take the same time to go in either direction, and you might as well have something to show for it.
You pause a quarter of the way. That way you know you require serious investment into your anger to keep going.
months? how long would it take to journey from the Italian alps to its southern most point? Turin to the south most point of the peninsula is about 240h walk, at a reasonable pace that should take about 2 weeks, a month at most.
although if we're talking about the whole empire, then corner to corner would take months
Yeah, but corner to corner, you'd probably be taking a boat anyway for 80%.
Even one end of Italy to the other, seems like walking to the coast, then boating the length, then walking coast to destination would be the play.
Turin to the south most point of the peninsula is about 240h walk, at a reasonable pace that should take about 2 weeks,
240 hours in 14 days is 17 hours of walking per day...
Even in a month that's still 8 hours a day. 8 hours a day is a LOT, maybe not the first day, but it's going to really suck after the 10th day. The vast majority of people today couldn't manage this without training for it even if they had modern gear.
Remember, this is a time of hard leather sandals, no socks, carrying food in a sack, etc etc. it wasn't at all guaranteed you would find shelter at the end of the day, many days would be cut short because you can get to a bed in 4 hours, but not 12 to the village after the next. With bad weather, your speed would drop hugely, and you'd need to pack for more supplies. Most people traveling would walk do 3 days of walking with 1 off, or 5/2, giving them a weeken.
And when you get there after a month of daily walking, in your worn shoes, blistered and sunburnt and your clothing smelling of travel and sweat... You'd still have to kick a guy in the shins.
Travel speed on foot, on good paved roads, with plenty of villages nearby, a big sack of coins and little else, is on the order of 100 or 120 km per week in good weather.
If you're not blessed with a paved road, which would apply to pretty much everyone, or incredibly wealth, you should consider 60km per week an excellent travel speed.
And when you get there after a month of daily walking, in your worn shoes, blistered and sunburnt and your clothing smelling of travel and sweat... You'd still have to kick a guy in the shins.
And then you had to walk back home!
And then you had to walk back home!
Even in a month that’s still 8 hours a day. 8 hours a day is a LOT, maybe not the first day, but it’s going to really suck after the 10th day.
IT'S A MAN'S LIFE IN THE LEGIONS, WOULDN'T GIVE IT UP FOR ANYTHING, CENTURION, SIR!
The main road arteries of Italy were already developed at the peak of the Roman Empire, with postal stations along them at “best” intervals to support travelers, so you could sustain an almost optimal speed. 8h/day is a reasonable maintainable schedule over long hikes, assuming mostly flat tracks - and that is the case for the Roman roads. Still, would take an optimal month, so likely one and a half months to cross Italy on foot.
I feel like ancient peoples walked a lot more than we do nowadays, so they might have been able to cover more ground than we can.
Admittedly, this is armchair speculation at best.
The travel speed isn't really limited by how fast you can walk, but how many of hours of walking you can do. And that comes down to equipment and logistics.
If you have a bed and food waiting, you can travel basically every daylight hour. 8h/day is totally doable. If you have roman feet that spent every day in roman sandals, I'm sure your feet will look just like mine in modern shoes after a day of walking (that is, not great, but also not bloody stumps).
But if you don't, you need to bring food and water, and those are heavy, so you can't bring a week's worth of supplies. You can bring modern sleeping gear on a hike, but that's not really a thing with a natural fiber tent and wooden poles, so you need to build a camp, and time spent building a camp is time not traveling. You need to cook, which is not trivial if you need to gather wood first, maybe gather water and supplement your rations. That's more time not traveling. I've done reenactment marches (medieval ones, but eh, mostly the same), and the walking is honestly very sustainable. It's all the work you have to do that slows you down.
Without logistics like roads and sleeping places, the limiting factor isn't how long YOU can walk, it's how many hours of walking time there are in a day.
With good logistics, the limiting factor is the distance between rest stops. So basically everyone travels at the same speed, because you can't really skip one. You also do have to take rest days, because if you destroy your health on a modern hike, you go home feeling like shit and maybe take some medicine. If you do that in 20AD, you die.
Related, I remembering reading a book about logistics in the Crusades, and they pointed out just how much time (and squire/groom manpower) was spent grazing horses each day. Almost as many as the traveling.
As Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach!
what if you have a horsie?
It would be even faster if a horse is also mad at that guy.
You can easily double the speed.
Not so much by riding it much faster, but because it can carry all your stuff and you can keep going longer. Suddenly you can haul several days of food with you, and some basic travel supplies so you don't have to sleep completely rough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansio
Apparently 200 miles in 24h at top speed (if you are the emperor)
