I'm Patrick Weiman, and this is the Fall of Rome.

Around the year 475, Sidonius Apollonaris, the Bishop of Claremont and what's today's

central France, wrote a letter to the famous Bishop of Reims, St. Romigius. A clear attempt

by Sidonius to network with a powerful figure, it was a flattering letter, complementing

the Bishop of Reims on the quality of his Latin prose in obsequious terms that would ring

hollow and embarrassing to our ears. How well-educated, blue-blooded aristocrats in Roman

Gaul talked to one another isn't what I want to focus on just now, though. I want to

talk about the poor guy who had to carry that letter all the way from Claremont to Reims,

a journey of some 380 miles. Put yourself in his shoes. You're probably a slave, though

a trusted one, and you're about to leave your friends and family behind for an uncertain

length of time on a dangerous journey. To get from Claremont to Reims, this career

had to tramp east along the well-worn Roman road, over gently sloping wooded hills studded

with vineyards that connected Claremont to Leone, the major city of central Gaul. Your

master has powerful friends in Leone, which sits near the confluence of two major rivers,

the Seon and the Rome, and these great and good of the city are people with whom you can

safely stay the night. From Leone, though, you're out of the territory where your master

has friends to look out for you. You turn north, winding through the lush fields that surround

the Seon River as it leads to Shalom. From there, you turn east to the high walls of the

city of Oltun, then north through the lush, evergreen forests of Morvon to Toa, and then

you'd finally hit the last, utterly flat stretch of road that led to Reims itself. Even

with a good horse at your disposal, that's a journey of at least 10 days in each direction.

Leaving aside the misery of any long journey on horseback, you would have been in constant

...