Robert A. Kaster

Ghost Road, Queen of Roads

Appian Way

linda

I had the great fortune of talking to Bob Kaster a few days ago, so I decided to pick up this book before our conversation. The Appian Way seemed like the most approachable of all his works. Indeed, the language in here is conversational and readable, and not academic at all. 

What is the Appian Way? It is a road extending 353 miles through Central Italy, built near the end of the fourth century BCE, by Appius Claudius Caecus. The Appian Way eventually became Rome’s most heavily traveled road at the height of its empire. However, Kaster notes that the Appian Way is much more than a physical road, but also “a road of power, following the expansion of Rome’s influence in Italy and its growth to the greatness of an empire,” “at once an instrument and a manifestation of Rome’s growing power.”

This book is not a travel guide, though I think I would bring it with me if I were to travel along the Appian Way. I think the coolest part of this book was understanding Bob’s thought process as he visited each site, especially how he weaved the history into the present. In particular, I loved the stories about Caecilia Metella, Cicero, Clodius, Crassus, et al. 

This line succinctly sums up my biggest takeaway from the book: “The past along the Appian Way keeps impinging upon the present, and being repurposed by it.” 

At the end of his book, Kaster reiterated this same idea about the inseparability of the past and present when he wrote, “The past, she is everywhere, in layer upon layer, before our eyes and beneath our feet. In Italy, and on the Appian Way, there are more layers than in most places, deeper, richer, and more complex.” When I visited Rome last summer, what I enjoyed the most was seeing the “layers of time” before my eyes, whether by exploring an underground Roman temple beneath a modern church or reading Latin texts in the places they were written. What I find most exciting about studying classics is building connections, physical and literary, between antiquity and the modern day.

Appian Way Ghost Road, Queen of Roads

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