The inn, it is well ascertained, never became a common institution in classic antiquity. It was utterly unknown in any thing like its modern shape among the Greeks; one cause being that the literary Greeks gave less care to their roads and communications than the administrating, fighting, conquering, and colonizing Romans always did. Even among the Romans the army trusted to its city-like encampments from stage to stage. Centuries passed away, during which the private traveller found few indeed, and far between, any better public resting-houses along the magnificent and stupendous highways, whose remains we still behold indestructible, from England to Asia Minor, than the half-day relay-posts, or mutationes. At these the wayfarer, by producing[28] his diploma from the proper authorities, obtained a change of horses.
Travelling, in short, was a thousand-fold less practised than it is among us; and those who did travel, or who deemed it likely they ever should, trusted to that hospitality which necessity had made universal, and the poetry of daily life had raised by repute into one of the greatest virtues. Years before any member of your family, supposing you to belong to the age through which the events of this narrative are carrying and to carry us, years before any of your circle quitted your roof, you knew to what house, to what smoky hearth in each foreign land, to what threshold in Spain, Gaul, Syria, Egypt, Greece, the wanderer would eventually resort. A certain family in each of these and other lands was your hospes, and you were theirs; and very often you carried round your neck, attached to a gold or silver chain, a bit of elder or oak (robur) notched and marked by the natural breakage, the corresponding half of which hung day and night round the neck of some friend living thousands of miles away, beyond rivers, mountains, wild forests, and raging seas. These tokens were the cheap lodging-money of friendship. Very often they were interchanged and put on in boyhood, and not presented till advanced age. He who had thrown the sacred symbol round the curly head of his playmate on the banks of the Tiber, saw an old man with scanty white hair approach him, half a century afterward, at Alexandria, or Numantia, or Athens, and offer him a little bit of wood, the fracture? of which were found to fit into those of a similar piece worn upon his own bosom. Or the son brought the father's token; or a son received what a father had given. And the stranger was forthwith joyfully made welcome, and took rank among dear friends. Forthwith the bath and the supper introduced him to his remote home amid foreign faces. To be once unfaithful to these pledges, was to become irreparably infamous. The caitiff who thus sundered the lies of traditionary and necessity-caused and world-wide kindness, became an object of scorn and reprobation to all. It was enough to mention of him,[29] tesseram confregit hospitalem, ("that man has broken his token-word of hospitality;") with that all was said. Traces of this touching custom appear to survive in some of the ceremonials of rustic love, amid many a population ignorant that the ancient Romans ever reigned over Europe.
But if inns, in year eleven, were not what they have been in mediæval and modern Europe, nevertheless a few existed even then, (cauponæ;) and a more notable establishment of this kind never flourished in any part of the Roman empire than that to which our story has now brought us. It was the exception to manners then prevalent, and the presage of manners to come long afterward. It used to be commonly called the Post-House of the Hundredth Milestone, or, more briefly, Crispus's Inn.
The public room of this place of entertainment was not unlike the coffee-room of a good modern inn, except that it was necessarily far more full of incident and interest, because the ancients were beyond comparison more addicted to living in public than any modern nation has ever been.
An Englishman who makes a similar remark of the French, in comparison with his own countrymen, has only to remember that the modern French as much excel the ancient Romans in fondness for retirement and privacy and domestic life as the English believe themselves to excel the French in the same particular.
An inn did not trouble itself much with the triclinium, a chamber seldom used by its frequenters. Even the manners of the triclinium were out of vogue here.
In Crispus's public room, for instance, there was one and only one table arranged with couches around it, upon which some three or four customers, while eating and drinking, could recline according to the fashion adopted in the private houses of the rich and noble. All the other tables stood round the walls of the apartment, with benches and settees on each side, offering seats for the guests. The inner seats at these tables were generally preferred, for two reasons; the occupants saw all that passed in the room, and besides, had the wall, against which they could lean back.
When Velleius Paterculus, having left Tiberius and Sejanus in the meadows near the Liris, took charge of the prætorian squadrons and of Paulus, he directed a Batavian trooper to dismount and give his horse to the prisoner. Paulus willingly sprung upon the big Flemish beast, and rode by the side of the obliging officer who had given him that conveyance. Thus they proceeded at an easy amble until they reached the post-house, to the porch of which the noise of four thousand hoofs, suddenly approaching along the paved road, had brought a group of curious gazers. Among these was the landlord, Crispus himself.
A halt, as the reader must have inferred from a former incident, was occasioned at the door by the intimation conveyed to Paterculus that Paulus's sister had fainted, that she and her mother intended to seek a lodging at the inn, and that the mother and brother of the invalid would both feel grateful to the commanding officer if he could permit Paulus, upon pledging his word not to make any attempt to escape, to remain there with them.
"As to the ladies," said the urbane literary soldier, "I have neither the wish nor any orders to interfere with their movements. But you, young sir, what say you? Will you give me your word to regard yourself as being in my custody till I expressly release you? Will you promise not to abire, evadere, excedere, or erumpere, as our friend Tully said?"