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Comment by mncharity | Hacker News Reader

An isochronic map of the Roman Empire: http://orbis.stanford.edu/ (path: "About" popup > "Gallery") Sigh.

I remember reading under an emergency the Roman's sent a new governor to London from Rome. With the ability to commandeer any resources available, took him about 22 days.

1600 years later the British recalled an ambassador from Rome under an emergency. Took him 22 days.

>1600 years later the British recalled an ambassador from Rome under an emergency. Took him 22 days.

Comical but not a 1:1 comparison since presumably the British didn't dispatch a private jet the instant he was recalled or give him the authority to commandeer whatever resources he wanted.

If Thresa May, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin all decided right now that they wanted to go have a cook out in a swamp in the Yukon they could probably all be crushing beers and eating burgers Saturday evening (local time).

The roman map is supposed to be around 200 CE, so 1600 years later would place the story around 1800.

I think it was between the French revolution and the defeat of Napoleon. But my memory isn't clear enough to give exact dates.

Both cases it's sailing ships and horses. Some of the limitation is probably human endurance. The pony express used relays of fit young men and teams of horses and I think the longest distance traveled by a rider was 130 miles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Haslam_(Pony_Express)

This says confusingly 120, 190 and 380 miles.

"ORBIS is designed for modern browsers and uses technology that works best in Chrome or Safari. If you want to try ORBIS in your unsupported browser, click here"

Double sigh, me & my Firefox.

What they meant to write was:

"ORBIS has only been tested in Chrome and Safari. If you want to try ORBIS in your browser we didn't want to allocate ressources to support, click here"

> Safari

> modern

Very informative. Wonder how long it took to get from Greece to India at that time? Remember seeing a reference in a book on influence of the Cynics school on the later Platonic Academy, post Roman conquest, to a letter from one wealthy aristocrats' son to another concerning some 'Grand Tour' where they would travel to India to interact with Brahman intellectuals, then off to Persia to interact with Magi (there was a reference to the Dervish being useless) then back to Greece. Must have been at least a two year excursion.

I can give you an upper bound of 4 years - as that is how long it took Alexander's army to cover that distance(while winning a few battles here and there between all the walking).

Thanks for sharing!

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