Litterae e Britannia...

Salvete omnes!

So this is my first attempt at blogging and I have no idea what I'm doing, but I hope that it will improve as I go!  My main goal is to keep my students up to date on all of my Roman-themed adventures this summer, but if I can also obtain the secondary goal of making my friends and colleagues jealous, I shall consider it a resounding success!

So after arriving in London early on Wednesday 26th and catching up with my friends Tiziana (who lives in London and has been hosting us) and Mirko (who just so happens to be the lead singer of Italy's number 1 Muse cover band, Bemuse) we rested up before hitting the road for some adventures in Roman Britain the next day.

Thursday began as a comedy of errors as Mirko and I seemed to bungle every step of our journey.  Even just getting to the right place to pick up our rental car was a Herculean task.  Then we had to get used to driving on the opposite side of the road, which is much more challenging than it looks.

Mirko driving on the right with Stonehenge in the distance...

This, of course, got me thinking... how did this happen?  Why does most of the world drive on one side and the British (and many of their former colonies) drive on the other?  As with most questions like this, there does not seem to be a clear, definitive answer and, as usual, searching the internet turns up more half truths and speculation-stated-as-fact than hard answers.  However, I did find some nice nuanced reporting on the blog of a certain Brian Lucas who has at least systematically and intelligently considered many different situations and vehicles.  Check out his findings here:  http://brianlucas.ca/roadside/.

Of course, we are concerned about the Romans.  What did they do?  Lucas feels fairly certain that the Romans drove on the left and he cites three pieces of evidence.  First, a report that an excavation of a Roman road at an ancient mine near Swindon in England revealed that the tracks on the right hand side of the road heading to the mine were deeper than those on the left.  This is taken as evidence that the tracks on the right must have been made by heavier carts leaving the mine, and therefore, "the Romans must have driven on the left--at least at this particular site."  However, in an admittedly quick Google search, I have not been able to uncover any viable links to this research.

Next, he says that someone named Robert Pease has seen a coin which shows Roman horsemen crossing each other right shoulder to right shoulder--again, signifying left side of the road driving.  However, again, I was unable to uncover any such image.  But, when looking at the images of Roman coins that did come up, I began to have my own thoughts about the matter.  All the Roman coins of horsemen which I could find always seemed to show the lead horse in the background.

Roman Republican era coin, ca. late 3rd, early 2nd Century BCE.

This, of course, could simply be for reasons of design--presumably the rider and the horses head are more interesting to look at than his hindquarters--but, if it does represent how they would ride, then driving on the left would make more sense, since you most likely would want the lead horse to stay to the outside leaving space for the others to fall in behind him.  If these horsemen were driving on the right, then the lead horseman could be stuck in the middle of the road with nowhere to go when encountering oncoming traffic.  Also, there is the idea that being on the left is more practical for mounting and dismounting, which, as my horseback riding instructor also told me and as was written about by the ancient Greek author Xenophon (in The Art of Horsemanship), is basically universally from the left.  If you mount and dismount from the left, you probably want to mount and dismount from off of the road, rather than in the middle of it...

However, just when if feels like we are getting somewhere, I was sitting at the Circus Maximus when I had a thought... haven't I seen images of chariot races?? Which way are they going?  Now, of course, you don't have two way traffic in chariot races, but the direction of the races might give us some clue.  In fact, a quick review of some images from all over the Roman world revealed what I had already suspected--Roman chariot races ran counter-clockwise.

While this does not prove anything, it may be evidence supporting an idea that, like us, the Romans would run their races counterclockwise to match the wide left turns of their everyday driving.  (Auto races in left-side driving Britain, in fact, typically run clockwise!).

Well, unfortunately, it looks like we're not able to solve this particular question at this time, but it's certainly fun to think about.  What do you think?  Leave a comment below and weigh in on this intriguing conundrum!