Travel in the Later Roman Empire

[Robert Vermaat]

As for life in the 'lesser villages' being more hazardous....why? What have they got that's worth stealing?

Cattle? Harvest? Drinks? Daughters? For a band of marauders, anything could be good enough to roast a farmer over a small fire. As happened a lot during Europes wars.

If you read the opening lines of Ausonius' "Mosella" (composed in the late 4th century, describing a journey from Bingen through Gaul), you don't get any impression of danger, even though he goes alone through 'trackless woodland'.

Does it? I get more the impression of total desertion due to a lot of violence:

amazed at the new walls added to old Vincum
where once Gaul equalled Latian Cannae
and penniless troops lie dead upon the fields, unwept.
Beginning my lonely journey from there through trackless woodlands
and spying no traces of civilization

I think the poet is not describing a idyllic empty countryside, but one bereft of population after a great slaughter. The new walls of Vincum amaze him - i guess he was not used to such construction activity!
The 'empty land' syndrome is a figure of speech much used in Late Antiquity:

The works of Fastidius, chapter 3
Of these some, who had frequently shed the blood of others, felt the wrath of God to such effect that they were compelled at last to shed their own. …Others who had committed similar deeds were so completely overthrown by the wrath of God that their bodies lay unburied and became food for the beasts and the birds of the air. Yet others who had unjustly destroyed a countless multitude of men have been torn to pieces limb from limb, piece by piece…

Orientius, Commonitorium, II.167-84
Neither the harsh terrain of dense forest and high mountain [celsi montis], nor strong rivers with their rapid currents, nor castles [castella] with their stones, nor cities protected by walls, nor the barrier of the sea, nor the troubles of the wilderness, nor caves, nor even caverns beneath black rocks, were sufficient to escape the hands of the barbarians. To many false trust was the cause of death, to many injury, to many civic treachery. What was not overcome by force was overcome by famine. The unlucky mother fell with her child and husband, the master underwent servitude with his slaves. Some lay food for dogs, and flaming roofs deprived many of life, giving then a funeral pyre. Throughout towns and villas, throughout fields and crossroads and all regions, on every road this way and that, there was death, sorrow, ruin [excidium], burning, grief. All Gaul was a single funeral pyre.

Salvian, De Gubernate Dei, VI.15.83-85
Those whom the enemy had not killed while they pillaged the city were overwhelmed by disaster after the sack; those who had escaped death in the capture did not survive the ruin that followed. Some died lingering deaths from deep wounds, others were burned by the enemy’s fires and suffered tortures even after the flames were extinguished. Some perished of hunger, others of nakedness, some wasting away, other paralysed with cold, and so all alike by diverse deaths hastened to the common goal. Worse than this, other cities suffered from the destruction of this single town. There lay all about the torn and naked bodies of both sexes, a sight that I myself endured. These were a pollution to the eyes of the city, as they lay there lacerated by birds and dogs. The stench of the dead brought pestilence on the living: death breathed out death. Thus even those who had escaped the destruction of the city suffered the evils that sprang from the fate of the rest. What followed these calamities? Who can assay such utter folly? The few man of rank who had survived destruction demanded of the emperors circuses as the sovereign remedy for a ruined city!

Sidonius, Epistulae, book III, letter 2
What joy it was for the afflicted when you set your sacred foot within our half-ruined ramparts! …What tears you shed, as if you were the father of all, over buildings destroyed by fire and half-burnt homes. How greatly you grieved over fields that were buried under unburied bones! How splendid then was your encouragement, how spirited your arguments for reconstruction! To this it may be added that, when you found the city evacuated because of civic dissension as well as barbarian attack, you, by urging peace, restored charity to the people and the people to their fatherland. Thanks to your advice the people have returned to a single mind as well as to a single city; to you the walls owe the return of their people, the returned people their unity.

Gregory of Tours, Homilies on Ezekiel, II.6.22
What is there to please us in this life? On every side we see grief, on every side we hear groans. Cities are destroyed, forts overthrown, fields depopulated, the lands reduced to a wilderness. No inhabitant remains in the fields, and scarcely any dweller in the cities; and yet these tiny remnants of the human race are still afflicted every day without respite. And the lashes of heavenly justice do not end because their faults are not corrected even under the lash. Some we see carried into captivity, other mutilated, others killed. What then is there to please us in this life, my brothers? If we still delight in such a world, it must be wounds we love, not joys. We see what will be left of Rome herself, who for a while seemed mistress of the world; bruised again and again by many great sorrows, by desertion of her citizens, by oppression by her enemies, and by repeated destructions, so that we may see in her what the prophet says against the city of Samaria [Ezekiel 24] …Where is now the senate? Where now the people? …And we few who have remained are still daily oppressed by the sword and innumerable tribulations… For because the senate is missing and the people lost, and because even among those who remain sorrows and groans daily increase, Rome. Now deserted, burns.

Of course, how much of this is pure hyperbole? I assume that a lot of it is, all the more since archaeology never found the traces of wholesale slaughter and devastation on such a massive scale. To the ancient authors, things must have looked bleak, but it never got as bad as they actually wrote.