The ship may either proceed directly south of Crete, or it may run across to Myra in Asia Minor, or to Rhodes, and thence proceed due west.  As a rule the ancient navigator preferred to keep somewhat near the shore.  Other ships, picking up and putting down cargo and passengers as they went along, would pass up the Syrian coast, calling at Caesarea, Tyre, Sidon, and other places before passing either north or south of Cyprus.  From such a ship it might be necessary—­as it was with St. Paul and the soldiers to whose care he was committed—­to tranship into another vessel proceeding directly to Italy.  If, as we have imagined, the traveller is on a cornship of the Alexandria-Puteoli line, he will reach the Bay one day after passing the straits of Messina, and his vessel will sail proudly up to port without striking her topsail, the only kind of ship which was permitted to do this being such imperial liners.

There were other famous trade routes of the period.  One is from Corinth; another from the Graeco-Scythian city at the mouth of the Sea of Azov, whence corn and salted fish were sent in abundance; a third from Cadiz, outside the straits of Gibraltar, by which were brought the wool and other produce of Andalusia; a fourth from Tarragona across to Ostia, the regular route for official and passenger intercourse with Spain.  Yet another took you to Carthage in three days.  Across the Adriatic from Brindisi you would reach in one day either Corfu or the Albanian coast at Dyrrhachium (Durazzo), where began the great highroad to the East.  Given a fair wind, your ship might average 125 or 130 miles in the twenty-four hours, and, if you left Rome on Monday morning, you had a reasonable prospect of landing in Spain on the following Saturday.  From Cadiz you would probably require ten or eleven days.  There was, it is true, no need to come by sea from that town.  There was a good road all the way, with a milestone at every Roman mile, or about 1600 yards.  Unfortunately that route would generally take you nearly a month.

It is not probable that sea travelling was at all comfortable; but it was apparently quite as much so, and quite as rapid, as it was on the average a century ago.  Ships were made strong and sound; nevertheless shipwrecks were very frequent, as they always have been in sailing days.  Wreckers who showed false lights were not unknown.  There is also little doubt that the vessels were often terribly overcrowded; one ship, it is said, brought no less than 1200 passengers from Alexandria.  That on which St. Paul was wrecked had 276 souls on board, and one upon which Josephus once found himself had as many as 600.  It is incidentally stated in Tacitus that a body of troops, who had been both sent to Alexandria and brought back thence by sea, were greatly debilitated in mind and body by that experience.  On the other hand, as has been already stated, there was generally no such thing as a pirate to be heard of in all the waters of the Mediterranean.