Royal Road
The Persian Royal Road was an ancient highway reorganized and rebuilt by the Persian king Darius the Great (Darius I) of the Achaemenid Empire in the 5th century BC. Darius built the road to facilitate rapid communication throughout his very large empire from Susa to Sardis ("centralized rule is the victim of time and distance," Robin Lane Fox has observed in this context). Mounted couriers could travel 1,677 miles (2,699 km) in seven days; the journey from Susa to Sardis took ninety days on foot. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote, "There is nothing in the world that travels faster than these Persian couriers." Herodotus's praise for these messengers—"Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor darkness of night prevents these couriers from completing their designated stages with utmost speed"— was inscribed on the James Farley Post Office in New York and is sometimes thought of as the United States Postal Service creed.
Read more about Royal Road: Course of The Royal Road, History of The Royal Road, A Metaphorical “Royal Road” in Famous Quotations
Famous quotes containing the words royal road, royal and/or road:
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“These are not the artificial forests of an English king,—a royal preserve merely. Here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. The aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Dear common flower, that grow’st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May,
Which children pluck, and, full of pride, uphold,
Hight-hearted buccaneers, o’erjoyed that they
An Eldorado in the grass have found,
Which not the rich earth’s ample round
May match in wealth—thou art more dear to me
Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)