Le voyage dans l'Afrique romaine

« The one for whom the travel is pleasant, doesn’t love his country”, wrote Augustine. His words, which turn up regularly in the comments of the bishop of Hippo Regius on the Christian religion, sound like a personal statement on his own experience of travelling on the roads of Roman Africa at the end of Antiquity. There is here a striking distance between an off-putting picture of the journey, especially because of the various inconveniences which might bother and endanger the traveller, and the increase in personal but also official travels since the Principate of Augustus and the strengthening of the Roman control over the African territory, that has modified the travelling context itself. Which evolutions thus occurred in the various practices of travelling, undertaken for official or private purposes? How are they symbolic of the great changes which have transformed the society and the African provincial territory, from the reign of Augustus to the times of St. Augustine?