The Rest Is History - 224. Roman Holidays

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Grand villas on the Bay of Naples, engraving names on Egyptian singing statues, and sightseeing tours of Biblical sights in the Levant. The fourth and final episode of this series explores Roman holidays - join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the destinations and activities of the ancient holidaying world. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. At the head of the terrace and portico successively is a garden suite of rooms, my favourite spot and well worthy of being so. I had them built myself. In this is a sunny chamber

which commands the terrace on one side, the sea on another, and the sun on both, besides an apartment which looks on the portico through folded doors, and on the sea through a window. In the middle of the wall is a neat recess. It holds a couch and two easy chairs, and as you lie on the couch, you have the sea at your feet, the villa at your back, and the woods at your head head and all these views may be looked at separately from each window or blended into one prospect adjoining is a chamber for passing the night or taking a nap and unless the windows are open you do not hear a sound either of your slaves talking or the murmur of the sea or the raging of the storms nor do you see the flashes of the lightning or know that it is day. So that, Tom Holland, was Pliny the Younger on his Laurentine villa west of Rome in the early second century AD. It sounds absolutely idyllic. It sounds exactly the kind of place I like to stay

in on holiday. So this is what? This is Pliny's holiday home. Is that right, Tom? Kind of. I mean, Pliny is fabulously rich. He obviously has a house in Rome. He has another house in Tuscany. He has another house up by Lake Como. So like, what's his name? George Clooney. Does he advertise Nespresso? I don't think he did.

That would have been beneath him. But he also has this gorgeous sounding villa on the Laurentian coast, which is about 20 miles from Rome, where he talks about, in terms that would be, I think, instantly familiar to anyone looking to rent a very, very upmarket kind of holiday house, maybe on the Cote d'Azur or Big Sur or whatever. I mean, absolutely gorgeous. He talks, you know, he has a swimming pool. He has a dining room that's surrounded on three sides by the sea. He says that the base is washed by the foam of the waves.

So absolutely gorgeous. Originally, we were going to, we've done three episodes, haven't we, on the kind of the rise of the modern holiday. And it just made me think, is it worth comparing the modern experience of holidays and tourism? You know, are there any parallels in antiquity? Because in lots of ways, I mean, in some ways, it seems a kind of foolish question. It's such a different world. But I think that Pliny's description of what is basically his holiday home, it does kind of raise kind of potentially interesting parallels, I think. I mean, the difference, of course, is that Pliny owns it outright. He's not renting it or anything like

that. No, but rich people have always had holiday homes that they owned outright, Tom. I mean, that doesn't make him different from lots of people who have holiday homes in Cornwall or in France or, you know, Americans who have houses on Cape Cod or something. I mean, I suppose that would be very familiar, wouldn't it? I mean, the idea of the holiday, I guess our idea of the holiday is a holy day, right? That's where the holiday is. That's the descent and that's the break. I mean, dare I say the coming of Christianity.ity well well you say that but i mean the romans did have holidays in the sense of holy days so um da's ferialis they called them so these were holidays defined by the state so they they were religious commemorated festivals of the gods

or anniversaries or um they were they were holidays announced by senior magistrates or all that kind of stuff. And then you have as well, you have the games. So these are also, they're not officially holidays, but you get the day off if you're living in Rome. So that's the whole, that's the circuses aspect of the bread and circuses. It's one of the perks of living in Rome

is that you do get all these spectacles. But I suppose the question is, are there parallels with, as you say, people going off to their holiday home in Cornwall or Cape Cod or whatever? Because I think there probably are, because these are perks of the rich in the way that we would understand them today. And they're the kind of things that you don't get in the Middle Ages, I think. You don't get in the Elizabethan period. You don't tend to get people going off to villas by the sea in the way that we have them now. Yeah, it's interesting that in that opening description,

so, I mean, as you say, it's like an Airbnb, a very high class, an Airbnb plus, Tom. class um an airbnb plus um tom it's uh it's um it's a you know he says uh the sun the sea the woods the silence so he's i mean this is a great argument that historians always have with each other whether some things are constant whether some you know things that we desire luxuries or our sense of what is beautiful or whatever whether these things are constant or whether they're entirely socially and culturally conditioned but plinny seems to like in his in his sort of i mean this is this is his retreat right this is the his country house is that i mean he seems to like in that everything that we like in holiday home so in other words the sun the sea

the silence they are all constants the romans prize them just as much as we do and the dining with the sea all around i mean that's such a yeah you know it's you go to an aegean island and you get the you know the table looking out over the the sunset or whatever i mean that's exactly what plinny is talking about um and one of the things i think that is different although actually again i, thinking about what we were talking about over the past three episodes, this nervous sense that holidays, you know, that you should improve yourself. So the Romans do, you know, they absolutely have that. So they have this phrase, otium cum dignitate. It's kind of leisure where you're not disgracing yourself, basically.

Leisure where you are reading up on philosophy or doing elevated contemplation of the nature of the gods or that kind of thing. So there's this nervousness about being lazy, about being luxurious, about becoming soft. And yet, of course, at the same time, that is the index of how much they wanted it. And Pliny's Villa is west of Rome, but really the epicenter of this kind of craving for the sea, fine dining, novel experiences is a bit south of Rome. And it's an area of Italy that to this day remains an absolute kind of tourist honeypot. And that's the Bay of Naples. And the appeal of the Bay of Naples for Romans is that it's very rich. It's very beautiful.

It's kind of absolute, you know, the natural beauties are profound, but it's also has a flavor of Greece. So you can go to the Bay of Naples and you can genuinely feel that you are sampling something Hellenic because Naples and Neapolis, the new city, that was founded by Greek colonists. Other cities as well along that stretch of what the Romans called Campania is still called Campania to this day, provide visiting Romans with, you know, you can meet Greek philosophers, you can get Greek speaking prostitutes, all these kind of things that Greece as well holds out. But you don't have to travel all the way to Greece to get them. So they have the same thing that we have, Tom, which is the desire for escapism and exoticism, right? I mean, that's what we look for on holidays.

Not too much exoticism. So I suppose it's a little bit like the Grand Tour, that on the Grand Tour, people are generally going to Rome and to Italy because that's familiar to them from their education. And likewise for Romans, they educated Romans, elite Romans are being brought up by Greek tutors. They're studying Greek literature. They're studying Greek philosophy. And so the chance to sample a little bit of Greece, albeit in Campania, is extremely appealing. They're not going off on adventure holidays to Gaul or anything like that. That's not what they want. A quick question. So the people that we're talking about are a very tiny minority, presumably. Yeah.

That are pretty similar, probably, are they, to the grand tourists, to the social, to the idea of a rich, educated elite? I mean, most Romans never go on any form of holiday, presumably. Absolutely, yes. So these are a minority of a minority. These are absolutely, you know, maybe 500 people. And even then, maybe only, you know, 50 can afford the absolute kind of top quality properties. But these are the guys who are writing the letters. These are the people who are writing, you know, whose testimony survives. And and of course as is always the way with

ancient history we're dependent on the sources but what you do get at the beginning of the first century bc um you get a figure who in so far as it's possible to find a roman equivalent of thomas cook you know thomas cook the guy who is packaging everything together and selling it to people who want a flavor of, who want relaxation. It's a guy called Sergius Arata, who in the 90s BC develops the oyster beds of Campania, which are celebrated as the best oysterbeds in Italy. He develops them, he builds dikes, he builds channels, all this kind of stuff, turns the Lucrine Lake into this vast expanse of oyster farming. So that serves to attract gourmands, foodies, food snobs. But then on top of that, he seems to have invented the heating swimming pool. It's a Latin phrase that is much contested, but the likeliest explanation is that he's built kind

of a swimming area that can be heated. So that's something attractive. And then on top of that, it seems that he is buying up lots of land, installing these heated swimming pools, developing the property sites and selling them to high-end clients in Rome. And so over the course of the first century BC, the line of the coast along the Bay of Naples, high-end properties with swimming pools seem to sprout up. So it's rather like California or Southern France. Yeah know southern france yeah the french riviera the french riviera and um we know of one of these kind of high-end houses is owned by the great general marius multiple consul great military uh leader um professionalizes the roman legions yeah and he has this property that is built we're told on a promontory on a rocky

promontory and that seems to be an absolutely key part of the appeal that you are kind of sticking out into the sea and one of the other things that you can get in the bay of naples is that you have this ash that that we know has been is volcanic they didn necessarily, but it has a remarkable property that it can set underwater. And so this facilitates the development of kind of piers that start jutting out into the sea. So again, a bit like Brighton, you're able to provide people with the opportunity to walk out and feel that you're surrounded by the sea. the romans are much too smart tom to be drinking seawater like in brighton right yeah they're probably not drinking seawater but they are going to spas are they i was going to ask about spas yeah they are so of course um the bay of

naples it's a very full of volcanic you know activity so there are lots and lots of sulfur baths all kinds of things like that and actually um the most notorious of all the pleasure resorts on the Bay of Naples, a place called Bailly, is celebrated for its sulphur baths. These sulphur baths, a bit like Brighton, provide an opportunity for the development of spectacular architecture because this concrete that can be used to set underwater also has the – its quality is such that Roman engineers can start to develop a spectacular new architectural form, namely the dome. And Baiae is famous for having the largest dome in the world. And it spreads over hot pools, sulfur baths, and it's rather like um the prince regent's spectacular in brighton this serves as the kind of you know the absolute landmark for by it's synonymous with all the kind

of the pleasures and delights that uh that by has to offer it's the ancient world's blackpool tower well it's it's not blackpool of course because blackpool is for is for the working classes because it's exclusive right there is of course, because Blackpool is for the working classes. Because it's exclusive. Right. There is no equivalent because the working people cannot afford to go there. But the rich can. And so it's probably, it's more like Brighton. So, Tom, when the rich go, do they all own properties?

Are there rentals? Are there hotels? How does that work? They own their own properties right is there any i mean obviously there must have been um places where you stayed if you're a traveler a courier you know that kind of thing but is there any concept in rome of the the hotel as a place you stay for pleasure not really i don't think um but just down from by you have the great port of Potioli, which is vast. Again, it has kind of great harbour built out of this concrete that can set underwater.

And that's where all the grain ships come from that enable Rome to be sustained. But Potioli also is kind of, you know, there are lots and lots of hotels, there are lots of brothels. There are lots of places where people who aren't necessarily senators can kind of procure entertainment and enjoyment. So Satyricon, Petronius is kind of novel. People aren't quite sure what it is, but it's a kind of prose account of people who are not of the senatorial class. And it gives you an insight into what life would be like for them. And there are absolutely, it's almost certainly set in Potioli. And you almost certainly get a sense of the kind of opportunities that are there for people who aren't necessarily kind of senatorial, but there is fun to be had there. So all of this, it's not an exact mapping on to the contours of the modern tourist industry,

but I do think that there are kind of echoes there oh they definitely are can i ask about a couple of things that um may or may not have existed so you mentioned the harbor would people i mean it would seem to me an obvious thing to do if i were a roman center that i might want to go on some form of cruise or some sort of you know take ship and go to greece go to egypt and look upon the pyramids or whatever. Do people ever do that? Do people ever go to the great temples in, I don't know, Ephesus or something or Athens? That's a great question. I think we should look at that in the second half. But on the question of, do they have yachts, say in the Bay of Naples? Absolutely they do. Yes,

absolutely they do. So at Bayeilly, again, which is the most notorious centre, part of the fun of it is that it's a place where you can let your hair down. And so you go out on a yacht and you get up to all the kinds of things perhaps that you wouldn't do even on dry land at Bailly. And so the know, strains of music and laughter are kind of drifting through the, you know, the warm nighttime air born from the yachts out in the bay is an absolutely key part of the appeal for people who can afford to go there. But it is, you know, if you if you spend too much time at Bailly, then people start to raise eyebrows. So Vespasian, for instance, a famously stern kind of old-fashioned type of emperor, ruggedly refuses to go to Bailly because he sees it as too decadent. But even he, in the very last year of his life, he succumbs to temptation and goes and has a lovely time but there is always this risk that that kind of hedges a wealthy roman constantly

about that if you go too far then people start to assume that you're up to no good and the classic classic example of this is the emperor tiberius i was just going to ask about something so i've been to capri to the island that that Tiberius went to. And, of course, I think it's called the Villa Jovis. Yeah. So the Villa of Jupiter. The Villa of Jupiter, his luxury holiday home, which was a fantastic setting, overlooks the sea, and where famously, now maybe you'll be able to tell us

whether this is true or not, Tiberius is supposed to have secluded himself and got up to no good on a very grand scale. Tom, do you want to tell us a bit about Tiberius's holiday pursuits? So Tiberius is an unbelievably impressive man. He is Rome's greatest general. Over the course of his military career, he twice saves Rome from a mass invasion, once on the Danube, once on the Rhine. He is highly, highly educated, highly, highly intelligent, very, very literate, a brilliant administrator, succeeds Augustus, rules as emperor. But I think by the end of his life, he's coming to feel that he has done enough. He is exhausted and he's fed up with Rome. He's fed up with the tensions implicit in his role because Tiberius is a man with a deep loyalty to the traditions of the Republic. And yet he has basically been obliged to take on the role of

Augustus. So a kind of autocratic role. And I think that the tension in the role becomes too much for him. And so he retires from Rome because he feels that he deserves his otium cum dignitate, his leisure time. He's earned the right to it. And he heads down the coast. He stops off in one villa where he has a spectacular dining place beside a cave, which is illustrated where past which Odysseus is meant to have sailed on his voyages.

And there's kind of spectacular statues illustrating the voyages of Odysseus all around this dining space. It's slightly ruined because there's an earthquake. And Tiberius almost gets crushed in the earthquake, but he survives that. And he then goes on and he ends up with basically the ultimate retirement place, which is the island of Capri, which is out in the bay. So it's completely secluded. And this is where he essentially settles and he doesn't come back to Rome. And the Villa Jovis is one supposedly of 12 villas that he builds, each one modeled on one of the gods of Olympus. And shocking, truly shocking stories are told of what he gets up to there. go swimming in his pool and have these small boys who swim alongside him and nibble at his genitals as they do so. Even more shocking things he's meant to do that I don't think that they can be... Suetonius, who describes this, one of the sentences with which he describes what Tiberius

is getting up to on Capri, I think is the single most shocking sentence in the whole of ancient literature. Even more shocking than the descriptions of Theodora that we had in last week. So if you want to go and find out what it is, go and read a translation. I won't say on this podcast. So the question, obviously, you know, as we discussed with Procopius bitching about Justinian and Theodora is what, you know, where is this coming from? Is it accurate?

There are other accounts of what Tiberius is getting up to on um a capri that make it sound a lot more innocent um tiberius is meant to have enjoyed growing vegetables in greenhouses that's very different he he was a he was he was a great man for literary chit-chat. He would have rather abstemious suppers where people would sit around and he would host literary people and he'd stage quizzes for them. Yeah. You know, equivalent of pub quizzes. It's like being a member of this podcast, Tom. There you go. We stage quizzes. Very similar.

Very similar, very similar. And so there is a kind of tension there. And I think it reflects the fact that basically there is this default Roman assumption that if you spend too long having a good time, secluded, isolated in a villa, it can only mean utter depravity. That you are up to no good. Utter depravity. In other words, the Romans have no sense that anyone has a right to privacy. You lead your life in public because if you don't, it's because you're an absolute pervert. You're up to all kinds of revolting activities. And Tiberius becomes the kind of the showboy, I guess, the poster boy for that assumption in

Roman life. And obviously, there is an enormous amount of class envy in this, going right the way down the social scale. But for Tiberius, I mean, it's humiliating for senators who supposedly are Tiberius's peers that they can't get to Capri. Tiberius owns it exclusively. And so they are obliged, if they want to have any contact with the emperor, to kind of renting out properties along the Bay of naples which could be you know incredibly expensive and if they can't afford that then that's very humiliating um and it's you know and and people who can't afford to go to the bay of naples full stop in rome of course they're going to moan and complain about it yeah of course can i just jump in is there another dimension to this

um i i know that it's such an interesting story the the story of Tiberius, which is that he's left Rome to be run by his right-hand man, Sejanus, who a lot of people hate and think is tyrannical. And so they're projecting, are they projecting a lot of their resentment of Sejanus onto Tiberius on the island of Capri. Yeah, so Sejanus is the guy who actually saves Tiberius from the earthquake that almost kills him. And he then goes on to basically, he's kind of Tiberius' conciliary, I suppose, running for him. And Tiberius ends up realizing that perhaps this is unwise and that Sejanus is plotting a coup. And so has Sejanus dispatched very brutally and all his family. Yes, I mean, I think that that is all true. And of course, you know, that doesn't help with what people are saying about Tiberius. But I think that the sense that people feel that leaders should not be going on holiday when there are crises is absolutely something that we would recognise.

Oh, yeah. If you're away in a crisis, Dominic Raab or Boris Johnson or whatever. Boris Johnson's just been off on holiday, hasn't he? He's been on his honeymoon and people are complaining about that. And also, I think there's kind of constant feeling that leaders don't deserve to get the kind of holidays that they may end up getting. So there was constant complaints about Tony Blair having, you know, being the guest of Cliff Richard or Berlusconi or whoever. Well, Tony Blair went on some very, very ill-judged holidays, I think. Yeah. So I think that sense that people have that the rich and the powerful are experiencing holidays and enjoyments and pleasures that the mass of the people can't have in Rome as in today generated hostility. And I think that that

is one of the things that Nero is interesting for, very much friend of the show. So in our episode on Nero, we talked about the golden house, which he built is this enormous kind of complex of palaces and pleasure gardens and lakes that he builds in the center of Rome after the Great Fire. And for senators, this is a monstrosity because basically what Nero is doing, he is bringing a luxury villa of the kind that Pliny described in the passage that you read at the opening that Tiberius enjoys on Capri into the heart of the capital. And so it's always remembered as an absolute monstrosity. But there is a case, I think, for saying that what Nero is doing is he's marketing himself as a friend of the people because he is giving people in Rome a chance to experience what

they would not otherwise have. So you could say that nero is playing the role of a very very upmarket billy butlin well i was about to say isn't there a claim about nero and his golden house that actually what nero is trying to build is a a roman antecedent of i mean i know it's a stupid comparison of something like tivoli in copenhagen pleasure gardens yeah which of course tivolioli, of course, was the inspiration for Disneyland and then Disney World. So he's creating a pleasure park that actually the common people will be able to enjoy as much as the elite. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And of

course, that's why the Senate hates it and obliterate it. But of course, the emperor who obliterates it is Vespasian, the stern, rugged soldier who refuses to go to Dubai because he's so puritanical about it. But he knows that if he's going to obliterate this great kind of concentration of lakes and gardens and groves that the people have been enjoying, he has to replace it with something else. And so he builds Rome's most famous monument on the site, namely the Colosseum. And the inauguration of the Colosseum and the kind of constant celebrations and feast day and public games that are held in the Colosseum enable the masses in Rome to have a lot of holidays. I was about to say the Colosseum, of course,

a place that people see on holidays, which Vespasian presumably will not approve of, visiting the Colosseum and eating an ice cream. I think he'd be very happy to know that it was still standing and that he he was still remembered for it i was about to say we should take a break in a second but have you got more to say about um no i think you haven't well i'm unbelievable i find that utterly implausible well i thought we should move on in the second half to um you know to tourism going abroad trips like that let's do that we will pack move on in the second half to, you know, to tourism, going abroad. We will. Trips like that.

Let's do that. We will pack our bags in the commercial break and we will return after the adverts, poised to go on a Roman holiday, as it were. I'm Gregory Peck. Tom is Audrey Hepburn. And we'll see you in a couple of minutes. Bye bye. Bye. I'm Marina Hyde

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head to therestisentertainment.com that's therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Our bags are packed, passports prepared. Tom, we're about to embark on a pleasure cruise, a voyage, call it what you will. So where are we heading?

We're heading for Greece because of course, you know, the Greek world really, I suppose for Romans is what Europe was for American tourists in the, maybe the forties and the fifties and the sixties. It was, you know, it was a place where you could feel rich, but you could enjoy some good old world culture. So I think the parallel is quite a neat one. And elite Romans are studying Homer, they're studying Greek philosophy. The famous sites in Greece, Athens, Sparta, Delphi, Olympia, are places with resonance for Romans in the way that, say, London or Paris or Rome would be for Americans. Yeah. These are places that you are familiar with from your childhood. And so you may well want to see them. And the first person that we have kind of record of doing this, basically going on a kind of an equivalent of a tour, looking at the sites, is a very distinguished military figure in Roman history, Lucius Aemilius Paulus, who is the son of the consul that dies at the Battle of Cannae, where Hannibal, you know, this great murderous victory over Rome, the worst defeat that the

Roman Republic ever suffered. And he's the father of Scipio Aemilianus, who will go on to destroy Carthage. Our Paulus's contribution to Roman military glory is that he defeats the King of Macedon, Perseus, at the Battle of Pydna in 168. and so he gets given by the senate the the subraca macedonicus um very good so that's his kind of yeah so it's splendid a splendid title and the year after he has um he's won the battle of pidna he goes back to the greek mainland and the kingdom of apyrus which is kind of of Albania, basically, isn't it? It's where Olympias, who was on the historical Love Island, the mother of Alexander the Great, came from.

And Paulus does his stuff. He goes around. He kind of beats the crap out of the Epirots. He sacks some of their cities. He loots and does all that kind of stuff. And then he decides he would like to go on a tour round Greece. And Livy, in his History of Rome, has a brilliant description of it.

And he says that it was now about the season of autumn. So that's kind of interesting. You don't want to go travelling in the summer because it's too hot if you're Roman, so you go in the autumn. Paulus decided to take advantage of the beginning of this season by travelling round Greece to visit the places which have become so famous by report that they are taken on hearsay as more impressive than they proved to be when actually seen.

Oh, no. The perennial holiday problem. Yeah, I think that must be the first account in, I mean, maybe if there's an earlier one, I'd love to hear it, if listeners can think of one. But as far as I know, that's the first account of sites that turn out to be not quite as impressive as you think they're going to be. So Paulus goes off and he goes to Delphi and he goes to Athens. He goes to Corinth, goes to Argos, he goes to Sparta, he goes to Olympia. And then he goes to olympia um and then he goes back and we talked didn't we uh over all three of the previous episodes about how modern tourists want to bring stuff back to show that they've been to a place so um you know you or i might bring back a a knickknack um yeah lords

millords going to rome might bring back a classical statue. Lord Elgin would bring some marbles. Yeah. Paulus brings back, you know, ships crammed full of loot. Absolutely huge, huge amounts of loot.

And this is what Roman generals from this point on, whenever they hit the Greek world and they have a chance to get embroiled in a war, they seize it with open arms. And so the most notorious figure who does this is a guy called Lucius Mummius, who in 146 is served up on a platter the opportunity to sack the famous city of Corinth. And Corinth is famous for its bronzes. It's famous for its statuary. And it's famous again, as Naples was, for its prostitutes. So Mummius wipes Corinth from the face of the earth. And the keys are loaded with bronzes, statues, works of art, prostitutes, all of which are loaded onto the ships, taken back to Rome. And Mamis can say, you know, he had a splendid time in Greece.

And from that point on, basically, you know, all these villas that we were talking about in the first part of this episode are stuffed full, you know, this is where you get your antiquities. This is where you get your... But there's no, I mean, the difference in then and now is there's no there's clearly no resentment of this presumably i mean there isn't a sort of movement later or 200 years later people say oh you should restitute no yeah restitute no no no of course not and interestingly of course i mean you know on the topic of the elkin marbles um the the parthenon was built with loot that the athenians

extorted from their subjects um and when in due course uh marius's great rival sulla gets the chance to sack athens you know he kind of basically says well you know this is payback so he he um he he he storms athens and he he nicks all kinds of stuff so he nicks the complete works of aristotle you know it'd be like i suppose i don't know people stealing the contents of the british library or something like that the vatican library you know taking them back to washington or something like that exactly um well it's pretty much what the nazis did isn't it i mean this was yeah of course this is anyone kind of pillaging you know in warsaw or cracow or whatever they would yeah they would load up with your tapestries and books and all this kind of stuff absolutely and there's this large uh temple to zeus that's been

unfinished in athens with all these kind of pillars standing there and um sullen knows that that the temple of jupiter back on the capital in Rome has burnt down. So he just takes them back to Rome. So it's all very Lord Elgin behavior. And you asked about how do the Greeks feel about this? There's actually, there's a really, this is quite a bit later. So this is the early second century. But there's a kind of philosopher stroke scholar called dio who comes um from the city called prusa in uh bithynia which is now kind of northern northern turkey

um just down from the bosphorus sea of marmora um and he visits roads and he's appalled by what he finds the rodians are doing to flatter visiting Roman dignitaries, so Roman tourists. Yeah. What the Rhodians are doing is they are taking statues of, you know, famous Rhodian heroes, often dating hundreds of years back. And they're erasing the names of the people to whom these statues originally portrayed and chiseling in the names of Romans. Oh, that is poor. That is very poor form. Yeah. And Dio is appalled by this and says, you know, you're, you're, you're wiping out your history. You're erasing your history. Yeah. But he also notes that the Romans have, have carted off a lot of statues from Rhodes

and he doesn't, he doesn't mind this. And in fact, he, he rather approves of it. And he says says it's true that the romans have carried off statues from everywhere including roads but this was to adorn their city where the objects are much better off than in some obscure corner of greece so actually dio is saying you know this is this is kind of saying well it's much better for the for the uh parthenophoresis to be in london where everyone can come and see them. It's almost identical argument. So kind of interesting. And do the Romans, Tom, do they go further east?

Do they go, would they go to, for example, to Asia Minor? Would they go to what's now Turkey? Would they go to Egypt? They would. So Ephesus is a great center. I mean, all the cities that have some, say Troy, places that have some kind of mythological, historical resonance. That's what they're interested in. Or indeed, kind of reputation for great art, great statuary.

And it's this kind of combination of, I suppose, of art and the numinous, the mythological, that is really what Roman tourists want. But that's a bit like the grand, that's the grand tourists, isn't it? I mean, they're looking for uplift and aesthetics and, but also fun. And I suppose Romans would have been the same. Completely.

So on the, I mean, on the subject of the great tour, we talked about Byron in our first episode. And, you know, he goes on, he actually goes to Greece. And in Childe Harold, he's writing about Cicero, the great Roman orator. And he quotes a letter that was written to Cicero by a guy called Servius Salpichus, just after Cicero's daughter has died. And Salpichus writes to Cicero, basically trying to cheer him up, saying, you know,

worst things happen at sea. It's basically chin up, that kind of thing. And Byron appends this note. He says, the celebrated letter of of servius subpictures to cicero on the death of his daughter describes as it then was and now is a path which i often traced in greece both by sea and land in different journeys and voyages and then he quotes subpictures on my return from asia as i was sailing from aegina towards megara i began to contemplate the prospect of the countries around me. Aegina was behind, Megara before me, Piraeus on the right, Corinth on the left, all which towns, once famous and flourishing, now lie overturned and buried in their ruins. And upon this sight, I could not but think presently with myself, alas, how do we poor

mortals fret and vex ourselves if any of our friends happen to die or be killed whose life is yet so short when the carcasses of so many noble cities lie here exposed before me in one view so aegan omega piraeus corinth these are all cities that kind of lie around athens and what you're getting there is that kind of shiver that tourists still get today or dream of getting because they don't anymore because so many tourists tend to go to antique you know ancient sites but the dream is of stumbling across some ancient city in its vastness and loneliness and feeling that kind of shiver down your spine and clearly what what salpichis is articulating is pretty much the same sentiment um you get a kind of shiver from thinking that which was great is no

longer so. So it's sort of Ozymandias, isn't it? The traveller in the desert sees the statue and it makes him think about the passing of time and the contours of history and all these kinds of things. But interestingly, there is also a kind of counter view that actually what you want when you say you go to Greece is you don't just want ruins. You want to experience, say, Athens or Sparta as they were in their heyday. So when Cicero goes, and Athens really, Athens, I suppose, is what Rome is to, well, it's a cross between what Rome was to Milords in the days of the Grand Tour and perhaps what Oxford is to Rhodes scholars. So it's a place that is the kind of the home of history, the home of art, but it's also a kind of a finishing school with great ancient monuments all around where you can feel yourself. So Cicero says that,

he describes the sites to be seen in Athens, the tomb of Pericles, the walkway where Demosthenes practiced his oratory. And he says that such things are endless in the city. For wherever we walk, we plant our footsteps on some piece of history. But by the time that the greatest tourist in Roman history, who is the Emperor Hadrian, who goes all over the Roman world. But Greece is really his love, and he goes there again and again and again. By the time he goes to Athens, he wants more than this sense of faded glories. And so what Hadrian can do because he's emperor is basically restore Athens to its former primacy. So he develops Athens on a massive scale. He brings in infrastructure. It's Hadrian who finishes off this temple to Zeus that Sulla had kind of nicked the columns from. And he enshrines Athens at the head of a kind of great confederation of Greek cities. basically trying to take Athens back to the heyday of the 5th century BC when all this tribute was coming in from Greek cities with which they built the Parthenon. So that's what he's trying to do.

He's trying to get Athens back to the 5th century so that then he can experience that kind of glory. And the other kind of intriguing city try and and resurrect try and kind of resurrect history is sparta because sparta famously there isn't much to see um so when when paulus goes to sparta livy says there isn't much you know there wasn't much to see there i can vouch for that i went to sparta last year tom there wasn't much to see i know and i directed you to a place full of homeless people didn't i yeah well you directed me to a temple where the guidebook then said, under no circumstances go to this temple. Sorry about that.

So Livy says that Paulus goes to Sparta not because there was anything to see, but because he wanted to admire the kind of traditional Spartan way of life. You know, the girls wrestling, boys being whipped brutally. I would have loved to have seen all that. I was very disappointed there was none of that going on. Right. I think, you know, secretly people, I think all tourists would quite like to see that.

And Paris is disappointed because by this point, it's not happening. Right. You know, Sparta is just like anywhere else. And so over the course of the first century AD, you're palpably starting to get this sense in Sparta that Roman tourists are turning up and they're disappointed by what they're finding. And by the time that Hadrian is emperor, he turns up and there's wrestling. Girls are wrestling.

Boys are being kind of whipped for the entertainment of watching tourists. You know, it's wrestling. Girls are wrestling. Boys are being kind of whipped for the entertainment of watching tourists. You know, it's all. And Hadrian likewise kind of gives money to the Spartans so that they can kind of reinstitute. You know, they could they can have a kind of sense of their old primacy. And I think that's a that's a very, very I suppose it would be like, you know, Bill Gates turning up in Stratford, say, and saying, well, I'm going to pull everything down and rebuild it in a Tudor fashion or something like that. But in a way, Tom, it's exactly the same as the thing we talked about in, I think, the very first episode. No, the second episode, sorry, the Victorian tourism. When we were talking about when people went to Italy on kind of, you know, the sort of early

Victorian package tour type things. They wanted to see Italians making pasta in the old fashioned way rather than with the new, you know, and the way in which actually that this still happens, right? No matter where it is, they specialize in leather and lace kind of old fashioned artisan products that clearly are probably being shipped in by someplace from some factory in China. But what you want to see is you want to see old women, you know, doing the lace in the way that they've done for generations. I mean, that's...

That is pretty much it. Yeah. But presumably Hadrian is about the... Would I be right in thinking that this is about the peak, as it were, of Roman tourism? Because obviously after Hadrian, you know, we've got the crisis coming of the third century. You've got the sort of the contraction of the empire, the economic attraction, plagues, and so on. So presumably the whole, as it were, the tourist industry,

if that's not a completely anachronistic way of talking about it, begins to implode from that point onwards. Yes, I think so. And also, of course, with the coming of Christianity, that shared classical culture starts to fade um yeah but i you know i think while it lasts is it a tourist i suppose you could i mean without too much risk of anachronism i think you could definitely say that um the the you know the relationship of the roman elites to the Greek world in particular, it does have kind of echoes of very, very high-end contemporary tourism, perhaps.

I think it's slightly more ambiguous with places beyond the Greek world. So, for instance, Augustus, his grandson and adopted son, Gaius, he is in the East and he has to pass through Judea. And Suetonius tells us that Augustus wrote to him approvingly because while Gaius was traveling through Judea, he had not gone and seen Jerusalem. So the implication of that is firstly that Jerusalem was a kind of tourist attraction for Romans. Yeah, that you could have stopped off and seen it. Yeah, you would go and look at the temple, Herod's Great Temple, which was absolutely a kind of tourist attraction, but also that you're to be admired for not doing that, for being devoted

to duty. I think also, of course, the other land that is absolutely stuffed full of tourist attractions is Egypt. But for the very high end traveler, Egypt is problematic because it's the private property of Caesar. And from Augustus onwards, senators are not allowed to travel to Egypt. So even Germanicus, who is in the reign of Tiberius, an absolute war hero, almost projected to succeed Tiberius as emperor, he goes to Alexandria to basically see the sites and gets into all kinds of trouble. But that doesn't stop people below the rank of senator from going to Egypt. And we have this brilliant, brilliant record of exactly how many Romans are going to Egypt in the form of these two great statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, who's the father of

Akhenaten. And they were erected outside this huge funerary temple at Thebes, so Luxor, on the West Bank, so kind of in front of the road that leads to the Valley of the Kings. But by the time that Roman tourists are going there, they've completely forgotten who these two great statues are, these two colossi, as they call them. And they think that it's a hero called Memnon, who they believed had been the king of Ethiopia, who'd come to the Trojan War. He was the son of the Dawn. He died in the Trojan War, killed by Achilles. And then the Dawn had gone to Zeus and had begged for Memnon to be brought back to life. And so Zeus allowed him to become an immortal. And there was a weird kind of atmospheric freakish quality

to the base of one of these statues, which was that very often at dawn, when the sun first came up, the base of the statue would sing. Well, it wouldn't exactly sing. We're told that it sounds like a lyre being played with a broken string so there must have been some crack that the wind was going through or something or there's kind of i think there's moisture perhaps in a crack and as

the sun comes up and it dries it and it makes it produces the sound but this this basically i mean maybe even more than the pyramids is what people in Egypt want to see. And so they go to these statues and they graffiti it. So they pay money to the priests who then chisel kind of, you know, names all over the colossi of Memeron, as they're called. And so it's an incredible, you know, it's a fabulous record of just how many people are going there. So for instance, there's a guy called Swadius, who is also attested in Tacitus. He gets involved in the civil wars of AD 69, the year of

the four emperors. He's involved fighting for Otho. And then he gets sent by Vespasian to sort out Pompeii. And so his kind of posters and inscriptions are all over Pompeii. And then his name pops up on the statue of Memnon, which is brilliant. But the most famous inscriptions on the statue of Memnon are inscribed by a woman called Julia Balbila, who is a distinguished poet, the sister of a very, very wealthy grandson of a king who lived in Athens. And she goes on possibly the most famous Roman tour of Egypt of the lot, which again is Hadrian. Hadrian travels to Alexandria. He sails down the Nile. He's with his wife, Sabina, and Julia Balbila is there as Sabina's companion. And they arrive at the statues of Memnon. They all go and dawn to wait for the statues to sing.

They don't sing. Hadrian kind of goes off. But Julia and Sabina go back the next day and hear them sing. And they go back again and again and again, because they're so fascinated by the phenomenon. And Julia has four of her poems inscribed on the leg of the statue of Memnon, and they're there to this day. Oh, wonderful. That sounds amazing. Byron notoriously chisels his name on the Temple of Poseidon at Suneon in Attica. Julia Balbila, centuries and centuries before, is basically doing the same thing. And so I think you do have this sense of perhaps, you know, kind of mirrors being held up.

Yeah. Unfortunately, Tom, that gives legitimacy to all those people who scrawl their names, teenagers now, on ancient monuments, which they invariably do. I think you've got to be a kind of high-end Athenian poet or a lord. Yeah, to get away with it. Really to get away with it. Really to get away with it. I think.

And one last question, I think, is among other things, my internet. I've just had a message saying my internet connection is unstable. Oh, no. So listeners will be worried to hear that because they're worried about the future of the podcast. I can assure you I stand for stability and I will ensure the restoration of stability, something I've advocated since the very beginning of this podcast. Now, Tom, it's about, you mentioned the coming of Christianity. And obviously, you know, the search for the classical heritage

kind of goes into abeyance, as it were. But it's replaced with something else, which is pilgrimages. So people wanting to go to Jerusalem, people wanting to go to Rome. So we talked at the very beginning of this week about Alfred the Great as a little boy going to Rome, didn't we, on a pilgrimage. How much do you think it's reasonable to talk about those in terms of holidays? Because there clearly was an infrastructure to support it, and there's the same sense of travel, of anticipation, of excitement,

of fun, of uplift that we get with modern holidays. Well, we talked about this. I mean, we kind of touched on it very briefly that you only have to look at the Canterbury Tales to see that fun was absolutely a part of it. I mean, that's why people were doing it. But you shouldn't overemphasize that because certainly for people in the early Middle Ages, it was really tough. I mean, it was really brutal. The dangers were enormous. And particularly if you were traveling throughout the Middle Ages, particularly when Jerusalem was under Muslim rule, to travel to Jerusalem, which is top pilgrimage destination if you're a Christian, was very, very dangerous.

And likewise for Muslims traveling, doing the Hajj. Again, there are opportunities. You're getting out of your normal situation. So there are, in that sense, kind of echoes of going on holiday. But I mean, it wasn't really a pilgrimage unless it was tough. And I think they were tough. But having said that, again, going back to the Roman period, the fourth century, when perhaps the infrastructure, the infrastructure, the folk memories of people going on trips around the classical sites was still a kind of living thing. High-end pilgrims going to Palestine, going to the Holy Land in the fourth century, of whom the most famous is Helena,

the mother of Constantine. When they get there, it's different to going to Athens or Egypt because often you're looking for things that aren't there. So famously, Helena turns up in Jerusalem. She wants to see the place where Jesus died, his tomb. She wants to see the true cross. It's not there. And so she starts excavating. And whoa, there they are.

There it is. She finds the true cross. Who would have thought that? What an extraordinary coincidence. Yeah. So that's why she's the patron saint of archaeologists. course of the fourth century, pilgrims who are going to Palestine, basically in liaison with the locals, are constructing a kind of tourist itinerary. So they're saying, you know, this hill is where David did that. This house is where Peter lived. This lake is where Jesus walked on the

water, whatever. They're kind of constructing a tourist topography that is still there to this day. So that basically when tour parties go to Israel and visit the biblical sites, as likely as not, they're visiting biblical sites that were manufactured as biblical sites in the fourth century by very similar Roman tour parties. And so I think that is a kind of fascinating continuity. Well, that's a lovely way to end because I mean, one of the great themes of this week has been continuity, hasn't it? I mean, it's one of the themes of history generally, but it's really interesting with holidays and with tourism, how many things that the Grand Tourists did, that the Thomas Cook pioneers did, that the first people on the Horizon flights in the 1950s, or indeed Pliny and his frankly delightful sounding villa.

They're so recognisable, aren't they? And Tom, you've got a holiday coming up, I believe, haven't you? You've got a Greek holiday of your own. Well, not till October because I didn't want to book it and still have not finished my book so i left it as late as possible but yeah very much looking forward to it i need it very exciting so tom uh can is now free to go and plan his holiday um i am going to go and begin the institution of the of stability um which i'm obviously all about internet stability

in my case and then i'll move on to the political and cultural stability of the realm, something I always advocate for on this podcast. And Tom, what have we got coming up? We've got French history told through the medium of film. We've got Lady Jane Grey. We've got China and the Second World War. We've got all kinds of goodies. All kinds of treats.

It's actually better than going on holiday, isn't it? Listen to this podcast. It's a holiday in itself. It's uplifting, and it's actually better than going on holiday isn't it listen to this it's a holiday in itself it's uplifting and it's also enormously sexy which is i think what people look for um in a holiday goodness definitely are you incredulous that people look for that or you're incredulous that i think that about this podcast i'm slightly incredulous that you think this podcast is sexy with the possible exception of love island pigeons. I'm reflecting what the public tell me. That is a very, very exciting thought and one on which I think we should say goodbye.

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