You don’t have to be well-versed in the corpus of Tacitus and Suetonius to know that the Romans liked a good party. Their excesses are the stuff of legend, best encapsulated perhaps in their bountiful banquets.
But where did the ancients go to let loose away from the prying eyes of the capital? Luckily, we have a few answers.
The town of Canopus in Egypt perfectly fits the bill for an ancient beach resort; the first-century satirist Juvenal deriding it as a “damned and debauched city.” But it can’t have been much worse than Baiae in Campania –– a volcanic spring resort rife in sun, sea, sex and, for good measure, some sermonising from the Stoic philosopher Seneca.
Baiae’s hordes of drunks promenading along the beach, endless streams of sailing parties (comessationes navigantium) and non-stop party playlists — an image I’ve admittedly elaborated from the meagre Latin offering of symphonia — offended the Younger Seneca’s stoic sensibilities so much, he writes, that he could only stomach it for a day.
Cicero too brought up Baiae’s “beach parties” and “banquets” during his attack on Clodia. The difference was that Cicero had a holiday home there.
Ancient literature is full of examples of the ancients on vacation. It’s just about looking for where they tell us (and extrapolating where they don’t).
Wealthy Romans ventured to Baiae to bathe in its volcanic waters, drink the night away, and have sex on the beach. Magistrates and locals travelled from across North Africa to watch a boy playing with a dolphin off the coast of Hippo. A mosaic found in Sicily shows a group of young women engaged in the same fun and games (otium lususque) as the North African boys, wearing something that strikingly resembles the modern bikini.
But what about those who didn’t like to be beside the seaside? What sources exist to prove the ancient Romans did exactly what many modern Italians do when the summer heat gets too much – retreat to the countryside, la campagna, for some cool mountain air?
This is what we’ll be looking at in the final part of this series on travel in the ancient world.
