We met some unusual characters while travelling the Roman provinces in last week’s post. In Apuleius’ masterful novel The Metamorphoses, we met Lucius, a man-turned-ass, who peregrinated around provincial Greece encountering people from all walks of life – from bandits to philosophers, nomadic slaves to catamites.
Then we met the industrious emperor Hadrian who spent much of his reign travelling the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, strengthening its defences, founding cities for his deceased lover, and simply doing some sightseeing.
And, by unlocking one of antiquity’s millions of lost voices through a unique inscription, we were rewarded with a glimpse into the travels of the all-work-no-play journeyman Conon, whose life of learning took him from Palestine to Antioch, Nicomedia, and finally Egypt – where he died from what we can only presume was complete and utter exhaustion.
Today, we’ll see how you didn’t necessarily need to leave your province to do a bit of sightseeing, spend some time at the beach, or hit up one or two tourist hotspots within the Roman Empire.
We start with a text that tells the story of a sleepy seaside town, a magnetic local spectacle, and the crippling effects of tourism in the ancient world.
Towards the end of the first century AD, Pliny the Younger tells us, there existed a stretch of coastline near the town of Hippo Regius in Algeria, North Africa, where people of all ages would spend their spare time sailing, swimming, and fishing.
Young boys especially loved the spot. It was somewhere they could mess about and play games (otium lususque), just as boys have done on beaches across the world for thousands of years.
It was during one of these games — a swimming race, Pliny says — that one group of boys came across a particularly playful dolphin. One boy in the group formed an immediate, intimate bond with the dolphin. For he, and he alone, had the remarkable ability to make it perform tricks, much to the delight of his companions.
The next day, the boys swam back to the same spot only to be greeted by the same playful dolphin. Again the one boy got it to perform tricks, and again his companions were overjoyed.
Only this time it wasn’t just this group of boys bearing witness to the spectacle but an ever-growing crowd of onlookers.
Word of the boy and his remarkably trained dolphin gradually spread, not just around the town but throughout the entire region. Testament to the efficacy of North Africa’s highway infrastructure under the Roman Empire is that it wasn’t long before the spectacle of the boy and the dolphin had utterly transformed the boys’ town from a sleepy coastal community into a thriving tourism hotspot.
This sudden influx was a cause of consternation for the town officials, who hastily called a meeting. They agreed that the financial strain all the visiting magistrates were putting the town under was simply proving too much. And so — in what would have been the most traumatising end to the “Flipper” franchise imaginable — they decided to do away discreetly with the dolphin.
There are many things to take away from this story.
Apart from kids swimming with dolphins long having been an Instagrammable event, the most important point for us is that, unlike in today’s world, a mass influx of travellers was seen as a drain rather than a boost to the local economy, suggesting there was absolutely no infrastructure able to deal with tourism — let alone sustainable tourism.
We know this to be the case from one of Cicero’s many letters to Atticus. Seeing the dismal financial state of the province to which he was posted, he proudly boasts that his stay in Cilicia in 57 BCE cost the people of the city no more than “four beds and a roof”.
Presumably, the North African local magistrates who proved such a drain on Hippo’s economy showed far less reserve. They certainly showed no respect for the town’s quietas (a substantive which we might translate as “unspoiltness”).
Hence why the town’s council took such extreme measures to preserve it.
But quietas didn’t characterise every coastal town in the Roman Empire. And for every sleepy seaside village was a raunchy resort with bars, brothels, and wild and notorious nightlife. Let’s go and visit some of them.
