Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye, in their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones, appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky.
(W. B. Yeats, The Magi)
Something strange about ghosts is that they always seem to float. Locked in limbo, they inhabit the liminal plane between the living and the forgotten, making their presence known to those who see them only indirectly, and without interfering.
We tend to find them terrifying, partly because of their ghastly physiognomy, partly because they’ve shuffled off their mortal coil—reaching the end of a journey we’re all on, and not seeming all too happy about it.
For those who steer clear of mediums and Ouija boards, the great god History is the only conduit to the dead. Such is its allure. And the further back you go – and the wider the chronological chasm that separates – the more tantalising this allure becomes.
But our dialogue with the dead can only ever be one-way. Yes, we can catch the occasional glimpse of the ancients through the things they left behind. But the majority of their stories are lost, and the minority overly political and personalised, passed down to us as logorrheic lists of power-grabbing exploits undertaken by power-grabbing men.
But the rewards are there if you scratch below the surface. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look.
In Italy, most flock to Pompeii, a site that some say still breathes its ancient past. Particularly famous are the perfectly preserved bodies of Pompeii’s victims – silent witnesses who succumbed to Vesuvius’ pyroclastic flow in the late first century AD, commonly regarded as one of the most macabre and poignant links to antiquity anywhere in the world.
Macabre, yes. Poignant, no.
Roaming among the tourists who wander the whitewashed reconstructed theme park of Pompeii, you never really feel the ancient world. To those travelling south, I always recommend nearby Herculaneum: less crowded, better preserved, more intimate.
To get to Herculaneum, you must descend down a tunnel taking you from the modern town to the ancient beachfront. At the bottom you’re met with a particularly morbid sight – the skeletal remains of Herculaneum’s ancient inhabitants, sheltering in perpetuity within the vaults of the town’s boathouses.
Grisly reminders of the desperation that gripped the town in its final hours.
Yet with the modern town of Herculaneum looming over the ancient site, no matter how hard you try to lose yourself in its ancient streets and villas, you never feel that you’ve truly left your world behind and grounded yourself in theirs.
But to consort with history’s ghosts, perhaps you cannot be grounded in either. The place I’ve sought out offers precisely this prospect.
It’s August 2016, and I’ve come to Baia, a small coastal resort just north of Naples.
It’s a resort little known to the Italians – most of whom eye me with suspicion whenever I mention it, unwilling to suspend disbelief until they’ve pulled out their phones and consulted Google Maps.
I find this surprising given the wealth of Baia’s history.
In its heyday, Baia was the place to be for Rome’s rich and famous. Julius Caesar had a holiday home there, as did the more notorious emperor Nero and the philhellenic (and famously philandering) emperor Hadrian.
For the most part, Roman writers eulogised it.
According to Horace, “No bay on earth” outshone Baia. For the Roman poet Martial, the resort boasted the golden shores of Venus herself.
The venereal reference is especially apt.
One of Baia’s main pulls was its luxurious spas and state-of-the-art saunas – a natural result of the area’s thermo-volcanic activity. But bubbling beneath the surface was a resort of vice, promising its prospective visitors brothels, beach parties, and binges that would put today’s Brits abroad to shame.
The famous stoic philosopher and tutor to Nero, Seneca the Younger, describes scenes strikingly familiar to us today: drunks wandering up and down the beach at all hours, booze cruises along the bay; a place to let loose one’s lusts away from the prying eyes of the capital.
Switch choral songs for EDM and you essentially have modern-day Ibiza.
The most notorious spectacle to grace Baia’s shores came in 39 A.D. For reasons largely unknown, the unhinged emperor Caligula built a bridge of ships across the width of the bay before spending a day galloping up and down it on horseback.
Donning the breastplate of Alexander the Great, he then headed a military procession along the pontoon. But as the setting sun bled into the sea, the spectacle descended into scenes of unabated Bacchic revelry. Several of the more intoxicated participants were even said to have fallen into the water and drowned.
Much to the emperor’s delight.
Joseph Mallord Turner, Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, engr. E. Goodall, Photo © Tate
Today’s Neapolitans flock to other stretches of coastline to escape the city’s oppressive summer heat. And despite the day’s beautiful weather, it’s not hard to see why.
With its flaking buildings and tired-looking bars, modern Baia is little more than a derelict shell of a decadent past – almost all of which is hidden anyway. Consigned to the depths over the centuries through the volcanic process known as Bradyseism.
But I haven’t come for the town or the beach. Sitting at a dusty desk in Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries some years ago, I learned that out in the bay lies submerged an archaeological treasure trove of relics from one of my favourite historical periods. A period of revolution, tyranny, excess, and debauchery – the early Roman Empire. And today I’m going to find it.
Having stumbled my way through signing up for the dive in my grammatically compromised Italian, I met our guide.
He’s a stocky, charismatic, middle-aged Neapolitan who mixes an earthy sense of humour – symptomatic of someone who comes from the visibly crumbling South – with a self-assured air of authority. Comforting qualities in a diving instructor.
Lacking the necessary certification, however, we won’t be counting ourselves among the prestigious ranks of the day’s divers. Today we’ll be snorkelling instead.
Seeing that our merry band consists of an Englishman (myself), my Irish partner, Alice, and an enamoured yet nervous-looking French couple, our guide decides that English will be today’s lingua franca. And so, in a beautiful blend of Italenglish, he tells us about the site we’ll be visiting.
“Today we dive Il Ninfeo di Claudio!” he announces, sounding almost certainly more dramatic than he means to.
It lies, he tells us, at a depth of between five to seven meters, and was built in the 40s A.D. by the emperor Claudius, not to be rediscovered until some 1,930 years later.
The Nymphaeum was an artificial grotto, cut out of the mountain rock and accessible only from the ancient beachfront. Its purpose was convivial, the main surviving feature being the long rectangular triclinium or dining room.
Baia’s Nymphaeum would have been a sensory delight.
Only the din of flutes would have drowned out the gushing water of its fountains during one of the emperor’s many dinner parties. Looking away from the entertainment, or up from one’s dinner, one would have cast their eyes over numerous niches containing statues of both deities and members of the imperial family (many of whom were also, by this stage, deities) spanning the circumference of the room.
And then there was the main course: at the far end of the dining room was an apse, in which stood a statued depiction of the cavernous Cyclops scene from Homer’s Odyssey.
We’re gathered outside the diving centre, a stone’s throw from the dock, while our guide wraps up his oration. Being from Naples, he punctuates his speech with hand gestures so exuberant they’d be impossible to replicate in the water, and the more stereotypically prejudice part of me thinks he’s just trying to exorcise them from his system before he’s no longer able to do so.
But, despite his best efforts, his linguistic enthusiasm doesn’t quite match his accuracy. And with my English sensibilities pushing me to avoid embarrassment at all costs, I don’t ask for clarification but decide I’ll be better off drawing on previous knowledge as we flipper our way towards the boat.
We climb aboard, exchange “ciaos” with another group, and set off across the bay. As the boat’s speed picks up and the coastal breeze buffets my chest, I mentally fast-forward to the return journey and immediately regret not accepting a wetsuit.
Eventually, amidst choppy waves and churned-up water, we come to a stop, a good distance out into the bay but not too far from some jutting headland. The more experienced divers immediately flop backwards off the boat. Our band of snorkelers linger on board a little while longer before gracelessly toppling in after them.
Once in the water, we all swim our separate ways. For the divers, this invariably means straight down, and no trace of them is seen again save the occasional surface bubbles or surprise close encounter in the day’s murky waters. Those of us without oxygen tanks, on the other hand, bob around in the water, intermittently filling our lungs with salty summer air between making short but hasty trips down to the seafloor some five meters below us.
The French couple delay their descent and instead spend a while arguing, and not understanding the language even this sounds beautifully romantic.
But it’s not long before the boyfriend realises he’s quite literally out of his depth on this trip and panics, splashing frantically for the jutting headland.
There he’ll stay for the rest of the afternoon, clinging to the rocks for dear life.
The water’s anything but clear – “not the best day for dive” our guide bemoans, sounding almost certainly more upset about this than he means to. But knowing what lies obscured beneath me, I’m not going to let this stop me. So, drawing a sharp breath, I plunge into the depths.
The first character to emerge out of Baia’s still and silent darkness is a headless statue of Ulysses (known otherwise as Odysseus). He kneels in supplication, the seabed closed in around his knees, offering a long-vanished statue of the Cyclops a goblet overflowing with water for at least five hundred years.
I rationalise his presence on the grounds of Claudius’ famous academic – especially Hellenic – interests. I’ll later learn that the Cyclops scene was a common visual motif at aristocratic dinner parties, particularly when they were hosted in caves.
You see, having your own personal Polyphemus (someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares) was a good way for the aristocracy to play around with the theme of inebriation while demonstrating an impressive appreciation of Greek culture.
Like quoting Shakespeare at a modern boozy dinner party.
I’ll also later learn that Baia may have derived its name from one Baius – Odysseus’ helmsman who, legend had it, was buried nearby. I push off the seafloor and go up for air before returning to introduce myself to another character.
Although completely featureless, the figure is so eerily lifelike in form and posture that I can’t help but imagine him amongst the plaster casts of Pompeii’s victims – silent witnesses to a disaster that would rock the ancient world less than half a century after this triclinium had been built.
There’s something helplessly Promethean about him – chained to a rock, forever struggling in vain to break free from the watery void that’s become his world.
His story doesn’t belong in Pompeii, however, but in the ninth book of Homer’s Odyssey. He’s Odysseus’ companion, the man tasked with bearing the goatskin sack of wine used to intoxicate the Cyclops and flee his cave (clinging to the underbellies of some presumably enormous sheep).
The story of Odysseus strikes a chord with me, although I won’t understand why until later. For now, we part ways as I lightly push off from Baia’s seabed.
Breaking the surface, I immediately begin relaying what I’ve seen to Alice. Or at least whom I take to be her. You see, people tend to look the same when they’re up to their shoulders in water and wearing steamed-up snorkelling masks. Therefore I actually end up waxing lyrical to the rather confused French girl.
Her boyfriend is, at this stage, still clinging onto the rocky headland for dear life quite some distance away, but a nervous, slightly stifled laugh suggests she’s taken my incomprehensible ramblings pretty well.
Even if it had been Alice, it wouldn’t have been the language that was the barrier but my inability to articulate myself. That’s because there’s something about diving down into a different world that’s almost indescribable.
Buoyed by the water, you cannot physically ground yourself on the mosaicked floor that makes up their ancient level. Without weighted diving equipment, even staying at a depth where you can stay face to face with one of the statues requires you to keep repeatedly pushing yourself down.
Repeating a motion that to the ancients might have looked something like praying.
And suspended between our two worlds, hovering in a fog of murky water and acknowledging the absurdity of my movements, I see myself reflected through ancient eyes.
As an intruder, an alien, a ghost.
I’m now on my final descent of the day, floating, impossibly, in an emperor’s dining room. Before me stands the grinning statue of a god – a block of marble that would have been more tangible to the ancients than either myself or the biodeteriorative organisms eating away at it.
The Romans would have recognised him as Bacchus; the Greeks as Dionysus. God of wine, theatre and ecstasy. But he was also the nurturer of souls, a bridge between the living and the dead. Feeling overwhelmed – perhaps by the pressure of the water, perhaps by my increasingly desperate need for air, or perhaps by my fleeting yet immediate connection to this lost world – I silently congratulate him on the good work.
For as long as he’s consigned down here, Bacchus will continue to bridge this gap for those who come looking. And he’ll continue to do so long after I’m gone – not just from his world but from this earth. The ancients realised this. They understood their transience. As Euripides put it in the 5th century BC:
“Oh Theseus, dear friend, only the gods can never age, the gods can never die. All else in the world almighty Time obliterates…”
And yet this is also a world that will cease to exist the moment I abandon it. It’s a hidden world, invisible, given shape only by the personal experiences of those privileged enough to see it.
Beneath the waves, Baia is a dead space, an aquatic atmosphere: incomprehensible to those who dined here two thousand years ago. Filling it with their voices, their smells; their boastful claims and private shames.
And it’s a place I can’t stay, but which has instilled in me a dread but vitalising feeling of transient mortality that I suspect will stay with me forever.
The reason Odysseus’ story had been so evocative begins to dawn on me. In the eleventh book of Homer’s epic, it is on the mist-shrouded shores of the River Ocean – in notably thalassic, murky and dark conditions – that Odysseus makes his perilous descent into the underworld, on his mission to meet his ghosts.
So too were the conditions in Virgil’s Latin epic the Aeneid, written just a few decades before Claudius’ Nymphaeum was built. Here I have a sudden cold and terrifying epiphany: that Virgil explicitly identified the volcanic area of the Phlegraean Fields northwest of Naples as the entrance to his underworld. And that I was currently in the midst of it, floating amongst ghosts, drowned in darkness.
But neither Odysseus nor Aeneas could dwell too long with the shades of the dead. Not while they could still draw breath. And as a cold fear starts to grip me, I’m grateful that our respective underworlds have this in common. With my chest tightening and the pressure pushing at my ears, all my thoughts turn to ascending to the surface and the world from whence I came.
At the end of Sophocles’ tragic Oedipus trilogy, the blind Oedipus hears a thunderstorm that he interprets as Zeus warning him of his imminent death. Reinvigorated by a strength that had all but ebbed away from him over the course of his long and traumatic life, Oedipus leads Theseus and his two daughters to a spot where he pours a libation and bathes himself before sending everyone away.
Then, in a flash, he vanishes without a trace.
When Sophocles’ grandson first produced the play in Athens in 401 B.C., he left this to the audience’s imagination. Having the event relayed by a messenger ensured that no one could witness Oedipus’ sudden and impossible ascension to the heavens.
Such would be the case now. No one’s there to witness my arrival. No diegesis narrates my departure. No imprint marks my visit.
Like Oedipus, my time too among the world of the ancients has come to an end. And so with the air gone from my lungs, I take leave of their dead and silent world and push off one last time from Baia’s floor.
Back up to my world of warmth and light and life.
