By the Classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the world’s first known “travel industry” had started springing up. Were you to visit a hotspot destination like Athens, for example, you would find the port of Piraeus studded with souvenir stores, food stalls, laundries, barbershops, and brothels.
While many travellers stayed at the homes of friends — and this practice continued among the wealthy well into the Roman period — inns and hostels (mansiones) also began to spring up along the roadside, and around popular temples and sporting venues, built to accommodate a nascent form of ancient tourism.
In fact, those sporting venues were quickly becoming just as big a draw as the temples they had been built to honour. Panhellenic games, such as the Olympics, reached their zenith of popularity in this period, summoning wrestlers, disc-throwers, sprinters — and, of course, legions of cheering fans — to cities like Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea.
Since the games were considered sacred events, blessed by Zeus himself, it was customary for city-states across Greece to declare a truce for the duration of the games, to ensure safe passage for all involved. Suddenly, long-distance travel became a tempting proposition for many Greeks, as a form of ancient tourism began to blossom.
The Classical era also witnessed the establishment of religious festivals, such as the Panathenaia and City Dionysia of Athens. Travellers from all around Greece would flood into the city for these celebrations, where celebrities and statesmen would mingle at seaside banquets, in between premieres of new plays by Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides.
As might be expected at such a Classical Cannes festival, wine flowed copiously, and gourmet chefs from all corners of Greece would compete to showcase their latest recipes. As the great Athenian statesman Pericles put it in 431 BCE,
“We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing…”
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II.35
International travel, too, began to open up for daring Greek adventurers, as bands of Hellenic mercenaries roved ever-farther in search of pay and plunder. In the early 400s BCE, the Athenian general Xenophon compiled his Anabasis, a book-length record of his travels, trials, and tribulations in Mesopotamia; which, while certainly subjective and self-congratulatory, does contain a striking profusion of accurate historical and cultural detail.
Less than a century later, in the wake of Alexander the Great‘s conquests, international voyaging became an increasingly viable option even for those without a military disposition. Members of Plato’s Academy in Athens recorded their journeys to scientific schools in Asia Minor. Well-heeled experts in music, mathematics, rhetoric and philosophy might travel to study under famous masters in faraway cultural hubs like Metapontum (home of the Pythagorean school, on what’s now the south coast of Italy), Ephesus, and Alexandria.
And although career development might have been the only worthwhile reason to risk one’s neck on a long overseas journey, it certainly wasn’t the only reason to take a trip. By the third century BCE, pleasure travel had become common practice for many among Greek society’s elite; so much so that experienced wanderers had to keep each other up-to-date on the latest picks for lodging and dining.
A literature of travel guidebooks was flourishing — inspired, at least in part, by ships’ logs (periploi) describing landmarks, routes, and distances between ports along Greece’s coastline.
As early as the fifth century, the poet Ion of Chios had penned his Epidēmiai, recommending must-see sites throughout the Greek world. In the third century, the go-to guidebook for those in the know was Heraclides Criticus’ On the Cities in Greece (now known only from a few surviving fragments).
These guidebooks offer intriguing insights into the Classical Greek mentality around travel, not so much because of what they include, but because of what they leave out. The authors go into considerable detail describing famous monuments, buildings, and works of art — but they make hardly a mention of a beautiful forest, a towering mountain range, a pristine white-sand beach, or any of the other stunning natural wonders that draw so many travellers to Greece today (and would also capture the imagination of Roman writers like Pliny the Elder).
What’s more, these guidebooks scarcely touch on the actual logistics of travel: what to pack, how to book transport, and so on. This is one of those frustrating lacunae we encounter so often in ancient texts. We have very little idea how an ancient Greek traveller would have packed, or how he might have gone about arranging passage on a ship or wagon, because his contemporaries assumed these things were common knowledge, and therefore unworthy of discussion in writing.
As the Hellenic world expanded in the second and first centuries BCE, guidebooks to foreign lands also grew in popularity. Lists of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were shared widely, even among readers who had no clear idea where Babylon or the Pyramids might actually be. The most famous “Seven Wonders” list comes down to us from a writer called Antipater of Sidon (preserved in the work of the later author Pausanias).
And through his words, we have our earliest example of a handbook for ancient tourism.
“I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, ‘Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand.”
Antipator of Sidon, IX.58
In Antipater we find, perhaps, the first-ever definitive mention of travel for the explicit purpose of “setting eyes on” world-famous sights. While religion, health, sports, and career prospects might all be worthy reasons to set off on a journey, aspirational sightseeing could now earn a voyager some serious bragging rights back home. One can almost imagine Antipater tallying up Instagram likes in his head, as he checks yet another wonder off his list as an influencer of ancient tourism.
Still, the most trustworthy travel recommendations, as always, come from friends who’ve travelled recently. In Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs, written in 405 BCE, the traveller Dionysius stops by the house of his well-travelled friend Xanthias on his way to the Underworld, whom he asks,
“Describe to me the harbours, bakers’ shops, brothels, rest stops, detours, springs, and roads, the towns, their customs, and the inns where there are fewest bugs.”
Aristophanes, Frogs 109
Innkeepers must have gone to great lengths to hold onto their five-star ratings in this Classical TripAdvisor system, where a single cry of “bedbugs!” might wreck one’s profit margin for years to come.
Such was the world of Classical Greece and, to a similar extent, the Hellenistic Age. But what happened after the arrival of Rome? How did ancient concepts of travel change with the establishment of the Roman Empire? More importantly, what effect did the imperial peace –– the pax romana –– have in facilitating the logistics and likelihood of travel?
These are just some of the questions we’ll be answering at in the third part of the series on ancient tourism and travel.
