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would believe what they hear. It happens in London not
least with the urban myth about not looking anyone in the
eye when travelling on the tube. This myth has created its
own reality whereby folk from foreign parts like Wiltshire
and Hampshire rattle through the tunnels with their eyes
cast down lest they be turned into a pillar of salt whilst we
Londoners, ever fewer in number, smile and chat away
quite happily to each other. Funny old world. Funny new
world.
When Not in Rome
Rich Romans built second homes for the spring social
season close to Rome while further afield holiday villas
were built in resorts dotted around the Bay of Naples.
Cumae attracted the fashionable (Southwold) while Baiae
attracted the down market tourist becoming infamous for
rowdiness, drunkenness and all-night singing (Blackpool).
The retired and the intellectuals favoured Pompeii and
Herculaneum, the latter being the more select and genteel
resort (as Hove is to Brighton).
In conquering most of the known world the Romans
created the first favourable conditions for leisure travel
abroad with no foreign borders between England and Syria
and seas safe from piracy. The Romans travelled to Sicily,
Greece, Rhodes, Troy and Egypt. As more people took to
travelling the well built and well maintained Roman roads
became lined with staging inns. Our own Isles of Wonder
weren’t in the Roman holiday brochures – I’m afraid we
were known for uppity natives and rotten weather. “
Send
more socks”
is the plaintiff cry of a soldier garrisoned at
the Vindolanda Fort near Hadrian’s Wall recorded in the
Vindolanda Tablets kept in the British Museum. These
wooden ‘post cards’ give us a fascinating insight into life
at home for the Romans in Britain between 85 and 135AD.
Beginning to Know What You’re Looking At
Greek sea captains travelled with a document known as
a periplus listing the ports and landmarks along a coast
together with useful information on the locals.
The Greco-Roman
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
has
survived from the 1
st
century AD as a valuable
first-hand description of the Roman-Egyptian ports along
the coast of the Red Sea as well as routes in Northeast
Africa and India.
“After Avalites there is another market-town, better than
this, called Malao, distant a sail of about eight hundred
stadia. The anchorage is an open roadstead, sheltered
by a spit running out from the east. Here the natives are
more peaceable. There are imported into this place many
tunics, cloaks from Arsinoe, dressed and dyed; drinking
cups, sheets of soft copper in small quantity, iron, and
gold and silver coin, not much.”
Malao is Berbera in Somalia on the southern shore of
the Gulf of Aden – 2000 years later it would become the
capital of British Somaliland.
The Periegesis meaning “progress around” wasn’t such a
hands-on practical guide book but was intended more for
reading at home. Fragments of many such works survive
Urban Legends
Ancient Greek religious festivals, including the Olympic
Games, increasingly became opportunities for sightseeing.
In Athens wide-eyed travellers from the countryside
visited the Parthenon during the day and the big-city
courtesans by night. The Greek historian Herodotus was
the worlds’ first travel writer. Born in the 5
th
century BC in
Halicarnassus (Bodrum, Turkey) Herodotus is called both
the “Father of History” and the “Father of Lies”.
His great work, The Histories, is a dynastic account of
the four great Persian kings from Cyrus to Xerxes but he
goes off on many digressions along the way including
descriptions of the many astonishing things he saw during
his extensive travels as well as tales recounted to him by
other travellers. The city walls, the Temple of Babel and
the Hanging Gardens he ranks among the Seven Wonders
of the Ancient World but grossly exaggerates each of them
suggesting he never actually went himself. His accounts
are very probably hearsay - many historians dispute the
very existence of the Hanging Gardens.
Nevertheless it is Herodotus who describes much of
what we know of Babylon, which he says “surpasses
in splendour any city of the known world”. He hasn’t
done ancient Babylon too many favours, describing a
rather hedonistic and depraved city where young girls are
married off at “wife auctions” as well as a custom whereby
every native woman must, at least once during her life, go
and sit in the temple of Ishtar. When a man throws her a
silver coin and invokes the goddess she must give herself
to him. It’s easy to see how folk coming to the big city
4
The Kettle
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