How to holiday like a Roman

For most people in the ancient world, holidays meant local public festivals – in Rome there were 135 a year – when politicians staged extravagant games and theatrical shows. But the elite mostly spent summers in their own or their friends’ villas, well away from the stench, heat and mosquitoes of Rome.

We tend to go abroad to ‘get away from it all’, though Seneca would have doubted that would do us any good – because it was ‘a change of character, not of air’ that people needed. He also quoted Socrates asking, ‘How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you and are saddled with the very thing that drove you away?’

For those who did travel abroad, as today, there was no escaping local guides. Examine something of interest, wrote Lucian, and ‘two or three people run up to tell you all about it – for a fee’. Nor do they ‘pay any attention to your entreaties to cut the talk short’. Special treats were put on display for the tourists. In Egypt, crocodiles were taught by the priests to open their jaws to have their teeth cleaned or to receive offerings, flushed down with wine, on behalf of the god Suchus.

Souvenir hunting was popular (think of the riot caused by Demetrius the silversmith in Ephesus when St Paul’s preaching threatened the sales of his replicas of the famous Temple of Artemis). In Naples one could buy little glass bottles decorated with labelled pictures of local sites: ‘Lighthouse’, ‘Nero’s Pool’ and scenes of temples, theatres, bathhouses and oyster beds. They have since been found in England, Spain and North Africa. Customs dues were, of course, charged (usually 2 to 5 per cent of the value, with luxury items going up to 25 per cent).