60 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A bat-belfry of errors (From The Palm Beach Post review), February 10, 2006
This review is from: Route 66 A.D. : On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (Hardcover)
Up until this moment, Tony Perrottet has led a happy life. Gambolling along like the jolly jumbuck of his native land's anthem, "Waltzing Matilda," the Australian writer has skipped in fleecy lambkin innocence across the green meadows and bosky dells of human existence.
Joyous, exuberant, he even wrote a book, "Route 66 AD, On The Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists." He has been interviewed by NPR, he has freelanced for The New York Times, Esquire and the Sunday Times of London. All seemed sunny.
He little dreamt, that in the dark fens of Palm Beach County, there lurked an alligator in the form of a failed classicist, who had majored in Latin and minored in Greek at Columbia University. There had the monster lain for weary years, nursing its dark hunger, watchful. Within the beast's reptilian brain there lay but one primordial law: Vengeance against intruders who dared venture within the sacred precincts of the Classics, joking, unarmed and unprepared!
A cosmic convergence has brought the frisking lamb within jaw-grasp of the alligator. Reader, if you are squeamish, if you cannot stand the sight of literary gore, avert your pitying eyes! What follows will be a massacre!
Let me begin smilingly: At least 20 percent of this book is unassailably accurate. Another 30 percent might conceivably, on an overcast day, situationally, theoretically, by a long stretch of imagination, be marginally plausible. The parts about Perrottet's own journey through the Mediterranean are, I suppose, true, at least in his mind and recollection.
The rest is utterly wrong. In fact the whole book is wrong in principle. The Greeks and Romans were not, save for a few hardy exceptions, great travellers, let alone tourists. They lived in a dangerous, spooky, uncertain world, where a drink of water from a strange stream could kill you, where there were no vaccinations or American Express offices, no Hilton concierges, no borders or passports. Travel was a huge risk, to be undertaken only in dire circumstances. People who journeyed, and actually returned home again, put up votive offerings to the gods, trembling with gratitude, thanking them sincerely for a safe passage through one of the scariest, most uncertain experiences known to classical antiquity: Travel.
Because it could literally kill you, no one in their right mind traveled in antiquity unless compelled by stern necessity, or on military orders. There is a marble ship, an ex voto offering from antiquity, still standing in Rome on the Caelian Hill, in front of the church of Santa Maria in Navicella. It was a thank-offering put up in antiquity, by a grateful traveller, glad to have gotten home alive.
Perottet, fly-fixed in the amber of the present, cannot accept this. So he projects modern tourism, modern movies (he quotes "Star Wars" twice and the book is ludicrously illustrated with Hollywood stills from movies, the usual orgies and chariot races), modern souvenir-hunting, modern wanderlust, back into a past where they simply did not exist. It is a remarkable act of imaginative bravado, but it will not wash.
I have never read a livelier, more absurd farrago of untruths, half-truths, quarter-truths, mistranslated truths, misunderstood-and-taken-out-of-context truths and outright lies about Graeco-Roman antiquity than this. A graduate student, if one could be found in this dying discipline, might write a Ph.D thesis, simply seeking out and rectifying all the lunacies in Perrottet's chapter on Rome.
Let me give an example. It is a bold author who cites a source in his bibliography, then writes something ((italix)) completely contrary ((enditalix)) to the cited source. Here is Perottet describing the (in fact woefully inadequate) sewer system of Rome, and using Jerome Carcopino's excellent "Daily Life In Ancient Rome" as a source:
(Perottet, P. 46): "They... created public latrines and a magnificent system of underground sewers that some patriots insisted were engineering marvels on a par with the Pyramids."
(Carcopino, P. 57-8:) (I am translating from the 1939 French edition) "Far be it from me to sell the admiration of the network of sewers which carried to the Tiber the filth of the city... It is incontestable that the Ancients, so courageous in their enterprises, so patient in their fulfilment, were not skillful enough to do what we should have done in their place. They did not do the bare minimum to assure the cleanliness of their city, for the health and decency of its inhabitants... The All-to-the-sewer idea of the Roman house is nothing but a myth born of the complaisant imagination of modern people, and of all the slaveries which weigh upon the City, this is the one which a modern population would most forcefully reject."
Not content with imaginary sewers, Perottet builds an imaginary Latrine, the so-called "Forica," "The largest of these complexes, Forica, was as big as Notre-Dame Cathedral," he asserts on p. 40, "its marble seats heated in winter and decorated with mosaics, silver fountains and dolphin motifs."
I have spent two years in Rome, and have interested myself in Roman topography. I have a large library on the subject, for I love Rome. I have searched in vain through Platner-Ashby's Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, through all of Rodolfo Lanciani's books, through all of Giuseppe Lugli's even more detailed discussions of the ancient city, through Ovid, Martial, Horace and Juvenal for this giant cathedral-sized Moby Dick of a latrine. In vain! I have scanned Italo Gismondi's great map of imperial Rome, the 1949 Forma Urbis Romae. I've run through guides, ancient and modern, Vasi, Fea, Huelsen, Melchiorri, authors of repute, men who spent their lives investigating this marvellous city. None of them mentions this Gargantuan latrine, the Forica.
So I went to Lewis & Short's large Latin dictionary and there, lowercased, was the word "forica," meaning "latrine." This, apparently, is the acorn from which Perottet's oak tree of imagination has grown.
This book simply bristles with errors. It is a bat-belfry of mistakes, and the cheery impetuosity of its author, who seems a very decent fellow, who loves his pregnant wife and takes her with him on his travels -- cannot excuse his fatal, Munchausen-like flair for tale-spinning.
Absurdities, fantasies, exaggerations, fall from Perottet's paragraphs, thick as leaves in Vallombrosa. To have studied and learned Latin and Greek, across long years, as I have, and then to open this book, is an Alice-In-Wonderland experience. His Latin is so bad, so barbarically bad, that I began to experience, vicariously, the deep fear that the beleaguered landowners of Gaul must have felt in the fourth and fifth centuries, AD, as the Visigoths and Ostrogoths closed in.
Before your amazed eyes, Rome-based satirists and poets and orators like Juvenal, Horace, Propertius and Cicero, rise, levitate and flit to places they only imagined in real life. Borne on Perottet's Ariel-wings of fantasy, people who never traveled in fact, are shanghaied hundreds of miles away in fiction. Jokes become voyages. Hyperboles and flights of fancy are solidified into geographical latitudes and longitudes.
Novelists like Apuleius and Heliodorus, wild joke-tellers like Lucian of Samosata, epigrammatists like Martial, are cited as unchallengeable eyewitnesses of places they never saw. This wonderful telekinesis occurs unpropelled by the dull machinery of footnotes. Perottet's book is innocent of footnotes and contains only a meager bibliography at the end, limited to 46 works of widely varying quality, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with the author's subject. This is bibliographical squid-ink, meant to terrify and confuse, not to illuminate or document anything. Over and over again, a reader with even a light smattering of classical literature asks in his mind: "Where is he getting this stuff?"
Freed of these earthly chains, Perottet soars like Pegasus of old. A random jest, uttered by an old poet, becomes a journey, and the journey becomes a PBS documentary, to be taken as sober-sided history. Learned, desk-bound geographers like Polemon and Dicaearchus (whose works are lost, thus allowing Perottet to make what use of them he pleases) are given Hawaiian shirts and turned into tourists. The beautiful Primaporta Augustus, unearthed in 1869, is used on the cover and a camera is draped around the statue's neck. Hey, Augustus was a tourist too! Soldiers on garrison-duty in far parts of the empire are, we are urged to believe, only there for pleasure, to gawk and sightsee, an explanation that would have angered and amazed them to hear.
Above all, Perrotet is attracted to smut. With many a deploring hand-flutter, he introduces us (again!) to Tiberius on Capri, one of the most discredited and lurid passages in Suetonius, and we get to hear about the Spintrians again, far more clumsily described than they were by Robert Graves in his "I, Claudius." We also learn how a young man masturbated in the presence of Praxiteles' masterpiece, the Aphrodite of Cnidos. This nudge-nudge, wink-wink invitation to dirty-postcard complicity is one I would prefer to decline.
Any classical author who ever mentioned another place, another country, is automatically promoted to tourist in Perottet's zany, zero-gravity universe. He crosses the line into actual dishonesty on p. 50, when he reports a comment the Roman Emperor Nero is supposed to have made, while watching Christians burn to death, as condemned criminals scapegoated for the great fire of Rome in 64 AD:
"Nero quipped that it was the first time Christianity had shed light on anything," Perottet writes glibly.
This is an arresting quote. It arrested me, because I had never read it before, and I had read...
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Informative, interesting, and amusing travelogue and history, April 5, 2005
_Pagan Holiday_ by Tony Perrottet is both an amusing and interesting travel book and an excellent history focused on the very first age of tourism, the age of Roman tourism. With the advent of a massive, highly detailed and for the time very accurate map unveiled in 5 B.C. (completed by the Roman war hero Marcus Agrippa), the completion and extension of Rome's glorious highway system, the acceptance of Roman currency even to the farthest reaches of the Empire, two unifying common languages (Greek and Latin), and the Pax Romana (the longest unbroken period of peace in European history, lasting roughly from 30 B.C. to A.D. 200), the world was open to legions of Roman tourists. These viatores or peregrinatores (wayfarers; also called spectatores or sightseers) would go on what he called the original Grand Tour, journeying to resorts in other parts of the Italian peninsula, to sacred and historical sites in Greece (the Hellenic "greatest hits" including Athens, Delphi, Olympia, Sparta, and Epidaurus), the Olympic games if possible, to the ruins of Troy, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the exotic and fantastic ruins in Egypt (which to first century A.D. spectatores were mostly enigmatic relics from a forgotten epoch, nearly as ancient to the Romans as they are to us today). Across the entire Mediterranean world a complex tourist infrastructure arose to cater to the needs of the Roman traveler. Perottet sought to both describe the experiences of the Roman tourists - who they were, what they saw, how they traveled, and the difficulties they encountered - and to replicate their travels as closely as possible, to show to the modern reader what they might have been like and to describe the ruins as they appear today.
I found the parallels between Roman and modern tourism quite striking. Perrottet provided numerous examples of Roman contemporary accounts of stays at roadside inns (where even some of the richest Roman tourists complained of hard mattresses, leaky roofs, and bad food), eating at restaurants serving highly questionable fare, visiting lavish temples (which the author noted were in many ways the equivalent of modern museums as they were often crowded with statues and all manner of artifacts), and sending home letters to friends and loved ones.
Another parallel between Roman and modern travel (particularly in the Third World) is the fact that tourists often had to deal with shysters and con artists competing for their attention at every site they visited, each one proclaiming that he can show secrets about the site and provide a true and accurate history (though that was very rarely the case). Perrottet vividly described the hordes of professional tour guides (called mystagogi) that clustered around the most significant tourist attractions, each competing for the attention of the Roman tourist, spouting memorized spiels of "facts" to the tourist, often geared towards the Roman ear by tying in local legends and ruins to Homeric accounts of the Trojan War or to the Roman gods. These guides often exasperated Roman tourists; one academic was known to have prayed to Jupiter to protect him from his guides at Olympia!
Also like today, the Roman tourists bought tacky souvenirs. Numerous painted glass vials showing the Lighthouse of Alexandria and miniatures replicas of famous statues of Apollo have been found. The author said that these were the ancient equivalent of water-filled snowscapes of famous tourist attractions.
Roman tourists were fond of leaving mementos of their journey, generally by etching graffiti onto their favorite monuments. Precisely 2,105 pieces of Roman graffiti have been noted (and studied) from the Valley of Kings alone. They often preferred to inscribe Homeric verse (some wealthy Roman tourists even brought poets along so that they could do this), while others left much simpler messages ("I was amazed" was a common inscription on notable ruins and tombs). Some sites thoughtfully provided stone carvers for hire so that these messages could be left.
Though the Romans traveled primarily by ship, this age saw the first "road trips." In particular the compact size and density of sites to see in Greece lead many Romans to hire wagons on the outskirts of Athens and travel on the excellent Roman highways to the various destinations they sought, taking advantage of roadside inns, periegesies (guidebooks), itineraria picta (graphic itineraries or maps), and even roadside markers (miliaria or milestones). Perrottett quoted a number of times from one of the most notable and thorough periegesies to survive into modern times, the _Description of Greece_ composed by the travel writer Pausanias between A.D. 130 and 180, an encyclopedic work that comprised originally ten papyrus scrolls, an amazingly thorough guidebook to the whole of mainland Greece.
Several Roman tourist destinations - notably Sparta and Troy - were but shadows of what they were in their heyday. While Sparta was a major city-state in the 5th century B.C., by the days of the Pax Romana it largely maintained its famed traditions for the tourists, with such events as the annual scourging of the youths at the festival of Artemis performed primarily for the benefit of its visitors.
One way Roman tourists differed from modern ones was in how the very richest traveled. The wealthiest aristocrats would have their private wagons for instance shipped to Greece, where they would travel in a slow and sumptuous convoy that included a huge retinue of chefs, slaves, and secretaries. These rich tourists would dine in silk-curtained tents set up each night as dining halls, eat off plates of beaten gold, and sleep in luxurious carrucae dormitoriae (sleeping carriages). The very richest and most powerful of travelers - several Roman emperors enjoyed the Grand Tour - often required years of preparatory work as entire buildings (notably baths) would be erected in anticipation of their visit. Whenever an emperor passed through a city it was nearly bankrupted by the massive expenses in entertaining him and his retinue.
A very entertaining book - Perrottet and his girlfriend had a number of interesting encounters along the way in their travels - I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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