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Route 66 A.D. : On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: New York, Asia Minor, Grand Tour (more...)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Just when it seemed certain that travel writers had exhausted the pantheon of destinations, Perrottet offers a fresh perspective by taking the road most traveled. From Rome to Naples to Sparta to Cairo, Perrottet traces the favorite itinerary of ancient Romans in search of adventure and culture abroad. adapting a truly classic journey. Much as the English gentry invaded "the continent" in the waning years of the British Empire, the well-to-do citizens of ancient Rome were ubiquitous and presumptuous when traveling through Asia Minor with their convoys of servants and luggage, and perhaps a portable mosaic swimming pool. Perrottet, whose provisions and entourage consist of a precious copy of the world's oldest known guidebook and his gamely pregnant wife, diligently puts himself at the mercy of the malevolent hoteliers, sullen bureaucrats and teeming masses of a Mediterranean summer, all in the name of embracing the same tedious truths that plagued tourists in the age of Plutarch. When it comes to souvenirs, rented transportation and mercenary guides, it appears there really is nothing new under the sun. Perrottet, an Australian-born freelance writer living in New York, presents a delightful reminder of how little men and women of leisure have changed. His wry personal account blends seamlessly with his historical narrative, which is based mostly on secondary sources. As he tells it, first-century tourist traps rise from the page in scenes so familiar and vibrant that it becomes difficult to discern whether the past is present or the present, past. That temporal illusion is this book's real triumph.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal

From Rome to Naples to Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea, then on into the land of Cleopatra, ancient Romans followed the path of their conquering armies in search of adventure. Like 21st-century sightseers, Roman tourists were hustled in and out of temples by professional tour guides and treated to sideshows by clever priests who charged hefty prices for a glimpse of a Cyclops's skull or a Gorgon's hair. They were also subjected to bad food and hard mattresses in roadside inns from Pompeii to Aswan. To prove that little has changed over the centuries, New York Times travel writer Perrottet takes us on a modern-day tour of the Roman Empire. Accompanied by his girlfriend, Perrottet follows the map drawn by Roman war hero Marcus Agrippa, traveling from Rome to Egypt along many of the same routes used by Horace and Pliny. The result is a fascinating and often humorous look at a world long gone and the tourist culture that has grown up around it. Perrottet's writing sparkles with descriptions of modern and ancient misadventures. The accompanying photographs enhance the narrative and help make this book a good purchase for any library. Mary V. Welk, Chicago
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Random House (April 23, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 037550432X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0375504327
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #961,161 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Tony Perrottet
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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IT MUST HAVE BEEN LIKE a film premiere at Cannes. Read the first page
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New York, Asia Minor, Grand Tour, Valley of the Kings, Great Pyramid, Appian Way, Bay of Naples, Imperial Rome, Pliny the Elder, Trojan War, Brother Yianni, Middle Ages, New Troy, Roman Empire, Alexander the Great, Apollonius of Tyana, Julius Caesar, Trojan Horse, Captain All, Third World, Windsor Hotel, World War, Agrippa's Map, Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Via Appia, October 23, 2002
I have spent the last few weeks reading this great book and just finished it. The idea that ancient Romans had to go through some of the same things we go through as tourists is incredible. The author puts a somewhat funny spin on his travels throughout the Mediterranean, but along the way he tells stories of ancient tourists like Seneca, Titus, Nero, and Vespasian. So you actually get two stories in one. His modern day travels and the travels of the ancients. It is interesting that the Romans had things like road side rest areas, mile markers on the roads, and star type ratings for lodging. They also had to put up with the same kind of things you put up with today when you travel around the Med. Beggars and scammers at the port, long lines to see anything, bad food, and all of this without air conditioning. He describes what the areas were like so well that you can really get a feel for what it may have been like during Roman times. He describes Rome as the New York City of the day and Naples as the Hamptons and Baiea as Daytona Beach just to name a few. His travels take him from Rome to Naples to Brindisi via the Appian Way, then he sails to Greece and the islands, then to Turkey. The author has several humorous and interesting anecdotes as well. Just to share one...He tells of how Julius Caesar was captured by pirates and held for ransom on his way to Rhodes. After they had got to port and the pirates received the ransom Julius told them he was going to find them, get the ransom back, and kill every last one of them. He did just that; hired a fleet, tracked the pirates, got the ransom back, and nailed them all to a cross old school style. A very enjoyable read and recommended for anyone interested in ancient social history as well as for anyone who has traveled around the Med.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Informative, interesting, and amusing travelogue and history, April 5, 2005
By Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (Paperback)
_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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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A good travelogue, May 15, 2002
Interesting book. I was hoping it would delve deeply into each and every single ancient visiting point, but it doesn't.
Perrottet's conversational style begins with his delving through ancient sources and realising that the history of tourism begins in the 1st century AD with the settled pax romana. With his pregnant wife, Les, he decided to take one last trip and where better than to follow the original tourist trail.
Beginning in Rome and dropping down to Naples (his imagery is bitingly humorous), Capri, Puteoli and thence to Brundisium, through Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt his narrative is more focused on his experiences of travelling the ancient routes and how the tourism compares to those indicated in the literary sources.
I was expecting a factual description of each point with details compared to those of the ancients, but what you actually get is a pleasing commentary on the realities of the original package holiday and how much it differs from those tantalising glimpses we get through authors such as Marcellianus, Juvenal, Petronius et al.
Thoroughly enjoyable I have no doubt this will prompt similar journeys following the ancient Romans.
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