They carved their names into statues of pharaohs and took cruises down the Nile.Mary Beard describes what happened when a party of elite Roman holidaymakers – led by the emperor Hadrian – descended on ancient Egypt’s tourist hotspots in AD 130
Roman emperors and aristocrats were great tourists. They were as keen as we are on visiting the famous sights of the Mediterranean world, and they brought home souvenirs by the bucket-load. The best guide we have to the appearance of the lost statue of the goddess Athena inside the Parthenon at Athens, an extraordinary creation in gold and ivory, comes in the stone copies made for travellers and tourists. These range from pricey, high-quality replicas to the ancient equivalent of fridge magnets.
The most sought-after destination was Egypt, and the most alluring method of transport there was, as now, a Nile cruise. Julius Caesar holidayed on the river with Cleopatra. Half a century or so later, in AD 19, we know that Prince Germanicus, nephew of the emperor Tiberius, visited the country and took a boat up the Nile south from Alexandria.
No tourist, however, visited Egypt in greater style – or, I suspect, with a larger retinue of support staff, than the emperor Hadrian in AD 130. And no imperial party left quite such a lasting mark of their visit. In fact, you can still see the poems commemorating this trip, written by one of the emperor’s aristocratic fellow-travellers – a woman by the name of Julia Balbilla (more on her later). They are carved into the leg of an ancient Egyptian statue, just outside modern Luxor (ancient Thebes).
It might seem like a rather upmarket version of ‘Balbilla (and Hadrian) was here’. But these poems not only document a tourist experience; they shine a light onto one of those hidden women of the Roman world. Balbilla was not an ‘ordinary’ woman, but one of wealth, glamorous connections, and talent. All the same, she usually slips below the radar of modern historians.
Hadrian’s Egyptian cruise was only one part of a much longer journey for the emperor and his entourage. He was the most travelled of all the Roman rulers – and sightseeing, in our sense of the word, was no doubt only one side of the story. He was, after all, also inspecting ‘his’ empire and visiting the far-flung troops. By the time they reached Egypt, the imperial party had already been on the road (or at sea) for two years, taking in Sicily, north Africa, Greece and Gaza – in what was more a mammoth royal ‘progress’, or a court on the
