Bedbugs, Bad Wine, and Rude Innkeepers: Roman Travelers Wrote Your TripAdvisor Reviews Two Thousand Years Ago

Somewhere in the ruins of Pompeii, preserved beneath volcanic ash for nineteen centuries, a traveler scratched the following sentiment into the wall of a lodging house: "Innkeeper, I pissed the bed. I admit my fault. But if you ask why — there was no chamber pot." The tone is instantly recognizable. The passive aggression, the preemptive self-defense, the pointed transfer of blame to management — this is, structurally and emotionally, a one-star review. The platform has changed. The human being behind it has not.

This is the central argument of long-memory travel thinking: that the most useful body of evidence for understanding how people behave on the road is not a survey of two hundred undergraduates at a midwestern university, but the entire accumulated written record of human movement across the ancient world. Roman travelers left behind an extraordinary archive of complaint, wonder, frustration, and hard-won advice. It deserves to be read not as quaint historical curiosity but as a primary document of human psychology — one that happens to be directly relevant to your upcoming trip.

Horace on the Appian Way: America's First Road Trip, Two Millennia Early

In 37 BCE, the poet Horace traveled from Rome to Brundisium (modern Brindisi) along the Via Appia, accompanying a diplomatic mission led by Maecenas. He recorded the journey in one of his Satires — a piece scholars call the Iter Brundisinum — and it reads, with minimal editing required, like a travel blog post written by a weary American journalist on assignment.

Horace complains about the water at his first stop, Aricia, describing it as barely tolerable. He notes that the canal boat he boards near Capua is delayed because the bargeman gets drunk and passes out before casting off. He cannot sleep because frogs are croaking outside and mosquitoes are biting him from within. A traveling companion develops an eye infection. The roads are bad. A comedy performance he attends at a roadside town is described as painfully amateur. He is, in short, doing what every American traveler has done on a long drive through unfamiliar territory: cataloguing indignities, sustaining himself on small pleasures, and counting the miles.

The detail that resonates most powerfully for a modern reader is Horace's observation about the social dynamics of travel. He notes the difference in treatment between his party — which includes recognizable public figures — and ordinary travelers at the same inns. The staff are attentive to the important men and indifferent to everyone else. If you have ever watched a hotel front desk agent transform entirely upon recognizing a loyalty status badge, you have witnessed the same dynamic Horace documented in the first century BCE.

The Graffiti Record: Yelp, Roman Edition

Pompeii's walls constitute one of the most remarkable archives of vernacular human expression ever preserved. Among the political slogans, declarations of love, and gladiatorial records, travelers left behind a rich body of commentary on the local hospitality industry that would be entirely at home on any modern review platform.

One inscription at a Pompeian inn reads: "We have wet the bed, host. I confess we have done wrong. If you want to know why, there was no chamber pot." (A variation on the inscription cited above, suggesting this was perhaps a genre of complaint rather than a single incident — which itself tells you something about the chronic inadequacy of Roman roadside plumbing.) Another, found at a bar near the forum, translates roughly as: "Landlord, may you drown in your own wine — you sell water but drink unmixed vintage yourself." The accusation of serving diluted wine to customers while reserving the good stock for personal consumption is a grievance that has echoed through centuries of traveler testimony. It is, in essence, the ancient equivalent of complaining that the hotel minibar charges fourteen dollars for a bottle of water.

The Roman legal scholar and travel writer Apuleius, writing in the second century CE, devoted substantial passages of his novel The Golden Ass to the dangers and discomforts of roadside inns — the cauponae and stabula that lined Roman roads the way chain motels line American interstate exits. His fictional traveler encounters dirty rooms, suspicious food, and hosts of ambiguous honesty. The word he uses most frequently for the experience is sordidus — squalid, mean, degrading. The emotional register is identical to a two-star review that opens with the phrase "I don't usually write these but."

Delayed Departures and Surly Locals: The Universal Vocabulary of Being Stuck

The Roman traveler's relationship with maritime delay deserves particular attention, because it maps almost perfectly onto the modern American's relationship with airline schedules. Cicero's letters — among the most intimate travel documents to survive from the ancient world — are saturated with the particular misery of waiting for favorable winds. He writes to his friend Atticus from Brundisium, from Puteoli, from various coastal staging points, with a mounting frustration that is almost comic in its familiarity: the ship was ready, then the wind changed, then the captain reconsidered, then a passenger fell ill, then the wind changed again.

"I am stuck here and I do not know for how long," he writes in one letter, a sentence that has been composed, in spirit if not in Latin, by every traveler who has ever sat in a gate area watching a departure board cycle through increasingly creative delay notifications.

The complaints about locals are equally durable. Travelers in the Roman world routinely noted the coldness, suspicion, or outright hostility of provincial populations toward outsiders — a sentiment that has generated ten thousand TripAdvisor threads about whether the French are actually rude or whether Americans are simply unused to a different social register. The Roman traveler Egeria, a pilgrim who documented her journey to the Holy Land in the fourth century CE with meticulous and occasionally exasperated detail, records multiple instances of locals who were unhelpful, misdirected her party, or simply stared without offering assistance. She responds with the patient dignity of someone who has decided not to leave a bad review but is absolutely thinking about it.

What the Archive Is Actually Telling Us

The value of this material is not merely comedic, though the comedy is real and worth savoring. The deeper argument is epistemological. If you want to understand what travel does to human beings — what it costs them psychologically, what they fear, what small comforts they reach for, what social dynamics they recreate on the road — you have two options. You can read a study conducted on people who have agreed to answer questions about a hypothetical travel scenario in exchange for course credit. Or you can read two thousand years of first-person testimony from people who were actually there, actually tired, actually bitten by insects, and actually furious about the wine.

The long memory of travel history is not nostalgia. It is the largest dataset we have. Horace's mosquitoes, Cicero's delayed ships, the unnamed Pompeian guest and his absent chamber pot — these are data points in a record of human experience that dwarfs any modern survey instrument. The traveler who reads them before a trip is not indulging in antiquarian sentiment. They are consulting the only manual comprehensive enough to be genuinely useful.

Your complaints, it turns out, are ancient. That should be, in some strange way, a comfort.