Seneca Was Complaining About Tourists Before You Were Born — And He Was Right

Somewhere in the first century AD, the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca sat down and wrote, with evident irritation, about the crowds descending on Baiae — the resort town on the Bay of Naples that served as the Roman equivalent of a heavily Instagrammed beach destination. The wealthy came. The noise was unbearable. The virtue of the place had been entirely consumed by its own reputation. He left early.

Read that passage today and you will feel, with some discomfort, that you have written it yourself — perhaps as a three-star review of a Amalfi Coast hotel, or as a text message to a friend after returning from a weekend in Sedona.

This is not coincidence. It is data.

The Unchanging Architecture of Travel Disappointment

The working premise of serious historical study — and of this publication — is that human psychology has not undergone meaningful revision in the past five thousand years. The mechanisms of desire, anticipation, disappointment, and rationalization that governed a Roman senator planning a holiday to Campania are identical to those governing an American professional booking a long weekend in Charleston. The technology of transport has transformed beyond recognition. The inner experience of the traveler has not moved an inch.

This matters practically, not merely philosophically. If the emotional logic of travel has been constant across two millennia, then the historical record is not a collection of quaint anecdotes — it is the largest dataset on traveler behavior ever assembled. The college psychology experiment, conducted on undergraduates who need the course credit, offers you a sample size of perhaps two hundred people observed across a few weeks. The historical record offers you every literate person who ever traveled and wrote about it, across recorded civilization.

The Roman record, in particular, is extraordinarily rich. Seneca's letters are only the beginning.

What the Romans Actually Said

Horace, writing in the late first century BC, complained about the road to Brundisium — modern Brindisi — with a specificity that reads like a Yelp thread. The inn was smoky. The water was bad. He was overcharged. A traveling companion fell ill from the food. The journey, which he had anticipated with some pleasure, delivered primarily grievance.

The satirist Juvenal catalogued the hazards of Roman travel with a mordant precision that would fit comfortably in any contemporary travel journalism: aggressive vendors, dangerous roads, accommodations that did not resemble their descriptions, and destinations whose fame had entirely outrun their reality.

Pliny the Younger wrote letters about his villas at Laurentum and in the Tuscan hills that read, structurally, as the ancient equivalent of a luxury travel blog — detailed descriptions of the views, the architecture, the quality of the light at particular hours — combined with pointed observations about why these places were superior to the fashionable alternatives everyone else was crowding into.

This last point deserves particular attention. Pliny was not simply boasting. He was articulating a principle that serious travelers have rediscovered in every generation since: the places that sophisticated people quietly prefer are almost never the places that everyone else is visiting.

The Mechanism of Overhype Is Ancient

Baiae, the resort Seneca fled, offers a case study worth examining carefully. At its peak, Baiae was Rome's most celebrated leisure destination — a place of thermal baths, extraordinary villas, and a coastline that attracted emperors. Julius Caesar had a villa there. So did Pompey, Cicero, and eventually Nero.

And yet the writers who documented Roman travel culture — the people who, by any reasonable measure, were the most thoughtful observers of their era — returned repeatedly to the same complaints. Baiae was loud. Baiae was morally degraded by its own popularity. Baiae attracted the wrong kind of visitor. The experience did not justify the reputation.

This is not merely ancient snobbery, though there is some of that present. It is a precise description of what happens to any destination that achieves sufficient fame: the fame itself becomes the primary product, and the original qualities that generated the fame are gradually displaced by the infrastructure required to serve the crowds who arrived because of it.

The mechanism is identical today. The small coastal town that was genuinely charming fifteen years ago is now primarily a delivery vehicle for the idea of itself.

How Serious Roman Travelers Actually Found Good Destinations

The more instructive question is not where the Roman crowds went, but where the Roman equivalent of the discerning traveler actually preferred to be.

The answer, drawn from the letters and essays of the period, is consistent: they sought places with genuine qualities — good water, pleasant climate, interesting local culture — that had not yet been fully processed by the tourism economy of their era. They relied on personal correspondence rather than public reputation. They were skeptical of famous places and curious about obscure ones. They understood that the gap between a destination's reputation and its reality tended to widen in direct proportion to the size of its reputation.

Seneca, for all his complaints about Baiae, was a careful observer of why certain places retained their character while others lost it. His analysis, stripped of its first-century context, produces a principle that applies with equal force today: a place's quality is inversely related to the efficiency with which it has been made accessible to the largest possible number of visitors.

The Practical Application

If you accept the premise — that the psychology of the disappointed traveler is genuinely timeless — then the historical record stops being background reading and becomes a planning tool.

The places that Roman writers preferred over Baiae were, in most cases, places that remained relatively uncrowded precisely because they lacked Baiae's famous name. The Tuscan hills Pliny described. The quieter stretches of the Campanian coast. The smaller towns along the Appian Way that offered decent accommodation without the premium attached to fashionable addresses.

Translate this logic into the present and the exercise becomes concrete. Before booking the obvious destination — the one whose name appears in every list of places to visit before you die — ask what the serious travelers of previous generations quietly preferred instead. Not the famous alternatives, but the genuinely obscure ones. The places mentioned in passing in old travel literature as pleasant stops on the way to somewhere more celebrated.

Those places still exist. They are simply waiting for you to look past the destination that everyone else is reviewing.