Experiencing Ancient Landscapes

Le résumé fourni par la source

Abstract This chapter canvases a selection of texts to frame what we might call ancient tourist literature. Odysseus’ ten-year return journey from Troy to Ithaca was involuntary, so that makes Homer’s Odyssey a poor candidate for antiquity’s tourist literature. While Herodotus’ Histories is well known for its author’s fascination with Egypt, less familiar texts help build out the picture: for example, the literary graffiti of Julia Balbilla, an aristocrat from Asia Minor, whose visit continues to be physically marked at the Colossi of Memnon near Thebes. Texts of this kind are, the author argues, the key to a mostly implicit ancient conception of tourism: while many journeys are famously recounted in epic and other genres, only a few are presented with a sense that they might potentially be emulated. An important element here is the Mediterranean landscape that emerges in key Greek and Latin geographical texts. Most notably, Pausanias in his Description of Greece richly bespeaks a notion of cultural landscape, at least with respect to the Greek mainland. With the ascendancy of Christianity in the early fourteenth century CE, the influential concept of a Holy Land emerged. While religion and tourism may seem odd bedfellows today, they show significant overlap in many early texts. Ancient tourism and its literature are characterized as the experience of particular landscapes. At issue are the literary genres by which those experiences become part of the collective memory of ancient societies and would also exert influence over subsequent readers.

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