Talk:Tourism in ancient Rome

Tourism in ancient Rome is currently a World history good article nominee. Nominated by Graearms (talk) at 23:37, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

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Short description: Tourism and vacation sites in ancient Rome

A fact from Tourism in ancient Rome appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 10 November 2022 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the ancient Roman tourist destination of Baiae was infamous for its hedonism?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2022/November. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Tourism in ancient Rome.

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Declined?[edit]

I find it a little perplexing that this article failed new article review. Though I do agree that 'Tourism in ancient Rome' would make a better title. Tewdar 13:44, 14 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Specifically, I don't see how This submission reads more like an essay than an encyclopedia article. Perhaps someone could point to something specific... Tewdar 15:48, 14 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Did you know nomination[edit]

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by RoySmith (talk) 23:16, 6 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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Comment or view
Article history

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House in Baiae

... that the ancient Roman tourist destination of Baiae was infamous for its hedonism? Source: ^[1]^[2]
- ALT1: ... that the Pyramids of Giza were popular destinations for ancient Roman tourists? Source: ^[3]
- Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Old Dartmouth

Created by Graearms (talk). Self-nominated at 17:43, 22 October 2022 (UTC).[reply]

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image eligibility:

Freely licensed:
Used in article: - no
Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: Article looks fine, another addition to the recently growing coverage of Ancient Rome! Only a few minor issues:

I've simplyfied some wikilinks by simply putting the plural "s" directly after the brackets (the software identifies this as a plural and adjusts the displayed link). However, I am confused why you are piping "Marsielle" to "Marseille"? The former is only a misspelling of the modern city, while the Ancient Greek and Latin name would be Massalia (which has its own article). Maybe change the wikilink to point there?
The title "In culture" for the section feels a little weird, as it doesn't exactly deal with cultural coverage of tourism. However, I don't know what to put there instead. Not an issue for DYK, just wanted to say it.
The image you attached to the nom is not used in the article currently; instead there's another one, File:Villa dell'Ambulatio 13.JPG. Please decide which one you want to see in the DYK, and then add that to both the nomination here and the article.

Once the picture thing is sorted, I'll approve. –LordPeterII (talk) 17:21, 27 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ "Parco Archeologico Sommerso di Baia - Campi Flegrei". Parco Archeologico Sommerso di Baia (in Italian). Archived from the original on October 22, 2022. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
^ Beard, Mary (May 20, 2022). "Evidence of tourism in the ancient world". TLS. Archived from the original on August 13, 2022. Retrieved August 13, 2022.
^ Perrottet, Tony (2002). Route 66 A.D. : on the trail of ancient Roman tourists. Internet Archive. New York : Random House. pp. 3–348. ISBN 978-0-375-50432-7.

I changed "Marseille" to "Massalia" and the "In Culture" section to the "Motives" section. I also fixed the picture. Graearms (talk) 01:11, 29 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Then I approve. –LordPeterII (talk) 18:05, 29 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Graearms I was going to promote the first hook, but don't see where the cited source says anything about hedonism. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:18, 3 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

RoySmith I edited the references of the articles. Also it says that Baiae was known for hedonism in this source. Graearms (talk) 19:00, 3 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review[edit]

This review is transcluded from Talk:Tourism in ancient Rome/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: Graearms (talk · contribs) 23:37, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 19:14, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Will give this one a look over the next few days. Hat off to you for attempting to bring such a broad, synthetic topic within the sometimes unruly constraints of a Wikipedia article. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:14, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I enjoyed reading this one: it does a good job of moving smoothly over a great deal of material. A few initial thoughts:

The biggest thing that stands out to me, at the moment, is the lack of chronological markers or acknowledgements of change over time. Roman history begins (at least) c. 500 BCE, but parts of the article read as if Rome was always a Mediterranean-spanning empire, that piracy was never a problem, or that people could always visit the Colosseum. Similarly, we have Hippocrates and Galen in consecutive sentences, as if they were contemporaries; they lived about half a millennium apart.
Building on that point, the article tends to treat all Greco-Roman sources as interchangeable, but we need some awareness of when these people wrote and who they were. We can't, for example, give the impression that Varro, Pliny, Lucian and Horace all lived in basically the same world.
The GA criteria don't require comprehensiveness, but I was surprised that the the Bibliography seems to consist largely of older or less scholarly works. There isn't a huge bibliography on the topic of tourism directly, but it does exist: see the bibliography of this paper for a few good bits, and the Oxford Classical Dictionary has a brief entry under "Tourism", as does the Cambridge Dictionary of Classical Civilisation (including a little on Late Antiquity; see below).
On which, there are a few citations, such as Lomine 2005 and Elsner and Rutherford 2007, where an edited volume with individual contributors is cited, but it isn't clear who should be credited for the cited text.
- I have edited the citations; there should no longer be any ambiguity. Graearms (talk) 20:12, 30 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  - Mostly happy here: I note that Talbert doesn't have volume/issue/page info, and the Ogden citation appears to be WP:PRIMARY in disguise: everything that Ogden's book has on the issue is simply a printed-out passage from Varro. We should always make sure that statements of fact are backed by the judgement of secondary sources (Varro could have been mistaken, lying or exaggerating about what Baiae was like, or out of step with what his contemporaries thought of it): so Bars dotted the area, and upper-class women were said to pretend to be prostitutes should be verified by a secondary source. It would also be preferable to have a secondary source who uses Varro's evidence in this manner, to avoid the charge of WP:SYNTH. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:18, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I have edited the Talbert source; It should now contain enough information. I have also edited the statements about Baiae to clearly showcase the source comes from Varro. I could not identify any secondary source citing archaeological evidence proving that there were bars at Baiae. However, I did find other secondary sources mentioning a few Roman primary sources which make similar claims to Varro. This source cites Seneca claiming that living in Baiae is like living in a bar. Graearms (talk) 11:56, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    All good there -- edited volume back with Rich and Shipley, however. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:42, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am surprised to see very little of some of the most famous tourists in the Roman Empire: Pausanias (NB spelling mistake in article: not Pausanius) and Hadrian's entourage immediately spring to mind. On medical tourism, Aelius Aristides seems a curious omission.
Late Antiquity seems conspicuous by its absence, we briefly allude to Christianity in the form of St. Paul, but I otherwise have no indication here that Rome was a Christian empire for hundreds of years.
- I have added more detail about Christian pilgrimage. Hopefully this is sufficient, however, Christianity still remains a minor part of the article. Graearms (talk) 22:47, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As it should: suggest a mention of Egeria, who gives the earliest proper account of a Christian pilgrimage, to go alongside Paula. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:16, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When citing an ancient source as quoted in a modern one, it would be useful to provide a link to the ancient source in addition to (not instead of) the secondary quotation. Most can be found freely on Perseus.
- I have added a few more primary sources to back up the quotes. However, I am unable to find an English translation of De compendiosa doctrina by Nonius. I also had difficulty identifying the English translation of this excerpt from Plutarch. Graearms (talk) 19:37, 30 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No worries: there aren't going to be online PD translations of everything, especially obscure texts (one of my eternal frustrations seems to be finding a decent edition of Aelius Aristides' Sacred Tales). A link to a Greek or Latin version is fine if no English one exists: that at least allows readers who speak those languages, or are happy using Google Translate, to get something out of it and verify that the source exists. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:10, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On piracy: I'm not sure that "piracy was an ever-prevalent problem for Roman travellers" is really the established view in scholarship: see Bruand in this volume, who points out that Roman sources from Augustus to Commodus uniformly said that piracy wasn't a problem, and rightly says that we should take this an an ideological statement above all else: however, that it wouldn't have been possible to say that if piracy was a big and obvious problem. Most treatments of "Pompey's eradication of piracy" now take it from the other direction: that Pompey et al exaggerated the scale of the earlier problem of piracy so as to provide an excuse/justification for extreme measures to combat it. In other words, it's less that piracy remained a serious problem after Pompey, and more that it was never all that serious to begin with. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:18, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have added more information about piracy. It should be more clear and accurate now. Graearms (talk) 13:39, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'll get to this in more detail when we start going through the article with a more specific lens, but for now we need some kind of temporal qualifier on piracy was likely not as widespread as ancient authors claimed (there's two batches of authors here: those around the Lex Gabinia, such as Cicero in the De Imperio Cn. Pompei, who argued that piracy had been a huge problem, and a second batch after Pompey/Augustus, who claim that piracy was extinct as a problem), and to correct the spelling/typo of Res Gestae. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 14:04, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I clarified that the “ancient authors” in question were centered in the Roman Republic. Graearms (talk) 16:22, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OK; we now need the corresponding balance that ancient authors after that period overwhelmingly said the opposite, that piracy wasn't a problem at all (and then the modern caveat that this might not have been entirely true). UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:39, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I added a small statement which hopefully makes this clarification. I added the text: "Most ancient authors during the Principate claimed that piracy was suppressed by the emperors." Graearms (talk) 19:53, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Let me know how you get on with these and I"ll give the article a more detailed look. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:44, 30 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[1] "Parco Archeologico Sommerso di Baia - Campi Flegrei". Parco Archeologico Sommerso di Baia (in Italian). Archived from the original on October 22, 2022. Retrieved 2022-10-22.

[2] Beard, Mary (May 20, 2022). "Evidence of tourism in the ancient world". TLS. Archived from the original on August 13, 2022. Retrieved August 13, 2022.

[3] Perrottet, Tony (2002). Route 66 A.D. : on the trail of ancient Roman tourists. Internet Archive. New York : Random House. pp. 3–348. ISBN 978-0-375-50432-7.

[1]

[2]

[3]