Booze Cruises and Bacchic Orgies: This Beach Resort was the Party Capital of Ancient Rome

One of our best descriptions of this side of Baiae comes from Seneca the Younger. A great stoic philosopher and tutor to the somewhat deranged Emperor Nero, Seneca spent much of his later life either trying to hold Nero back from murdering people or trying to survive himself (an endeavor in which he ultimately failed). When he had a moment’s respite, however, Seneca liked to spend his time sermonising, particularly to a friend of his, Lucullus, in a series of letters that have come down to us today.

In one such letter, he complains about the fact that he’s found himself stuck in Baiae. It’s a resort of some natural beauty, Seneca confesses, but it’s mainly a resort Luxury has claimed for itself, where pleasure-seekers from the capital come to let loose and indulge in their vices. Seneca describes how the resort is constantly full of people wandering drunk up and down the beach, on their way from (or indeed to) one of the many bars and taverns lining the strip.

Nor was it just land where the resort’s ancient revelers ran amok. Seneca also describes how any peace and quiet in the bay would be drowned out by the “riotous revelling of sailing parties”. Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us what this “riotous revelling” consisted of. But if you picture a modern-day booze cruise, switch “Despacito” for the din of flutes, and imagine groups of wealthy, wasted Romans screaming incomprehensible Latin or Greek at one another, you probably get the picture.

Seneca goes on: He rails against gangs of lewd women sailing past on brightly colored barges shouting obscenities at those on the shore. Curiously, he also describes roses being strewn across the bay. Who threw them we don’t know; perhaps the lewd women he describes, perhaps other revelers out in the bay. But their symbolism is important. Roses in the Roman world represented dedication to Venus, goddess of love, beauty and most importantly sex. That their sweet smell wafted the resort day and night seems to suggest there was no shortage of the latter, and that the supply of orgies was positively blooming.

Baiae was also immensely popular with some of the big political names of the time. During the time of the Republic, Gaius Marius, Gnaeus Pompey and Julius Caesar had holiday houses overlooking the bay; under the Empire, Augustus, Claudius, Nero and Hadrian had coastal homes there. It was at his villa in Baiae where Hadrian died, probably of heart failure, at the age of 62. But it’s Claudius, and the sunken remains of his villa which because of volcanic activity now lie some five meters underwater, who gives us our most intimate picture of how the rich and famous lived in this resort.

There are extensive archaeological remains of Claudius’s villa, but the most well preserved are those of a triclinium, a long rectangular dining room lined with statues on all sides. There’s Bacchus, the god of wine, theatre and ecstasy, a headless kneeling statue of Odysseus offering the Cyclops a goblet of honeyed wine (after drinking it he would go on to have his one eye gouged out) and a member of the imperial family who historians identify as Claudius’s mother, Octavia. The theme connecting most of these statues seems to have been heavy drinking, something we know Claudius, and his guests, indulged in liberally. But the archaeological record can’t really prove this. Instead, we’re forced to turn back to the ancient literature to find evidence of the Roman elites indulging themselves.

Our best evidence for this comes from of a court speech given by Cicero in 56 BC in defense of the young aristocrat Marcus Caelius Rufus. He had been accused of civil violence, a serious charge that roughly equated to treason against the state. At one stage, Cicero gives a shortlist of some of the character-assassination charges that have been brought against him: “orgies, love affairs, adultery, Baiae, beach parties, banquets, parties, singing, concerts and boat trips”.

The way he drops Baiae’s name so seamlessly into this list of thoroughly disgraceful, thoroughly un-roman activities and doesn’t bother to mention what goes on there tells us two things: Firstly, that it was precisely those things—orgies, beach parties, banquets, boat trips—that went on there; Secondly, Cicero’s audience knew it. In bringing up Baiae, there was the small problem that Cicero opened himself up to accusations. He did, after all, have a house there. But Cicero, of course, was more interested in the natural and intellectual pursuits around the area. Or at least that’s what he said.

Baiae had its heyday at the turn of the first millennium, drawing many more pleasure seekers than nearby Pompeii, Herculaneum or Capri. As time went on its reputation waned, and by the late Roman Empire it had transformed from a decadent and fashionable resort to the port of the Western Roman Navy, the Portus Julius. It was sacked several times after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, first by the Goths and later by the Muslims in the 8^th century. It fell into a derelict, uninhabitable wasteland, rife with malaria, slowly sinking away into due to bradyseism: the falling of land caused by volcanic activity.

A few years ago, all of the remaining sites opened to the public. There are temple remains on land, but the real gems—imperial villae, towers and artificial sea grottos—lie hidden under the sea. You can visit them by booking onto one of the many scuba diving or snorkeling tours run by companies in the area, and see where the ancients went to let loose for their summer holidays 2,000 years ago