Caligula in the Hamptons

New York Times

2 days ago

Every summer, magazine stories chronicle the extreme lengths to which people are willing to go to keep up in the Hamptons, the entirely unaffordable beach enclave a couple of hours east of New York City. Borrowing, bribery, tax fraud. At the same time and often in the same publications, we hear the gripes and grim prognostications of the regulars. 'What's going on in East Hampton,' one resident felt duty bound to warn the readers of Vanity Fair, 'is a nightmare.'
In their triumphant annual return to a place that seems to be the cause of so much ire, Hamptonites and their ilk are part of a venerable tradition, stretching all the way back to ancient Rome. Two thousand years ago, the richest representatives of what was then the world's greatest empire spent every summer in a place they claimed was too busy, too debauched and too expensive.
The place in question was the stretch of Campanian coastline around the Bay of Naples. Originally a quiet retreat of rugged cliffs and healing thermal springs, by the middle of the first century B.C., the bay was teeming with military potentates, spendthrift aristocrats and the people who could afford to keep up with them. 'Palaces on palaces were built, one after another,' wrote the geographer Strabo, until, he said, the coast had the aspect of a city. Villas bought for 75,000 drachmas in the late second century B.C. were sold for 2.5 million only a few years later. The towns — Baiae, Puteoli, Pompeii, Cumae — were polished until they gleamed with marble bathing complexes and emporiums of imported luxuries. 'All extremely desirable spots,' wrote the famed orator Cicero, 'except for the great crowds of annoying people.'
Just like the French Riviera two millenniums later, the Campanian coast developed a reputation for debauchery, nowhere more so than Baiae. 'A lodging house of vice,' railed the stoic philosopher Seneca, 'chosen by Luxury as her own favored protégé.' A century before, Cicero already felt it necessary to begin his defense of Caelius — a politician on trial for the murder of a consequential Egyptian diplomat, among other charges — by begging the jurors not to be swayed by his client's regular visits to Baiae.
This did nothing to lessen the area's popularity. Despite his grumbles and his aspersions, Cicero owned three villas on the Bay of Naples when he died in 43 B.C., and over the decades that followed, its coastline and islands were colonized by a rash of villas owned by Rome's new imperial family. These people, like the habitués of the Hamptons and the French Riviera, could holiday anywhere; they went to the Bay of Naples because everyone else went there, too.
The crowds that arrived each spring knew that none of their favorite activities could be done alone. Parties, gossip, business, pleasure, politics and jockeying for status all required a proper cast and a full audience, and these were to be found on the Bay of Naples. Cicero's letters reveal an endless cycle of easy socializing — neighbors dropping by in the afternoons, bouncing from one villa to another, rowing across the bay for a dinner of fish gratin at a friend's place near Pompeii.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.