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.
These social calls were not all pleasure. That would have been impossible for a group of people who drew so little distinction between the personal and political. Soon after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., Cicero found “a great crowd” of critical players — among them the consul-designates and Octavian, Caesar’s 19-year-old heir — plotting and negotiating by the beach. For many, the power swilling about the Bay of Naples was key to its appeal. Retreating to this stretch of coastline meant that schemers addicted to political intrigue were not forced to break for holidays, since connections could be made and deals brokered more discreetly than in Rome.
For those unable to shake the inbred Roman impulse for competition but loath to spend their summers politicking, Campania opened a second theater of combat in the war of conspicuous consumption. Back in the city, senators and moguls were constrained by the inconvenience of space and the dying splutters of an established ideal of frugality. Not so on the coast. One villa in Herculaneum covered at least 215,000 square feet — 10 times the size of the billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s home in today’s Southampton — and many were probably larger still. On the Bay of Naples, villas sprawled down terraced hillsides to private jetties, unashamed of their opulence. Inside, walls were frescoed, floors mosaicked and rooms filled with works by the old Greek masters.
The summer colony required then, as now, a different social code of display — having money counted only if you knew what to spend it on. On the once-wild Bay of Naples, it revolved around carefully trained nature. Senators displayed well-kept vineyards and vegetable gardens. The statesman Lucullus spent more than the price of a villa digging a channel through the mountain to feed his fish ponds. Hills were carved out and rebuilt to better frame the views. Just as the first four spots on New York magazine’s “Hamptons Status List” are occupied by a type of grass, a melon, a tree and a particular hue of egg, holidaying senators obsessed over oyster farming, fish ponds, imported cherry trees and fashionable moray eels.
Other pleasures were less wholesome. In his defense of Caelius, Cicero enumerated the temptations of the Campanian coast: “Lusts, loves, illicit lovers, Baiae parties, beach parties, banquets, bacchanals, singing parties, musical parties, pleasure boats.” It wasn’t unlike the competitive hosts Vanity Fair observed in the Hamptons of the 1990s. We might doubt Suetonius’ description of the pleasure boats kitted out with gardens and heated baths in which the emperor Caligula “reclined at table for the entire day amid dancers and musicians, cruising the shores of Campania,” had archaeologists never found nearly identical ships used on a nearby lake. One party was particularly spectacular: a banquet thrown on a temporary road constructed across the entire bay, lit like a theater by fires in all the surrounding hills. Only the host’s manners were lacking; as the revelry intensified, Caligula began drowning guests for his amusement.
Summers on the Bay of Naples blurred normality. All the same people could be found as in Rome, but their behavior was loosened in unpredictable ways by the parties and warmth. It was the perfect place for affairs. You only had to look out to sea, Seneca claimed, to count the adulteresses sailing past. This moral murkiness opened the door to greater crimes: It was said that Nero first attempted to murder his mother by inviting her to a banquet at Baiae and sending her home in a collapsing boat. Shocking! Abhorrent! But perhaps yet another reason to return next summer. Go elsewhere, and you might not know the gossip.
When we read Cicero’s protests or New York magazine’s briefing on the Hamptons’ most fashionable topics of scandal and complaint, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking this is true masochism. There are few things human nature finds more gratifying or more bonding than gossip and common grievance. A little summer outrage is and ever was part of the point. It satisfies and entertains, signals you’re in the know, marks you out as a principled connoisseur and binds you closer to the people you’ll need, socially and politically, back in the city. After all, what does overcrowding matter when you have a private beach?
Honor Cargill-Martin (@honorcargillm) is a classicist and the author of “Messalina: Empress, Adulteress, Libertine: The Story of the Most Notorious Woman of the Roman World.”
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