Travel, Tourism, and Identity

Gabriel R. Ricci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351301107
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Travel, Tourism and Identity addresses the psychological and social adjustments that occur when people make contact with others outside their social, cultural, or linguistic groups. Whether such contact is the result of tourism, seeking exile, or relocating abroad, the volume's contributors demonstrate how one's identity, cultural assumptions, and worldview can be brought into question.

In some cases, the traveller finds that bridging the social and cultural gap between himself and the new society is fairly easy. In other cases, the traveller discovers that reorienting himself requires absorbing a new cultural history and traditions. The contributors argue that making these adjustments will surely enhance the traveller's or tourist's experience; otherwise the traveller or tourist will be at risk of becoming a marginalized figure, one disconnected from the society that surrounds him.

This latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series features a collection of essays on travel and tourism. The essays cover a range of topics from historical travels to modern social identities. They discuss ancient travels, contemporary travels in Europe, Africa and sustainable eco-tourism, and the politics of tourism. Essays also address experiences of Grenada's "Spice Island" identity, and the effects of globalization and migrations on personal identity.

1

The Importance of Dio’s Travels

William Hutton

SURVEYS OF ANCIENT Greek literature rarely give more than a passing nod to Dion of Prusa, an orator/philosopher of the first and second centuries CE, more commonly known (with Latinized spelling) as Dio Chrysostom.¹ The epithet “Chrysostom” translates as “Golden-mouthed” and reflects the admiration that Dio’s oratory commanded in antiquity and the Middle Ages, in contrast to his relative anonymity in modern times. Dio’s orations served as models of elegant and engaging rhetorical discourse in the high and late Roman Empire and as a result, more of his works survive than most other ancient Greek authors—more than seventy orations more or less intact, along with many fragments of lost orations. Dio was an early representative of the cultural phenomenon known to modern scholars as the Second Sophistic, in which master orators, styled “sophists,” achieved empire-wide renown by making public display of their stem-winding skills in cities large and small and at festivals in major and minor religious shrines.² Philostratus, whose third-century CE work, Lives of the Sophists, chronicled the careers of these public intellectuals, expressed uncertainty about whether to call Dio a sophist or a philosopher, since many of his orations (and the bulk of those that survive) deal with serious political issues and moral advice for kings, cities, and emperors, in contrast to the sophists’ usual stock-in-trade of crowd-pleasing historical impersonations and displays of clever rhetorical showmanship.³

This essay focuses on one unique aspect of Dio’s opus: as far as we can tell from the surviving writings of the major orators of the period, and from testimonia about their writing in other authors, Dio is unique among them in making his identity as a traveler a central part of his oratorical persona. While the wandering sage is an important archetype in Greek literature from the time of Herodotos’s Solon,⁴ or even from the time of Homer’s Odysseus, to whom Dio is not above comparing himself,⁵ no other major writer of this period (with the arguable exception of the topographer Pausanias) so frequently invokes the topic of his own travels. Certainly other stars in the sophistic firmament had itinerant careers, as did earlier poets and philosophers, such as the famously rootless cynic sage Diogenes, another predecessor on whom Dio clearly patterns his self-presentation.⁶ But neither Diogenes nor any of Dio’s more immediate predecessors is known to have given such a central place to travel as a device for framing narratives and arguments and for establishing his own persona and authority. Given the popularity and influence of Dio’s orations in subsequent generations, it is possible that we should see Dio’s emphasis on travel as one of the motivating factors in the efflorescence of travel-themed literature in the centuries that followed.

The self-portrait that Dio delivers piecemeal over the course of his orations asserts that after achieving renown and advancement to the highest social and intellectual circles in the empire’s capital, he was banished by the emperor Domitian from Rome and from his native Prusa (in northwestern Anatolia) for his association with a suspected conspirator against the emperor.⁷ Eventually, Dio was recalled from exile by the emperor Nerva and quickly reclaimed his position as a cultural celebrity, even reportedly being invited by Nerva’s successor Trajan to stand with him on a golden chariot and to declaim from the chariot during the emperor’s triumphal entrance into Rome.⁸ Most of Dio’s surviving orations date, probably or certainly, to the reign of Trajan (98–117 CE) and in them, Dio makes frequent references to his years in exile. Instead of choosing a comfortable spot in which to wait out his banishment (an option doubtless open to him as the scion of a wealthy and well-connected family), Dio tells us that he spent his exile wandering the eastern reaches of the empire. While the elite of the period generally traveled with entourages,⁹ or at least a slave or two, Dio portrays himself as journeying alone, unencumbered even by the baggage and supplies that other wayfarers of more than modest means might find obligatory.¹⁰

In his orations, Dio uses his position as exile, his position of alienation from the central authorities, from his familiar haunts and acquaintances, and from the comforts of his upper-class life, as a standpoint from which to deliver moralizing lessons on the potentially corrupting influences of wealth, social ambition, and political hurly-burly, factors that Dio in his pre-exile life experienced along with a good portion of the actual and intended audiences of his orations. The encounters Dio claims to have had with unfamiliar peoples and places also allow him to share illuminating perspectives with his listeners and readers. For instance, in his thirty-sixth oration, known as his Borysthenitic Discourse, Dio recounts his visit to the city of Borysthenes, which lay at the very edge of the Greco-Roman universe on the north coast of the Black Sea. In Borysthenes, he tells us, he delivered to an audience of semi-Hellenized provincials a lecture on the relation between the Stoic conception of the order of the cosmos and the ordering of earthly communities. The setting of the oration, both in geographical space and in the experiential landscape of Dio’s exile narrative, allows his philosophical sermon to reflect upon issues of Hellenism and barbarism and on the role of Greekness in a world dominated by Rome.¹¹

Even in antiquity, and even among Dio’s avowed admirers, skepticism about the literal truth of his exile narrative was expressed,¹² and it is clear that Dio, at least on occasion, enhanced the rhetorical and philosophical potential of his exile’s stance by fabrication. In Oration 1, his First Discourse on Rulership, an oration ostensibly addressed to Trajan himself, Dio reflects on a time when he lost his way while traveling alone toward Olympia through the Peloponnesian hinterlands. In introducing his tale, Dio gives his audience a portrait of himself as someone who had deliberately abandoned the comfort and complications of elite city life in search of something more simple and genuine:¹³

Once when I happened to be wandering during my exile … I travelled around as much as possible among Greeks and barbarians alike in the appearance and dress of a vagabond … Arriving at the Peloponnesos I did not go into the cities much, but spent my time in the countryside, which provided much material for contemplation, communing with shepherds and huntsmen, people of upright and ingenuous habits.

In his search for someone to set him back on the right path, Dio encounters an elderly woman “of Elis or Arcadia,” who claims to be the mother of a local shepherd but who had also been endowed by the Mother of the Gods with the gift of prophecy. The mysterious woman proceeds to prophesy for Dio the end of his exile and his eventual meeting with a “powerful man who rules a vast number of lands and peoples,”¹⁴ an obvious reference to the emperor. She then relates a parable to Dio, bidding him to share it with the great man when he meets him.¹⁵ The parable amounts to a version of the Choice of Heracles, a popular moralizing tale first ascribed to the fifth-century BCE philosopher Prodicus of Keos, except in the version of Dio’s interlocutor, Heracles is not the youthful dispossessed prince of tradition but a mighty king who ruled not only Greece but, like Trajan himself, “all the land from the rising sun to the setting sun and all the peoples among whom Heracles had holy shrines.”¹⁶ Dio can scarcely have expected his educated audience to take his story at face value, with its recapitulation of the dog-eared parable of Prodicus, the adaptation of that parable to suit the circumstances of his addressee, and the further echo, in the person of his feminine preceptor, of the Arcadian prophetess Diotima, to whom Socrates ascribes his initiation in the mysteries of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. But regardless of the veracity of the tale, it exemplifies the way Dio uses the dislocation and deracination of the traveling persona’s point-of-view to claim a standpoint from which he can cast a critical eye on the status quo and the world of the familiar.

Dio’s most extensive use of this strategy comes in his Seventh Oration, known as the Euboean Discourse, and it is with this oration that the remainder of this essay will largely be concerned. The Euboean Discourse is famous for the story Dio tells of being shipwrecked on a remote part the Aegean island of Euboea, where he is taken in by a humble but proudly self-sufficient huntsman, an embodiment of the honest and unpretentious country folk he praised in his First Oration. This story, sometimes considered Dio’s masterpiece, has been praised as a literary descendant of Homer, bucolic poetry and New Comedy, as an early cousin to novelistic narrative, as a rare snapshot of the Greek countryside in the Roman period that is at least partially accurate, and as an effective embodiment of Stoic doctrine in the form of parable.¹⁷ It is in this period of exile that Dio seems to set his experiences on Euboea. It is possible, if not probable, that the beginning of the oration is lost.¹⁸ When the surviving text begins, Dio is narrating how once while traveling alone, he went as a passenger with some fishermen sailing from Chios toward the Greek mainland. A storm drives the boat into the rocks off the rugged and desolate shores of eastern Euboea. When his fishermen companions leave him behind to take up with some nearby dye-fishers, Dio is left alone to seek shelter and safety along the rocky shore. Fortunately, he soon encounters a lone huntsman whose dogs have just driven a deer over the cliffs overlooking the sea. This friendly native takes Dio back to his dwelling in the mountains and treats him to a faultless display of hospitality in his humble but comfortable abode, sharing with him the simple but abundant produce of the land and the good cheer of his small community, which consists not only of his own family but the family of a second huntsman who lives nearby.

On the way to the huntsman’s dwelling, Dio learns the story of the men and their families, and it is here that contemporary politics begins to intrude upon the idyllic Odyssean scenario that Dio has created. Dio learns that his benefactor and his fellow huntsman owe their present contentment to the fact that their fathers had been herdsmen in the employ of a local grandee and had lost their jobs when their employer was put to death by an unnamed emperor in order to confiscate his wealth (7.11–12):

For the land is not ours; we didn’t inherit it and we didn’t acquire it ourselves. Our fathers were free men but no less poor than we, hired herdsmen who tended the cattle of one of the rich men of the island … He died and his property was confiscated—they also say that he was put to death by the emperor for his money—and they immediately drove off his herd to be slaughtered, and along with the herd they also took our few small cattle, and there was no one to pay wages.

Deprived of their connection to the urbanized imperial economy, the huntsmen’s fathers and their households must undergo a transformation to a new life as squatters in a remote corner of their former master’s property, where first they and then their sons build for themselves a life that, if not affluent by urban standards, is at least comfortable and self-sufficient.

Dio next learns that the stable but legally ambiguous lifestyle left behind by the huntsmen’s forefathers also has been called into question in his host’s generation. The huntsman relates how he was once summoned to a public hearing in the city theater¹⁹ and accused of squatting on public land, exhibiting in the course of his account a comical degree of unfamiliarity with the urban world.²⁰ He expresses his wonderment at the city’s stone-built theater, which he likens to a canyon with short sides (7.24), and demonstrates that even his grasp of the concept of money is somewhat shaky, confusing a reference by one of his interrogators to a monetary talent with a reference to a unit of weight for commodities (7.44): “He asked me if each would be willing to give an Attic talent. I said, ‘we do not weigh our meat, but whatever it is, we will give it.’” Of course the narrator of this encounter between the urban and the rural is the huntsman himself, and he relates his own adventures with the same sort of insouciance that Dio elsewhere attributes to Diogenes the Cynic in his encounters with the urban crowds.²¹ Without a hint of chagrin, the huntsman recounts the amusement and exasperation his rustic cluelessness provokes in the audience of city dwellers. He also makes it clear that it is not merely citified knowledge that he lacks but citified values (7.45–6):

“And he asked me if we have grain and how much. I said what there was truthfully; ‘two medimnoi of wheat, four of barley and as much millet…. You take the wheat and the barley, I said, but leave us the millet. But if you need millet, take that too.’ Another asked, ‘Don’t you make wine?’ ‘We do,’ I said. So if one of you comes we will give it to you, but make sure that he brings a wineskin, because we don’t have one.’”

For the townspeople, surplus produce exists to be monetized and either horded or injected into the urban exchange economy; for the huntsman, it is something to be shared without recompense with neighbors and with guests by the ancient laws of hospitality. In the end, with the support of a magnanimous stranger amongst the assembled citizens and with the emergence of a witness who, like Dio himself, had once been saved from shipwreck by the self-same rustic huntsman, he wins the blessing of the civic authorities to remain in possession of his accustomed property a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Importance of Dio’s Travels
• 2 “Homer in a Nutshell”: The Nostoi of J. F. Usko (1760–1841)
• 3 Greece in Travel Writing and Tourist Discourse: Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Construction of Classifications
• 4 Travel Writers and Greece: The Legacy of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor
• 5 Know Thyself: An Anglo-Greek Author’s Search for Roots and Identity
• 6 “I Don’t Know Where I Am—Boise or the Basque Country”: Diaspora Identity Travel and Tourism
• 7 Experiential Branding of Grenada’s “Spice Island” Identity
• 8 Measuring Identity: Indicators for Comparison of Real and Fictional Discourses on a Cultural Heritage City
• 9 Identity Sustainability, Identity Affectivity, and the Ithaca Traveler: Conceptual Tools for Measuring and Modeling Tourism as an Opportunity
• 10 Staged Authenticity and Identity Conflicts: Cultural Tourism in Africa
• 11 Globalization, Migrations, and Personal Identity
• 12 Midlife Single Men and the Solo Holiday
• 13 Imagining “Home”: Discovering Multiples Selves and Homes through Travel
• 14 Studying Abroad
• 15 “Massive Involvement”: Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm and the Limits of “Reality Tourism”
• 16 Grockles and Locals: Tourists, Service Providers, and Residents—Mutual Perceptions and the Reciprocal Gaze (A Mediterranean Case Study: Corfu, Greece)
• Contributors