Justin Marozzi's Classical Grand Tour
The Independent (Justin Marozzi)
So, you thought the Grand Tour was an 18th-century phenomenon? The preserve of languid young aristocrats milording it through Europe, swanning across Paris and Geneva, cutting a dash in Turin, Florence, Rome and Venice, before hightailing it to Innsbruck, Heidelberg and Potsdam? Think again.
The Greeks were at it well before that. Two millennia, in fact. And you'd struggle to find a better, more dashing Grand Tourer than Herodotus, the fifth-century father of history, whose gallivanting expeditions across North Africa, the Aegean and the Middle East form the perfect itinerary for the traveller of today. He did it over the course of a lifetime, admittedly, but it's perfectly possible to squeeze the highlights into two or three weeks. Much as we'd love to visit Babylon, we'll leave Iraq to one side for now and concentrate on Turkey, Egypt and Greece.
Let's begin in the resort town of Bodrum, Herodotus's home town of Halicarnassus on Turkey's Aegean coast. There's little left of the Mausoleum, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, but the 16th-century Castle of St Peter is magnificent and the sailing in island-studded turquoise seas is superb. History buffs can immerse themselves in the faded glory of Ephesus, Priene and Pergamum, leaving the dedicated clubbers to enjoy Halikarnas, which describes itself as the most beautiful disco in the world.
From the ruins of Turkey, it's off to Egypt, which completely mesmerised our Greek traveller. As he wrote in The Histories, his one-volume masterpiece, "more monuments which beggar description are to be found there than anywhere else in the world". No surprise to find the sky-grazing pyramids on the itinerary. No Egyptian monument is quite as magical, especially at dawn and dusk, when the crowds have disappeared. Guides told Herodotus no end of nonsense about the pyramids. Someone told him that the pharaoh Cheops, running out of money while he was building the Great Pyramid, decided to send his daughter to a brothel, where she charged her customers one block of stone – think 2.5 tons of limestone – per romp.
Next we take to the Nile to visit many-templed Luxor, the Thebes of old.
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