As a compulsive traveller, I’ve long made a career of avoiding crowds — heading for places like Pago Pago, Belize City Zanzibar and La Paz, resolutely refusing to go anywhere too popular, let alone in high season. Why put up with bumper-to-bumper traffic, overpriced hotels and mind-numbing airport delays — all the indignities of modern travel? At home in New York, I wouldn’t even take the subway at rush hour.

Then, a couple of years ago, I realised something was awry. I’d been to Tierra del Fuego five times, yet never been to Rome; I’d cruised the Colombian Amazon, but never clapped eyes on Greece. It was starting to seem a touch pathological. If I didn’t get over my dread of crowds and tourist chaos, I’d never make it to anywhere famous — and certainly not the Mediterranean, which is the modern world’s ultimate tourist market.

Luckily, history came to my rescue. Digging around in some library archives one summer, I came across a cache of material on the ancient origins of tourism — and found, to my consolation, that holiday chaos is part of a tradition that stems from the dawn of western civilisation. It turned out that Augustus Caesar and his citizens were the very first leisure travellers, whose tourist itinerary we unconsciously mimic today.

During the Pax Romana, it transpired, ancient sightseers set off in droves to visit the wonders of their world, lounging in sumptuous seaside resorts and admiring marvellous attractions such as the pyramids and the Parthenon. But even for these lucky pioneers — well-to-do scholars, art-lovers, poets and socialites, with every resource at their disposal — the vacation experience was rarely comfortable.

IT WAS a lesson in Zen that helped me at every step of a summer journey to the Med, when I overcame years of neurotic avoidance and set off to follow the grand tour of anti-quity, the classical tourist trail from Rome to Greece, Turkey and Egypt. The scales, you could say, had fallen from my eyes.

Whenever I was trapped in traffic on an Italian autostrada, I didn’t let loose with a string of unsavoury epithets. Instead, I spared a quiet thought for those ancient Roman rubbernecks back in the first century AD, who faced history’s first traffic delays on the Appian Way, grinding along in iron-wheeled wagons (axles without grease let out tooth-jarring shrieks). Every time I confronted an Aegean island beach whose every inch of sand was covered with yellow umbrellas for hire, I reminded myself that the Roman tourists loved to cluster by the water 2,000 years ago.

In fact, the first stop on the grand tour of antiquity, the Bay of Naples, in southern Italy, qualifies as the Ibiza of antiquity — the prototype of all our contemporary seaside resorts, whose extravagant villas and bacchanalian banquets were renowned throughout the empire.

What’s more, this ancient beach scene was no more relaxing than our contemporary version, much to the annoyance of more delicate Roman souls: “Why must I look at drunks staggering along the shore, or noisy boating parties?” asked the philosopher Seneca in an extended rant. Why did he have to have his sleep broken by the squabbles of nocturnal partygoers? Just like today, the indignities of travel tended to increase the further one ventured from the larger cities. Roadside inns around the Med had even more erratic standards than any modern £15-a-night pension: a wealth of ancient literature attests to rock-hard mattresses, leaky roofs, surly staff and demented innkeepers. And long before Fawlty Towers, the Greek playwright Aristophanes described a hotel in Hades whose terrifying madam threatens to dismember misbehaving guests with a billhook.

The food at these ancient inns was worse than at the sorriest modern diner. Rumours abounded of human flesh in the stews — if you were really unlucky, you’d find a knucklebone. And the company could be as boorish as at any truck stop. Plutarch advises humming to oneself to block out the drivel of halfwitted travellers, not to mention the taunts of drunken mule-drivers.

Then there were those per- ennial menaces of the Medi- terranean summer — heatstroke, stomach disorders and insect plagues. Olympia, in Greece, even had a shrine to Zeus Apomyius, “Zeus the Averter of Flies”, in a vain attempt to keep the infestations at bay.

THE ANCIENT travel experience was no easier when Romans arrived at their “must-see” attractions. Judging from the surviving accounts, even the hallowed sites were shameless tourist traps, boasting a level of commercialism that sounded eerily familiar as I battled my way up the Acropolis, into the ruins of Delphi or around the Sphinx.

Ancient temples were the precursors of modern museums, mini Louvres where visitors could fork over hefty donations to huckster priests to see a gorgon’s skin, a cyclops’s skull or the relics of Homeric heroes. Inside every site, sightseers had to battle teams of tour guides known as mystogogi (“those who explain the sacred places to foreigners”). The pushiness of these pioneering industry professionals was axiomatic, as was the inaccuracy of their spiel. “Abolish lies from Greece and all the tour guides there would die of starvation,” wails the wandering orator Lucian, “as no tourist wants to hear the truth — even for free!” Even today’s floor shows had their ancient antecedents. While we flock to Turkish folkloric dances, Romans liked to see Spartans put on displays of their military prowess.

Sacred crocodiles were fed at an oasis by the Nile (quite a spectacle, with shaven-headed Egyptian priests chasing bejewelled reptiles around a pool, then hand-polishing their teeth — an early prototype of our Florida dolphin shows, perhaps). Oracles would babble, sorcerers would conjure — all, of course, for a hefty fee.

In fact, the chaos of ancient sites could be overwhelming. Souvenir vendors pressed forward with engraved-glass vials, knock-off silver statues or lucky charms. Fast-food vendors flogged cut-rate sausages of dubious quality, nuts and figs. At the pyramids, you could hire professional stonecutters to inscribe graffiti. In fact, a remark by one Roman trav- eller in Alexandria still resonates from Sicily to Istanbul: “Unus illis deus Nummus est” (“They worship only one god: cash”).

AND SO, as I travelled around the Mediterranean — battling scamming waiters, shyster taxi drivers and maniacal hoteliers — the Romans were a constant source of inspiration. The crucial thing is, none of the diffi-culties they faced really fazed those ancient tourists. All the problems of the road were simply accepted as part and parcel of the travel experience.

In fact, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus even described tourism as a metaphor for life. He listed all the discomforts of going to the Olympic Games in Greece, where sanitary conditions for the 40,000 spectators were worse than at a badly planned rock festival.

“Don’t you swelter all day in the sun?” he asked rhetorically. “Aren’t you jammed in with the crowds? Isn’t it hard to get a bath? Aren’t you soaked to the bone whenever it rains? Don’t the din and the shouting and the other petty annoyances drive you mad? But of course you put up with it all because it’s an unforgettable spectacle.”

It’s a mantra I repeat every time I wait in line for another airport security check, get caught in a dismal hotel room or turn up at an attraction to find that 10 tour buses have arrived before me.

The logistics of travel may be punishing, exhausting, even downright degrading — but it’s all worth it. Or, as one piece of ancient graffiti crowed in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings: “Those who have not seen this have seen nothing. Happy those who have!”

Tony Perrottet is the author of Route 66AD: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (Ebury Press £6.99), which follows the “grand tour of antiquity”, visiting the great classical sites in Italy, Greece, Turkey and Egypt