It is not actually the case that I cannot think of anything more ghastly than going on a holiday tour with a group; spending any time on board one of those gigantic cruise ships would be substantially worse. But it is very much not my thing for multiple reasons. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t understand their attractions for some people who are not me, and I can certainly admire the business thinking behind them.
After yesterday’s experience in Philippi, I looked at the website for one of the expressly Christian (specifically, in this case, Catholic) companies running Footsteps of St Paul tours. They turn out to offer a wide range of European experiences, always with some expressly religious stops, but by no means exclusively; their tour of England, for example, ends in Walsingham (fine), having taken in Bath (okay), Glastonbury (Hmm. Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail?), Birmingham (curry?) and Southampton (den of iniquity?!?). Clearly the point is to have a sufficient amount of religion for plausible deniability but not overdoing it, spending time together with one’s own sort of people, the whole thing presumably heavily advertised in the USAnian equivalent of The Tablet, and that’ll be $5000, thank you kindly.
Naturally one starts idly to imagine alternative itineraries for touring Greece, rather than following St Paul’s rather eclectic choice of overnight stops. Herodotus and the Persian Invasions: start at the Hellespont, travel all along the coast to Thermopylae, then Plataea, Marathon and Salamis before ending in Athens. Even better, the Peloponnesian War tour; okay, you can’t really do it in chronological order without a lot of doubling-back on yourself, but an itinerary of Athens, Corinth, Sparta, Pylos, Melos, Samos, Lesbos (for Mytilene) and Amphipolis makes sense – of course you have to go to Amphipolis – and maybe then fly over to Corfu (Corcyra) and take the boat over to Syracuse…
Far too obvious an idea for no one to have thought of it, but I note, with a sense of smug superiority, that the Advanced Battlefield Studies Pel War Tour sticks to Attica and the Peloponnese, while the only Persian Wars tour I could find does Thermopylae, Marathon and Plataea in a single day, and nothing else. Pathetic.
If you look I’m sure you’ll find something similar is being done. It could even be a career opportunity of sorts; a retired academic (and even-more-retired diplomat) I used to know had an enjoyable sideline as resident expert on tours of Eastern Europe. Mostly river cruises, though; he said the Danube route was particularly anticlimactic, starting as it did in Vienna and finishing in Bucharest.
There are a fair number of ‘subject expert on cruise around classical Med’ gigs, though I get the strong impression that it’s more or less a closed shop – you need to know the right people to get asked.
I can imagine a certain sort of academic being much more excited by Bratislava and Bucharest than Budapest…