The First Travel Writer Was Gay, Grieving and Running an Empire

Let me tell you something that nobody in the travel writing business wants to admit, because it would require us all to rethink the tidy little origin story we’ve given ourselves.

The first travel writer was not a journalist. He was not a blogger with a round-the-world ticket and a good camera. He was not a Victorian gentleman with a pith helmet and a mild case of colonial entitlement. He was a Roman emperor who spent more than half his reign on the road, who built a wall across Britain not because he wanted more territory but because he’d looked at the map and decided enough, who rebuilt the Pantheon and wrote poetry and had the beard of a philosopher before beards were fashionable (I know it’s mustache now, but whatever) — and who loved a young man from Bithynia so completely, so catastrophically, so without apology, that when that young man drowned in the Nile, he tore a hole in the known world trying to fill it.

His name was Publius Aelius Hadrianus. We call him Hadrian.

And he was, …