A certain class of people, through luck or cunning or inheritance or just plain smarts, accrue a massive amount of wealth and power, not necessarily in that order. But the work of plotting and ruling can be exhausting. So, who can really fault the rich and power-hungry for building an exclusive vacation destination, a spot to which they can escape to relax and blow off some steam—which, translated into the language of the elite, means gorge themselves on outrageous feasts, engage in hedonistic bouts of drunkenness, and commit epic feats of debauchery out of the public eye.

Las Vegas and Ibiza, St. Tropez and the Maldives may be all bright lights and big party places for the wealthiest in the world today, but they’re nothing compared to the spot where the ancient Roman aristocracy once played, the city of Baiae. “[Baiae] is a place where they were buffered from the real world. They could come and relax and indulge in any of their kinks,” Kevin Dicus, an assistant professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Oregon, tells The Daily Beast. “But the other dirty secret of Baiae is you get a lot of aristocratic shits together like them in one place, there’s bound to be palace intrigue… You get these crazy hedonistic stories but you also get this plotting and these powerful people in their beautiful houses trying to figure out how to get more powerful.”