Food and Drink

A soldier takes ten years to sail home from a war that already took ten. He loses every ship and every man he started with. Meanwhile his wife holds off a hundred and eight suitors who have moved into his house and are eating it empty, and his son goes looking for news of a father he has never met. When he finally lands on his own island he arrives alone, asleep, and disguised as a beggar — and spends the second half of the poem finding out who in his own household can be trusted.

Herodotus goes to Egypt and writes down everything: why the Nile floods, how a body is embalmed and what each grade of embalming costs, what the priests would and would not tell him, and a king-list running back ten thousand years. The founding document of curiosity about other people.

Ten thousand Greek mercenaries, stranded deep inside Persia after the man who hired them is killed, march north for the Black Sea. Book 4 is the worst of it — hostile tribes in the passes, then frostbite and snow-blindness on the plateau — and ends with the shout from the ridge when they see the sea.

A fortnight on the road from Rome to Brundisium: bad water, gnats, sore eyes, a boatman who ties up the mule and falls asleep. What the poem never mentions is that Horace is travelling with the delegation negotiating peace between Octavian and Antony.

Horace hands the stage to Ofellus, a farmer, who explains how to eat: hunger is the best sauce, the peacock is bought for its tail and not its taste, and a man who has never been hungry cannot enjoy bread. A miser is mocked as hard as a glutton. Then Ofellus himself appears, his farm confiscated and given to a soldier, still working the same land as a tenant, and the dinner-table advice turns out to have been about how to lose everything and stay yourself.

Horace had been given a farm in the Sabine hills by Maecenas, and this is the poem in which he thanks the gods for it and asks for nothing more. Then it takes him back to Rome for a day: shoved through the streets, dragged into court as a guarantor, stopped by strangers who assume that a friend of Maecenas must know state secrets. Then back to the farm, to beans and bacon and dinners with neighbours where the talk is whether money or virtue makes people happy. And then the neighbour tells a story: a town mouse visits a country mouse and persuades him to come and taste the good life in the city, where they are nearly eaten by the dogs. It is the classic ancient picture of having enough.