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.