Travel and the Road

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.

Four men walk home from the docks after gawping at an enormous Egyptian grain freighter and fall to wishing aloud — for money, for an empire, for a ring that grants anything. Each fantasy is allowed to run until it collapses under its own weight.

A commander's defence of himself, written decades later by a man who had changed sides. Josephus held Galilee in the Jewish revolt, surrendered, and ended up in Rome on an imperial pension. This is his account of the year it went wrong, arranged to answer a rival who had accused him in print.

Lucian opens by announcing that every travel writer lies and that he fully intends to as well, then sails past the Pillars of Heracles, is carried to the Moon by a waterspout, fights in a war between the Moon and the Sun, and is swallowed by a whale. Written around 170 CE and still funny.

Egypt and North Africa described for readers who would never go: the Nile from Ethiopia to the Delta, Alexandria quarter by quarter, then west along the coast to Carthage. Strabo is correcting earlier geographers as much as reporting, and says so.

A working sailing manual for the Indian Ocean run, and almost the only one to survive: every port from Egypt to the Ganges in the order a ship meets them, who controls it, what to bring and what to take away. No narrator, no wonders — just harbours, goods and prices.

Alexander's admiral takes a fleet from the mouth of the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf and writes down what happened. Anchorages, distances, whether there was water — and a stretch of coast where the fleet beats the sea with its oars and sounds trumpets to frighten off whales.

A doctor arriving in an unfamiliar town is told to study it before he studies anyone in it: which way it faces, which winds reach it, where its water comes from and whether it stands or runs. The oldest surviving argument that health is a property of places rather than of individuals — and then it turns outward and explains whole peoples by their weather.

Paul is shipped to Rome under guard and the vessel is lost off Malta. The most technically detailed account of ancient seafaring that survives: the sailing season, the soundings, the decision to run before the wind, and the moment the crew pass ropes under the hull to hold the ship together.

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.