Past Perfect: From Rome To Brindisi

In the spring of 37 B.C., the Roman poet Horace set off down the Appian Way, the grand, ancient highway beginning in Rome and stretching some 350 miles to the southeastern coast of Italy. His destination: the port city of Brundisium (modern Brindisi), a popular point of embarkation for Romans heading to Greece. Along the way, Horace met up with his patron, Maecenas (who had been summoned to Athens to settle a prickly political dispute between Mark Antony and Octavian), and with other luminaries of Maecenas’s literary circle: Virgil, Plotius Tucca and Varius—“surely the finest [men] the world has to […]