HOW TO TRAVEL

In which the ancients tell us to pack our bags and see the world.

Travel can cure prejudice and xenophobia, expand horizons, and teach us that the rest of the world doesn’t always see things as we do. In the case of Herodotus, the lead author of this lively anthology, a few local unpleasantries teach us that “custom is king.” The Persian shah Darius, Herodotus writes in his Histories, asked a group of Greeks how much money it would take for them to eat their dead parents, “and they replied that they wouldn’t do it at any price,” while a group of Indians, asked how much it would cost for them to refrain from doing so, “begged Darius not to blaspheme.” Today, presumably, feasting on one’s kinfolks is too rare to make the guidebooks, but some of the verities assembled here are truly eternal. Writes the Roman philosopher Seneca, in a passage that classicist Usher gamely titles “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” the heaviest baggage a traveler carries is mental. “You must lay down the mind’s burden,” Seneca counsels. “Until you do, nowhere will satisfy you.” Usher’s authors travel the known world over, and farther still. One, Hanno, sails beyond the Pillars of Hercules and heads down the west coast of Africa, while another, the Syrian Greek novelist Lucian, heads to the Moon, discovering there “men who ride on huge vultures, making use of the birds as horses.” Closer to home, Pausanias, a traveler who wandered around Greece on the back of a donkey, visits the sacred shrine of Delphi, which “marks the center of the whole earth” and thus obviously warrants a visit. One of numerous Princeton University Press titles in which ancient writers and thinkers offer advice to moderns, this volume celebrates curiosity—and, on that note, even has a few words about dead cats.

Just the thing to slip into your carry-on.