Episode 10.1.b
>Villa of Salvius, Southwest of Londinium, Britannia, 81 CE<
Tiberius looks at you for a moment as though he is trying to recover something, then shakes his head. "The truth is, my friends, I don't know. Did that man in the Mouseion tell me something? I can't call it back. All I remember is thinking, 'If I ever see the Recentii again, I have to show them this.'
"Maybe I thought it because you are the most remarkable people I know, and this map is the most remarkable thing I have ever found, and something in me insisted the two belonged together. And..." He drops his eyes to the floor. "This will sound foolish, I know it will. But I have the same feeling about you, and about poor Sextus, and about Septimus too, and about this map. It seems to me, I can't say how, that I am meant to bring all of it together, and to help you."
He turns to the scroll cases, a little red in the face. "I was thinking," he says, "that we should begin..."
Another voice finishes it for him.
"...with the poets that Gaius, the grandfather of Marcus Maecenas, kept about him. Like these?"
You cannot tell which is stranger: a girl's voice you have never heard before, or the two sheets lying on the topmost shelf, the only shelf in the room without dust on it, copied out, by the look of them, from longer scrolls.
"Salvius will be furious if he finds you in here, Salvia! You know that."
The girl comes in anyway. She is perhaps seventeen, and she carries herself like someone who has read a great deal and has no intention of apologizing for it. She turns to Tiberius.
"I'm not worried, Tiberius. I have to help them."
You have two passages in your hands: one from the first book of Horace's Odes, one from the eighth book of Vergil's Aeneid. If Salvia is right, each poet has left a trace of the way, and it lies in what the poem is about.
Prompt: Solve the riddle of the map. Why these two passages? What do Horace's ode and Vergil's book of the Aeneid have in common that might point the way?
