Strabo

His account may remind readers of past travelogues such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts” or John Steinbeck’s “A Russian Journal,” both of which dip a toe in the Black Sea’s waters, but as Mühling points out, the sea has been an object of fascination for foreign writers since the time of Strabo and Herodotus.

The result, according to classical writers like Galen, Strabo, and Herodotus, was a large, sweet, shelf-stable fruit that was a prized treat throughout the Roman world.

Scholars link it to a story by Strabo in 7 B.C., and a European version in 1634.

Greek philosophers like Strabo made contemporary accounts of the Gaul tribes' penchant for heads.

The Gauls embalmed heads from enemies “of high repute,” Strabo wrote about 2,000 years ago, “in cedar-oil . . . they would not deign to give them back even for a ransom of an equal weight of gold.”