In a seafront café, waiting for the boat to Piraeus, I saw a book nestling in a cardboard box of discarded holiday thrillers: The Ides of March (1948) by Thornton Wilder, a 1960s Penguin Modern Classic. Scuffed and grey, it beckoned with the modest allure of a vestal virgin in a troupe of painted harlots. An epistolary novel about Julius Caesar in the last year of his life – how could I never have heard of it? I paid one euro and hurried on to the boat with my prize. Wilder was a gregarious loner who loved nothing so much as a ship’s deck ‘amid the careening smoke stacks and the flying spray’ – it was the perfect place for us to meet.