He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato’s Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they’re terrible. He shows them to no one.

The county gives him a plaque and a pension, Luther the big brindle dog dies a peaceful death, and Zeno adopts a terrier and names him Nestor the king of Pylos. Every morning he wakes in the little brass bed upstairs, does fifty push-ups, pulls on two pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks, buttons up one of his two dress shirts, ties one of his four ties. Green today, blue tomorrow, the duck tie on Wednesdays, penguin tie on Thursdays. Black coffee, plain oatmeal. Then he walks to the library.

Marian, the library director, finds online videos of a seven-foot-tall professor from a Midwestern university teaching intermediate ancient Greek, and most mornings Zeno starts his day at a table beside the large-print romances—what Marian calls the Bosoms and Bottoms section—with big headphones on and the volume turned up.

Past tense literally causes him back pain, the way it flings all the verbs into the dark. Then there’s the aorist tense, a tense unbound by time, that can make him want to crawl into a closet and huddle in the darkness. But at the best moments, working through the old texts, for an hour or two, the words fall away and images rise to him through the centuries—warriors in armor packed into boats; sunlight spangling on the sea; the voices of gods carried on the wind—and it’s almost as though he’s six years old again, in front of the fireplace with the Cunningham twins, and simultaneously adrift with Ulysses in the waves off the coast of Scheria, hearing the tide roar against the rocks.

One bright afternoon in May of 2019, Zeno is hunched over his legal pads when Marian’s new hire, a children’s librarian named Sharif, calls him to the welcome desk. On Sharif’s computer screen floats a headline: New Technologies Uncover Ancient Greek Tale Inside Previously Unreadable Book.

According to the article, a crate of severely damaged medieval manuscripts, stored for centuries at the ducal library in Urbino, then moved to the Vatican Library, had long been considered illegible. A little nine-hundred-year-old goat leather codex in particular piqued the interest of scholars from time to time, but water damage, mold, and age had collaborated to fuse its pages into a solid, illegible mass.

Sharif enlarges the accompanying photo: a puckered black brick of parchment, no longer even rectangular. “Looks like a paperback soaked in a toilet for a thousand years,” he says.

“Then left in a driveway for another thousand,” Zeno adds.