Maybe this is how he got his culinary expertise?
In his formative years, which he most likely spent in some Jesuit school, the Tribune must have been made to read classic epics, such as Homer's ''Iliad'' or Vergil Maro's ''Aeneid''. He wold would later refer to the latter as "my friend Maro",<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book IV, verse 977</ref> even though he probably knew the <i>Aeneid</i>'s plot from scholars' commentaries rather than from the epic itself. Mickiewicz too, no doubt, had to read the same classics, in their 18th-century Polish translations, as a schoolboy. And while he didn't think very highly of these translations' poetic value, they must have left a deep impression on his memory. Take, for example, this excerpt from Book XI of ''Pan Tadeusz'':
{{ Cytat
{{ Cytat
| <poem>All now slumberslumbered: the Gods and the mortal host;
But Jove's eyes closed not while in his mind he tost
All night long his projects for how to, in Troy,