I'm currently listening to a (great) audiobook "The Meaning of Life - Perspectives from the World's Great Intellectual Traditions" which covers the stoics. A portion of the professor's reading from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations caught me, which I'm copying from a translation I found on the internet:
"We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive. For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker's art, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating. And again, figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit. And the ears of corn bending down..."
http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.3.three.html
How could Marcus Aurelius be referring to a New World plant, corn, centuries before contact with the New World except bad translation?
"Corn" is actually a generic term which is often applied to whatever happens to be the chief agricultural product of a region. In the United States, what we call "corn" is "maize" in the rest of the world. In England, the term "corn" is typically applied to wheat. In Scotland, the word is often applied to oats.
Most English translations of Roman literature where at least originally done by English translators. So dear old Marcus Aurelius was in fact thinking about waving fields of wheat in his Meditations, and it got translated as corn.
You should read "corn" as a generic term for grains. Its more specific meaning as one Western Hemisphere crop, maize, is a much later Americanization and specialization of the English word.
Sorry, grammatical error in my title, should read: "have made" but I can't seem to edit that.