An endnote from the Fagles translation of the Odyssey, glossing the bit where Telemachus lets out a “lusty sneeze”:

Ancient Greeks regarded a sneeze as an omen, since it is something a human being can neither produce at will nor control when it arrives. Hence it must be the work of a god.

For me this dredges up a factoid from Encyclopedia Brown’s Record Book of Weird and Wonderful Facts, a book I sort of obsessed over as a kid, which factoid warned that if you try to hold back a sneeze, you might snap a muscle in your face or give yourself a stroke. My impressionable elementary-school self was freaked out after reading this — sneezes were suddenly sinister brushes with death or disfigurement! — and as such it remains one of only two items from that book that’ve stuck with me. (The other item was about how the blue whale is so large that some of its blood vessels are wide enough for a small child to crawl through. My elementary-school self found this image awesome. Now it seems surreal and nightmarish. Wouldn’t it be dark in there?)