SPQR IV: The Temple of the Muses

by John Maddox Roberts

“Perhaps you’re right, but the world isn’t what is used to be. I noticed you’ve met Iphicrates. That wild man also believes in practical applications.” He pronounced the word like something forbidden by ritual law.

  Now, I knew these rumors about Asklepiodes to be true. Over the years, he had sewn up about a mile of my own hide. But he always did this in strict secrecy, because these Plato-crazed old loons of the academic world thought that it was blasphemous for a professional philosopher (and physicians accounted themselves philosophers) to do anything. A man could spend his whole career pondering the possibilities of leverage, but for him to pick up a stick, lay it across a fulcrum and employ it to shift a rock would be unthinkable. That would be doing something. Philosophers were only supposed to think.

  I extricated myself from the Librarian, looked around and saw Berenice, Fausta and Julia talking to a man who wore, among other things, an enormous python. The purple robe with its golden stars and the towering diadem with its lunar crescent looked familiar. Even in Alexandria one didn’t see a getup like that every day. It was Ataxas, the future-foretelling, miracle-working prophet from Asia Minor.

  “Decius Caecilius,” Berenice said, “come here. You must meet the Holy Ataxas, Avatar on Earth of Baal-Ahriman.” This, as near as I could figure it, was a combination of two if not more Asiatic deities. There was always something like that coming out of Asia Minor.

  “On behalf of the Senate and People of Rome,” I said, “I greet you, Ataxas.”

  He performed one of those Eastern bows that require much fluttering of the fingers.

  “All the world trembles before the might of Rome,” he intoned. “All the world marvels at her wisdom and justice.”

  I couldn’t very well argue with that. “I understand you have an … an establishment here in Alexandria,” I said lamely.

  “The Holy One has a splendid new temple near the Serapeum,” Berenice said.

  “Her Highness has graciously endowed the Temple of Baal-Ahriman, to her everlasting glory,” Ataxas said, fondling his snake.

  And used Roman money to do it, I’d no doubt. This was ominous. Obviously, Ataxas was the latest in Berenice’s long chain of religious enthusiasms.

  “Tomorrow we sacrifice fifty bulls to consecrate the new temple,” the princess said. “You must come.”

  “Alas,” I said, “I’ve already promised to take Julia to see the Museum.” I looked desperately at her for affirmation.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, to my great relief. “Decius is intimate with the great scholars. He’s promised to give me the whole tour.”

  “Perhaps the next day, then,” Berenice urged. “The priestesses will perform the rite of self-flagellation and worship the god in ecstatic dance.”

  That sounded more like it. “I think we can—”

  Julia trod on my toe. “Alas, that is the day Decius has promised to show me the sights of the city: the Paneum, the Soma, the Heptastadion …”

  “Oh, what a pity,” Berenice said. “It is a sublime spectacle.”

  “There’s Fausta,” Julia said, “I must speak with her. Come along, Decius.” She took my arm and steered me away. Ataxas looked after us sardonically.

  “I don’t see Fausta,” I said.

  “Neither do I. But I don’t know how long I could keep dodging invitations to that fraud’s odious temple.”

  “What savages!” I said. “Fifty bulls! Even Jupiter only demands one at a time.”

  “I noticed you weren’t all that averse to watching a bunch of barbarian priestesses flogging themselves into a frenzy and dancing like naked Bacchantes.”

  “If you’re asking whether I prefer a brothel to a butcher shop, I confess that I do. I’m not entirely without taste.”

  In the course of the evening, we were invited to the rites of at least a dozen loathsome Oriental deities. Most of these were touted by transient religion-mongers much like Ataxas. As Rufus had predicted, I had discovered that the place of these religious frauds was quite different in Alexandria. In Rome, the followers of crackpot cults were drawn almost exclusively from the slaves and the poorest of plebeians. In Alexandria, the wealthiest and highest persons lavished money and attention on these disreputable fakes. They would adopt them as matters of fashion and rave about the latest unwashed prophet as the leader to the one true path of enlightenment. For a few months, anyway. Few of the nobility of Egypt had the tenacity of attention possessed by a ten-year-old child.

  The scholars were nearly as tiresome. Before the reception was over, Iphicrates of Chios had managed to get into arguments with at least six guests. Why anyone would argue over abstract matters escaped me. We Romans were ever an argumentative lot, but we always argued over important things like property and power.

  “Nonsense!” I heard him shout once in his obnoxiously loud voice. Indeed, his conversational tone could be heard all over the reception hall, and in several other rooms besides. “That story about a crane that picked up Roman ships and set them down inside the city walls is patent foolishness!” He had an Armenian ambassador backed into a corner. “The mass of the counterweights would be prohibitive, and the whole thing would be so slow that any ship could easily avoid it!” He went on about weights and masses and balances, and the other scholars looked deeply embarrassed.

  “Why do they tolerate him?” I asked Julia’s latest catch, an editor of Homeric works named Neleus.

  “They have to. He’s a great favorite of the king. Iphicrates makes toys for him: a pleasure-barge driven by rotating paddles instead of oars, a moving dais in the throne room to elevate the king above the crowd, trifles like that. Last year he devised a new system of awnings for the Hippodrome that can be spread, altered as the sun moves and then rolled up, all from the ground instead of sending sailors up on ropes to haul them around.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said. “If the king is going to finance this Museum, he might as well get some good out of it.”

  “But, Decius,” Julia said patiently, “this reduces him to the status of a mere mechanic. It’s unworthy of a philosopher.”

  I snorted into my excellent wine. “If it weren’t for ‘mere mechanics,’ you’d be hauling water from the river to your house instead of having it delivered from the mountains by way of an aqueduct.”

  “Roman accomplishments in applied philosophy are the marvel of the world,” Neleus said. Greeks may despise us as their intellectual inferiors, but they have to toady to us because we’re powerful, as is fitting.

  “Besides,” I said to Julia, “I thought you admired Iphicrates.”

  “I do. He is unquestionably the finest mathematician alive.”

  “But having met him,” I said, “you find your enthusiasm dimmed?”

  “His manner is abrasive,” she confessed. By this time the man was talking with Ataxas, of all people, and keeping his voice down for a change. I couldn’t imagine what those two could find to talk about, but I knew a few Pythagoreans in Rome, and they had contrived the almost inconceivable feat of confusing mathematics and religion. I wondered what monstrous, Minotaur-like cult might emerge from a fusion of Archimedes and Baal-Ahriman.

  We finally did encounter Fausta. She was naturally the center of much attention. Everyone wanted to meet the daughter of the famous Dictator, whose name was still feared throughout much of the world. Julia, as a mere Caesar, was not so assiduously courted. If only they had known.

  For this was the year of the famous First Triumvirate. Back in Rome, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus had decided that they owned Rome and the world. People now write as if this were some great, world-shaking event. In fact, nobody was even aware of it save the three involved. It was merely a highly informal agreement among the three to watch out for one another’s interests while one or more of them had to be away from Rome. It was a portent of things to come, though.

  But that evening we were blissfully unaware of such intriguing. We were free of tiresome politics, and we had time on our hands and all of Alexandria in which to enjo
y ourselves.

  3

  “THE MUSEUM,” I SAID, “WAS founded in the reign of Ptolemy I, surnamed Soter, ‘the Savior,’ two hundred thirty-five years ago.” I had bribed a tour guide to teach me his spiel, and I now delivered it to Julia as we mounted the steps to the main hall. “It was planned and directed by the first Librarian, Demetrios of Phaleron. The Library, of worldwide fame, is actually an adjunct of the Museum. Since the time of Demetrios, an unbroken chain of Librarians has overseen the institution and its collections. The successors of Demetrios have been Zenodotus of Ephesus, Callimachus of Cyrene, Appolonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Appolonius the Eidograph, Aristarchus of Samothrace—”

  “I can read, Decius.” Julia said, cutting me off in mid-genealogy.

  “But I still have a hundred years of Librarians to impart,” I protested. It had been a considerable feat of memorization on short notice, but we noble youth of Rome had that sort of rote learning flogged into us from an early age.

  “I read everything I could find on the Museum and the Library during my journey. You can learn a great deal between bouts of seasickness.”

  At the top of the stair one passed between a pair of gigantic obelisks. Beyond them was a courtyard paved with polished purple marble, dominated by beautiful statues of Athena, Apollo and Hermes. The greatest buildings of the Museum complex faced on this courtyard: the Library, the magnificent dining hall of the scholars and the Temple itself, a modest but exquisite structure sacred to the Muses. Beyond these were a good many more buildings: the living quarters, lecture halls, observatories, colonnades and so forth.

  Julia did much exclaiming over the architectural marvels. In truth, Rome had nothing to touch it. Only the Capitol had anything like the splendor of the great edifices of Alexandria, although our Circus Maximus was a good deal larger than their Hippodrome. But the Hippodrome was made of marble, where the Circus was still mostly of wood.

  “This is sublime!” she said excitedly.

  “Exactly the word I would have chosen,” I assured her. “What would you like to see first?”

  “The lecture halls and the refectory,” she said. “I want to see the scholars as they go about their philosophical labors.”

  Someone must have sent word ahead of us, because Amphytrion appeared at that moment. “I will be most happy to escort our distinguished guests. The Museum is at your disposal.”

  The last thing I wanted was to have some dusty old Greek coming between me and Julia, but she clapped and exclaimed what a privilege this was. Thus robbed of a graceful way to sidestep his unwanted intrusion, I followed the two into the great building. In the entrance peristyle he gestured toward the rows of names carved into the walls.

  “Here you see the names of all the Librarians, and of the famous scholars and philosophers who have ornamented the Museum since its founding. And here are the portrait busts of the greatest of them.” Beyond the peristyle was a graceful colonnade surrounding a pool in which stood a sculptural group depicting Orpheus calming the wild beasts with his song.

  “The colonnade of the Peripatetic philosophers,” Amphytrion explained. “They prefer to converse and expound while walking, and this colonnade is provided for their convenience. The Orpheus was sculpted by the same hand that created the famous Giganto-machia at the altar of Zeus in Pergamum.”

  This I was prepared to admire to the fullest. It was an example of that flowering of late Greek sculpture that I have always preferred to the effete stuff of Periclean Athens, with its wilting Apollos and excessively chaste Aphrodites. Orpheus, caught in mid-note, was the very embodiment of music as he strummed his lyre. The beasts, obviously stopped at the moment they were about to spring, were carved with wondrous detail. The lion’s fanged mouth was just relaxing from a terrifying snarl, the wolf lapsing into doglike friendliness, the bear standing on his hind legs looking puzzled. In real life no one is ever attacked simultaneously by such a varied menagerie, but this was myth, and it was perfect.

  But Julia wanted to see the philosophers at their labors, so we went in search of some. The problem was that, when they aren’t talking, philosophers aren’t doing much at all. Mostly they stand around, or sit around, or in the case of the Peripatetics, walk around, pondering matters and looking wise.

  We found Asklepiodes in a lecture hall, speaking to a large audience of physicians about his discoveries concerning the superiority of stitching lacerations rather than searing them with a hot iron. One of the attendees ventured to question whether this was properly the concern of physicians, and Asklepiodes parried him neatly.

  “Before even the divine Hippocrates, there was the god of healing, Asklepios. And do we not read in the Iliad that his own son, Machaon, with his own hands tended the wounds of the Greek heroes, even withdrawing an arrowhead in one instance?” I applauded this point vigorously, and there were learned murmurs that this was a valid point.

  From the lecture halls we passed into a large courtyard filled with enigmatic objects of stone: tall spindles, slanted ramps, circles with gradations marked off in inscribed lines. A few of the smaller instruments I recognized as similar to the gnomon that engineers use to lay out building sites or camps for the legions.

  “Welcome to my observatory,” said a man I recognized as Sosigenes, the astronomer. He grinned engagingly as Julia went through her now-customary gush of enthusiasm.

  “I shall be most happy to explain something of my studies, my lady,” he said, “but I confess that there are few things more useless than an astronomer in the daytime.” And this he proceeded to do. Sosigenes had a redeeming sense of humor that was notably absent in most of the philosophers there. I found myself actually listening attentively as he explained the purpose of his instruments, and the importance of recording the movements of the stars and planets in calculating positions in navigation, and in determining the real date as opposed to the slippery dates of conventional calendars. The reliable calendar we now use was the invention of Sosigenes, although Caesar took the credit by making it the legal calendar through his authority as Pontifex Maximus. I resolved to return to the observatory some night when he could explain more effectively the mysteries of the stars.

  In another courtyard we found the redoubtable Iphicrates of Chios, bossing a crew of carpenters and metal workers as they assembled a complicated model of stone, wood and cable. At our arrival he turned frowning, but smiled and bowed when he saw that Rome had come calling.

  “And what do you work on now, Iphicrates?” Amphytrion asked.

  “His Majesty has asked me to solve the long-standing problem of silting in the great canal that links the Mediterranean with the Red Sea,” he proclaimed proudly.

  “A daunting prospect,” I said. “But its solution would do much to facilitate traffic between the West and India.”

  “It’s good to see that someone from outside these walls has a grasp of geography,” he said.

  “It’s one of the things we Romans find important,” I answered. “What is your solution?”

  “The basis of the problem is that the canal is at sea level, and therefore a noticeable current flows through it from west to east, just as water enters the Mediterranean from the Ocean through the Gates of Heracles, and from east to west through the Hellespont.” In explaining the mysteries of his art, his voice lost its accustomed belligerence and he actually communicated a bit of his own excitement at solving these thorny natural problems.

  “I have designed a series of waterproof gates and dry docks at each end of the waterway. By means of these, the dry docks can be flooded to raise or lower shipping to the proper level, and it can sail, row or be towed the intervening distance without a constant current. The amount of silt admitted will be minimal, and the waterway will need to be dredged no more often than every fourth or fifth year.”

  “Most ingenious,” I acknowledged. “Worthy of the successor to Archimedes.”

  “I thank you,” he said with poor grace. “But the rev
ered Archimedes did not fare so well at the hands of the Romans.” Greeks are always carrying some sort of grudge.

  “Yes, well, it was an unfortunate incident, but it was his own fault. You see, when Roman soldiers have just broken into your city after a lengthy siege, and are rampaging about, looting the city and massacring anyone who shows resistance, why, the last thing you want to do is speak insolently to them. If he had just kept his mouth shut and abased himself, he would have been spared. As it was, Marcellus felt awfully bad about it and he gave the old boy a very nice tomb.”

  “Just so,” Iphicrates said through gritted teeth.

  “But, learned Iphicrates,” Julia said hastily, “what other marvelous works occupy your mind? In your books you have said that you always have a number of projects under study at any time.”

  “If you will come this way,” he said, ushering us into a spacious room adjoining the courtyard where the workmen assembled his water gate. The room was full of cupboards and tables, and the tables were littered with models in varying stages of assembly. Most of the machines, as he explained them, had something to do with raising weights or water. I pointed at one that displayed a long, counterweighted arm tipped with a sling.

  “A catapult?” I inquired.

  “No, I never design engines of war. That is an improved crane for lifting great stones. A number of your Roman engineers have shown interest in it. It will prove most helpful in your great bridge and aqueduct projects.”

  While he spoke to Julia and the Librarian, I wandered about the room, admiring his amazingly lucid drawings and diagrams, every one of them applying geometry and mathematics to the accomplishment of some specific task. This was a sort of philosophy that I could appreciate, even if I found the man himself odious. The open cupboards were filled with more papyri and scrolls. On one table was an oversized scroll of dark, oiled olive wood, its handles stained vermilion. Even a glance told me that it was not made of Egyptian papyrus, but of the skin-paper of Pergamum. I picked up the massive scroll and began to unroll it, but Iphicrates made a massive, throat-clearing sound.