“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.