“Help me do what?”
He waved a hand airily. “Whatever needs to be done.”
This did not sound good, but I could not imagine how the institution of a new calendar could be the occasion of much trouble.
I was soon to understand the poverty of my imagination.
* * *
The Temple of Aesculapius on the Tiber Island is one of Rome’s most unique places, the inevitable goal of the ailing and sightseers alike. The temple itself is beautiful and the island is uniquely disguised as a ship. I have always wondered whose idea that might have been. On the island I found a priest and asked where the astronomers were to be found.
“Those Alexandrians?” he sniffed. He wore white robes and a silver fillet around his temples. “The dictator has given them quarters at the downstream end.”
“You seem to disapprove of them,” I noted.
“Not just of them, but of their project. Nothing good can come of changing our ancient calendar. It is the sort of presumption that displeases the gods. It is an affront to our ancestors, who bequeathed our calendar to us.”
“I see no point in it myself,” I told him, “but I am not dictator, whereas Caesar is. Disputing with the master of the world is both futile and hazardous.”
“I suppose so,” he grumbled.
At the downstream end of the island I found that a courtyard formerly used as a venue for lectures had been converted into a small observatory, a miniature of the immense one I had seen at the Museum in Alexandria. It had a number of those mysterious instruments necessary to the art of astronomy: long wedges of stone, blocks with curved cutouts and bronze rods, everything carved all over with cryptic symbols and calibration marks. Sosigenes had tried to explain these marvels to me, but I found the municipal sundial quite complicated enough.
The astronomers were clustered on a platform at the “stern” of the island, the part that is carved to resemble that part of a galley. I recognized Sosigenes immediately and one or two of the others looked vaguely familiar. Not all wore the usual Greek clothing. There were Persians and Arabs, and one man who wore a fringed, spirally wrapped robe that looked Babylonian. I had been in that part of the world and had seen such clothing only on old wall reliefs. I caught Sosigenes’ eye and he beamed broadly.
“Senator Metellus! You do us great honor. Have you come to refresh your study of astronomy?” He flattered me by referring to my discussions with him years before in Alexandria as “study.” I took his hands and exchanged the usual pleasantries.
“Actually, the dictator wishes me to work with you on implementing this new calendar. Exactly what he intends by that, I confess I cannot imagine. My ignorance of astronomy is vast, as you know.”
He turned to the others. “The senator is characteristically modest. You will find that he has a sharp and subtle mind, a quick grasp of new facts, and a very superior inductive style of reasoning.” Greeks are terribly prone to flattery. “Now, Senator, allow me to introduce the gentlemen with whom you will be working.”
There was an old fellow called Demades who hailed from Athens, along with several other Greeks whose names I no longer remember, an Arab whose name I could not pronounce, three Persians, a Syrian, a dark-skinned fellow in a strange yellow turban who called himself Gupta and who claimed to be from India, and the man in Babylonian clothing who called himself Polasser of Kish, but who, from his looks and speech, was pure Greek. I decided to watch out for that one. In my experience, people who affect the clothing of an exotic land that is not their own are usually religious frauds of some sort.
“I really believe,” I told Sosigenes, “that my true task has nothing to do with helping you with the calendar, which I could not do anyway, but rather to convince the Roman people that it will be beneficial. We are very attached to our ancient institutions, you know.”
“All too well. Well, let me explain a bit.” He took my arm and began to stroll among the instruments and the others followed us. Like a great many Greek philosophers, Sosigenes liked to expound while walking. This originated with the Peripatetic school of philosophy, but spread to many of the others. Among other advantages, it saved the rent of a lecture hall.
“For all of your history you Romans, along with most of the world, have been using a calendar based upon the phases of the moon.”
“Naturally,” I said. “It is a measuring of time observable by everyone as the moon waxes and wanes and disappears and reappears.”
“Precisely. As such it is what we might call an intuitive way to measure the year, and it works after a fashion, but far from perfectly. The moon has a phase of twenty-eight days, but, alas, the year cannot be divided into a certain number of discrete twenty-eight-day segments. It is always off by a number of days because the year is 365 days long.”