The Calendar (5 page)
Presumably the Maya discovered the true solar year using natural cues and careful astronomic observations, though exactly how they did it remains a puzzle. Until recently scholars believed their motivation was a literal worship of time, though new interpretations since the breaking of the Maya language code reveal that the Maya actually used their calendars to legitimize the acts of kings and other key events by recording with great accuracy the day, hour, and even minute when they occurred. This is shown in countless hieroglyphics, steles and paintings depicting the exact date when specific kings and queens waged battle, ceremonially mutilated themselves, married and performed important sacrifices.
Maya and other Mesoamerican gods also seem to have demanded that their priests perform ceremonies precisely on time. Nowhere was this taken more seriously--and to such a bizarre extreme--than among the Aztecs. Obsessed with the belief that they must keep time on its proper course, the Aztecs offered a numbing progression of human sacrifices to appease their sun god, Tonatiuh, to assure that he would rise each day and cross the sky.
The Aztecs believed that the sun required for ‘fuel’ rivers of blood from victims who ranged from priests and criminals to the deformed, though most were prisoners captured in warfare. If Spanish chroniclers can be believed, the Aztecs sacrificed 20,000 to 50,000 people a year in their capital, Tenochtitlan, with each month requiring a prescribed tally of victims: male and female, child and adult. For instance, in the months when the rains were supposed to come, children were drowned or walled up in caves. The more they wept and cried, the better the omen for rain. Others were flayed to help crops grow and burned to death during harvest time. To feed the need for such huge numbers of victims, the Aztecs arranged a peculiar agreement with their neighbours to fight regular ceremonial battles not for conquest, but to allow each side to capture large quantities of sacrificial victims. Apparently most of the victims seized in what was called the War of Flowers considered sacrifice an honour or an unquestionable act of fate. Most were anaesthetized first with narcotic plants, though all were left conscious enough to scream and exhibit pain, which was part of this bloodiest of time rituals.
Despite the remarkable achievements in time reckoning by Mesoamericans and the people of Wessex, out of all those who early embraced the sun, it is the Egyptians who lie in the direct path of our story. It is their affair with Sol which brought us our calendar, making the solar year victorious over the moon first along the Nile and then in Europe and, much later, around the world. But this triumph of the Egyptian year was hardly inevitable. Nor was it even likely given the circumstances that led to the fusing of the ancient solar calendar of the Nile with a brash, upstart empire ruled by a people living on another river, the Tiber, and led by a conqueror whose adoption of a new calendar had more to do with his love for a legendary woman than with a passion for accurately measuring time.
3 Caesar Embraces Time
Caesar . . . reorganized the Calendar which the College of Priests had allowed to fall into such disorder, by inserting days or months as it suited them, that the harvest and vintage festivals no longer corresponded with the appropriate seasons.--Suetonius, AD 96
As night fell, a small ship slipped under the sea chain defending Alexandria’s harbour, raised by guards bribed to let it pass. The boat on this balmy October evening in 48 BC stole quietly through the black waters, past quays and warehouses full of grain and treasure. Skirting the fleets of Egyptian and Roman warships, the boat carried a cargo that would not only transform two great empires, but lead to a revolution in measuring time that is directly responsible for calendars hanging on walls from present-day St Louis to Singapore.
After the boat landed unnoticed on a stone wharf, a Sicilian named Apollodorus leapt ashore, carefully lifting onto his back a rolled-up coverlet tied at each end. Apollodorus carried his load past Roman sentinels, explaining by the light of torches that he bore a gift for the recently arrived Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome. Led to the general’s apartment in Alexandria’s royal palace, Apollodorus greeted Caesar by unfurling the coverlet, which concealed a woman.
She can hardly have appeared dignified emerging from a bedroll. Yet as Cleopatra rose in front of the astonished Caesar, she managed to impress him profoundly with her majesty and sexual allure--and also with the pathos of a woman who desperately needed help from the most powerful man in the Western world.
Cleopatra’s trouble had begun a few months earlier when her teenaged brother and co-ruler, Ptolemy XIII, staged a palace coup with his advisors and forced her to flee the city. Escaping to Syria, she had recently returned to Egypt at the head of a small army, determined to wrest back her throne--a cause she hoped to convince the newly arrived Caesar to embrace.
Poets and romantics tell us Caesar was smitten from the moment he saw Cleopatra. She was twenty-two years old and a queen since her father, Ptolemy XII, had died three years earlier, leaving her and her then ten-year-old brother to jointly rule in the Egyptian fashion. Cunning, brilliant and erotic, Cleopatra spoke several languages, was highly educated in science and literature, and was possessed of an insatiable ambition that amused and captivated the master of the Roman world. The Roman poet Lucan (AD 39-65) says the general and the queen made love that very night.
Caesar was fifty-two years old at the time. ‘Tall, fair and well-built,’ according to the Roman historian Suetonius, but also balding and epileptic, he was on the verge of becoming the undisputed dictator of an empire that had just conquered virtually the entire Mediterranean world and parts beyond. Caesar himself had seized Gaul in a series of masterly victories ten years earlier. Since then he had been locked in a wrenching civil war against another brilliant general and conqueror, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus--Pompey for short. Caesar had just arrived in Egypt in hot pursuit of Pompey, who fled there after a crushing defeat by Caesar in the Battle of Pharsalus in central Greece. Arriving three days after Pompey, Caesar had been welcomed off the coast of Alexandria with a grisly gift from the boy-king Ptolemy and his advisors: General Pompey’s embalmed head wrapped in Egyptian linen. A soldier hired by Ptolemy’s court had stabbed the great general in the back as he stepped off his boat. Caesar reportedly wept at the spectre of this great Roman being assassinated by foreigners. But his sorrow was tempered with relief if not a carefully concealed elation, for the empire was now his.
With Pompey dead, Caesar should have left for Rome to consolidate his victory. Instead he stayed to settle the conflict in Egypt, a country still nominally independent but in thrall to Rome, and to be with Cleopatra. The latest in a never-ending string of mistresses--Caesar’s troops sang of his conquests in battle
and
in bed when they celebrated his triumphs--Cleopatra impacted both his libido and his politics. ‘Overcome by the charm of her society,’ writes the Roman biographer Plutarch, he forced the boy-king Ptolemy within days of Cleopatra’s dramatic entrance to reconcile with his sister, ordering ‘that she should rule as his colleague in the kingdom’. Cleopatra then promptly threw a party to celebrate which is where Caesar first heard about the Egyptians’ solar calendar, according to Lucan.
This seems an unlikely venue for an event that would literally reorder time for millions of people. Indeed, Lucan tells us Cleopatra hardly had calendar making on her mind the night of the soiree. Dressed in heavy strands of pearls, ‘her white breasts . . . revealed by the fabric of Sidon’, and her hair wrapped in wreaths of roses, she seemed far more intent on dazzling her lover with the riches and exotica of Egypt: ‘birds and beasts’ served on gold platters, crystal ewers filled with Nile water for their hands, and ‘wine . . . poured into great jewelled goblets’.
Still, Eros and fine food were not all that the young queen and her court offered to this uncommonly curious Roman conqueror. ‘When sated,’ says Lucan, Caesar began discoursing with a scholar attached to the royal court, an elderly wise man named Acoreus, ‘who lay, dressed in his linen robe, upon the highest seat.’ Caesar asked questions about the source of the Nile, the history of Egypt and about the country’s calendar. It was during this conversation that Caesar heard about Egypt’s reliance on the sun for its year--measured by the annual rise of Sirius in the eastern sky and by the flooding of the Nile, which, the Alexandrian sage said, ‘does not arouse its water before the shining of the Dog-star.’
No other ancient source that I am aware of describes this scene or mentions the sagacious Acoreus, although something like this undoubtedly happened to inform Caesar about the Egyptian system for measuring time. Later he would take this new knowledge back to Rome, though for the moment he seemed in no rush to leave.
Caesar’s liaison with Cleopatra was also an infatuation with Egypt itself. Already very ancient even in Caesar’s day, this was a country of fantastic wealth and mystery--and, during the final years of the Ptolemaic dynasty, of a decadence and sensuality very foreign to a Roman raised in the austerity of the republic. But Alexandria was also a feast for the mind, a city that even in its decline as a regional power remained one of history’s premier centres of learning and sophistication. For three centuries it had attracted the greatest minds of the far-flung Hellenistic world, who created a milieu of intellectualism that fostered a breath-taking progression of discoveries--including ground-breaking work on time and the calendar.
Founded by Alexander the Great when he conquered Egypt in 332 BC, the city was seized after Alexander’s death by Ptolemy, one of his key generals. Declaring himself king of Egypt in 305 BC, Ptolemy I lavished the Nile Valley’s wealth on his new capital, creating a haven for scholars who came from as far away as India, which was briefly connected to the Hellenistic world after Alexander’s conquests. The city quickly expanded to at least 150,000 people, one of the largest in the ancient world, as Ptolemy and his dynasty filled the city with magnificent palaces, temples, gymnasiums, museums and amphitheatres. Sometime around 307 BC the Athenian writer and statesman Demetrius of Phaleron inspired Ptolemy I to lay the foundations for the great library of Alexandria, which eventually housed hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls, including Aristotle’s personal library. A generation later Ptolemy II (308--246 BC) built the famed Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, towering four hundred feet and emitting a blazing fire signal that could be seen for miles offshore.
Luminaries during Alexandria’s golden age included Apollonius of Rhodes, author of the
Argonantica
, about Jason’s quest for the golden fleece; the anatomist Herophilus of Chalcedon, who performed one of the first systematic autopsies; and Euclid and Archimedes, whose ideas form the core of Western mathematics. But perhaps the greatest achievements in this city on the western edge of the Nile delta, hard by the Libyan Desert, were a long line of discoveries in astronomy, some of which became the basis for the new calendar born of Caesar’s tryst with Cleopatra.
The stargazers of Alexandria started with the patrimony left them by earlier Greek astronomers and mathematicians. Since at least the sixth century BC, they had been looking up in the sky and postulating about what they saw. The earliest of these postulated that the sun is one foot wide and is renewed afresh each day, and that the earth either floats on water or is supported on air. But they also realized that ‘moonshine’ is really reflected sunlight, that the moon is closer to the earth than to the sun, and that eclipses are caused by the shadow of the earth and other celestial bodies.
These speculations gave way to more solid science with Pythagoras (sixth century BC), who developed some of the early geometry and mathematics used by later astronomers to analyse the respective positions of the sun, moon, earth and stars. Then came the Athenian astronomer Meton, discoverer of the Metonic cycle in 432 BC. At roughly the same time the astronomer Euctemon estimated the length of the seasons, though he got them wrong. A century later Callippus of Cyzicus calculated the correct lengths to round figures--90 days for summer, 90 for autumn, 92 for winter and 93 for spring. Also working in the fourth century BC, the astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus devised a mathematical theory involving spheres that he used to try to explain the motions of the planets and the moon, and what appeared to be the motion of the sun in an earth-centred universe. Aristotle (384-322 BC) also weighed in, working in the years immediately leading up to the founding of Alexandria. His writing in astronomy expands on Eudoxus’s theory of the planetary spheres by suggesting that the stars, planets and sun literally are encased in invisible spheres that orbit the earth in a series of concentric circles.
One of the greatest of the early astronomers in Alexandria itself was Aristarchus (fl. c. 270 BC), who constructed a modified sundial called a
skaphe--
a spherical bowl with a needle standing up in the centre like a miniature obelisk to cast shadows against lines marked off on the bowl’s surface. Using this device he could measure the height and direction of the sun. This allowed him to figure out that the sun shines light against a half moon, as seen on earth, at an angle of 87 degrees. From this he surmised that the sun is many times the size of the earth and must be very far away.
Aristarchus also deduced that the earth circles the sun, an astronomic theory that ran counter to the accepted orthodoxy that the sun orbited a stationary earth. He argued that the sun
seems
to move across the sky because the earth spins on its axis. But lacking a telescope and accurate star charts, Aristarchus could not prove something considered ludicrous by an earth-centred world, one that would remain convinced the sun was subservient to our little planet for another eighteen centuries, until the age of Copernicus and Galileo.