Chaeremon of Apamia

Chaeremon is the first priest of the dragon goddess who enters the stage in the initial volume of the "Romanike" series. He calls himself the Herald of the Lady of All and second in the hierarchy of his order. Close to nothing is known about him before he pops up in the provincial capital of Pannonia to establish his fledgling cult. He claims to come from a place named Apamia, far in the east of the world: there were several cities of this name, but whether any of them is really his home is unknown.

It is not evident, either, whether he has Roman citizenship, for he is never referred to with a triple name (like, say, Caius Iulius Caesar) nor is he ever seen wearing the traditional dress of the citizen, the toga. Chaeremon prefers effeminate long robes under which he is able to hide his hands or other objects, and in violation of Roman customs he displays a black coloured beard in the fashion of eastern barbarians. Like all the other disciples of the Lady of All, he is marked by a heavy jewelled collar which he often pairs with a diadem from which a dragon's head protrudes or with a high pointed hat and a staff. 

Chaeremon is an extremely dominating and impressive character, exceeding paternal authority over strangers or subjects and leaving no one unaffected who meets him. In his religious order he serves as astrologer, and for some reason he is capable of calculating any person's horoscope at the speed of the wind, a procedure that takes other men of his profession considerable time, especially with the clumsy numerical system of the ancient Greeks given. He also has significant scientific and technological knowledge by which he contributes to the designs of his cult. In public he is usually accompanied by four Marcomannic bodyguards, two men and two women, who are as loyal to him as they are ruthless to others.  

Iulia Balbilla, Princess of Commagene

We would not even know that Iulia Balbilla had existed if she had not left four graffiti at the statues of Memnon, in Egypt. Nothing else of her life is known, save that on 19–21 November 130, she was in the retinue of emperor Hadrian's wife, Vibia Sabina, as they visited the Valley of the Kings. One of her four epigrammes, written in a rare Aeolic dialect of Greek, she refers to her grandfathers "Balbillus the Wise" (probably Tiberius Claudius Balbillus, prefect of Egypt under emperor Nero and notorious astrologer) and "Antiochus the King" (who was last king of Commagene before its annexion by emperor Vespasian). There are speculations that Balbilla may have financed the raising of the Philopappos Monument in Athens and a heroon in Sparta that was dedicated to a distant relative.

In "Opus Gemini", Vol. IV to VI of the "Romanike" series, Balbilla has been exiled to her ancestor's capital, Samosata, due to her dedication to astrology. When Samosata falls to the invading forces of king Vologaeses of Parthia, Balbilla escapes and plots to restore her power by regaining the Opus Gemini, the last surviving sibling of the Antikythera Mechanism.

Iulia Balbilla of the "Romanike" series is a woman of high age, yet agile. She pursues her aims with aristocratic ruthlessness, trusting nobody but her closest living relatives, and travels all way across the Roman Empire to get the Opus Gemini which she claims as the heirloom of her ancestors, the House of Balbilli. Being the oldest living descendant of the royal house of Commagene, she is also high priestess of the cult of Iuppiter Dolichenus, which gives her a significant power base to draw upon.

I will present and analyse Balbilla's epigrammes in future posts of this blog.

So when and where was the Antikythera Mechanism built?

A recent study discussed in the New York Times on 25 Nov examined the sequence of solar and lunar eclipses that the Antikythera Mechanism is able to display and concluded that the earliest available date was 205 B.C.

'Beginning with the hundreds of ways that the Antikythera [Mechanism]’s eclipse patterns could fit Babylonian records ... the team used their system to eliminate dates successively, until they had a single possibility.

The calculations take into account lunar and solar anomalies (which result in faster or slower velocity), missing solar eclipses, lunar and solar eclipse­s cycles, and other astronomical phenomena."

"This suggests the mechanism is 50–100 years older than most researchers in the field have thought."'(1)

Frankly, I don't see how that final conclusion would arise from the evidence presented. Did it not come to the researchers' mind that the maker of the Antikythera Mechanism may have wanted his gear to calculate back into the past? The astronomy software installed on my computer is able to trace the movements of the heavens back to 2712 B.C. - is that conclusive evidence that king Sargon of Akkad ordered its making? At its best, the date of 205 B.C. suggests a terminus quo ante, that is: It is unlikely that the mechanism was crafted before that year because its maker would certainly have wanted it to be useful in his own time, not after some arbitrary date in the future. The commonly accepted age of the Antikythera Mechanism, however, is unchallenged in my opinion.

The argument about whether the workshop that built the Antikythera Mechanism was located in Sicily or in Rhodes is back at full volume, NYT also reports:

'An inscription on a small dial used to date the Olympic Games refers to an athletic competition that was held in Rhodes, according to research by Paul Iversen, a Greek scholar at Case Western Reserve University.'(2)

A new expedition to the Antikythera Device

One reader has pointed out to me that a new expedition to the Roman shipwreck from which the Antikythera Mechanism was salvaged in 1901 will be launched next September. The website of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture expresses the hope that these dives will help to locate other parts of the mechanism, known only in fragments, or even a second mechanism:
"Meanwhile, ancient technology geeks like us wonder whether the site might be hiding another Antikythera mechanism, more pieces of the original, or at least some clues as to whom this mysterious object belonged to." http://antikythera.whoi.edu/about/

This information, which was reprinted in various media, was in my opinion a misunderstanding by a journalist. Some sources claimed that a part of the original Antikythera Mechanism which has been designated fragment D does not belong to the device at all and may therefore be attributable to another device. Here, the sources are not correctly quoted: Fragment D has a single gearwheel that cannot be assigned and is therefore usually omitted in modern reconstructions of the mechanism. Michael Wright, one of the best-known reconstructors, has suggested that this gear may have linked to other transmission parts that moved pointers for the planets Mercury to Saturn across the mechanism's scales - the parts known were used only for displaying the positionf of Sun and Moon and their eclipses in the past or future. This gear gives reason to hope that further parts of the Antikythera Mechanism may still be hidden near the wreck, 60 m below the surface of the sea. There is no evidence that would suggest the existence of a second device on board, however!

In any case, I will follow news of the expedition and comment on them on this blog.

The Opus Gemini and the Antikythera Mechanism

In 161 A.D., only one such device is still known to a few insiders of the Roman Empire: the Opus Gemini, last surviving sibling of the Antikythera Mechanism that has been lost in the sea long ago, forged by the astronomer Geminus on the island of Rhodus. The Corpus Sacrum trilogy (Societätsverlag Frankfurt, 2006) told how Geminus' mechanism came to its current location twenty years before this story begins. Knowledge of Corpus Sacrum is not required to enjoy the Opus Gemini trilogy.

According to Corpus Sacrum, Princess Iulia Balbilla, interpreter of the Codebook of the Cosmos, was exiled by the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius in about 140 A.D. She has been biding her time since in the border city of Samosata on the river Euphrates where once stood the throne of her royal ancestors, the last kings of Commagene. Now Antoninus Pius is dead and Roma has new lords: Marcus Aurelius, also called the Philosopher on the Throne, and his co-regent, Lucius Verus. For the first time, the Imperium is ruled by two emperors together. And at once they have to face a mighty foe: Vologaeses IV, king of the realm of Parthia, has taken the opportunity to invade the Eastern provinces. As Princess Balbilla escapes from the sack of her place of exile, she plots her return to the summit of power - and for this aim she needs the Opus Gemini.

The Antikythera Mechanism or Antikythera Device

In 1901, the most sophisticated device of the ancient world returned to sunlight after it had spent 2000 years in a Roman shipwreck offshore the Greek island of Antikythera. But it was as late as 1957 that this clotted lump of gearwheels, axles, scales and pointers was recognised as part of an astronomical instrument that is without known counterpart in its period or the centuries after. This instrument, known as the Antikythera Mechanism or the Antikythera Device, features a sort of clockwork that was able to display, for any freely eligible date, the positions of the sun, the moon and probably also of the visible planets, taking into account many intricacies of their varying orbits. Better still, this instrument could predict solar and lunar eclipses many years in advance!
After the turn of the millennium, the publications of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) turned attention to this unique object. If you happen to visit the National Museum of Athens, Greece, you may find it there on display; a number of functional reconstructions are spread across technical museums world-wide.
The AMRP believes that the mechanism may have originated either in Corinth or its famous colony, Sicilian Syracuse. However, the ship that kept it contained cargo from Asia Minor and, when it sank, had set a western course - probably heading for Rome. We do not know who may have used it and for which purpose. No classic author seems to have described its function, though instruments predicting the movements of the skies are mentioned, among others, by Poseidonius and Cicero. No other device of this age was found so far - the second-oldest preserved is many centuries younger and much simpler. But one fact may be safely inferred: The Antikythera Mechanism had achieved technological maturity; it cannot have been a prototype.
The Opus Gemini trilogy, a part of the Romanike series, tells the story of the Antikythera Mechanism's lost siblings.

Fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism in Athens



Links:
The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project: www.antikythera-mechanism.gr
Michael Wright's reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism: http://www.mtwright.co.uk/
"Decoding the Heavens", the story of the Mechanism's discovery: http://www.decodingtheheavens.com/default.aspx
Rekonstruktion des Antikythera-Mechanismus im Astronomisch-Physikalischen Kabinett, Kassel: http://www.museum-kassel.de/index_navi.php?parent=1035