The Seven Wonders: A Novel of the Ancient World (Novels of Ancient Rome)

April (Aprilis) to August (Sextilis): Gordianus and Antipater visit Halicarnassus and see the Mausoleum (“The Widows of Halicarnassus”).

Late August (Sextilis) to early September: Gordianus and Antipater attend the 172nd Olympiad and see the Statue of Zeus (“O Tempora! O Mores! Olympiad!”).

September: Gordianus and Antipater visit the ruins of Corinth (“The Witch’s Curse”).

Autumn to winter: Gordianus and Antipater stay with Posidonius in Rhodes and see the remains of the Colossus (“The Monumental Gaul”).

91

23 March (Martius): Gordianus is nineteen.

Mithridates invades Bithynia, expels Nicomedes, and sets up Nicomedes’ brother Socrates as king; Ariobarzanes, the king of Cappadocia confirmed by the Romans, is usurped and replaced by the son of Mithridates, Ariaranthes Eusebes.

Outbreak of the Social War, as the Italians revolt against Rome.

Spring: Gordianus and Antipater visit Babylon and see the remains of the Walls and the Hanging Gardens (“Styx and Stones”).

June: Gordianus and Antipater journey up the Nile to Memphis and visit the Great Pyramid (“The Return of the Mummy”).

Gordianus and Antipater travel to Alexandria and visit the Pharos Lighthouse (“They Do It with Mirrors”).

90

23 March (Martius): Gordianus is twenty. He solves the case of “The Alexandrian Cat” (included in the collection The House of the Vestals).

89

War begins between Rome and Mithridates.

88

Conclusion of the Social War; Rome is triumphant over the rebellious Italians.

80

The dictator Sulla moves the 175th Olympiad to Rome. (The Games are afterward returned to Olympia.) Gordianus is in Rome, and is hired by Cicero, as recounted in the novel Roman Blood.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

IN SEARCH OF THE SEVEN WONDERS

(This note reveals elements of the plot.)

Over the course of ten previously published novels and two collections of short stories, Gordianus the Finder has occasionally made reference to his younger days, and specifically to his journey as a young man to see the Seven Wonders of the World.

For a long time, I have wanted to write the story of that journey. At last the occasion seemed auspicious, and the result is the book you hold in your hands.

Little did I know at the outset that the author’s voyage of discovery would be every bit as long and arduous and full of wonders as that of Gordianus. To explore the Seven Wonders, one enters a labyrinth of history and legend, hard facts and half-facts, cutting-edge archaeology and the very latest innovations in virtual reality.

The fascination exerted by the Seven Wonders has long outlasted their physical existence. Only one, the Great Pyramid, remains intact. The others are in fragments or have vanished altogether. To understand the scale and magnificence of these monuments, and the reasons they made such a lasting impact on the world’s imagination, we must turn to ancient literary sources—which are sometimes more confusing than enlightening. Images of the Wonders abound, but are often unreliable; over the centuries, methodologies used to visualize the Wonders have ranged from the rigorously scientific to the patently absurd.

I soon discovered that there was no single source I could turn to for answers to all my questions; an authoritative book encompassing all we know about the Seven Wonders has yet to be written. But one book came close, and I didn’t even have to search for it; it came to me, arriving by international post at my house one day, a gift from the British editor, anthologist, and author Mike Ashley.

Like Gordianus, Mike visited the Wonders in his own younger days by writing a marvelous book about them, The Seven Wonders of the World, published as a paperback original by Fontana in Great Britain in 1980. Learning that I intended to take Gordianus to the Wonders, Mike mailed me one of his archival copies—which proved to be a godsend. Meticulously researched and splendidly written, Mike’s book is far and away the best single volume I encountered about the Wonders. Long out of print (and a bit out of date due to subsequent archaeological research), it is a book that cries out for a new edition.

Among my debts to Mike Ashley is the intriguing notion that Alexander the Great may have had a hand in conceiving the list of the Seven Wonders. In the novel, this theory is put forward by Gordianus’s traveling companion, Antipater of Sidon, a real historical figure who did in fact write a poem listing the Seven Wonders— probably the very earliest such list that still exists.

The various poems recited by Antipater in this novel are either of my own invention or are freely adapted from the English translations by W. R. Paton in the Loeb Classical Library five-volume edition of The Greek Anthology, now in public domain. For insight into the more subtle points of Antipater’s work I turned to Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context by Kathryn J. Gutzwiller (UC Press, 1998); Dioscorides and Antipater of Sidon: The Poems edited by Jerry Clack (Bolchazy- Carducci, 2001); and two monumental works by A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology: