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

each side. And the most astonishing thing of all is that they feel no concern for their proper dignity, but prostitute themselves without a qualm; nor do they consider this behavior disgraceful, but rather, if they should offer themselves and be rebuffed, they consider such a refusal an act of dishonor.”

By the time of Gordianus’s visit to Babylon, there was not a great deal left to be seen of either of the two Wonders located there. Numerous reconstructions of the Hanging Gardens have been proposed over the years, drawing on descriptions by Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. Herodotus describes the ziggurat Etemenanki and recounts the Babylonian tradition of temple prostitution. As for the Walls of Babylon, one can gain some idea of their magnificence from the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way on view at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which was built from material excavated by Robert Koldewey. Parts of the excavation, including images of lions and dragons, can be seen in several other museums around the world. At the site of Babylon itself, archaeological research has been made problematic in recent decades by Saddam Hussein’s building projects, by looting during the chaos of the U.S. invasion in 2003, and by subsequent occupation of the site by the U.S. military.

The Great Pyramid at Giza, our only surviving Wonder, has been endlessly explored by books, magazine articles, television programs, etc. It was equally famous—and mysterious—in the time of Gordianus. Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, and Ammianus Marcellinus all wrote about the pyramids.

Herodotus tells us about the use of mummies as security for loans; Diodorus Siculus repeats this information, and both authors provide fascinating details about the different forms of mummification.

Neither Herodotus nor the later writers Strabo and Diodorus Siculus (both contemporaries of Gordianus) makes any mention of the Great Sphinx of Giza, which is described by Pliny the Elder, writing a couple of generations after Gordianus. Pliny notes that Egyptian sources, too, are silent about the Sphinx. This leads to the hypothesis that the giant monument was buried by sand for a long period, and not rediscovered until the time of the last Ptolemaic rulers or even later. (See the Loeb edition of Pliny, 36.17, and the translator’s note by D. E. Eichholz.)

As readers of the novel will gather, the Pharos Lighthouse was not among the original Seven Wonders; it was added only later, long after the list was first devised, usually replacing one of the faded Babylonian Wonders. (Many other variations occur in the canonical list over the centuries; the permutations are too numerous and complicated to recount here.) Even after seeing the original Seven Wonders, Gordianus marvels at the Pharos, the world’s first (and for many centuries, only) skyscraper.

A miracle of engineering, the Pharos survived until the fourteenth century, when earthquakes sent it tumbling into the harbor of Alexandria. Hermann Thiersch assembled all the literary sources, coin images, and other data about the lighthouse in Pharos, Antike, Islam und Occident (Teubner, 1909); if you can find an original edition of this classic, feast your eyes on the two enormous foldout illustrations of the Pharos as rendered by Thiersch. Equally essential to an understanding of the Pharos’s history and appearance is a close reading of the details in P. M. Fraser’s three-volume Ptolemaic Alexandria (Clarendon Press, 1972); see vol. I, pp. 17–21, and vol. II, pp. 45–46. Judith McKenzie’s The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300 B.C.–A.D. 700 (Yale University Press, 2007) also provides useful information about the lighthouse, including the idea that naphtha may have been used as a fuel; see pages 41– 48.

Our ideas about the Pharos continue to evolve. In recent decades, underwater archaeology in the harbor of Alexandria by Jacques-Yves Empereur and others has yielded new knowledge and recovered artifacts related to the lighthouse. New techniques of virtual reality and digital reconstruction have also been brought to bear on the mystery of its design and dimensions. During the writing of this novel I was privileged to have access to the work of Anthony Caldwell, research scholar at the Experiential Technologies Center, UCLA. A draft copy of Caldwell’s Reconstruction of the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria, including detailed diagrams of the lighthouse (based on his synthesis of literary, archaeological, and engineering knowledge), fired my imagination.

Everyone could see the Pharos—from a distance of 300 stadia, or over thirty miles, according to Josephus. But could the Pharos gaze back, watching those who watched it? This is from John Webster Spargo’s Virgil the Necromancer (Harvard University Press, 1934): “The lighthouse at Alexandria threw its beams far and mystified mankind. Its use as a mere lighthouse was eclipsed in the popular mind [in the Middle Ages] and it was regarded as an instrument which could ‘see’ as far as it threw its beams—a misconception … perhaps associated with the knowledge that it had a reflector, a mirror.” From the Pharos of Alexandria we may trace a direct line to the many magical mirrors and “all-seeing” towers of fiction in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, all the way to the far-seeing palantiri, the Eye of Sauron, and the two towers of Orthanc and Barad-dur in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

A few books that cover all seven Wonders should be mentioned. Die Sieben Weltwunder der Antike: Wege der Wiedergewinnung aus sechs Jahrhunderten (Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2003) by Max Kunze, a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Winckelmann-Museums in Stendal, Germany, contains many useful images. Also lavishly illustrated is Die Sieben Weltwunder: 5000 Jahre Kultur und Geschichte der Antike by Artur Muller and Rolf Ammon (Scherz Verlag, 1966). Kai Brodersen’s Dic Sieben Weltwunder (Beck, 1996), which includes a comprehensive survey of sources, has gone through numerous editions in Germany, but has not been translated into English. A basic introduction to the Wonders can be found in The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, edited by Peter Clayton and Martin Price (Routledge, 1988); the scholarship of the contributors is sound, but the division of the subject into essays by different authors gives the book a less coherent focus than the previously mentioned The Seven Wonders of the World by Mike Ashley.

Looming in the background of the novel are two world-changing events: The so-called Social War in Italy, and the incipient war for hegemony in Asia Minor between Rome and Mithridates. The literature on these events is vast, but I should mention Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods, but Verify by Rose Mary Shelton (Frank Cass, 2005); the chapter entitled “Diplomat, Trader, Messenger, Client, Spy: Rome’s Eyes and Ears in the East” was especially pertinent to my purposes. A lecture at UC Berkeley by Adrienne Mayor, author of The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton, 2010), was particularly rewarding; it is to Mayor that I owe the line, “Rome is the disease, Mithridates is the cure.”

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Various episodes in this novel were published first as short stories. (Details may be found on the indicia page.) I am grateful to the anthology and magazine editors who first read and commented on those stories: Mike Ashley, Gardner Dozois, George R. R. Martin, Gordon Van Gelder, and Janet Hutchings. I was especially gratified to see Gordianus in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, because my first professional sale was to that magazine, many years ago; and I was glad to see Gordianus back in the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, where the very first Gordianus short story appeared.

I also want to thank my longtime editor at St. Martin’s Press, Keith Kahla, my longtime agent, Alan Nevins of Renaissance, and my longtime partner, Rick Solomon, all of whom helped Gordianus and his creator explore the Seven Wonders of the World.