With the suspenseful story that follows, “Styx and Stones,” he introduces a whole new series of tales that will take a teenaged Gordianus to visit the Seven Wonders of the World; his traveling companion is the elderly Greek poet Antipater of Sidon. The Seven Wonders stories take place in 92–90 B.C., and so serve as a prequel to the first novel in the Roma Sub Rosa series,
IN BABYLON, WE SHALL SEE NOT ONE, BUT TWO OF THE GREAT WONDERS of the World,” said Antipater. “Or at least, we shall see what remains of them.”
We had spent the night at a dusty little inn beside the Euphrates River. My traveling companion had been quiet and grumpy from the moment he got out of bed that morning—travel is hard on old men—but as we drew closer to Babylon, traveling south on the ancient road that ran alongside the river, his spirits rose and little by little he became more animated.
The innkeeper had told us that the ancient city was not more than a few hours distant, even accounting for the slow progress of the asses we were riding, and all morning a smudge that suggested a city had loomed ahead of us on the low horizon, very gradually growing more pronounced. The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and for miles around is absolutely flat, without even low hills to break the view. On such a vast, featureless plain, you might think that you could see forever, but the ripples of heat that rose from the earth distorted the view, so that objects near and far took on an uncertain, even uncanny appearance. A distant tower turned out to be a palm tree; a pile of strangely motionless—dead?—bodies suddenly resolved into a heap of gravel, apparently put there by whoever maintained the road.
For over an hour I tried to make sense of a northward-traveling party that seemed to be approaching us on the road. The shimmering heat waves by turns appeared to magnify the group, then make them grow smaller, then disappear altogether, then reappear. At first I thought it was a company of armed men, for I thought I saw sunlight glinting on their weapons. Then I decided I was seeing nothing more than a single man on horseback, perhaps wearing a helmet or some other piece of armor that reflected a bluish gleam. Then the person, or persons, or whatever it was that approached us, vanished in the blink of an eye, and I felt a shiver, wondering if we were about to encounter a company of phantoms.
At last we met our fellow travelers on the road. The party turned out to consist of several armed guards and two small carts pulled by asses and piled high with stacks of bricks, but not bricks of any sort I had seen before. These were large and variously shaped, most about a foot square, and covered on the outward-facing sides with a dazzling glaze, some yellow, some blue, some mixed. They were not newly made—uneven edges and bits of adhering mortar indicated they had been chiseled free from some existing structure—but except for a bit of dust, the colored glazes glimmered with a jewel-like brightness.
Antipater grew very excited. “Can it be?” he muttered. “Bricks from the fabled walls of Babylon!”
The old poet awkwardly dismounted and shuffled toward the nearest cart, where he reached out to touch one of the bricks, running his fingertips over the shimmering blue glaze.
The driver at first objected, and called to one of the armed guards, who drew his sword and stepped forward. Then the driver laughed, seeing Antipater’s bright-eyed wonder, and waved the guard back. Speaking to Antipater, the driver said something in a language I didn’t recognize. Apparently, neither did Antipater, who squinted up at the man and said, “Speakee Greekee?”
This was my first visit to a land where the majority of the population conversed in languages other than Latin and Greek. Antipater had a smattering of Parthian, but I had noticed that he preferred to address the natives in broken Greek, as if somehow this would be more comprehensible to them than the flawless Greek he usually spoke.
“I know Greek, yes, little bit,” said the driver, holding his thumb close to his forefinger.
“You come from Babylon, no?” Antipater also tended to raise his voice when speaking to the natives, as if they might be deaf.
“From Babylon, yes.”
“How far?” Antipater engaged in an elaborate bit of sign language to clarify his meaning.
“Babylon, from here? Oh, two hour. Maybe three,” amended the driver, eyeing our weary-looking asses.
Antipater looked in the direction of the smudge on the horizon, which had grown decidedly larger but still held no promise of towering walls. He sighed. “I begin to fear, Gordianus, that nothing at all remains of the fabled walls of Babylon. Surely, if they were as large as legend asserts, and if any remnants still stand, we would see something of them by now.”
“Bricks come from old walls, yes,” said the driver, understanding only some of Antipater’s comments and gesturing to his load. “My neighbor finds, buried behind his house. Very rare. Very valuable. He sell to rich merchant in Ctesiphon. Now my neighbor is rich man.”
“Beautiful, aren’t they, Gordianus?” Antipater ran his palm over a glazed surface, then lifted the brick to look at the bottom. “By Zeus, this one is actually stamped with the name of Nebuchadnezzar! It must date from his reign.” For a moment I thought Antipater was about to break into verse—creating extemporaneous poems was his specialty—but his thoughts took a more practical turn. “These bricks would be worth a fortune back in Rome. My patron Quintus Lutatius Catulus owns a few, which he displays as specimens in his garden. I think he paid more for those five or six Babylonian bricks than he did for all the statues in his house put together. Ah well, let’s push on.”
Antipater gave the driver a coin for his trouble, then remounted, and we resumed our slow, steady progress toward the shimmering smudge on the horizon.
I cleared my throat. “What makes those old bricks so valuable? And why did the Babylonians build their walls from bricks in the first place? I should think any proper city wall would be made of stone.”
The look Antipater shot at me made me feel nine years old rather than nineteen. “Look around you, Gordianus. Do you see any stones? There’s not a quarry for miles. This part of the world is completely devoid of the kind of stones suitable for constructing temples and other buildings, much less walls that stretch for miles and are so wide that chariots can ride atop them. No, except for a few temples adorned with limestone and bitumen imported at great expense, the city of Nebuchadnezzar was constructed of bricks. They were made from clay mixed with finely chopped straw, then compressed in molds and hardened by fire. Amazingly, such bricks are very nearly as strong as stone, and in the ancient Chaldean language the word for
“So the famous walls of Babylon were built by—” I hesitated over the difficult name.
“King Nebuchadnezzar.” Antipater made a point to enunciate carefully, as he had when speaking to the cart driver. “The city of Babylon itself was founded, at least in legend, by an Assyrian queen named Semiramis, who lived back in the age of Homer. But it was a much later king, of the Chaldean dynasty, who raised Babylon to the height of its glory. His name was Nebuchadnezzar and he reigned five hundred years ago. He rebuilt the whole city on a grid design, with long, straight avenues—quite different from the chaos you’re accustomed to in Rome, Gordianus—and he adorned the city with magnificent temples to the Babylonian gods, chief among them Marduk and Ishtar. He constructed a huge temple complex called
