The Calendar

by David Ewing Duncan

  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.

  A generation after Aristarchus, the Alexandria-based mathematician, philosopher, geographer and astronomer Eratosthenes (276-194 BC) deduced within a tenth of a degree the tilting of the earth’s axis of rotation, which causes the seasons. He also measured the circumference of the earth to within 250 miles of the true value. A few years later Ctesibius of Alexandria constructed an elaborate water clock using floats, a chain winch, cog shaft, dial and a sundial system that linked the path of the sun astronomically and geometrically with levels of its shadow.

  In about 130 BC the astronomer Hipparchus (fl. 146-127 BC) discovered the precession of the equinoxes, a slow shift westwards of the equinoctial points against the stars, something Isaac Newton much later determined was caused by the very subtle gravitational tug of the moon and sun on the earth. Hipparchus published a celestial catalogue, since lost, that described hundreds of stars and provided calculations about distances among them. He also confirmed the accuracy of the Egyptian year by studying several years’ worth of solstices to come up with a reasonably close approximation of the true solar year: 365 days, 5 hours and 5 5 minutes, some six minutes too long.

  But none of these stargazers were as influential as Alexandria’s last great astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy. A Greek and a citizen of Rome who flourished some two centuries after Caesar’s sojourn in Egypt, Ptolemy compiled during the second century AD a massive encyclopaedia on astronomy and geography that became, with Euclid’s Elements on mathematics, a widely revered if not always understood textbook in the Middle Ages. Ptolemy’s calculations about the length of the month and year; the motions of the sun, moon and stars; eclipses; and the precession of the equinoxes became the benchmarks used by every time reckoner who followed him for over a thousand years: Bede, Roger Bacon and the chief architects of the calendar reform in 1582, Christopher Clavius and Aloysius Lilius. Ptolemy’s value for the length of the solar year, which he borrowed from Hipparchus, happened to be wrong by several minutes. Yet it is worth noting that Ptolemy and the Alexandrians knew Caesar’s year of 365 1/4 days was in error centuries before Roger Bacon--and some 1,400 years before Pope Gregory finally fixed it.

  On the night of Cleopatra’s feast Caesar may have received an earful about Egypt’s calendar, but as it turned out he almost missed his chance to use it. That very night he narrowly avoided being killed in an attempted palace coup. Only the intervention of Caesar’s barber, a busybody who overheard the plotters, saved him. As it was, Caesar had barely enough time to protect himself and to muster his troops. After fierce fighting inside the palace, the general and his men managed to secure the royal compound, though this left them under siege by the boy-king’s army and a mob of anti-Roman Alexandrians. The Romans retained access to their small fleet, moored to the palace docks, but were blockaded from leaving the main harbour by Egyptian warships.

  Foolishly, Caesar had come to Alexandria with only two depleted legions from the battle at Pharsalus. No more than 3,200 men and 34 ships were pitted against an Egyptian army numbering at least 22,000 men supported by a large Alexandrian navy. Fortifying the palace and securing the royal harbour, Caesar dispatched messengers to fetch reinforcements from his legions in Syria and Greece. He then launched a series of sorties to reinforce his position, at one point setting fire to part of the Alexandrian fleet. Tragically, these flames spread to the shore, destroying several buildings in the lavish Brushium district west of the palace, including buildings that housed part of the great library’s priceless collection. In another skirmish, fought over a causeway connecting the island of Pharos to the city, Caesar’s position was overrun, forcing him to swim for his life to a Roman skiff, pelted all the way by Egyptians who could easily single him out in his imperial purple toga.

  Caesar ultimately prevailed, however, when a large relief force of legionnaires arrived some five months later. With these he crushed his enemy and restored his lover to her throne.

  Caesar was now free to return to Rome, but delayed again, this time to celebrate his victory with a two-month journey with his mistress down the Nile. Luxuriating on an immense barge filled with banquet halls and apartments fitted out with cedar, cypress, ivory and gold, the general and the queen feasted, relaxed and made love, producing in due time a son that Caesar would later recognize as his own, calling him Caesarion. Hoping to float all the way to Ethiopia to discover the source of the Nile, Caesar during this trip undoubtedly continued his discourse with the sages of Egypt. These may have included a court astronomer named Sosigenes, who wrote several books about the stars, all of them now lost. But unlike those great stargazers whose works have been preserved, Sosigenes at some point during Caesar’s time in Egypt passed on something far more lasting than suppositions about the placement of stars and the distance of the sun and moon: a breathtakingly simple idea for reforming the Roman calendar.

  In June of 47 BC, Julius Caesar finally departed Egypt. As a parting gift he left the pregnant Cleopatra three Roman legions to protect her, but also to guard the interests of Rome against a woman Caesar clearly understood was as ruthless as he in her ambitions. Desperately needed in Rome to sort out the aftermath of the civil war, Caesar first launched two lightning-quick wars against an upstart king in Syria and against the remnants of Pompey’s army, which had fled to the north coast of Africa. He then returned to Rome, where the Senate named him dictator for ten more years, commissioned a bronze statue of him to be erected in the Forum, and ordered a celebration of forty days for his victories in Gaul, Egypt, Syria and Africa. This triumph became a legendary orgy of festivals, games and debauches that included the slaughter of four hundred lions in the Circus, and mock battles on land and sea in which hundreds of war captives and criminals died. For days at a time Caesar’s soldiers marched in parades leading into the Forum, carrying more than 20,000 pounds of captured treasure and leading in countless prisoners weighed down by chains. These included the young princess Arsinoe, a sister of Cleopatra who had sided with her enemies.

  Caesar’s supporters revelled in their triumph, though many Romans, raised in a republic that had for centuries despised the idea of a king, found the celebrations grossly ostentatious and an unsettling display of arrogance and personal power. The Roman historian Dio reports that people recoiled against the bloodshed and the ‘countless sums’ lavished on the shows. People also complained about the treatment of high-born prisoners, including Arsinoe. Demeaned in her chains, she ‘aroused very great pity’, to the point that Caesar released her rather than face the wrath of the populace. Not even a lavish gift of gold, grain and oil to every free person in Rome assuaged a general anxiety about what Caesar would do n
ext. Already his enemies were talking darkly of a man whose success and virtually limitless power was turning him into a monster.

  The fact that Caesar governed mostly with energy and resolve after his infamous fete made his enemies revile him even more, since an able dictator set back the cause of those who longed for a return of the republic far more than if Caesar had been inept. He plunged into a dizzying series of projects ranging from a flurry of new temples and a planned canal across the Isthmus of Corinth to hundreds of new laws and reforms. He dissolved the corrupt guilds in the city; limited the terms of office for senior elected officials; forgave a quarter of the debts owed by all Romans, to stimulate the economy; awarded prizes to large families to increase the population, depleted by the war; and reduced the expensive subsidies of grain to the city’s paupers. He also consolidated power by naming his own men to key offices and by co-opting control of the Senate.

  But none of the measures taken by Caesar during his first months back in Rome was more dramatic than the one he decreed sometime in the first half of 46 BC; the reordering of the Roman calendar. More than a simple adjustment in the way days were counted, this reform was a potent symbol both of Julius Caesar’s newfound authority and of an empire that believed it had the power to reorder time--not only for its own people but for subjects living in far-flung locales, from the English Channel to what is now Iraq. Fortunately for the millions of people who would have to use his calendar, Caesar’s hubris coincided with the pragmatism of a veteran general and statesman who based his new calendar on science, not vanity or religious dogma. In any case, Rome’s old lunar calendar was in desperate need of reform, running in Caesar’s day several months fast against the solar year.