by Graham Robb
Only two events stand out in the modern history of Châteaumeillant. Its frost-haunted vineyards were first planted in the sixth century AD, when the collapse of the Roman empire robbed the Gauls of their red nectar. In 2010, the vin gris of Châteaumeillant – a slightly metallic and surprisingly potent rosé – received the accolade of an ‘Appellation d’origine contrôlée’, and for the first time since the Middle Ages, the name of Châteaumeillant is not entirely unknown beyond its provincial boundaries.
The other notable event occurred in 1972 when a retired postman went out to his back garden to plant some endives and felt the earth give way beneath his feet. When Mme Gallerand came out to inspect the endive trench, she found her husband staring into a void. A hundred years or more before the Roman conquest, a consignment of wine amphorae, each one weighing more than forty kilograms, had been brought by ship and mule from southern Italy. The amphorae had been stored in the home of a wealthy Biturigan merchant which stood on the site of M. Gallerand’s vegetable plot. During the Gallic War, when the Gauls were pursuing a scorched-earth policy and burned down more than twenty Biturigan towns in a single day, the house was destroyed by fire. Its contents remained safely buried in the sandy clay until the postman’s spade pierced the night of twenty-one centuries.
A few weeks later, the endive trench was large enough to hold a team of excited archaeologists. Wine vessels had been found before in Châteaumeillant, but not in such numbers. Digging continued in the gardens of the Gallerands’ neighbours, and eventually three hundred and fifty beautifully turned amphorae were unearthed. One of them still had its seal of cork and pozzolana from Pompeii. Inside, there were traces of the resin that was used as a lining and the seawater that was added to the wine as a preservative. It was one of the largest stores of amphorae ever found in France. For some unfathomable reason, Châteaumeillant had once been a centre of the Gaulish wine trade.
As so often, an archaeological discovery seemed to make a mockery of historians who paint an orderly and rational picture of the Iron Age. The world in which Châteaumeillant had been a place of such importance must have been governed by criteria that bore no relation to any recognizable form of commerce or town planning. The small oppidum where the Kings of the World had sited their international wine warehouse was served only by two small streams, on which a child could barely float a paper boat. Neither river was ever navigable. Unlike most other oppida, the town was on relatively low ground and surrounded by higher hills. It had a wall which, according to calculations based on the work of African pool-diggers, would have taken two hundred people almost a year to build. This was not a fortification that had been hastily thrown up when the vocal telegraph brought news of the Roman invasion. Experiments have shown that this type of murus gallicus, with its exposed wooden beams and stone facing, was not the best defence against fire and battering-rams. The wall was built that way because it looked nice. If the aesthetically minded Bituriges had remained in charge of Châteaumeillant, the town might never have prospered in an increasingly secular, practical world, but it would certainly have found a place in the Guide Michelin.
With its coiffeurs, its funeral parlours and its ‘Loto’ café, modern Châteaumeillant looks like almost any small town in the agricultural heart of France. An anthropologist might conclude that the Castelmeillantais are particularly concerned with hair-dressing, burial practices and a form of divination based on horse racing and ritualized battles. An unassuming museum in a side street displays the hoard of wine amphorae almost exactly as it was found under the postman’s vegetable plot. There is little else to attract a casual visitor, and the museum does nothing to counter the impression that Châteaumeillant has always been a backwater. One display features an Astérix cartoon in which a rustic Gaulish lass shows off the latest Roman fashion: ‘The civilization of the invaders eventually conquers even the remotest corners of the countryside.’
The student at the reception desk was visibly unenthralled by the prospect of spending her summer in an old house full of damaged pottery. Responding to an expression of enthusiastic appreciation, she asked, with a hint of incredulity, ‘Ça vous a plu?’ (‘You liked it?’). Gaulish exhibits usually suffer from comparison with the dainty products of Roman industry, and, apart from Astérix and his friends, the only protohistoric human presence in the museum is an almost faceless stone bust of a man wearing a torc. Yet some of the original Biturigans can be seen on coins that predate the Roman invasion. One day, perhaps, the coiffeurs of Châteaumeillant will be inspired by their sophisticated predecessors to recreate some of the styles that enlivened the streets of Mediolanum Biturigum.
A few hundred metres away, across the river Sinaise, is Châteaumeillant’s main attraction: the ungainly Romanesque basilica of St Genès and its amazing collection of one hundred and thirty-one historiated capitals. Though the church is still a temple of the same religion, some of its twelfth-century Christian carvings are now incomprehensible, even to art historians. Their oak-leaf scrolls, labyrinthine entanglements and half-human faces staring almost indistinguishably out of vegetation would probably seem less exotic to a Biturigan Druid.
Inside the church, which had appeared to be empty, two figures were moving slowly through the forest of pillars: one was gazing up at the capitals with the keen eye of a connoisseur; the other man was shuffling about the echoey aisles, apparently lost in inner contemplation. He stopped in front of two antiquated maps that had been hung on a wall of the nave. One map showed the Compostela routes snaking down through Gaul; the other depicted Romanesque churches along the routes. Some of the churches were marked with a symbol signifying ‘trésor’. In this context, ‘treasure’ means a collection of valuable religious artefacts, especially those that contain the relics of a saint, but the man’s intense examination of certain parts of the map seemed to hint at a more romantic interpretation. When he moved away, I inspected the route that passes through the centre of France, and it was faintly disappointing to see that there was no ‘trésor’ in Châteaumeillant.
Outside, a small esplanade looks down on the Rue de la Libération. Sounds of sarcastic laughter were coming from the ‘Loto’ café across the street, where a group of locals were drinking at tables on the pavement. Nothing much happens in Châteaumeillant, and the strangers who wander into town on the Compostela route are evidently cherished as a source of entertainment. When the two men emerged from the church, we struck up a conversation. The man who had been studying the carvings was a modern Christian; he completed a certain section of the route each year on his summer holiday and was about to return home to the Netherlands. His temporary companion, who carried with him the smell of farm buildings and nights under the stars, was walking all the way to Compostela. He had the look of many miles in his eyes and a tone of wonder in his voice. Whether it was the reason for his departure or a result of his Herculean labour, he seemed to be suffering from a form of delusion, like someone striving for a goal that is sufficiently implausible to be taken for a profound truth. I wondered whether, after reaching Santiago, he would continue to Fisterra and whether there would be anything left of his battered shoes to burn at the ara solis.
He saw the bicycles resting on the parapet, and, since cycling is reputed to be an exacting mode of transport, and the Church allows pilgrims to undertake the journey on a bicycle or a horse, he assumed that we, too, were bound for Spain. ‘Vous êtes pèlerins,’ he said, as though stating a fact. I agreed that we were, after a fashion. He nodded as though satisfied that the information was congruent with some complex calculation. We shook hands and wished each other luck. The sun was about to disappear behind the oppidum. There are no hotels in what was once an international hub of the Gaulish wine trade, and there was still a long hour of cycling ahead.
The future route now lay to the east, along the equinoctial line, to the borders of the Aedui and the Arverni. Eventually, the same line of latitude would lead to the vast Helvetian sanctuary above Lausanne and, beyond that, to the
place in the Alps where the Rhone has its source and which was known to the ancient Celts as ‘the Pillar of the Sun’. But these would be the stations of a later expedition whose distant terminus had yet to be discovered. More sounds of merriment came from the café across the street: the inhabitants of Mediolanum Biturigum were warming to their evening entertainment. It was time to return to the glowing screen and the lower world of the library, to find out how the paths of the gods had been brought to Middle Earth, and whether any of this was ever real or even possible.
PART TWO
6
The Size of the World
The barnacle-encrusted lump had been sitting under the portico of the Athens archaeological museum for several months before anyone noticed anything unusual. A year and a half before, in October 1900, some sponge-divers from Rhodes had been blown off course by a storm and dropped anchor off the almost uninhabited island of Antikythera. Sixty metres below was a shelf that had not been recorded on any chart. When the winds had died down, they decided to look for sponges before sailing for home. The first diver had been in the water for no more than a few minutes when he tugged violently on his rope and was pulled to the surface. Evidently suffering from hallucinations caused by nitrogen narcosis, he claimed to have seen a mass of human remains. A second diver went to investigate. He, too, saw a dark mound of wreckage and then, protruding from the mound, a beautiful bronze arm.
Two thousand years earlier, in about 80 BC, a large and elderly ship carrying bronze and marble statues had sunk with all its crew and cargo. It had probably been sailing to Syracuse or Rome when the wind gods capsized it and locked up its treasures in the sea. After its rediscovery, the arm eventually found its way to Athens. An expedition was mounted and, with the help of the sponge-divers, the contents of the wreck were salvaged.
The Antikythera wreck produced so many spectacular finds – a bronze lyre, a marble bull, a philosopher’s head, a Hercules, a bowl of blue glass similar to one found at Alesia in Gaul – that no one paid much attention to the formless bits of debris that were dumped under the portico or deposited in cardboard boxes. It was not until one of the lumps fell apart that the museum director spotted something that was not only strange but, according to everything that was known about the ancient world, impossible: embedded in the calcified wood was what appeared to be a gear wheel with tiny bronze teeth less than two millimetres long. The first inspections showed a series of bronze plates enclosed in a wooden case. Since then, increasingly sophisticated techniques have been brought to bear on the object known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Recently, a few more bits and pieces were discovered in a storeroom packed into boxes labelled ‘Antikythera’, and with the help of computer-gaming software and an eight-ton X-ray machine, most of the miraculous mechanism has now been brought back to life.
It took the form of a rectangular case about the size of a small shoebox. Some of the names of months engraved on its bronze plates suggest that it was manufactured in Corinth, presumably before that city was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC. The device was practically an antique when it was taken on board the ill-fated vessel in c. 80 BC. There were two dials on the front and one on the back. A side-crank moved pointers on the dials and allowed the user to calculate the dates of solar and lunar eclipses, the phases of the Moon, the dates of the four Panhellenic Games, and probably also the positions of the sun and the five planets, and the rising and setting of certain stars. There was a choice of two calendars – Egyptian and Metonic.18 The calculations were based on astronomical observations made by the Babylonians over the course of several centuries. It had epicyclic gearing (gears whose bearings are attached to other gears), which is otherwise unknown until the Middle Ages. This would have made it possible to multiply fractions and to replicate the apparently erratic motion of the moon across the sky. Despite the infinitesimal complexity of its workings, it would have been no more difficult to operate than an iPhone, though it must have taken some careful studying of the manual – thousands of Greek characters minutely engraved on the dials – to comprehend phrases such as ‘spiral subdivisions 235’.
The exact purpose of the Antikythera Mechanism is still unknown. It may have been a scientific toy and an elegant illustration of micro-engineering (it was designed to be easily dismantled and reassembled).
As a calendar or an almanac, it was unnecessarily but delightfully precise. It would have been the perfect gift for an astronomer who wanted to hold the workings of the heavens in his hands or a geographer who wanted to find out exactly where he was on the earth. Whatever its purpose, it seems an almost alien presence in that world of brute force and basic machinery, and this was the most startling revelation of all: no one could possibly have known from the written record that such a thing had ever existed. And yet, unless the sponge-divers had been unbelievably lucky, there was more than one hand-held computer travelling about the Mediterranean in the second and first centuries BC.
That shapeless lump of wood and the glittering microcosm it contained are a rude reminder that only fragments of ancient wisdom have survived. A scholar who enters a Classics reading room with its beautifully published texts prepared by priestly editors is witnessing an illusion: behind the orderly accumulation of knowledge is a cavernous museum of many floors, devastated by war or natural catastrophe, most of its shelves and cabinets either empty or strewn with illegible clumps of charred parchment.
Inventions and discoveries were not instantly transmitted to the rest of the world. They could lie dormant in libraries for hundreds of years and then disappear for ever when the library was burned to the ground or when a librarian replaced an old text in the belief that it was out of date. Even the existence of a scientific instrument was no guarantee that the principles of its construction would be deduced and understood. In 263 BC, in the early stages of the war on the Carthaginians, Roman legions captured the Sicilian town of Catania. Among the trophies that were carried back to Rome was a curious invention called the horologium solarium. The sun cast the shadow of an upright stick onto a flat surface marked with lines and, in this way, indicated the hours of the day. The device was set up on a column facing the Senate House in Rome. For ninety-nine years, it gave the citizens of Rome the wrong time of day until finally someone realized what people on the Mediterranean coast of Gaul had known two centuries before: that the height of the sun and the angle of its shadow vary with latitude. Unless the earth shifted on its axis, a sundial made for Catania would never be accurate four degrees further north in Rome.
Since the Middle Ages, scientific wisdom has accumulated like interest in a savings account, but in the days of the ancient Celts, whole tribes and empires vanished within a few decades or were reduced to relict populations with no means of reproduction. The Celts believed that, one day, the sky would fall in and destroy the earth. This belief reflected their experience. Their own scientists and intellectuals, the Druids, were hunted almost to extinction: their last significant appearance in Roman history is as a band of screeching, foul-mouthed fanatics on a coast in North Wales. In some periods and domains, regression was the norm, and it would not be surprising if a future historian, confused by the backward counting of years BC, reversed the chronological data in order to produce a more logical sequence.
It was almost three centuries before the Roman conquest of Gaul that one of the greatest expeditions in the ancient world took place, and over a thousand years would pass before anything similar was attempted. One day in the mid-320s, an ocean-going vessel rounded the rocky headland, passed under the beacon-tower and the temple of Artemis, and came to rest among the other ships in what is now the Vieux Port of Marseille. Massalia, founded three hundred years before, had become one of the most powerful cities in the Mediterranean. Aristotle had recently praised its enlightened oligarchy and its council of six hundred senators. Its houses stretched over the hills behind the port, where vines and olive trees had been planted. Ramparts kept out the Ligurian tribes who lurked in the forested ravines of
the hinterland, but there were safe and well-travelled routes up the Rhone Valley leading to the lands of the wealthy, wine-addicted Celtic tribes. In the crowds that walked along the quays, there were Greek-speaking Celts and Gaulish-speaking Greeks. The warehouses and taverns were thronged with merchants and pirates who had seen a world many times bigger than the world of Homer’s Odyssey. But even the most imaginative and cosmopolitan Massaliot would have found it hard to match the tales of the traveller who returned that day to his native city.
The traveller’s name was Pytheas. He may have been commissioned by the senate or by a guild of merchants to prospect new trading routes, or perhaps, as a boy growing up in Massalia, he had contracted the incurable disease of curiosity. He would have read the sixth-century Periplus that described the coasts from Massalia to the Sacred Promontory, ‘where the starry light declines’, and the sea routes that led to the wintry lands under the Great Bear from where the tin and the amber came. Mediterranean city-states treated their explorers as secret agents and kept their logbooks under lock and key, but leaks were unavoidable, especially in a large port, and mariners are notoriously loquacious. Pytheas would certainly have heard of his fellow Massaliot, Euthymenes, who, in the early 500s, had sailed through the Pillars of Hercules, turned south and followed the coast for many weeks until he saw crocodiles and hippopotami swimming in the fresh water of a great river that flowed far out to sea. Down at the harbour, he would have talked to sailors who knew how to steer a steady course over long distances and whose knowledge of winds, constellations, tides and currents was only then being translated into mathematical equations.
Pytheas was conversant with the very latest developments in scientific theory. He may even have corresponded with Aristotle. He knew that the celestial pole around which all the stars revolved was an empty patch of sky that could be located from three stars in the constellations of the Little Bear and the Dragon. (There was no star at the pole in the third century BC.) Before leaving home, he set up a gnomon marked off into one hundred and twenty sections – a system which, in contradiction of the accepted chronology, suggests knowledge of the Babylonian division of the circle into 360. On the longest day of the year, the shadow cast by the noonday sun was 414/5 sections long. This indicates a latitude of 43.2° – one-tenth of a degree south of the harbour of Marseille, where the reading is supposed to have been taken. It was a remarkably precise figure and perhaps completely accurate: 43.2° is the latitude of Cap Croisette, where only the raggedy gnomons of telegraph poles spoil the view, and where there were fewer obstructions and disturbances than in Massalia. For the first time in recorded history, a man defined his position on the earth with an exact coordinate. When Pytheas stood on that windy headland on a sunny day in June measuring the length of the sun’s shadow, he had already embarked on his voyage of discovery.