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

Автор книги: Steven Saylor

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I turned and gazed up at the Pharos. At the uppermost parapet, amid the glitter of soldiers’ helmets, I saw a shock of white hair. That was my last fleeting glimpse of Antipater.

*   *   *

After landing at the wharf, I discreetly discarded the green tunic and went directly to the dwelling of Isidorus. Soldiers had reached the house ahead of me and were swarming in the street outside. There could have been no better demonstration of the swiftness and efficacy of the Pharos signaling system.

I walked away as quickly as I could without drawing attention to myself. In my mind I enumerated the few possessions I had kept in my room. I would have to do without them.

I slept that night in the open, not a terrible hardship in such a warm, dry climate. The next day, I tried to think through my position. As long as Antipater made no mention of me to the authorities, no one had any reason to connect me to the deaths at the Pharos. Isidorus’s slave might have overheard my name, but the woman knew nothing else about me. No one else in Alexandria even knew of my existence, except the professional receiver of letters and the banker who was holding the funds from my father in trust for me. As I saw it, I had no cause to fear the authorities.

Later that day, I decided to pay a visit to the banker—or more precisely, to one of the clerks who met with clients on his behalf. I half-feared that some of King Ptolemy’s soldiers would appear from nowhere and seize me, but the man was happy to give me the minuscule disbursement I requested.

“Also, a message was left for you this morning,” he said, producing a small scroll of papyrus tied with a ribbon.

I went to a public garden nearby and found a patch of grass next to a palm tree. A mule was tied to the trunk—his young owner was nearby, talking to some other boys—so I chose a spot on the opposite side of the tree, sat with my back against it, and opened the letter.

There was no salutation and no signature—nothing to compromise either of us, should the letter fall into the wrong hands.

I hope you will remember all that was good in our travels. Forget all that was bad. If that means forgetting me, so be it.

I will not ask you to forgive me, for that would imply remorse, and I do not regret the choices I made. I promised to show you the Seven Wonders; I did. I promised your father that I would see you safely to our final destination; I did. You will say I hid things from you, but every man has secrets, even you.

I am leaving Egypt. You will not see me again, at least not here.

You should stay in Alexandria, if you wish. I had intended to leave a few drachmas for you with the banker, adding them to the funds from your father; but the record of such a deposit might someday be misconstrued as a payment—evidence of an affiliation between you and me that does not exist. I would not want that to happen; nor would you, I think. Eventually you may need to find work, but for a young man as clever as you, that should be no problem.

I am an old man. I may have a few years left, or a few days. But I can die happy now. My lifelong desire was to see the Wonders—that was no deception!—and that wish has been fulfilled, thanks in no small part to you. I could not have asked for a better traveling companion. We may have begun as teacher and pupil, but on this journey I learned as much from you as you ever learned from me. I am proud of you, and I thank you.

Our ways must part now, but if the gods allow, we will meet again.

Burn this letter after you read it, or toss it into the sea.

How could I bear to destroy the letter? For better or worse, it was my last link to Antipater. In a daze, I laid it on the grass beside me. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, letting the dappled sunlight warm my face. A moment later, I heard a chomping sound, and turned my head just in time to see the last bit of papyrus vanish into the mule’s mouth.

X

Epilogue in Alexandria:

THE EIGHTH WONDER

For many days, the fiery deaths at the Pharos were the talk of Alexandria. Various stories were put forth to account for the terrible events, but the one that came to hold sway was this: one of the workers, in a fit of insanity, attacked the master of the lighthouse and cast him into the flames, and this same worker then attacked a visitor whom Anubion had been escorting on a tour, an unfortunate scholar from the Library who had expressed an interest in the history of the Pharos. The killings were put down to the act of a madman; politics and intrigue played no part. A certain Zoticus of Zeugma was occasionally mentioned, but only as a witness. No one seemed to know anything about him—which was hardly surprising, I thought, since no such person existed.

*   *   *

At the age of seventeen, the world had declared me to be a man, old enough to wear a toga. But it was in Alexandria that I truly left my boyhood behind. The transformation happened not in an instant, but over a period of time. It began the moment I realized that Antipater had deceived me.

Before, despite all my travels and riddle solving and amorous adventures, I was still a boy, trusting the world around me—or more precisely, trusting that the world, enormous though it might be, was nonetheless a comprehensible place, susceptible to reason, as were the people in it. People, especially strangers, could be mysterious, but that was not a bad thing; it was a cause for excitement, for mysteries existed to be solved, and solving them gave pleasure. Every mystery had a solution; and by their very proximity, the people closest to us were the least mysterious. Or so I had believed.

“The world is not as simple as you think,” Antipater had said to me. It would never be simple again.

My first days and months alone in Alexandria were often languorous, but never boring. I had just enough money to get by, which is all a young man needs. Also, as Antipater had predicted, I began to find work, following in my father’s footsteps. The Finder, he called himself—though as often as not, I found myself playing ferret or weasel, digging through other people’s garbage. To a young Roman in a vibrant, foreign city, the mysteries I was hired to solve all seemed exotic and alluring—the more sordid and bizarre, the better.

I continued to struggle to come to terms with Antipater’s deceit. Thanks to our travels together, I had seen with my own eyes the glories of Greek civilization. Antipater loved that world and desperately wanted to preserve it, at any price. He was a poet who decided to become a man of action, dedicating his final years to the cause of saving the Greek-speaking world from the domination of Rome, which could only be accomplished by Mithridates. Toward that end, Antipater had been willing to sacrifice everything else—including my trust in him. My feelings about this changed from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour.

One evening, as the stars began to come out, I was sitting on the steps of the Temple of Serapis, gazing over the city toward the distant Pharos, when a doubt suddenly occurred to me. It must have been worming its way through my consciousness for months, planted there by Nikanor. He had been certain that Antipater was a traitor to their cause—and had said as much to Anubion before he killed him, railing against “the old Sidonian.” Of course, Nikanor had been mad. But madmen are not always mistaken.

What if Nikanor had been right about Antipater?

Was it possible that Antipater was a double agent? Could it be that he only pretended to side with Mithridates, while in fact he was loyal to Rome? If such was the case, might it be that my father knew of the deception and actively took part in it? Indeed, could it be that my father was the author of the scheme? What did I really know about my father’s activities and affiliations?

If my father was in fact working for the Roman Senate, and Antipater was a double agent, then the two of them had doubly deceived me—all for my own good, of course. I found this convoluted notion at once disquieting and strangely comforting.

Stop, Gordianus! You’re beginning to sound as mad as Nikanor,I told myself. But the worm of doubt would not be put to rest.

How was I ever to know the truth? I prayed that the gods would keep my father safe from all harm, and that I would see him again in Rome. I prayed for them to protect Antipater as well, so that I might speak to him at least once more. But the world is a dangerous place, and prayers are not always answered. What if I was never to know the truth?

Sitting on the temple steps, I stared at the unwavering light of the Pharos—a point of certainty in an uncertain world. I wished for an end to all my doubts, knowing it was not to be. This was manhood, from which there could be no turning back: to know that some mysteries might never be solved, some questions never answered. But a man must persevere nonetheless.

*   *   *

“Why seven?” I had asked Antipater. At the time, it had not occurred to me to ask, “Why make a list at all?”

Now I knew. A list delineates that which is from that which is not. A list can be memorized and mastered. A list gives order to a chaotic universe.

With such thoughts in my head, I took to spending much of my free time on the steps of the Library, listening to teachers and philosophers who freely shared their wisdom with anyone who cared to listen or dared to argue. All schools of thought were represented. I listened to Stoics, Skeptics, Cynics, Epicureans, and Neo-Platonists, along with stargazing Babylonian astrologers and tale-spinning Jewish sages.

At night, I sought pleasures of the flesh. In Alexandria, these were not hard to come by.

It occurred to me that the true wonders a man encounters in the journey of his life are not the mute monuments of stone, but his fellow mortals. Some lead us to wisdom. Some delight us with pleasure. Some make us laugh. Some fill us with terror, or pity, or loathing. You need not travel the world to find these wonders. They are everywhere around you, every day.

But a man who has traveled to the Seven Wonders of the World need never lack for attention. Men and women alike loved to hear the stories I could tell. In the taverns of Rhakotis, my cup was always full. On warm, starlit nights, my bed was seldom empty.

Such was the life into which I settled in Alexandria: hardworking, intellectually stimulating, and dissolute all at once. By the Roman calendar the month of Martius arrived, and with it the birthday of Antipater. Was he blind drunk, suffering his annual “birthday fever,” wherever he might be? This was followed by the second anniversary of his false death. Then came my birthday. I was twenty.

I began to feel—dare I say it?—slightly jaded. Perhaps I had traveled too far, seen too much. Pleasures that had amused me began to bore me. Food lost its flavor, inebriation was tedious, and even ecstasies of the flesh seemed repetitious. The philosophers and sages all began to sound alike. Alexandria itself—the most cosmopolitan of cities, center of culture, beacon to mankind—began to seem mundane and ordinary, just another place.

And then …

I was near the waterfront one day, passing a market where slaves were sold. It was not one of the better such markets in the city; the goods were usually damaged or in some way second-rate. Some of the slaves were offered so cheaply that even I might have afforded one—had I needed a servant and wished to pay for the upkeep. A cat would have suited me better than a slave, but either would need to be fed.

The item on offer was a toothless old vagrant who had agreed to give up his freedom if anyone would care to purchase him. The crowd hooted and made catcalls. There were no takers. The auctioneer voided the offer, and the disconsolate would-be slave shambled off. The next offering was brought onto the block.

“Not this one again!” cried someone.

“She’s back,” said another. “Didn’t someone buy her just a few days ago?”

“Bought her, took her home—and returned her the next day!” came the answer. “She’s a troublemaker, that one. Buyer beware—unless you don’t mind having a finger bit off!”

“Looks harmless enough. Not that big—”

“It’s the small, wiry ones you have to look out for.”

“Nice figure. Could be quite pretty, if someone were to bathe and take a brush to her.”

“Pretty counts for nothing, if she’s too wild to be tamed.”

The auctioneer called for silence. He looked unhappy, like a man with a toothache. “I have for sale one female slave, exact age unknown, though you can see for yourself that she’s quite young. I won’t pretend that she’s fresh—many of you have seen her before. A few of you have even owned her already—and brought her back to be sold again. Her current owner is aware of the problematic nature of this item, and so he is willing to start the bidding at a very low amount.” He named a ridiculously low sum, the cost of a few days’ worth of bread.

For the first time, I took a good look at the girl on the block. She had kept her head lowered until that moment. Now she looked up, pushed the masses of black hair from her face, and stared defiantly at the crowd. She stood with one foot in front of the other and held her shoulders back. Her posture and demeanor were not that of a slave. Her dark, glimmering eyes met mine.

My heart quickened. Something stirred in me that I had never felt before.

I looked into the little money bag I carried. As low as was the figure the auctioneer had named, I did not have enough.

The auctioneer called out the figure again. The crowd shuffled restlessly. No one bid.

“Very well,” sighed the auctioneer. “I am authorized to lower the starting bid.” He named a figure that was half of what he had named before.

It was exactly the amount I had in my purse. I studied the coins to be sure, then swallowed hard and looked at the girl again. She stared back at me. On her face I seemed to read amusement and disdain. But that was only on the surface, the face she showed to everyone. There was something else in her eyes, something only I could see—an expression at once proud and pleading, demure and demanding.

Never having bid on a slave before, I slowly raised my hand.

“We have a buyer!” cried the auctioneer, looking relieved and slightly astonished. Others in the crowd raised their eyebrows and shook their heads. Some laughed out loud.

Eager to finalize the transaction at once, the auctioneer summoned me onto the block and reached for my purse. As he counted the coins, I asked him what the girl was called.

“A name as peculiar and barbaric as she is. Hebrew, I think: Bethesda.”

Looking at her, I spoke the curious word for the first time. “Bethesda,” I whispered. “Now I know the name of the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

The auctioneer looked at me as if I were crazy. So did Bethesda.

So began the next chapter of my life.

CHRONOLOGY

ca. 2550 BC

The Great Pyramidis built in Egypt.

ca. 600

The Walls and Hanging Gardensare built at Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar.

776

The first games are held at Olympia.

ca. 750

The Temple of Artemisis constructed at Ephesus; it will subsequently be destroyed more than once (by flood and by fire) and rebuilt.

482

Xerxes demolishes the Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

456

The Temple of Zeus is open for the 90th Olympiad.

ca. 432

Phidias installs the Statue of Zeusin the temple at Olympia.

ca. 425

The historian Herodotus dies.

356

13–14 October: Herostratos burns down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus; Alexander the Great is born the same night. The temple is subsequently rebuilt.

ca. 350

The Mausoleumis built at Halicarnassus.

331

The city of Alexandria is founded in Egypt by Alexander the Great.

323

Alexander the Great dies at Babylon.

298

The Celtic warlord Cimbaules makes incursions against the Macedonians and is repelled.

ca. 290

The Colossusis completed at Rhodes.

ca. 280

The Pharos Lighthouseis built at Alexandria.

281-79

The Celts make a second incursion against Macedonia; Brennus attacks Delphi.

227

The Colossus falls.

ca. 170

Antipater of Sidon is born.

146

The Roman general Mummius sacks Corinth, but spares Olympia; Carthage is destroyed by Rome.

ca. 135

Posidonius is born in Syria.

133

Attalus III of Pergamon bequeaths his kingdom to Rome, which establishes the province of Asia.

ca. 115

Posidonius studies under Panaetius the Stoic in Athens.

110

23 March (Martius): Gordianus is born at Rome.

ca. 106

Bethesda is born at Alexandria.

ca. 90

After travels in Spain, Gaul, Italy, Sicily, Dalmatia, North Africa, and Greece, Posidonius settles in Rhodes.

95

Rome sides with Nicomedes of Bithynia in his war against Mithridates of Pontus.

93

23 March (Martius): Gordianus turns seventeen and puts on his manly toga.

92

Rome aids Nicomedes of Bithynia against Mithridates for the second time.

23 March (Martius): The novel begins in Rome on this day—the birthday of Gordianus and the funeral day of Antipater.

April (Aprilis): Gordianus and Antipater visit Ephesus during the Artemisia festival and see the Temple of Artemis (“Something to Do with Diana”).

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 Contextby Kathryn J. Gutzwiller (UC Press, 1998); Dioscorides and Antipater of Sidon: The Poemsedited by Jerry Clack (Bolchazy-Carducci, 2001); and two monumental works by A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigramsand The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Philip(Cambridge University Press, 1965 and 1968).

The rebus epitaph on Antipater’s tombstone also appears in The Greek Anthology,attributed to Meleager. The factuality of the poem—and whether it actually appeared on a stone—are matters for conjecture. From Pliny, Valerius Maximus, and a fragment of Cicero we hear about the annual “birthday fever” that supposedly caused or contributed to Antipater’s death.

*   *   *

How and when and from whom did the list of Seven Wonders originate? What do we actually know about each Wonder, and how do we know it? What became of the Wonders?

Mike Ashley’s book addresses these basic questions; I cannot repeat all that information here. But I can lay down some pointers for the reader curious to know more about the Wonders. Herewith, some notes on sources, following the order of each Wonder’s appearance in this book.

About the city of Ephesus and the worship of Artemis, the most useful volume I encountered was Rick Strelan’s Paul, Artemis, and the Jews of Ephesus(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996; also published as Journal of Theological Studies49, no. 1, 1998), which contains a long chapter vividly describing the city’s devotion to the goddess. Among the ancient sources, Pliny and Vitruvius provide details about the temple, while Strabo and Tacitus tell us about the grove of Ortygia. Very little remains of the Temple of Artemis; a few fragments can be seen at the British Museum in London.

What are we to make of the appendages that hang from archaic statues of Artemis—are they breasts or bovine testicles? See a clear digression on this point in “At Home in the City of Artemis: Religion in Ephesos in the Literary Imagination of the Roman Period” by C. M. Thomas in Ephesos: Metropolis of Asia,edited by Helmut Koester (Trinity Press International, 1995). Where was the grove of Ortygia located? I defer to the opinions of Dieter Knibbe and Hilke Thür in their respective papers, also included in Koester’s book.

Ephesus appears as a setting in several ancient Greek novels. Leucippe and Clitophonby Achilles Tatius describes the procession of Artemis and recounts the story of the virginity test and the Pan pipes in the sacred cave. The novel Apollonius, King of Tyre,by an unknown author, was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s play Pericles, Prince of Tyre,which comes to a giddy climax at the Temple of Artemis and gives us these memorable lines:

Marina

If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,

Untied I still my virgin knot will keep.

Diana, aid my purpose!

Bawd

What have we to do with Diana?

Gordianus’s visit to Ephesus had nothing to do with Dionysus, but everything to do with Diana.

A detailed reconstruction of the Mausoleum can be found in the multivolume The Maussolleion at Halikarnassos: Reports of the Danish Archaeological Expedition to Bodrumby Kristian Jeppesen. Volume 5 of the report, published in 2002, analyzes all the architectural, sculptural, and literary evidence (Pliny is our primary source), and includes photographs of a scale model. Fragments of the sculptural remains, including the famous statues thought to represent Mausolus and Artemisia, can be seen at the British Museum.

The grief of the widow Artemisia is described by many ancient authors, perhaps most vividly by Aulus Gellius. Ovid tells the story of Hermaphroditus and his transformation at the spring of Salmacis. Strabo and Vitruvius also mention the spring and its reputed powers. The sexual activity of the widow Bitto is the subject of one of Antipater’s poems, but it was my conceit to make her a relative of the poet.

Many books have been published about the ancient Games at Olympia. One of the most accessible is Tony Perrottet’s The Naked Olympics(Random House, 2004), which lays out the known facts with all the panache of a modern sportswriter. The Chronicleof the ancient author Eusebius lists the Games by date and names some of the winners, including Protophanes of Magnesia, about whom nothing else is known. The viper called a dipsas is mentioned in several ancient sources, including one of Antipater’s poems.

Ancient authors were astonished by the magnificence of the statue of Zeus by Phidias. The Roman author Quintilian declared that its “beauty is such that it is said to have added something even to the awe with which the god was already regarded: so perfectly did the majesty of the work give the impression of godhead.” Nothing of the statue remains today.

The interlude in Corinth was inspired by Antipater’s poems, recited in the novel, and also by a lecture I attended at the University of California at Berkeley in 2011, “Magic and Religion in Ancient Corinth,” delivered by Ronald Stroud, Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature Emeritus. Professor Stroud’s vivid account of curses and witchcraft was the genesis of Gordianus’s uncanny experiences amid the ruins of a once-great city. For archaeological details I consulted Ancient Corinth: a Guide to the Excavations(American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1960). Was the destruction and depopulation of Corinth as complete as many ancient authors suggest? Elizabeth R. Gerhard and Matthew W. Dickie address this question in their paper “The View From the Isthmus” in Corinth, the Centenary, 1896–1996, edited by Charles K. Williams II and Nancy Bookidis (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2003).

Sculptor and author Herbert Maryon recounted the history of the Colossus and considered the artistic and engineering challenges of its construction in a long article, “The Colossus of Rhodes,” published in 1956 in The Journal of Hellenic Studies76. More recently, Wolfram Hoepfner published his ideas about the monument, with illustrations of a reconstruction, in Der Koloß von Rhodos und die Bauten des Helios(Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2003). Nothing of the Colossus remains, and the exact location it occupied is uncertain. Despite their profound impression on popular imagination, old-fashioned images that show the statue straddling the harbor at Rhodes are works of fantasy, depicting a physical impossibility.

At the time of Gordianus’s visit, as recounted in the novel, the polymath Posidonius had recently settled at Rhodes after extensive travels. His writings about the Gauls survive only in fragments; a summary can be found in Philip Freeman’s The Philosopher and the Druids: A Journey Among the Ancient Celts(Simon & Schuster, 2006). Diodorus Siculus is probably quoting Posidonius when he describes the homosexual behavior of the Gauls: “Although their wives are comely, the men have very little to do with them, but rage with lust for each another. It is their practice to sleep on the ground on the skins of wild beasts and to tumble with a boy on 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.