The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (29 page)

 
Beyond stood a more sober and sadder sight. By the temple of Poseidon, where arriving sailors gave thanks for their safe passage across the sea, Mark Antony had built a small promontory out into the harbor. At the end of this stood the Timonium. This temple, built after Antony’s defeat at Actium, was named after the misanthropic Timon of Athens, who had been an Athenian lord, wronged and mistreated by his friends, who henceforth hated and mistrusted all mankind. He had withdrawn from Athens and lived alone in the wilderness, and Antony, abandoned by his Roman friends, had wished to imitate him. The depths of such despair might be gauged from the epitaph on Timon’s tomb, which Callimachus, quoted in Plutarch, says read:

 
Older and happier buildings also crowded around the harbor and foremost among these was the museum in whose portico Eratosthenes had placed his astrolabe. This remained a lively and extensive institution, with its dining halls, colonnades, and gardens, in part of which roamed the exotic animals of the scholars’ private zoo. In the first century AD there would be a sea change here, inspired not by the pure philosophy of Greek thought but by practical problems of engineering, which would make this the only modern city in the ancient world.

The fascination with engineering that so failed to impress Archimedes now began to absorb the scholars of the museum. Rome was a physical empire, not an empire of the mind, and it wanted scholars to find practical solutions to their most pressing problems: conquering and ruling the world. The result would be advances in architecture and engineering that would remain unparalleled until the Renaissance: the first use of concrete; concrete that set underwater; aqueducts; metropolitan sewage systems; high-rise buildings; and, in Alexandria, very nearly a revolution.

Among the new breed of inventors who now walked the corridors and gardens of the museum and library, one stood out—Hero—and the revolution he nearly started eighteen hundred years too early was an industrial one. Hero was at one level exactly the type of scholar who had worked at the museum and library for centuries. He was a great geometer; his work
Metrica
(which was lost until 1896) dealt with theoretical problems of geometry, finding the areas and volumes of two- and three-dimensional geometric shapes and reiterating an ancient Babylonian method for estimating square roots which is still used in computing today. But at another level Hero was something new. His purpose in studying at the museum and library was practical. Hero professed none of Archimedes’ distaste for engineering but set out to collect the greatest examples from antiquity and add his own to them. For him theory was just a preliminary to practice. Pappus, an Alexandrian mathematician working around AD 320, considered Hero a “mechanician.” His school, he tells us, divided mechanics into theory and practice. The theory included the study of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and physics, while the practice included metalwork, architecture, carpentry, painting, and any other manual skill. It seems Hero had these skills in perfect balance, and in Pappus’s view, that put him among another group—the wonder-workers.

 
In fact, in Alexandria in the first century AD, Hero was the greatest of the wonder-workers. He was a designer and builder of automatons—automatically operated machines—with which he delighted and bemused the people of the city. The machines he built used gravity, pressure, heat, and water to power devices that appeared to operate without human intervention. They would have surprised and bewildered an eighteenth-century European as much as they did Romans and Alexandrians. In his great book the
Pneumatica
he explained the purpose of his lifework:

 
Simple machines had been a part of Alexandrian life for centuries before, usually seen in the clanking automatons of the great Ptolemaic parades of the early kings. The museum had been collecting peculiar machines, tricks, and unusual natural objects since its very inception. Ever since Alexander ordered his people to send any strange novelty to Aristotle that he might use it in his teaching, the collection of books had gone hand in hand with the collection of “things” in the museum. But before now these were perhaps considered little more than novelties or, at best, talking teaching aids. But in Roman Alexandria, the construction of such novelties now blossomed and expanded. For a moment it looked as though Aristotle’s own dream of a mechanized world was about to come true:

 
If there was a man to take Aristotle at his word, it was Hero. As with so many of the great Alexandrians, we know very little about his private life, but thankfully some of his works survive, either as original texts or as comments and discussions in the works of later engineers and mathematicians. In these books he describes the machines he built and the practical skills he learned in the process, and we also gain a sense of his delight at producing devices which filled their audience with wonder.

The machines that Hero built were the wonders of their age—indeed, they would have been the wonder of many ages since—and their deployment about the city made it appear to visitors to be literally a place of miracles. Some were for the home, simply there as entertainments for dinner parties. Others whirred and clanked away in theaters, producing amazing special effects. But the most likely place to find one of Hero’s machines was where magic and miracles were only to be expected—in the temples.

Religion in Egypt was a booming business in the early Roman Empire. The Roman view of religion was surprisingly relaxed. Provided that the imperial cult was acknowledged—more a matter of allegiance than belief—most Roman citizens and subjects were free to worship whatever deity they wished. This liberal approach made cities like Alexandria the home to hundreds of cults, from the traditional Roman and Greek pantheons and the worship of the Ptolemaic Serapis, to the uniquely Egyptian mystery cults of Isis and Osiris, to the Mithraism so beloved by the army officer corps, and even the ecstatic Eastern castration cult of Cybele. Within the city, the temples of Isis and Osiris vied with those of the deified Ptolemies, Zeus, and Jupiter for the devotion (and the money) of adherents. Attracting enough worshippers to any one, when there were literally hundreds to choose from, required a miracle, and that’s exactly what Hero could provide.

Hero could build devices which appeared to perform tasks either without human assistance or through divine intervention. It was the stage magic of its day, utilizing hidden machinery to make an audience stop in the street and look in awe at the show being put on by whichever god was worshipped in the temple where Hero had installed his device.

The illusion might begin even before worshippers entered the building, in the form of a machine he describes in
Pneumatica:

 
As the priest and congregation approached they would be faced with the huge, closed doors of the temple. Stepping forward, a priest would light a fire on an altar and, as though the god were pleased with the offering, the doors would swing open of their own accord, accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets. Behind the scenes, where only Hero and the priests ever went, a complex series of air- and water-filled tubes connected the altar to large bucket counterweights attached to the temple doors by pulleys. As the fire heated the air it expanded, forcing water in another tube into the buckets, which would then open the doors when there was enough water to weigh them down and set the pulley train in motion. When the fire was extinguished, the air in the pipes cooled and sucked the water back out of the buckets. As the weight in the buckets lessened, so the doors slowly closed under their own weight. It was all just advanced hydraulics, a subject first studied by another Alexandrian, Ctesibius, whose works Hero must have pored over in the library.

But the mechanical wonders had only begun. Inside temples it was very important for worshippers to purify themselves with holy water before any ritual. Selling this could of course be a useful additional income stream for a temple struggling against the competition, but collecting the money and dispensing the water was a time-consuming and frankly boring job, taking one of the priests away from his other duties. To ease this problem Hero invented a

 
Hero had invented the slot machine. On putting a silver four-drachma coin in the slot, a measured amount of holy water was dispensed—another little miracle for devotees. With ablutions complete, the acolyte could then proceed into the main sanctuary, where Hero could really allow his imagination to run riot with a series of miracle machines:

 
In one temple a steam boiler was used to create a jet of invisible steam on which a ball floated, apparently defying gravity. Hero also talks of a machine which allowed a group of mechanical songbirds to sing in a tree until a mechanical owl turned around to stare at them, at which point they fell silent in terror. And to complete the effect, in the temple gloom behind the miraculous machines, Hero’s moving statues blinked and waved like exotic extras in a Ray Harryhausen movie.

But these devices could also have a more practical use—and raise more money for the temple. Here was a chance for the great engineer to make the gods speak directly to their followers, and like any good show-man, he gave them what they wanted. Fortune-telling was a central part of many ancient classical religions, knowledge of the future, or a least a belief in having knowledge of the future, providing some bulwark against the fragility of life. Whole cities and states officially consulted the great oracles such as the Pythia at Delphi. The fabulously wealthy King Croesus of Lydia had many centuries before, according to Herodotus, asked the Pythia whether he should attack Persia. He had received a typically ambiguous response: “If you do, you will destroy a great empire” (Herodotus,
The Histories,
book 1). Heartened by this, he immediately attacked, only to discover that the empire the Pythia was referring to was his own.

Even Alexander had sought the oracle at Siwa to discover if his campaigns would be successful. This may seem like a piece of stage magic today, but the word of the Siwa oracle not only helped Alexander to resolve his course of action, but likely paved the way for his conquests. In the same way, not long after the Chaldean oracles of Babylon began predicting his doom, he did indeed die, and the same doleful prophesying had probably helped to oust Darius before that. Prophecies could be self-fulfilling. Enemies would attack a man marked out for bad luck. A man apparently blessed would be left alone. Oracles, to put it simply, worked, and many of all types and importance vied with each other. At the greatest, such as at Delphi and Siwa, kings themselves might send for answers, receiving back those cryptic messages from the god via a human intermediary, usually a priest or priestess absorbed in an ecstatic trance or under the influence of psychotropic drugs. Romans would seek answers in the entrails of sacrificed animals, as interpreted by their augurs.