The Book of the Wanderers

by Marcus Manilius, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The tables came to my house in a fuller's basket, under a cloth that smelled of urine and sulphur, on the fourth day after the Senate had voted to clear Italy of astrologers. Zosimus carried the basket himself. He would not let my man Primus take it from him at the door, and he set it down on the floor of my writing-room as a man sets down a sleeping child, and then stood up and pressed both hands into the small of his back, for he was past fifty and the climb from the Subura is long.

"The fuller lent me the basket," he said. "He thinks it holds my winter tunics. He asked why a man with no wife needs four."

I should say who Zosimus was. No man is understood until he is set in the order that holds him, and his was a small one, a room and a lamp and a long column of figures.

He was a freedman of the Julian house, freed long ago, a citizen with the vote and a Greek name he never troubled to change. In the trade the Romans called him a mathematicus, which was the law's word for him now, and also the true word, for what he did was arithmetic. He did not sit in a booth by the Circus taking coins from soldiers who wished to know whether their girls were faithful. He sat in a room above a cooper's shop with a lamp, an abacus, and a copy of tables that had come from Alexandria, and he worked out where the five wandering stars would stand, day after day, for years that had not yet come. Then he sold the columns to men who did sit in booths, and they cast the nativities, and took the coins, and some of them were now on the roads south with their gear on a mule, and two of them were dead.

Everyone in Rome knew of the two by then. Pituanius had been thrown from the Rock. Marcius the consuls had put to death outside the Esquiline Gate, in the ancient manner, with a trumpet sounding. Primus had gone to see it and came back grey, and would not say what the ancient manner was, and I did not ask him twice.

"You are staying," I said to Zosimus.

"I am a citizen. Citizens who give up the art are let alone, they say. Tomorrow I go and give it up." He looked at the basket. "So tonight I must decide what to do with it."

---

Let me say what was in the basket, since I spent the next several hours with it on my knees, and the rest of that winter.

There were eleven rolls of papyrus, each the length of a man's arm when wound, and a bundle of tablets tied with a cord. The rolls were tables. Down the left side of each column ran the days, by the Egyptian months, which keep a steady count of days, as ours did not before the deified Julius mended them. Across ran five headings in Greek: the star of Kronos, the star of Zeus, the star of Ares, the star of Aphrodite, the star of Hermes. Under each heading, against each day, stood a sign and a number of degrees and a number of sixtieths of a degree, in the little Greek letters that serve that people for numerals, written very small and very straight with a reed cut so fine that a breath would bend it.

The first roll began in the year Augustus took the name of Augustus. The eleventh ran forward to a year that has not yet come as I write this.

"Seventy years," I said.

"Seventy-four. Up to the year I was freed, I copied. After that I worked." He pulled a stool toward the lamp with his foot and sat. "Do you know what the hardest thing is, in that work? Not the arithmetic. The headings."

He unrolled the eleventh roll a little way and showed me. At the head of each year, where the Egyptian count gave its number, he had left a space beside it, and in the earlier rolls that space was filled with two Roman names: the consuls of that year, by whom we name our years. In the later rolls the space was empty. Year after year, the stars of Kronos and Zeus and Ares walked on down the columns in their small straight letters, each to its degree and its sixtieth, and above them stood a blank where the names of the men who would govern Rome that year ought to be.

"I know where Ares will be on the morning of the Kalends of March," he said, "nineteen years from now. I do not know whose year it will be. Nobody knows. They have not been elected. Some of them are still at their letters." He laughed, quite softly. "I can compute Ares. I never undertook to compute the Senate."

---

Here I must stop, as I stopped him then, because he had said a thing I could not let pass.

He spoke as though there were two heavens: one above, of stars, which a careful man with an abacus could follow down the years without error, and one below, of men, of elections and trials and decrees, which no one could follow and which fell upon the careful man out of the dark. But there is one heaven. The cosmos is a single living thing, ruled through by a single reason, and the parts of it do not keep two calendars. The same order that sets Ares at his degree on the Kalends of March sets the consuls in their chairs. The same chain that brings the star of Kronos round to the Ram again after its long slow labour brought Libo Drusus to his sword on the Ides of September, and brought the Senators to their benches after it, and brought their decree down the Subura to a room above a cooper's shop. The names in the blank space are fixed. They are fixed now, as Ares is fixed. They are only not computed.

I said so. I said it, I am afraid, at some length, and in my own measures, for I had been working that afternoon on the proem to a book, and the lines were still in my mouth.

Zosimus heard me out with his hands folded on his belly.

"Then the Senate was computed," he said, "only not by me."

"Not by any man."

"Good. I should not like to think a colleague had seen this coming and not sold me the column." He leaned forward and touched the edge of the roll, where the empty headings were. "Your poem, Marcus. How far have you got with it?"

---

This was not idle. He had a right to the question, and I will give the answer here as I gave it to him, for I have never given it plainly anywhere else.

I had promised the wanderers. I had promised them more than once, in the books I had already finished and read aloud to the few who would sit for it: that I would come in due course to the five stars that do not keep their places, and sing their natures and their powers, and how each, entering a sign, alters what the sign would otherwise do. Any man who casts a nativity needs them. Without the wanderers a nativity is a house with its walls up and no one living in it. Zosimus knew this better than I did; he had sold the furniture for thirty years.

And I had not written them. I had sung the signs, which keep their order and their figures; I had sung the twelve lots of fortune, and the twelfths of the signs, and the constellations that rise beside the zodiac and give their own gifts at a man's birth. All of these keep station. They are the fixed frame of the heaven, and the hexameter, which is itself a fixed frame, takes them gladly. The line has six feet and the zodiac twelve signs and both of them come round. You can feel the order in the measure. That is why I write in measure. To sing an ordered heaven in shapeless words would be to tell a lie about it with every sentence.

But the wanderers walk. They go forward and then stand and then go back, and the backward walk of Ares in particular is a thing I had tried four times to put into verse and four times had produced either nonsense or a column of numbers in disguise. The order is there. Zosimus had it in his basket, every degree of it for seventy-four years. But it is an order of the abacus, of sixtieths carried and remainders kept, and every time I tried to lift it into the line, the line broke under the weight of it, like a cart-axle loaded with lead.

"I have not got to them," I said.

"You will not."

"I may."

"You have promised them for seven years." He did not say it unkindly. "I have read your books. All your heaven stands still. It is a beautiful heaven. It is like the ceiling of a rich man's dining-room. My heaven moves, and it is ugly, and it is correct." He tapped the basket with his foot. "So I thought, since I am to stop tomorrow, and since you are a poet and not a mathematicus, and no praetor in Rome will search the house of a poet who writes about the stars for the stars themselves, which are not illegal: you might keep the moving part. Put it under your still heaven. Then the house will have someone living in it."

---

I will set down the arguments against, because Primus set them down for me that same night, at the door of the writing-room, in a whisper that could have been heard in the street.

The decree had not said "booths". It had said astrologers. A man who held forty-two years of the wanderers in a basket held exactly what an astrologer holds; and if anyone came, what would they find, a poem or a practice? He did not want to go and see the ancient manner a second time with his own master at the end of it. He had been with my family since before I could walk, and he used that freely.

He was right that it was a risk. He was wrong that it was a choice.

This, reader, is the point at which most men who have learned something of the stars go astray, and I set it down so that you will not. They think that knowing the order frees them to step aside from it. They look at the column and see trouble coming, and they think: there, now I know, now I shall go round. But there is nothing to go round, and nowhere to go round to; the man who steps aside steps into another part of the same chain, which was also written. Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling. Either way you go. The only thing left to you is the manner of your going, whether you walk with your head up or are hauled along the stones.

Zosimus was going to the praetor tomorrow, to put his hand where they told him and say that he had stopped. He was going willingly. I had watched him across the lamp for an hour and he had not once raged at the Senate or wept for himself or cursed Libo, who had brought it on all of them by asking the wrong men the wrong questions about his own greatness. He had come up the hill with his basket, as a man brings in the harvest before the rain. And now the basket was in my room, and whether it stayed there was no more open than the position of Ares on the Kalends of March. It was only not yet computed.

I told Primus to bolt the street door, and go to bed.

---

Zosimus did not leave at once. He wanted, I think, to see the rolls into my hands properly, as a father wants to see a daughter into the house of her husband and the door shut. He showed me how the columns ran and how the Egyptian months stood against ours, and how to find the day I wanted, and how to read the little letters, which I could read slowly and badly, being a Roman who learned his Greek from books. He showed me where he had found his own errors, years ago, and gone back and washed them out with a wet sponge and written the true number over. You could see the places if you held the sheet against the lamp: a thinness in the papyrus, a cloud in the light.

"Whoever copies these after me," he said, "will put a seven for a two somewhere, and a planet will be in the wrong sign for a month, and some poor child will be told he will die in his bed when he is meant to drown. I cannot help that. I can only make the first copy true."

I said nothing to that. I have thought about it since more than I can say here. A poet, too, makes only the first copy.

Then he took up the bundle of tablets, which he had not yet untied, and turned it over in his hands.

"These are the working," he said. "The rolls are clean. These are where I did the sums."

"Then they belong with the rolls."

"No." He untied the cord and opened the top tablet, and I saw the wax was crowded edge to edge with figures, and the last line of figures stopped halfway across. The stylus had dug a little hole at the end of it, where the point had rested and been lifted away.

"I was working the year after the last roll, thirty-three years from now," he said. "The star of Zeus, the month of Athyr. My neighbour knocked and told me about the decree, and I put the stylus down to answer the door, and I have not picked it up." He looked at the half-line a while. "It is not finished. If I finish it tonight I have done one more night of the art. If I finish it after tomorrow, I am forsworn."

"Then leave it."

"Yes. But I do not like to." He closed the tablets and tied them again, carefully, as he did everything. "I shall take these home and smooth them for my landlord's accounts. He sells barrel-hoops. There are always numbers."

At the door he stood a moment, looking up, though there was nothing to see from my door but a strip of sky between two roofs. Then he went down the hill without a lamp. I heard his sandals for a long way, because the street was quiet that week; a good many people had gone quiet that week.

---

He went to the praetor in the morning and gave up the art. Primus went too, to stand in the crowd and watch, and came back and said it had been quick, a line of men, a few words, a hand on something, and Zosimus had come out into the sun and blinked and gone off toward the cooper's. I did not go myself. I told myself it was out of tact. I think now it was so that I could not be counted among the people at the door.

That night I took the eleventh roll up to the little terrace over the street door. I had told myself I would find the star of Zeus by its column and see it where the numbers said, and so have the two heavens, the moving and the still, in my own two hands at once.

It was not so simple. Zosimus's letters were small and my lamp was poor, and the wind off the river kept lifting the end of the sheet. The sky over Rome was the sky over Rome, which is to say smoky at the edges and full of the light of other men's lamps. I found the sign where the column put the star of Zeus, or I believe I found it, low down where the smoke was thickest; and there was a bright point in it that did not twinkle, and I could not be sure, then or after, whether it was the star of Zeus or a lamp burning late in some high window on the Aventine. That was all the confirmation I had: a point of light that might be heaven or might be a man, and a number I had read at the third attempt.

But I did not need more. I have never doubted that the wanderers walk where the numbers say. What I stood there doubting, with the papyrus flapping against my wrist, was my own book. I had built a still heaven and called it the whole, and a freedman with an abacus had climbed my hill and set the rest of it at my feet in a fuller's basket, and gone home to measure barrel-hoops.

I went down and sat at my table. The proem I had been writing lay where I had left it, its last line unfinished, and beside it the space where the wanderers ought to begin. I trimmed the lamp. I put the eleventh roll on the table, open at the year with the empty heading, and weighed down its corners with the inkpot and the whetstone I keep for my reed-knife. Then I took up the reed, and wet it, and held it over the place where the line broke off, and waited for the measure to come.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Mārcō Mānīliō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Marcus Manilius, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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