Wayward Son Read Online Free

from the Vatican. Although its origin was murky, the device itself was not. Virtually all seventy-two of its gears, with equilateral triangular teeth, were intact. And the two-thousand-character “instruction manual” on the first antikythera was dwarfed by the five thousand characters on the mechanism the Vatican had sent—not to mention the fact that this more sophisticated version could be dated to about 250 BC, at least a century before the one in Athens.
    Was the antikythera built primarily for navigation? For calendar making? For astrological forecasts? For predicting celestial events or pinning down the dates of festivals like the Olympic Games? The Getty conservators, led by Amanda James, figured that their priceless bronze bauble might well yield the answer.
    With the speed she had cultivated to neutralize spam grams, she zapped her current column to her boss, then typed a detailed report on the antikythera team’s progress to date. She attached a memo indicating that she felt there would be sufficient material for an update to the Vatican. Particularly interesting, she wrote, were the results from the ESEM (Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope) exams, which revealed most of the five thousand characters with stunning clarity. Then, as insurance, she prepared a bulleted list of talking points on the latest batch of Herculaneum papyri she had been restoring.
    Amanda had been fascinated by papyri since her undergraduate days. The papyrus plant’s widespread distribution in tropical Africa and its adaptability into sheets and strips made it an ideal medium for writing in the ancient world, beginning as early as 3000 BC. There were alternatives, of course, notably ostraca, or potsherds, as well as leather. But for availability and price, no material bested papyrus.
    After the earliest excavations of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum began in the 1750s, a trove of nearly eighteen hundred papyrus rolls came to light, thus giving the Villa its name. The rolls were carbonized by the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that buried the town in AD 79, and unrolling and reading them proved especially challenging. Two and a half centuries after the discovery, UCLA and the Getty were still busy with the task. By that time, it was clear that the Villa dei Papiri—by many accounts the most luxurious in either ancient Herculaneum or Pompeii—had been the repository for written works of exceptional interest. For the Getty, participation was natural—the Villa dei Papiri was the principal model on which Mr. Getty’s Malibu museum was based architecturally.
    The Villa’s original owner, Lucius Calpurnius Piso , had a taste for philosophy. As the father-in-law of Julius Caesar , Piso’s wealth meant that he could indulge his leanings, and he commissioned Philodemus, a philosopher with roots in Syria, to shape the library collection. Not surprisingly, the collection came to include many of Philodemus’s own works, which focused on ethics, rhetoric, government, and music, as well as the history of philosophy.
    Prior to the excavations of the 1750s, none of Philodemus’s prose works had been known. So Amanda’s deepening involvement in the UCLA/Getty’s Philodemus Project had a twofold cachet: she was part of a team that was carefully bringing an important ancient author to light, and the team was also advancing their technical know-how as they delved ever deeper into the only surviving private library from the ancient world.
    By nine forty-five, Amanda felt ready for her meeting down the hall. She suddenly remembered her promise to confirm with Juan Carlos, yet she needed to raise the issue with Walker, who had clearly been brought into the loop. She wondered how much Johnny’s grandfather, Silvio, director of the nuovi scavi, had told her boss. She decided to carefully tease out the extent of Walker’s knowledge.
    At the stroke of ten, Amanda knocked on his door. A resonant voice welcomed her inside the office.