Lunar Follies

POSIDONIUS

Maximus Valerius Posidonius, all of whose writings have been lost, yet whose theories of solar vital forces and rock-removal as a methodology for the prediction of the movements of large bodies of infantry, prefigured the contemporary strategies concerning the deployment of conscripted troops as assistants of various types in the preparation and serving of food, i.e., hot meals, and the maintenance of dining areas within the larger system of the order of battle, is thought to have conceived the notion of cosmic sympathy, and the employment of certain elements of post-Attic Stoicism, to hoist petards and launch Greek fire, shine Phoenician brass, and find the direction whence come and whither go sunbeams during extended thunderstorms, so as to better answer the questions of often surly travelers, stuffed, even bloated, with pita bread and roast lamb — at that time (ca. 94 BC) the only food available in the vast wastes of a particularly arid Syria (known, at that time, as “the Congo”) — is also thought to have taught his students the secrets of grinding eggshells for use as the basic component of a particularly fine spackle, corn flakes, ink, and heroin, secrets improbably locked into number theory and its attentions to the special properties of the integers, e.g.: unique factorization, primes, equations with integer coefficients, (biophantine equations), and congruences; and although earlier thinkers (Galen, Dombrowski, Galento, Fitts-Couggh, Gavilan) laid the groundwork for such discoveries with their invention of algebra, Posidonius’s work has about it a certain furtive elegance, an elegance much apparent in the exhibition of his astonishing solar-storm drypoints. The exhibition has, unfortunately, unexpectedly and abruptly closed, and its contents subsequently lost or destroyed.