Chapter 1
Jupiter's Panorama

It must have been like a film premiere at Cannes. Throngs of excited spectators filed their way into the heart of Rome, shamelessly ogling the latest fashions and pointing out the celebrities in their midst. An impatient crowd was soon milling outside the venue-an elegant, column-lined arcade called the Vipsania Colonnade, expressly built as a sort of open-air art gallery-where a sensational new opus was about to be unveiled. White-robed priests were busy sacrificing animals to guarantee the ongoing favor of the gods. Choruses of youths sang patriotic anthems. Silver fountains burbled in nearby gardens, while food vendors and beggars noisily worked the crowd. At last, this colorful audience of ancient Romans-everyone from perfumed aristocrats in their silk gowns and brilliant togas to impoverished slum dwellers in their grimy tunics-jostled to the foreground, all trying to have their observations heard above the cacophony.

Looming above them was a dazzling spectacle-a map of the world as large as a drive-in movie screen, showing the three known continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Two thousand years later, it's easy to imagine the frisson of that heady scene-especially if you happen to be, as I was, piecing it together in the fabulous halls of the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan, a modern-day Roman temple whose interior gleams with marble and ceilings swarm with depictions of the pagan gods. I'd fled there to escape the first heat wave of summer-steam was rising from the sidewalks like the fumes from Hades-and besides, New York reality was starting to close in on me, in more ways than one. But in that silent refuge, surrounded by ...