In medieval Constantinople, a neighbourhood feud between an architect and a lawyer escalated into a battle of wits involving steam-powered earthquakes and blinding mirrors. This is the bizarre story of how one man used science to terrorise his rival, earning himself the nickname ‘Zeus the Lightener.’
In sixth-century Constantinople, there were two neighbours: Anthemius, an architect, and Zeno, a lawyer. Apparently, they had a dispute, perhaps because of someone snooping too much or due to the construction of an extension that blocked the other’s light. They took their grievances to court, and Zeno won. However, Anthemius was not willing to concede and, according to the historian Agathias, set out to get his revenge:
Zeno had a fine, spacious, and sumptuously decorated upper room, in which he loved to pass the time of day and entertain his close friends. The ground-floor rooms underneath it, however, belonged to Anthemius’ part of the house, so that the ceiling of the one was the floor of the other. Here Anthemius filled some huge cauldrons with water and placed them at intervals in various parts of the building. To these, he fastened tapering, trumpet-shaped pipes encased in leather and sufficiently wide at their bottom ends to allow them to fit tightly over the rims of the cauldrons.
He then fixed their upper ends securely and neatly to the beams and joists so that the air in them should rise up freely along the pipes until it exerted a direct pressure on the ceiling, while the leather held it in and prevented it from escaping. Having secretly set up this apparatus, he laid a fire under the base of each cauldron and kindled a powerful flame. As the water grew hot and boiled, a great head of steam began to rise.
Anthemius’ steam engine had one purpose: to cause the upper floor to rock under pressure, as if struck by an earthquake. Zeno and his friends fled in terror into the street, only to be baffled when they realised no one else was experiencing the shaking.
The torments didn’t end there, though. Anthemius also constructed a concave mirror, “by means of which he trapped the sun’s rays and then turned the disk round and suddenly shot a powerful beam of light into the room, so powerful in fact that it dazzled everyone it came into contact with.” Next, Anthemius found various objects with good percussion to “produce a deep, booming sound … and achieve the effect of loud and terrifying peals of thunder.”
It didn’t take long for Zeno to figure out who was behind this thunder and lightning spectacle. He took his complaint to the Byzantine emperor, stating that he was being tormented by ‘Zeus the Lightener’ and ‘Poseidon the Earth-Shaker,’ which soon became new nicknames for Anthemius.
We do not know how the emperor reacted, but Anthemius continued to have a successful career. He even wrote a treatise entitled On Burning Mirrors, which survives to this day. The historian Agathias also noted that many were in awe of Anthemius’ machine and wondered if he was truly trying to understand how earthquakes were created.
This tale of bad neighbours can be found in Agathias’ The Histories, translated by Joseph D. Frendo and published in the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae series by De Gruyter in 1975.
See also: 10 Medieval Inventions that Changed the World
In medieval Constantinople, a neighbourhood feud between an architect and a lawyer escalated into a battle of wits involving steam-powered earthquakes and blinding mirrors. This is the bizarre story of how one man used science to terrorise his rival, earning himself the nickname ‘Zeus the Lightener.’
In sixth-century Constantinople, there were two neighbours: Anthemius, an architect, and Zeno, a lawyer. Apparently, they had a dispute, perhaps because of someone snooping too much or due to the construction of an extension that blocked the other’s light. They took their grievances to court, and Zeno won. However, Anthemius was not willing to concede and, according to the historian Agathias, set out to get his revenge:
Zeno had a fine, spacious, and sumptuously decorated upper room, in which he loved to pass the time of day and entertain his close friends. The ground-floor rooms underneath it, however, belonged to Anthemius’ part of the house, so that the ceiling of the one was the floor of the other. Here Anthemius filled some huge cauldrons with water and placed them at intervals in various parts of the building. To these, he fastened tapering, trumpet-shaped pipes encased in leather and sufficiently wide at their bottom ends to allow them to fit tightly over the rims of the cauldrons.
He then fixed their upper ends securely and neatly to the beams and joists so that the air in them should rise up freely along the pipes until it exerted a direct pressure on the ceiling, while the leather held it in and prevented it from escaping. Having secretly set up this apparatus, he laid a fire under the base of each cauldron and kindled a powerful flame. As the water grew hot and boiled, a great head of steam began to rise.
Anthemius’ steam engine had one purpose: to cause the upper floor to rock under pressure, as if struck by an earthquake. Zeno and his friends fled in terror into the street, only to be baffled when they realised no one else was experiencing the shaking.
The torments didn’t end there, though. Anthemius also constructed a concave mirror, “by means of which he trapped the sun’s rays and then turned the disk round and suddenly shot a powerful beam of light into the room, so powerful in fact that it dazzled everyone it came into contact with.” Next, Anthemius found various objects with good percussion to “produce a deep, booming sound … and achieve the effect of loud and terrifying peals of thunder.”
It didn’t take long for Zeno to figure out who was behind this thunder and lightning spectacle. He took his complaint to the Byzantine emperor, stating that he was being tormented by ‘Zeus the Lightener’ and ‘Poseidon the Earth-Shaker,’ which soon became new nicknames for Anthemius.
We do not know how the emperor reacted, but Anthemius continued to have a successful career. He even wrote a treatise entitled On Burning Mirrors, which survives to this day. The historian Agathias also noted that many were in awe of Anthemius’ machine and wondered if he was truly trying to understand how earthquakes were created.
See also: 10 Medieval Inventions that Changed the World
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