ANTHEMIUS  ,

Greek mathematician and architect, who produced, under the patronage of Justinian (A.D . 532), the original and daring plans for the church of St Sophia in Constantinople, which strikingly displayed at once his knowledge and his ignorance . He was one of five, brothers—the sons of Stephanus, a physician of Tralles—who were all more or less eminent in their respective departments . Dioscorus followed his father's profession in his native place; Alexander became at Rome one of the most celebrated medical men of his time; Olympias was deeply versed in Roman jurisprudence; and Metrodorus was one of the distinguished grammarians of the great Eastern capital . It is related of Anthemius that, having a quarrel with his next-door neighbour Zeno, he annoyed him in two ways . First, he made a number of leathern tubes the ends of which he contrived to fix among the joists and flooring of a fine upper-room in which Zeno entertained his friends, and then subjected it to a miniature earthquake by sending steam through the tubes . Secondly, he simulated thunder and lightning, the latter by flashing in Zeno's eyes an intolerable light from a slightly hollowed mirror . Certain it is that he wrote a treatise on burning-glasses . A fragment of this was published under the title IIep1 irapa66 cev pnxavgA6,ro.v by L . Dupuy in 1777, and also appeared in 1786 in the forty-second volume of the Hist. de l'Acad. des Incr.; A . Westermann gave a revised edition of it in his lIapabot-aypacpaa (Scriptores rerum mirabilium Graeci), 1839 . In the course of constructions for surfaces to reflect to one and the same point (1) all rays in whatever direction passing through another point, (2) a set of parallel rays, Anthemius assumes a property of an ellipse not found in Apollonius (the equality of the angles subtended at a focus by two tangents drawn from a point), and (having given the focus and a double ordinate) he uses the focus and directrix to obtain any number of points on a parabola—the first instance on record of the practical use of the directrix .

On Anthemius generally, see

Procopius, De Aedific. i . 1; Agathias, Hist. v . 6-9; Gibbon's Decline and Fall, cap. xl . (T . L .