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Sosigenes: late 40's, male, single, peripatetic scholar.

Sosigenes is a Greek Alexandrian, an astronomer and mathematician, and who knows what else besides?

The Egyptians, a cheerful and pragmatic people, are the oldest of the civilisations, and he is heir to their accumulated knowledge. He knows the thirty-six volumes of the Hermetic Books of Thoth, and so is a master of geography, of the liturgies and sacred rites, of the all-important course and rhythm of the Nile. He is believed to have his own theories as to the causes of the Nile's rise and ebb.

Then there is the library at Alexandria, the greatest by far in the world, in whose most obscure reaches he is often to be found.

He has discovered that the planet Mercury orbits the Sun.

His view of the Romans? They count inclusively, so that the day after tomorrow is (Sosigenes holds up his hand to you) - thumb today finger tomorrow finger day after - three days! Contemptible. Their calendar is a standing joke, months out of kilter with the seasons. How can a people so at odds with the simplest natural cycle behave as anything but reckless and malevolent children?

In appearance and manner he is a mild and pleasant-looking man who goes unnoticed, a solitary wary of crowds and noise. If he chooses to teach you, you will remember his intense and amused eyes.

What else is he besides? Whatever pertains to measurement and span, on the earth or in the heavens: astrologer, architect, intelligencer, technocrat, inventor of artillery pieces, doctor and apothecary (since bodies and elements have their scales and harmonies), philosopher...

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In another universe and in 46BC, Sosigenes revealed to Caesar, an amateur astronomer himself, the pattern of the Sothic Calendar, along with the notion of a Leap Year which the Egyptians, despite the command of Ptolemy III of 238BC, had never adopted.

Some rilles and a crater in the Sea of Serenity are named after him. The crater Julius Caesar is nearby.

A moony mystic? A critic has written...
He took no heed of standard or measure, of orbit or of sacred interval. But first he cut up the year into twelve unequal and unmeaning bits - to say he divided it into portions is far too scientific an expression - which rags bore indeed the name of the insulted moon, but of which that mighty measurer condescended to make no sort of recognition. And then he threw the "odd day" in along with the "odd month"; much as a child, who has broken his toy horse, glues a bit of the tail to the shortest of the legs, and calls aloud on creation to admire his handiwork.