Anthemius of Tralles

Dioscorus followed his father's profession in Tralles; Alexander did so in Rome and became one of the most celebrated medical men of his time; Olympius became a noted lawyer; and Metrodorus worked as a grammarian in Constantinople.

[3] Anthemius was said to have annoyed his neighbor Zeno in two ways: first, by engineering a miniature earthquake by sending steam through leather tubes he had fixed among the joists and flooring of Zeno's parlor while he was entertaining friends[4] and, second, by simulating thunder and lightning and flashing intolerable light into Zeno's eyes from a slightly hollowed mirror.

[3] In addition to his familiarity with steam, some dubious authorities credited Anthemius with a knowledge of gunpowder or other explosive compound.

In the course of his treatise On Burning Mirrors, he intended to facilitate the construction of surfaces to reflect light to a single point, he described the string construction of the ellipse[1] and assumed a property of ellipses not found in Apollonius of Perga's Conics: the equality of the angles subtended at a focus by two tangents drawn from a point.

[3] He was commissioned with Isidore of Miletus by Justinian I shortly after the earlier church on the site burned down in 532 but died early on in the project.