Squareonthehypothenus
With the first appearance of Squareonthehypothenus in the album The Mansion of the Gods, we discover a shy young man with the brightest of futures ahead of him. Caesar himself has just entrusted this architect with an important project: to build a group of dwellings to house the Romans near Asterix’s village, thus forcing our indomitable Gauls to accept Roman civilization.
But some things you cannot learn at school, and the learned calculations of our young architect are of little help when confronted with Getafix’s magic and slaves suddenly vehemently interested in workers’ rights (to such a point that the Roman legionaries themselves begin negotiating their pay and midnight permits).
What is worse, as Squareonthehypothenus strives to smooth things over, he becomes more and more authoritarian and less and less civilized! The last straw is when Cacofonix’s mellow melodies convince the recently arrived Romans that the Gauls, whom they seek to conquer at all costs, are fiendishly invasive themselves.
The name Squareonthehypothenus is a reference to the Pythagorean Theorem, which states that in a right angled triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. In other words, a2+b2=c2.