Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

“I see the famous theatre,” I said, shading my eyes against the late-morning sun above Mount Pion, “but where is the great Temple of Artemis?”

Antipater snorted. “Gordianus! Have you forgotten the geography I taught you? Your head is like a sieve, boy.”

I bridled at being called a boy — I was eighteen, after all — then smiled as the lesson came back to me. “I remember now. The Temple of Artemis was built outside the city, about a mile inland, on low, marshy ground. It must be … somewhere over there.” I pointed to a spot beyond the steep northern slope of Mount Pion.

Antipater raised a bushy eyebrow. “Very good. And why did the builders chose that site for the temple?”

“Because they decided that building on marshy soil would soften the effect of earthquakes on such a massive structure.”

“Correct. To further stabilize the ground, before the cornerstone was laid, they spread a deep layer of crushed charcoal. And then what?”

“Atop the charcoal they put down many layers of fleece, taken from sheep sacrificed in honour of the goddess.”

“You are an apt pupil after all, my boy,” said Antipater, gratifying and irritating me in the same breath.

The sun was directly above our heads by the time a ferryboat arrived. Antipater again elbowed his way to the front, with me following, so that we were among the first to be ferried ashore. As soon as we alighted on the mole, a group of boys swarmed around us. Antipater chose the two who looked most honest to him and tossed them each a coin. They gathered our travelling bags and followed after us.

We strolled up the mole, which seemed like a small city itself; the crowded ships were like dwellings along a broad thoroughfare. I saw people everywhere, heard babies crying, and noticed that many of the masts were strung with laundry. A great many of the visitors to Ephesus, unable to find accommodations in the city, were apparently residing aboard ship.

“Where will we stay in Ephesus?” I asked.

“Years ago, when I lived here for a while, I had a pupil named Eutropius,” said Antipater. “I haven’t seen him since, but we’ve corresponded over the years. Eutropius is grown now, a widower with a child of his own. He inherited his father’s house, about halfway up the hill, not far from the theatre. Eutropius has done rather well for himself, so I’m sure our accommodations will be quite comfortable.”

We reached the end of the mole and arrived at the open gate, where people stood in long queues to be admitted to the city. I was unsure which queue we should get into, until one of the gatekeepers shouted, in Latin, “Roman citizens and their parties in this line! Roman citizens, queue here!”

As we stepped into the line, I noticed that some in the crowd gave us dirty looks. The line was shorter than the others, and moved more quickly. Soon we stood before a man in a ridiculously tall hat a bit like a quail’s plume — only a bureaucrat would wear such a thing — who glanced at my iron citizen’s ring as I handed him the travelling papers my father had secured for me before I left Rome.

Speaking Latin, the official read aloud: “‘Gordianus, citizen of Rome, born in the consulship of Gaius Marius and Lucius Valerius Flaccus’ — that makes you what, eighteen years old? — ‘of average height with dark hair and regular features, no distinguishing marks, speaks Latin and some Greek’ — and with an atrocious accent, I’ll wager.” The man eyed me with barely concealed contempt.

“His Greek accent is actually rather good,” said Antipater. “Certainly better than your Latin accent.”

“And who are you?”

“I am the young man’s travelling companion, formerly his tutor. Zoticus of Zeugma.” Antipater gave the name under which he was travelling incognito. “And you would not be speaking to us this way if my friend were older and wearing his toga and followed by a retinue of slaves. But Gordianus is no less a citizen than any other Roman, and you will treat him with respect — or else I shall report you to the provincial governor.”

The official took a long look at Antipater, made a sour face, then handed my documents back to me and waved us on.

“You certainly put that fellow in his place!” I said with a laugh.

“Yes, well … I fear you may encounter more than a little of that sort of thing here in Ephesus, Gordianus.”

“What do you mean?”

“Anti-Roman sentiment runs deep throughout the province of Asia — through all the Greek-speaking provinces for that matter — but especially here in Ephesus.”

“But why?”

“The Roman governor based at Pergamon taxes the people mercilessly. And there are a great many Romans in the city — thousands of them, all claiming special privileges, taking the best seats at the theatre, rewarding each other with places of honour at the festivals, sucking up the profits from the import and export trade, even sticking their fingers into the treasury at the Temple of Artemis — which is the great bank for all of Asia, and the lifeblood of Ephesus. I’m afraid, in the forty years since the Romans established their authority here, a great deal of resentment has been stirred up. If even a petty document-checker at the gate feels he can speak to you that way, I fear to imagine how others will behave. I think it might be best if we speak no more Latin while we’re here in Ephesus, Gordianus, even among ourselves. Others may overhear and make assumptions.”

Somewhere in the middle of this discourse, he had switched from Latin to Greek, and it took my mind a moment to catch up.

“That may be … a challenge,” I finally said, pausing to think of the Greek word.

Antipater sighed. “Your words may be Greek, but your accent is decidedly Roman.”

“You told the document-checker I had a good accent!”

“Yes, well … perhaps you should simply speak as little as possible.”

We followed the crowd and found ourselves in a market-place thronged with pilgrims and tourists, where vendors sold all sorts of foodstuffs as well as a great variety of talismans. There were miniature replicas of Artemis’s temple as well as images of the goddess herself. These images came in various sizes and were fashioned from various materials: from crudely made terra cotta and wooden trinkets, to statuettes that displayed the highest standards of craftsmanship, some advertised as being cast of solid gold.

I paused to admire a statuette of the goddess in her Ephesian guise, which seems so exotic to Roman eyes. Our Artemis — we call her Diana — is a virgin huntress; she carries a bow and wears a short, simple tunic suitable for the chase. But the manifestation of the goddess here — presumably more ancient — stood stiffly upright with her bent elbows against her body, her forearms extended and her hands open. She wore a mural crown, and outlining her head was a nimbus decorated with winged bulls. More bulls, along with other animals, adorned the stiff garment that covered her lower body, almost like a mummy casing. From her neck hung a necklace of acorns, and below this I saw the most striking feature of Artemis of Ephesus: a mass of pendulous, gourd-shaped protrusions that hung in a cluster from her upper body. I might have taken these for multiple breasts, had Antipater not explained to me that these protrusions were bulls’ testicles. Many bulls would be sacrificed to the virgin goddess during the festival.

I picked up the image to look at it more closely. The gold was quite heavy.

“Don’t touch unless you intend to buy!” snapped the vendor, a gaunt man with a long beard. He snatched the little statue from my hand.

“Sorry,” I said, lapsing into Latin. The vendor gave me a nasty look.

We moved on. “Do you think that image was really made of solid gold?” I asked Antipater.