David Wishart - Bodies Politic

‘You shut up too, please, dear.’

Agron grinned. ‘Yes, love.’

We ate in silence. Not that it was a hardship. The dumplings were beautiful.

‘Besides,’ Cass said after a bit, ‘Alexandria isn’t a place to visit at present.’

I looked up from my bowl. ‘You heard something from Mika?’ Mika was another of Cass’s huge family of siblings, although she’d reversed the trend, married another Alexandrian Greek, and moved back to the old country. Her husband ran a barge.

‘We had a letter just a few days ago,’ Agron said. ‘Mika’s getting worried.’

‘About what?’ I scooped up a dumpling.

‘What else? Trouble again between us and the damn Jews.’

Uh-oh. I held the dumpling poised. That had been Cass. I noticed the ‘us’. And the ‘damn’.

We’d hit serious cultural shoals here, or at least as close to them as the normally easy-going Cass – easy-going in that sense, anyway – ever went. To any reasonable person in the empire – certainly to any Roman – the Jews’re a joke: they believe in and worship only one monomaniacally-bad-tempered god, they have dietary rules that make no practical sense, and they flatly refuse to burn incense to the Divine Augustus and the Spirit of Rome, which to any non-Jew is just plain bad manners. Still, as far as Rome herself’s concerned if they choose to be stiff-necked, uncivilised, antisocial bastards then that’s their business; so long as they don’t get political and mess with the pax romana they can do whatever the hell they like, and we’ll defend their right to do it against anyone who wants to object. Just like we would for the other guys, if the situation was reversed. That’s what the pax romana means: you’ve the right to live as you like, believe what you want, so long as you keep the peace and don’t meddle with the social and political status quo. Do that – even think of doing it – and Rome’ll be on top of you like Archimenides’s marble block, because the downside of all this is that you play the game by her rules or not at all.

Which was just the problem in Alexandria. Or potentially at least. And it had been simmering on for years. Greeks and Jews are cat and dog; put them together en masse in the one city and you’ve got a recipe for trouble that’s inevitable. Two out of five of Alexandria’s population – and we’re talking six hundred thousand here, more than half the size of Rome – are Jews; and that’s a sizeable minority. Trouble is, with the exception of a handful of individuals from the oldest and richest families, they aren’t citizens. Only the Greeks are. And the Jews don’t like it. And the Greeks don’t like the fact that the Jews don’t like it.

The other important factor is that Rome rules Alexandria, not the Greeks who live there. We have done since Augustus beat Cleopatra and Antony at Actium sixty years back, and what we say goes, nem. con. The Greeks don’t like that, either. And sixty years, in a Greek city whose history goes back almost three hundred to Alexander himself, is nothing.

Complicated, right?

Still, we weren’t going to solve Alexandria’s Roman/Jewish/Greek problem in five minutes round an Ostian dinner table. It was time for a little tact. I put the spoon with its dumpling back down carefully on the plate. ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing serious,’ I said to Cass. ‘Mika’s always been a worry-monger.’ That was certainly true enough: two years back, when a minor stomach bug had swept the city, Mika had sent a letter to Cass that read like it was a last desperate missive smuggled out before the plague wiped out all human life within the walls, and had her making offerings at every temple in Ostia. When a second letter arrived a month later to say it had only been a small dose of the gripes and enclosing a recipe for quince jelly she hadn’t known whether to cry with relief or curse her sister black and blue for the worry she’d caused. According to Agron she’d done both.

‘Not this time, Marcus,’ Agron said. ‘It’s bad, or getting that way. And it’s your fault.’

‘ My fault?’ I’d been reaching for the wine cup. ‘How the hell can it be my fault?’

‘Come on, pal!’ He chuckled. ‘I mean the fault of you Romans. According to Mika, anyway. The governor’s a guy by the name of Flaccus, Atillius Flaccus. You ever hear of him?’

‘No.’

‘He was a crony of the Wart’s.’ Yeah, well, I’d suppose he’d’ve had to be to make Egyptian Prefect: the job has always been a direct imperial appointment. ‘Up to recently he was on the Jewish side, but now he’s done a U-turn.’

‘Not before time.’ That was Cass again, and it was snapped.

Agron glanced at her. ‘Maybe,’ he said cautiously. ‘But at least it kept the peace.’

‘ The peace? ’ Cass’s spoon went down. ‘We’re not threatening the peace. All we’re doing is protecting ourselves. Trying to, anyway. The Jews are parasites, they’ve all the perks of living in the city with none of the duties. They don’t mix with us or anyone else if they can help it, they’ve their own assembly, their own courts, their own festivals -’

Uh-oh; this was a bad one, and when Cass got the bit between her teeth she was worse than Perilla. I lowered my head and concentrated on my soup.

‘Cass, love.’ Agron put a hand on her wrist. ‘That’s enough. Come on, settle down, eh? And what’s this “us”? You were born here in Ostia. You’ve never even seen the place.’

It was touch and go for a moment, but then she took a deep breath, patted his hand and smiled. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. But it still makes me angry.’

Yeah, I could see that. And if someone like Cass could get so upset about conditions in Alexandria then there was trouble there right enough. None the less, I was interested. ‘How do you mean, “done a U-turn”?’

‘Flaccus used to support the Jewish community, like I said.’ Agron dipped his bread in the soup. ‘Stuck up for their rights to try purely Jewish cases, where only Jewish religious law was involved, in their own courts. Things like that.’

‘Hang on, pal. No problem there. It’s standard Roman policy anywhere a Jewish community’s concerned. Their religious law’s a minefield, even I know that. The governor would keep out of it, stay neutral. So long as no actual crimes or common issues were involved.’

‘That’s the point.’ Agron put the piece of bread in his mouth and chewed. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m no expert, I just know what Mika told us. But it looks like as governor he’s not sitting on the fence any longer, and he’s come down on the Greek side. Maybe it has something to do with what’s happening in Judea. They’ve had trouble there in recent years, riots, that sort of thing. A few hothead Zealot leaders crucified, and you know how these things spread, especially when religion and politics get mixed. My guess is he’s stopping trouble before it starts, sending out a message to keep his own local Jewish hotheads’ tails down.’

‘Are there any?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m only passing on what we get from the letters. Far as I can see, and reading between the lines, it seems like any hotheads there are’re Greeks, and Flaccus isn’t doing anything about them at all.’

‘That’s not fair,’ Cass said.

‘I’m sorry, love, but it is.’ Agron could be firm when he wanted, and he was firm now. She frowned but said nothing. ‘That guy Isidorus sounds a real troublemaker, for one.’

‘Isidorus?’ I paused, the wine cup half way to my mouth. ‘I knew an Isidorus, a couple of years back. Here in Rome. He was one of the Wart’s top men in the diplomatic corps.’

‘Different person, then. This one’s Alexandrian born and bred.’