Джеймс Миченер - The Source

So in a kind of martyr’s defiance, ennobled by a force he did not understand, Jehubabel threw off his fear and performed the circumcision. The Jews had taken the step from which there could be no retreat.

… THE TELL

One cool sunny day in October, while John Cullinane watched the hoopoe birds make believe they were archaeologists, Eliav and Tabari stood behind him on the mound with a pair of field glasses inspecting the sea off Akko, where white specks were appearing, and the Arab asked, “You ever see this, John?”

Cullinane took the glasses and focused them on the lovely minarets of Akko, then shifted them downward to the Mediterranean, where against the blue sea a cluster of white specks appeared, dancing upon the water like uncertain birds. “Are they sails?” he asked.

“The annual race from Akko,” Tabari said, and the men passed the glasses back and forth to follow the distant competitors.

“It must have been quite a shock to the Canaanites and the Jews when the Greeks introduced games on a large scale over there in Akko,” Cullinane suggested.

“We Jews watched their exhibitionism with disgust,” Eliav said. “The Old Testament looks with a fairly cynical eye at games.”

“But not the New,” Tabari said as he followed the white dots spreading out across the sea, the abler to the fore and those less skillfully handled already behind. “I remember at school in England our headmaster used to recite with tears in his voice the statement of St. Paul commending games.” Mimicking a toothy Church of England dignitary, he recalled the motto of his school: “‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day …’”

“The Greeks and the English,” Eliav reflected. “They’re the ones who took games seriously. Gave us an ideal of sportsmanship. And not only in games. You fight with an Englishman in war or politics, fight him fairly, and when the war’s over you shake hands. I wish we Jews and Arabs had learned that kind of discipline.”

“I was always out of place in my school,” Tabari recalled. “There was one swine from Leeds who used to knock me down eight times running in boxing, then say with his ruddy sportsmanship, ‘You fought the good fight, Tabari.’ Under me breath I used to mutter an old Arab curse, I hope, you bloody barstard, you break every tooth in your head but one.’ Between those two concepts there’s quite a difference.”

“Why didn’t the Greek ideal catch hold in these parts?” Cullinane asked.

“For the same reasons it wasn’t acceptable in Rome,” Tabari explained. “It’s fun to chase after a running man, but it’s more fun to sit in a comfortable stadium and watch lions chase him. The Greeks and the English developed sports. The Romans and the Americans degenerated them into spectacles. And the Arabs and Jews said to hell with the whole silly mess.”

“But the sense of fair play, extended truce, that comes from games. We all need that,” Eliav said. “From what experience will we in this part of the world learn those lessons?”

“‘He kicked me in the back when I wasn’t looking,’” Tabari quoted from the motto of his family, “‘so I kicked him in the face, twice, when he was.’”

“How do you explain the big difference between Old Testament and New on these matters?” Cullinane asked. “I can remember dozens of quotes from St. Paul on athletics.”

“Could only have been the Greek influence,” Eliav said. “Paul attended the great games at Antioch. He speaks constantly of wrestling and running and gaining the prize. It was from him that Christians gained their idea of the moral life as a struggle against competitors, whereas we Jews abhorred the idea of competition in such fields. From the over-all point of view, I suppose the Christians were right.”

Cullinane tried to recite a passage from St. Paul dealing with athletes, but he bogged down and went to his office for a Bible, where in Corinthians he found the words which had been hammered into him as a boy: “‘Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.’” He closed the book and asked, “Isn’t that the sportsman’s ideal, fight to win but control yourself in doing so?”

“I’m rather pleased these days,” Eliav said, “when I see Jewish men and women competing in the Olympic games. Very late we’re discovering that in these matters the Greeks were right.”

“Now if the Arabs will do the same,” Tabari added, “and if we’ll both go the rest of the way and indoctrinate ourselves in the British attitude toward fair play when the game’s over, we might pick up where the Greeks left us more than two thousand years ago.” Through the glasses he studied the distant racers and reported, “The triangular sail’s far out in front, proving that St. Paul was right. In every race there can be only one winner. The question is what filthy tricks can you play on the other fellow, without being caught, to make sure he loses?”

• • •

The Ptolemais to which Gymnasiarch Tarphon led his runners in that gracious autumn of 167 B.C.E. bore no resemblance to the ancient Akka of the Egyptians or to the Aecho of the Phoenicians. Those settlements had huddled inland upon a mound overlooking the Belus River, but Ptolemais, one of many cities throughout Asia Minor encouraged by the forward-looking Antiochus Epiphanes, stood boldly upon a peninsula jutting out into the sea, while the hinterland reached back to encompass the older site as well. Within an ambulating wall Ptolemais stood as one of the subtlest political inventions of man, a free Greek city-state with its own assembly, its right to mint its own coinage and its own particular system of government with elected officials subservient to Antioch and Antiochus only in matters of foreign policy and the higher reaches of religion. Along the waterfront it contained a noble theater built of marble, where the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides were seen and where the comedies of Aristophanes were offered to amuse the mob. Exquisite temples dotted the city, one to Antiochus Epiphanes but many to the local gods like Baal, and there were baths dedicated to Aphrodite. Factories produced glassware that would enchant all subsequent generations who loved beauty; silver from Asia and gold from Africa were worked into local jewelry that was famous as far away as Spain.

To explain in one instant the superiority of a true city-state, as compared to a town like Makor, which was ruled from Antioch, Tarphon took his runners to a bench-lined square where a tall, white-bearded Negro from Nubia stood majestically on a podium, arguing with any who cared to contest his intelligence. “He’s a sophist,” the gymnasiarch whispered to his athletes. “Listen.”

Tarphon stepped forth from the crowd and said, “Sir, I hold the earth is flat.”

“It must be round,” the dark sophist replied, and in a series of brilliant and logical deductions the former slave, trained in Athens, proved to any sensible man that the earth must be round. He cited Aristotle, travelers to Arabia, the common sense of men who could see the ocean and the flight of birds. When he paused for breath, Tarphon whispered to Menelaus, “Tell him it’s round.” And Menelaus did so, whereupon the sophist cast his luminous eyes at the youth and said, “Hold now! How in reason could the earth be round?” And one by one he demolished his own former arguments, calling again upon Aristotle and common sense to refute the idea that a thing so essential to life as the earth could be round, allowing men to fall off.