György Spiró - Captivity

Hippolytos recounted with a laugh that virtually all those with a deep attachment to the land were the descendants of Jews who sometime in the past, many generations ago, had been carried off as slaves into Egypt. The Ptolemies had crammed them into border fortresses to protect the frontiers of the state, and they had graciously given them land instead of food and pay, of course — let them make their livelihood as best they could, and if they couldn’t, then so be it, they’d perish of hunger. Those Jewish slaves of the border fortresses, who were subjugators, oppressors and looters of the indigenous population, had become the first wealthy Jews in Egypt since Moses — mistakenly, as it had turned out for sure in retrospect — had plumped for an exodus from Egypt. There was no richer countryside anywhere else on Earth; the Nile valley, due to its yearly flooding, was the most fertile land anywhere in the world, and the Jews would have saved themselves a world of trouble if, two thousand years ago, they had just calmly sat on their bottoms. Their monotheistic religion would in any case gradually have spread this far, only with fewer conflicts. If things had happened that way, then the conquering Greeks who had overrun the country under Alexander the Great would today be our slaves, Hippolytos declared wistfully.

Uri was captivated by the young astronomer’s compact philosophy of history, and asked him whether he was right in believing that by that token anyone among the Jews who was enslaved at the right time and in the right place was favored by fortune. Hippolytos confirmed that this was indeed the case: anyone who remained free on his own land, that he himself had dug, whether he was Jewish or some other Canaanite, would sooner or later be consumed by the hordes which swooped across it.

Uri simply noted the Roman experience: the present-day descendants of the robbers and murderers whom Herod the Great had deported to Italia as a punishment were doing remarkably well for themselves.

Hippolytos nodded: those of us who are doing so remarkably well for themselves and living off the fat of the land are virtually all descendants of the villains who mercilessly pillaged and slaughtered the indigenous population, bringing them under their rule; for that reason, they were not much liked even nowadays in those areas where the locals lived, he added, memories died hard even after hundreds of years, and it was not possible to eradicate legends and myths. But the wretched Copts did not like the Hellenes any better because they too were newcomers; they had arrived with their fire and swords not long before the Jews, and they were at least as villainous as the Hebrews. For the aboriginal workers of the soil it was all the same — whether one was a Hebrew or Hellene, they hated you, and the only place it didn’t matter was in Alexandria, where the two equally exploiting forces fleeced each other for profit. In any case, it hardly mattered who was hated by the natives, who more than likely were originally Jewish or from some similarly inferior rabble, since they held no power, were quite incapable of any organized way of life, didn’t have the knowhow to manufacture weapons, and were superstitious to boot.

They strolled southward along the bank of the broad north-south canal.

En route, Uri would have liked to inspect the edifices, the vast stadium and everything else that he could see, but he was troubled by a deep-seated disquiet: he had again become a victim of mistaken identity, and that was going to land him in big trouble one of these days.

Here he was liked for precisely the reason he had been loathed in Judaea. Or maybe not loathed, but all the same… Yet there was no foundation in reality for this identification, any more than there had been for the other. What was going to happen when they found out?

And anyway, how come they know about me at all?

They were passing by the rectangular structure of the massive fortress-like Serapeion, tall even though it was only one story high; it must have been near to a stadion long and almost half a stadion wide. Its entrance was set amid Ionic and Corinthian columns facing to the north, toward the sea, being built by Ptolemy III Euergetes, Hippolytos said, and Uri had just nodded, though he had no idea when that ruler had lived. On obelisks standing in front of the temple were a pair of red granite sphinxes and a black granite statue of Apis. This was on the hill of Rhakotis, Hippolytos said, and called Uri’s attention to the entrance to the cemetery next to the temple, where there was a statue of jackal-headed Anubis, the interesting feature of which was that the sculptor — whether in mockery or in an attempt to curry favor — had carved him wearing the dress of a Roman centurion. Inside there was also a shrine to Isis, Hippolytos noted, and a number of other smaller shrines such as one to Harpocrates, the Greek rendering of the Egyptian Har — pa — khered , meaning “Horus, the child.” Now Horus was regarded as being the son of Serapis and Isis, Isis being the wife of Serapis — if Uri was not clear on that point, because some of the characteristics of Osiris had been blended into this Serapis whom the first Ptolemies had dreamed up, yes, along with some of the characteristics of Asclepius, the god of healing, and of Hades as well, of course. There was no special cult of the son, Harpocrates, but Isis, Serapis’s consort, was considered to be a savior, who forgave sins, Serapis himself as well — a sacred family trinity of Father, Mother and Son, not that this had any particular religious outgrowth.

The new Great Library was also inside the temple, its stock having been transferred here from Pergamum by Mark Antony and a gift to Cleopatra in return for the volumes that Julius Caesar had committed to the flames.

In a big garden could be seen a statue of Serapis, this new state-proclaimed god who the subjects of the Ptolemies had hastened to worship, sedulously offering sacrifices to him in expression of absolute fidelity to the new Macedonian ruling house that had been planted on them. Nowadays this confected deity was more or less the only one to which the Greeks here offered sacrifices; the Egyptians too, when it comes to that. Ptolemy I Soter had the massive, bearded marble figure, sheaves of grain adorning the locks of his hair and seated on a marble throne, brought over from Sinope, where it was worshiped as Jupiter Dis; every year the Greeks celebrated the arrival of Serapis — in other words, the arrival of the statue — on the twenty-ninth day of August, which also marked the start of the Egyptian New Year. Seated on a smaller throne beside that was his assistant, Pluton, commander of the realm of the dead, with a marble snake coiled around the throne.

Sheets of gold, silver, bronze and marble were affixed all over the temple’s ancient exterior walls, and Uri stepped closer: former patients, not one of them still alive, Uri suspected, had carved words of gratitude to Serapis for curing them.

They then walked westward alongside the wall of the old Egyptian necropolis until they reached the city gates. Heading out into the fields, the guards handed each traveler a slip of parchment that they might return to the city without any problems.

“It’s easy to get out, hard to get back,” said Hippolytos. “That’s one thing the Hellenes and Hebrews can agree on.”

Uri looked at the city wall, at least eight feet high. It looked old, built of coarse stones, with the trees and shrubs growing out of the cracks locking the structure together rather than splitting it apart. Anyone who wanted to badly enough might climb over it.

The city wall, said Hippolytos, was raised by Ptolemy I Soter, thanks to whom Alexandria was founded as a city. He recounted the legend that as Alexander the Great had himself selected the site, cantering on horseback around a dozen fishing villages that had stood here, and because he had no other means he had dropped his army’s entire stores on the field to mark the place. The legend does not say, however, what the soldiers thought of this, but it shows how decent he was, because at that time barbarians were still in the habit of marking out a city’s walls in blood — the great warrior might just as easily have had the local people or their livestock slaughtered, using their blood to trace the walls of his city to be in the untouched ground.