György Spiró - Captivity

This is just too extravagant for me. The thought entered Uri’s mind. Senseless. They’d do better to cut a window in the wall of the atrium and anyone could gaze outside through that. Cheaper.

Perish the thought, he chided himself. The reason the wealthy had money was to squander it on senseless luxuries.

Two of the servants vanished, leaving the one who stayed there standing respectfully without watching them.

“I’ve never been here before,” said Hippolytos, happily sprawled on the couch. “I’ve you to thank for this, Gaius Theodorus.”

He was also gazing at the mural, examining the length of the four walls, though he could look at it from where he was seated as his eyesight was good. All of a sudden he shrieked:

“This panorama depicts precisely the spot where we are now! Do you see?”

“Yes, I see it.”

A short, bald, aged man hastened into the atrium accompanied by one of the servants. He was wearing a simple white tunic and there was a conspicuous flushed quality about his cheeks. Hippolytos leapt to his feet.

“Your Worthiness, Philo…” he began until Philo gestured for him to hold it, and turned to Uri.

“Are you Gaius Theodorus?”

“That’s me,” said Uri.

Philo rushed over and hugged him. Uri returned the embrace. The great philosopher had slender bones.

“The rest of you can go,” Philo said impatiently.

Uri watched sorrowfully as Hippolytos, the young astronomer, who was no doubt a hundred times brighter and more talented than himself, disappointedly trailed out after the servants. Uri called out to him:

“Many thanks for accompanying me, Hippolytos.”

“My dear son, come — take a seat! What can I offer you? Tell me all! Or rather, take a bath: you’ll get a rub-down with oil and get beaten with birch twigs… What do you hanker after? Some wine? Food?”

Uri felt somewhat faint as he took a seat on a couch with a twisting, convoluted ornamental back, made from a beautifully grained wood, not turned on a lathe but handcrafted, he noted as he ran his fingers over it.

“How lovely this is!” broke from his lips.

Philo sat down on the couch next to it with a happy laugh.

“You’ve got good taste! That is the most expensive seat in the whole room! Rosewood.”

“I was a cabinetmaker for a while…”

“Marvelous!” the elderly man clapped in delight. “A cabinetmaker! Terrific!”

Some servants raced at the sound of the clapping. Philo didn’t understand what they wanted, but since they were there he gave orders for one thing and another, after which the servants left.

“So, tell me all!”

It was now Uri’s turn to laugh out loud.

“What could I possibly tell you that you don’t know already? I am deeply honored… I’ve read your works — at least some of them… But the idea that one day I would get to meet the author is something I never even dreamed of doing.”

“So, which of my works have you read?” Philo asked teasingly.

Uri began to list them. Philo was flabbergasted. When Uri got to a work entitled “On the Life of Moses,” he interrupted.

“What do you make of that?”

Uri pondered.

The servants at this point brought wine, water and fruit, and they pulled the table between the two couches so that both men might reach.

“I found it a hugely entertaining read,” said Uri cautiously. “I have to admit I was startled by the notion behind it — the idea of portraying Moses as an original philosopher, that is to say, and that he is the source of all Greek wisdom and art, even including Homer…”

“You really have read it!”

“Of course I did!” burst from Uri.

“Keep your hair on!” Philo said appeasingly. “Any number of people brag about how cultivated they are, when they aren’t.”

“I’ve encountered something of the same,” said Uri. “But to get back to Moses, as I said, that stunned me to begin with. But after a while I got used to the notion, and I believe grasped its purpose, which is to show that one sphere of thought can be just as valuable as another, that the one can be derived from the other and vice versa.”

“Amazing!”

Philo gazed in astonishment at the young man sitting tensely, uneasily on his most expensive couch. There was nothing special in his outward appearance: myopic gaze, sharply steepled brow, greasy, mousy-brown hair, sunken cheeks yet despite that an incipient double chin under a receding jaw line. His nose was crooked, bending to the right, as did his jaw.

“Did you also speak to Agrippa about philosophy?”

“No,” said Uri, and left it at that.

Philo roared with laughter:

“I doubt Agrippa read even three books in his entire life, and half of those will have been lost on him!”

Philo picked up the plate of fruit and offered it to Uri, who took a fig.

“So,” Philo resumed, “and do you agree with that line of thinking?”

“I’m not mature enough intellectually to be able to agree with it,” said Uri carefully, yet frankly. “My mind has not become as unruffled as yours, a venerable philosopher’s.”

Philo gave an unforced chuckle.

Uri also laughed out loud.

“Well, there’s plenty of time to debate that,” said Philo cheerfully. “But I ought to draw your attention to one of my predecessors whose notion I merely developed further in my “Moses,” the idea was not mine originally… Have you heard of Artapanus?”

Uri blushed and confessed that he hadn’t.

“One of the most significant Jewish thinkers,” exclaimed Philo. “Never mind, you’ll get around to reading him… but tell me, what happened to you in Judaea? We lost track of you after you set off from Caesarea for Jerusalem.”

Uri was astounded but kept that hidden.

“Well,” he said, “after that I got pulled into some quite extreme scrapes.”

“What happened in Samaria?” Philo asked.

Uri was again astounded: some people had been continually feeding reports about him — and to Alexandria at that. It was staggering.

Uri gave a brief account of the massacre at Mount Gerizim, saying that it had been Vitellius’s soldiers who were responsible for the slaying, but Ananias, the former high priest, had gotten the delegation to sign off on a report that blamed Pilate’s cohorts for the killing.

“And did you sign?” Philo ask pensively.

“I had no choice,” said Uri. “Otherwise it’s hard to believe I would be here now.”

Philo nodded.

“That we didn’t know,” he said. “You did well.”

“I did well by signing what I knew to be a lie?”

Philo raised his head and stared vacantly into the space above the hills and dales that were painted on the atrium walls.

“You did well,” Philo repeated, returning his gaze to Uri. “That was how Vitellius was able to disgrace Pilate. About time too. Were you there when they led him away in chains?”

Uri confirmed that he had been there and seen that. Just as he was present in the exultant throng when Vitellius announced that he was restoring the safeguarding of the high priest’s vestments to the Jews.

“That’s about as far as their intellectual horizon extends,” said Philo ruefully. “As if it matters who looks after the high priest’s vestments.”

“It was a pity that many hundreds of innocent, jubilant people were slain for the sake of machinations like that,” Uri opined.

Philo took a melancholy sip of the wine, not mixing it with water.

“You’re right, of course, it was a pity,” he said. “A dirty, low-down provocation to use that hired false prophet — what was his alias? Simon, wasn’t it? That the Ark of the Covenant has been found! Only in Samaria could the masses be made to swallow that sort of guff… To the best of our knowledge it was the high priest who spun the line to Vitellius, who took the bait… Pilate was cautious, being singularly moderate in his reactions to any provocation, constantly backing down… That, however, was one thing he cannot have counted on… To be saddled with responsibility for a bloody act that he didn’t even commit. It’s not something for delicate stomachs: it sickens me!”