György Spiró - Captivity

Uri felt uncomfortable: this was high politics and had nothing to do with him. The Jews of Rome by tradition wisely steered clear of this sort of thing.

“Look, my boy,” said Philo. “The high priest and Vitellius came to an agreement that they would have Pilate removed. Antipas in Galilee allowed the Syrian cohort into Samaria; he had no choice because he did not want to upset Rome — after all, the Syrian legate is the embodiment of Rome. In his shoes Agrippa would have done exactly the same.”

Uri nodded, but there was still something he wished to get out.

“Master,” he said. “While I was going about among the mutilated corpses on that hillside in Samaria, the dead bodies of women, children, and old people — not all of them had been cleared away and the relatives were still grieving over them — there were some fairly weird sensations at play. The wretched fanatics had gone there simply because they were looking for the Ark of the Covenant… It wasn’t they who hit upon the idea, they had been duped there by others… The ruins, the remains of their destroyed temple, are there on the hillside… That was where those who share the same faith as us once used to pray, and it was their co-religionists, the Jews, who destroyed their shrines… All I saw was a cloud over the mountaintop, that must have been the ruins, but I understood why only the worship of idols built at the top of hills is forbidden… a mountaintop is a very big deal indeed… Excuse me if I am still indignant when I speak about this…”

Uri fell silent.

Philo muttered:

“It’s not possible to feel sorry for everybody… They were Samaritans…”

“People!”

“You’re not a Samaritan.”

Uri nodded glumly.

“That’s true, I’m a Roman Jew…”

“I understand you, I really do understand,” Philo quickly added.

There was a silence.

“Young man that you are,” said Philo, smiling with an omniscient air, “you most likely came to like even the peasants of Judaea…”

“Yes, I grew fond of them. They were hosts for me, and they treated me well…”

“I too will be your host: you’ll spend the night here.”

As a result, Uri spent the night at Philo’s, though he did not get a wink of sleep, the guestroom being crammed with scrolls of parchment and tablets, and he was able to burn as many lamps as he wished, so it was with bleary, red eyes that he looked up in the morning, when Philo dropped by to say good morning.

“Didn’t you sleep at all?” Philo asked.

“Not really,” murmured Uri, drunk from reading.

Philo ran his eyes over the books that were piled up on the table; there must have been a good ten of them, some quite voluminous scrolls.

“And you read all of those?”

“All of them,” muttered Uri.

“Can I test you?”

“What’s that?”

Philo picked up one of the scrolls, a play, the “Exagoge.” He picked out a passage at random and read out aloud: “Aaron: It’s not worth going that way, there’s nothing there!”

Uri closed his swollen eyelids and half-asleep mumbled: “Moses: How would it not be worth going that way! Over there is the Promised Land…”

Philo put down the scroll.

“You know it off by heart?”

“Certainly,” said Uri with a big yawn.

“And you know where it comes from?”

“A Jewish play of some sort. What’s the title? Maybe ‘Exodus’… Not a particularly good work as the outcome is given from the start, moreover one can have a fair guess what the ending is and that they will reach their goal… It’s not possible to turn that subject into a tragedy; the author ought to know…”

“Ezekiel the Poet wrote it, two centuries ago! Is it something you read earlier?”

“Why would I have done that? I’m not going to spend time rereading things that I’ve already read in Rome… The works here on the table are not available in Rome.”

Philo picked his way through the scrolls lying on the table and nodded. Indeed, it was unlikely that a copy would be found in Rome.

“Have you been to libraries there?”

“Of course I have,” said Uri. “From the time they open to when they close, from the first to the fifth hour, one can read anything there, on the premises, for free, and it’s surprising how much one can read in four hours if one tries…”

Philo looked at the sleepy, red-eyed young man swaying around, almost out cold, on the seat in front of him, and he was genuinely touched.

“Get some sleep now,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “I’ll give orders that you’re not to be disturbed. And that when you wake up, you are to be fed. There’s no need to hurry the reading: you’ll have plenty of time for that, plenty of time for reading, dear boy.”

The old man was almost on the point of tears and hurried out. It was almost as if he were flying, a tiny, airy-boned bird.

He has no child of his own, Uri reflected, and was glad about that.

Uri did not understand what was happening to him, but he found he had been accepted in Alexandria.

And not by just any family either, but by the family of Alabarch Alexander, the richest and most influential of all Jewish families in Egypt, and hence in the whole world, the family for whom the very first row of stone benches on the west side of the stoa of the Basilica was reserved.

Alabarch means chief tax collector, the person who collected all the customs duties on goods carried along the Nile and paid these in to the Roman state treasury. All of Egypt had become the private property of the Roman emperor, by edict of the Deified Augustus, when sixty years ago he crushed Mark Antony. Uri could well imagine that the alabarch held on to a tiny bit of it as there was no one to keep a check on him.

The prefect of Egypt, commander in chief of the two Roman armies stationed in the country, had no trouble with them as it was peacetime, but his entire day was taken up by dispensing justice, and acting as the guardian of all rights — an office which had devolved on him from the kings of Egypt by the grace of Augustus — and he did not concern himself with excise matters. He was the alabarch’s superior nominally, but not in practice. A twenty-five percent excise was assessed on goods arriving in Egypt from abroad, payable at the port of entry — in other words at Alexandria, Canopus, and Pelusium. The alabarch was not concerned with these as he only exacted internal duties. Uri was amazed that a Jew could be a chief tax collector on all the goods freighted along the Nile, even if it was one who had been granted Greek citizenship rights. In response to which he was told that for two hundred years and more Jewish soldiers had been standing guard along the Nile because the Egyptian kings had judged them more reliable than the Greeks, and the Romans had left things that way: don’t fix what isn’t broken, a wise dictum.

The stargazers whom he had met at the Basilica — and who wanted to maintain good relations with him because he was now living at the house of Philo, elder brother to the alabarch — related that Alexander had now been in office for fifteen years, to the evident satisfaction of the emperor, ever since Germanicus — a general of whose successes Tiberius, his stepfather, was jealous — had appeared in Alexandria, causing a huge commotion during his short stay of just a few weeks, with throngs of people, Greeks and Jews by turn, holding processions daily to cheer him, in their desire to please him and his wife Agrippina. Germanicus had the state’s grain stores opened, and thereby the price of grain across the length and breadth of Egypt plummeted, at which point Germanicus made tracks out of Egypt and back to Syria with his wife and small children, and before too long he was dead, poisoned by Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, who while the court hearing was in progress took his own life in Rome, yet on the orders of Tiberius, the trial continued as if the accused had been still alive. It was at this juncture that the governor of Egypt at the time relieved the former chief tax collector of his duties, appointing in his stead Alexander, who as it happened had just returned from Rome where he had gone before Germanicus arrived in Alexandria. There might be some connection between the two, smirked the stargazers, and they also related that Emperor Tiberius had unexpectedly granted Germanicus’s mother, Antonia, vast lands in Egypt, and Alabarch Alexander — for reasons one can only guess at — had become the estate manager of those lands.