György Spiró - Captivity

Uri did some quick reasoning: that must have happened around the time when Tiberius had expelled from Rome both the Jews and adherents of Egyptian cults, as a result of which he and his parents had roved around the countryside, with him carried piggyback by his father. Strange that he should be enjoying the hospitality of a family whose lucky star had at the time happened to be in the ascendant. Antonia, Germanicus’s mother, must have supplied the emperor with signal services if, after Roman dominion was instituted she alone had been granted private estates in Egypt. Germanicus and Agrippina had been exceedingly popular, and the rumor was still making the rounds that Germanicus had been poisoned either by Piso or someone else. Tiberius subsequently banished the widowed Agrippina and had her murdered on the island of Pandataria. Of the sons of Germanicus only Gaius was still alive, along with three daughters, and Tiberius kept Gaius with him on the island of Capri.

Could it be, by any chance, that Antonia had sacrificed her unguarded son, Germanicus — whom popularity had turned soft in the head — to protect her other son, Claudius, and her grandsons? And had Alexander the alabarch played some role in this?

The astronomers divulged no secrets, telling Uri only things that were common knowledge in Alexandria, but still they were honoring him with their trust, and for that reason alone he sensed they would be expecting some favor in return.

The first Friday evening that he took his seat among the Jews of Alexandria in the double-colonnaded Basilica, on the first row of stone benches to the west(and near the middle of the row at that), opposite the bimah, the very place where he had developed such a hankering to sit the day of his arrival, he found himself seated next to Alabarch Alexander’s second son, Tiberius Julius Alexander, who bore the nickname Tija and was just a year older than himself. He almost had to force himself to marvel that it all seemed so natural, the impossibility that he, a good-for-nothing from Far Side in Rome, had been accepted so smoothly and speedily by the most powerful Jewish family in the world.

And people stared: Who is that young man; why have we never seen him before? Uri refrained from looking back, he grew — not exactly eyes, but more an ear on the back of his head — and even if he couldn’t quite make out the whispers about him, he understood them well enough: the astronomers must have gossiped, and the rumors had been passed on. There was a big crowd of people for services at the Basilica that evening. Philo was unmarried, and nothing was said about Alexander’s wife (maybe she had died or he had driven her away), but on Alexander’s right was seated his firstborn son, Marcus, a tall, ash-blond young man; also seated in the front row of stone benches were several collateral female relatives and their husbands, siblings and children. Uri was introduced to them, though he was incapable of registering who was who.

“The leathermakers’ Kahal,” someone next to Uri had whispered, meaning that a representative of the koinon of Jewish leather-dressers was doing the reading from the Septuagint that day. All the crafts in Alexandria were organized into koinon, which in Ptolemaic Egypt was the name for a guild, which just as with the Greeks had their own leaders, notaries, and secretaries, and these were rotated in strict order for officiating at the divine services on Friday evenings and other feast days, just the same way as the tribes of priests and Levites succeeded each other in Jerusalem. Uri was told by an elderly woman from the alabarch’s family that lots were not drawn, as in Jerusalem, but rather the order was settled collectively each Rosh Hashanah by democratic deliberation and calculation, with no further arguments for the rest of the year.

It crossed Uri’s mind that his father would be listening to that same passage in their modest house of prayer in Rome, and it was quite within the bounds of possibility that a tanner was also reading it out there. Next to the reader, standing ramrod-straight, was a tall man with a solemn expression on his face, the very image of one with a holy mission to do. He held a pale red kerchief in his hand, and when he held the kerchief aloft the ten thousand or so in the assembly said “Amen.” That kerchief was necessary, because although the acoustics in the Basilica were good, the tanner’s words were nearly impossible to hear beyond the first few rows due to all the rustling.

Few went home after the prayers, with the mass staying in the Basilica. On countless trestles under the roofed sections stood food and drink, and everyone was free to take as much as they cared to. Nobody chided the children who spilled wine or threw food onto the floor, chased and frisked about: a group already chosen would tidy up tomorrow evening. The cost of the spread was covered by a common fund, drawing on compulsory donations from the three-hundred-thousand-strong Alexandrian Jewish community. Uri asked if everyone was present, but of course not: most of the city’s Jews would celebrate Friday evening at their own local houses of prayer, scattered across the other four districts of the city, the feasts in these being just as copious.

The stargazers gravitated toward Uri and were delighted — especially Hippolytos — to greet him. Uri was also pleased to see them, though they had little in common to talk about and the conversation grew increasingly tiresome. Uri couldn’t manage to slip away — even aged Heraclitos, eminent and funny, would not let him go, pressing after him as he tried to make his way to the next table. Nothing of importance was said, but Uri still sensed that he — a gadabout good-for-nothing — was being fawned over by these agreeable, scholarly men merely because Philo had shown him favor, and he also had the feeling that Philo esteemed by them not on account of his philosophical oeuvre but for being brother to the all-powerful Alabarch Alexander.

Philo’s younger brother was a vigorous man, his brow wrinkled by many laughter-lines. Alexander also had supervisory charge of the postal service in Egypt, Uri was later to learn, and thus he was able — should he so desire — to find out what anybody wrote in their letters. He too was a great bibliophile; in Rome, Antonia’s lame, deformed boy Claudius, was a bookworm just like Philo, and the two often sent each other bibliographic rarities. By no means incidentally Antonia was close friends with Berenice, the mother of Julius Agrippa, and Claudius had grown up side by side with Julius Agrippa, a grandson of Herod the Great, one of whose names was given after Julius Caesar, the other after Herod the Great’s friend, Agrippa, who was so loved by Jews that the largest synagogue in Rome was also named for him.

Alexander was recognized by all as the real leader of the Jews of Alexandria; no major decisions were taken without him. And somehow he, Gaius Theodorus, a nobody from Rome, had won access to this of all families. He would have liked to tell the stargazers that everyone was mistaken: he had been given no important mission by anyone, it was all a misunderstanding, but instead of doing that he just smiled inanely back and started inquiring about the ingredients of some of the unfamiliar dishes of food.

The alabarch’s palace was not situated in the Jewish Delta district, but in Beta, the second district. As the inner city of Alexandria was laid out by the Ptolemies according to a regular rectilinear plan, it was divided into five districts, and special Greek councils were convened to arrange the affairs of the districts entrusted to them. They even took pains to reorganize the rural Egyptian populace and all manner of immigrant settlers into invented, artificial tribes, which were named after Greek divinities. Over the centuries, these tribes had gradually come to bear the names of the divinities with such pride — so said Philo — that by now they were all convinced that they were lineal descendants of Artemis, Poseidon or Athene. Greeks had two names officially, their own and that of their god, and in all official documents they were obliged to use both; Jews had only one name, but beside that they had to write that they were Jewish.