György Spiró - Captivity

Uri did not ask any further questions.

But how could a Samaritan slave have come by such an immense fortune? He couldn’t have, otherwise he would not long have been a slave. He must have been a cover for someone else, but Philo wasn’t going to say who that was. Maybe it was the alabarch himself. Even the emperor, to whom Agrippa was of importance. Or maybe some senator. When all was said and done, it made no difference.

Tija, anyway, began quizzing him, throwing out questions seemingly arbitrarily, about astronomy, Greek literature, or philosophy or history, listening to Uri’s answers for only two or three sentences, by which time Uri’s proficiency had become apparent and then switching to another topic. The one area in which he did not pose any questions was Latin literature, and Uri was shrewd enough to ask him — during a lull in the barrage of questions — which particular line in Virgil was Tija’s favorite. Tija was speechless: he was not used to being interrogated. Uri loftily brushed that aside, all right, then, what about being so kind as to quote something from Livius’s rough translation of the Odyssey . Tija started to grow uneasy and began declaiming bits of Greek, but Uri was impertinent enough to signal that he should stop: Latin, if possible. Tija made an attempt to render in Latin hexameters the passage he had just quoted in Greek, but he could not do it without errors, omitting to place a caesura in the line, as Uri was not slow in pointing out. Philo, who had been an earwitness to the exchange, gleefully swooped down on his nephew:

“See, you don’t know everything!”

Tija fumed angrily; probably nobody had ever dared to humiliate him in such a fashion. Not that it was a serious humiliation: more in the way of a little teasing, but Tija still turned bright red.

“That’s not fair!” he burst out. “He lives in Rome; Latin’s his native tongue!”

Uri protested: Greek was his native language too; he had learned Latin through his own industriousness, for at least a third of the Roman populace, if not half, didn’t speak a word of Latin, or at best read only graffiti. The Jews there spoke no Latin, as they had no need to.

Philo guffawed; he was enjoying the exchange.

“Gaius is right,” he said. “Tiberius can speak excellent Greek, yet for some reason it was Latin that he would have liked to hear everywhere, and he was irate, as long as he was living in Rome, then not even all the senators spoke it!”

He turned to Uri:

“I’ll take you on as Tija’s instructor in Latin,” he declared forthrightly. “He could do with one. At the Gymnasium he almost totally ignores Latin out of sheer arrogance. Read a bit of Cato and a bit of Cicero together and you’ll be done with the matter.”

After hesitating a moment, Tija decided with a nod of the head to accept. It was an odd smile, more in the way of a grimace. Uri shuddered, but he was glad that by this means, under the pretext of teaching Latin, he would have the chance of officially spending some hours with this prodigy, and that delight dispelled the momentary aversion.

Alabarch Alexander was seldom seen in the palace, attending to his business affairs across the city and along the Nile, whereas Tija kept to his suite of rooms from Friday after dusk until Sunday evening, being a boarder at the Gymnasium. Uri was thus free to read in the palace library or roam around town and in the evening, by the light of a multitude of gorgeous candles, he conversed with Philo, who on weekdays during the daytime would visit the Musaeum’s famous Library which Uri himself so longed to do.

It transpired that it was no simple matter to visit the Library. to enter it, one had to be a citizen of Alexandria, and if one were Jewish only those who were Alexandrian Greek citizens could set foot in the sanctum of the Library; it was not enough merely to have rights of residence in Alexandria. An Alexandrian Jew might feel he was a cut better than a metic (a Greek resident alien), but not much.

Philo clarified: an Alexandrian citizen did not pay electoral taxes; these were paid by those who merely had rights of residence in Alexandria, as was the case with most Jews. Citizens who were exempt from paying the electoral tax (and all Greek natives of the city belonged to that category) clung to that privilege and were loath to award rights of Alexandrian citizenship to Jews and other non-Greek nationals. To this day, the peoples living in the villages on the sites on which Alexandria was built — Persians, for instance, who had arrived with the Babylonian invasion, and whose descendants still lived in the city — had not been granted rights of citizenship even though it was the Greeks who had “assimilated,” not them. The Jews, whose ancestors had been resident in Alexandria centuries before, had long been fighting to be accepted as Greek citizens by virtue of being born there and had already addressed countless petitions on the matter to both Augustus and Tiberius, but — though it was hard to say why that was so, because the electoral tax amounted to no great sum — assent had been slow in coming. All the same, Alexandrian Jews were not united on the issue, as many preferred to pay the additional tax and stay segregated from the Greeks as members of the Alexandrian Jewish polity, fearing that by coming under the same jurisdiction as the Greeks they would lose their status as God’s chosen people.

“How much is the electoral tax?” Uri queried.

Philo, being a Jew with full rights of Greek citizenship, was stumped: he didn’t know exactly, but he would make inquiries.

“But then I don’t even know the price of eggs at the market,” he confessed with a blush. “I’ve never had to buy anything in person.”

Uri felt that the time was ripe for him to mention that he would be happy to buy this or that for himself, but he didn’t have a penny to his name. Philo again blushed.

“Don’t take it amiss, dear boy. I completely forgot about that… I’ll instruct the majordomo to provide you with daily pocket money. How much do you need?”

Uri paused. He could name any price at all: Philo would have no clue as to its value, but decided nonetheless to stick with a small amount, about as much as his tessera would get him in Rome.

“You’ll get twice that,” said Philo, shaking his head in dissatisfaction with himself.

Still, Uri had to make himself useful for that per diem, a half to two-thirds of which he would put aside each day: during their evening discussions Philo would grill him, pleasantly but methodically. And Uri would have to muster his entire knowledge in responding. The talk ranged from literature to matters of history or philosophy, and sometimes Philo would interrogate Uri about Rome and Judaea, having visited neither. Uri was worried he would start questioning him about Agrippa, but he was spared that, and it suddenly occurred to Uri that they already knew more than enough about Agrippa not to need any information from others.

Tija was present on one occasion when Philo made a strange assertion about Agrippa: that unconscionable, prodigal, giddy, greedy charlatan would someday become the greatest Jewish king there ever was, just wait and see, even greater than Herod the Great.

He even stated his grounds: Agrippa owed people in Rome left, right, and center, not just Jews but also senators, and the only way they would get the money back with interest was if they were to use their united might to make Agrippa king of the Jews. Philo laughed, and Uri could only gape, flabbergasted. Tija added that Antipas too was bidding for Judaea, Samaria, and everything else which had at one time been part of his father’s realm to be annexed to Galilee, and there was even some chance he would achieve that, but he was going about it in a very stupid way, because he didn’t owe money to anyone in Rome.