György Spiró - Captivity

Uri was surprised at how Philo, the omniscient great philosopher, was so ill-informed about conditions in Rome and Judaea that he knew virtually nothing about the lives of Rome’s Jews, the Judaean countryside, even Jerusalem itself. With a deft, witty choice of words, Uri sketched what he knew. Philo was immensely diverted to learn that a Jewish house of prayer was to be constructed in Ostia purely because someone had by chance, and at no cost, had laid hands on four Greek columns.

“Those Jews!” he shook his head contentedly. “Those Jews!”

Uri had a good mind to give an account of the Jewish bordello in Syracusa, the prison cells that filled the shop premises in the palace of the high-priest, and similar topics, but he checked himself: there was no way of knowing what might provoke Philo, who had perhaps never truly had to come to terms with the practicalities of living.

In exchange, with regard to the lesser-known works of certain individual philosophers, Philo willingly held little lectures, in the manner of the Peripatetic school, pacing up and down the room as Uri slowly braced himself to ask again: how might he, without Alexandrian citizenship, be able to get into the renowned Library so as to be able to read these works. It was not that Philo’s explanations were in any way deficient, but he loved the smell, the feel, of parchment and papyrus…

Philo would shake his head: that was no easy matter, Uri was a newcomer, not even a native Alexandrian Jew. Precise records were kept of all the three hundred and some thousand locally born Jews, and copies of these were sent to Jerusalem so that the information would be safe if any harm were to befall the genealogical volumes in Alexandria. Reports were also made on those Jewish citizens of Alexandria who were permitted to enter the library, because a number of those were of priestly descent.

“How might I get to be an Alexandrian citizen?” Uri asked audaciously.

Philo was astonished.

“You want to settle here definitively?”

“Not that,” Uri responded diplomatically. “But I very much like this city… It’s not that I want to live off you permanently,” he added. “Having the pleasure of your family’s hospitality cannot last for long, and I would not want to abuse that. I’d be glad to take up some respectable trade and earn my keep… If that’s not possible, then I’ll go back to my father.”

“All right, all right,” Philo muttered disconcertedly. “For the time being, though, just stay seated on your bottom, and read… It’s no easy matter… There are no more than three or four hundred citizens of Alexandria who have gained Greek citizenship… Just like Rome, Alexandria takes care of itself…”

“But Rome doesn’t take care of itself,” said Uri, “because all the Jews there are granted citizenship provided the grandfather is a freedman — that’s how I too acquired it…”

Philo brightened up.

“Of course! You’re a Roman citizen! That means you can visit the library. In principle, Roman citizenship is of a higher class than Alexandrian Greek: anything that is more difficult to obtain at any given place is automatically of a higher class.”

Uri was extremely pleased by that flash of inspiration.

Needless to say, this was not quite how things turned out: a Roman citizen needed to obtain special permission to visit the library, Philo was told, and that was hard to get.

“I can understand them,” said Philo on the evening of the next day. “They’re concerned for their scrolls. And don’t think that Alexandrian citizens, the ones who are entitled, flock there in droves to read… Nearly all of them are preoccupied with business. Only a handful of us readers potter around there, and half of us are Jews, the rest professional copyists… There’d be no trouble finding space for you, it’s just…”

Uri protested that there was no reason to fear for any scrolls in his hands, he took great care of them.

Philo recounted what the librarians in Alexandria were truly worried about.

Eighty-eight years ago, the book collection was burned by Julius Caesar, and it had been estimated that some four hundred thousand irreplaceable scrolls had thereby been lost. It was not the Library as such that the Revered One had torched, but the timber sheds at the port used for warehousing that caught fire when Caesar, who at the time was residing in the palace next to the Musaeum, was caught by surprise, and his residence came under fire from ships in the harbor. In their pursuit of Pompey, Caesar’s navy had driven him into Alexandria, Pompey had been killed, so Caesar had felt he was safe — a mistake. The wing with the Royal Library, which still stands today as part of the Musaeum, just cannot hold many books. Caesar was placed in the fraught position of having to order blazing torches to be hurled against the enemy ships anchored in the harbor, and they were set ablaze, but the fire also spread to the book depots on the shore. When later asked why he had not taken greater care for the books, Caesar is supposed to have quipped: “Why didn’t you build your whole city of stone?”

Philo recounted that Isidoros, the present head of the Gymnasium, was in the habit of remarking to Jews, whom he loathed: “The Revered Julius, man of culture, your beloved patron, your idol.” Philo himself tended to argue back that he was unaware that Julius Caesar had shown Jews any particular favor, as compared with other groups, to which Isidoros would always enumerate all the people in the entourage first of Caesar then Augustus who had once been Jewish slaves, and the way in which their influence had been exerted to the detriment of Greeks — insignificant snippets of information that Isidoros must have pieced together in a manner befitting more serious matters. It was a waste of time for Philo to expostulate that he did not believe that other peoples had been any less pushy than Jews in the crush around the emperors.

The Musaeum itself had remained intact, but the remaining volumes — around one tenth of the former stock — had been transferred from there to the Serapeion, which was also home to the two hundred thousand scrolls that Mark Antony had brought over from Pergamum as a gift to Cleopatra VII. The inhabitants of Pergamum had been demanding the return of the scrolls ever since, but Alexandria was not disposed to oblige them: a delegation would regularly be sent from Pergamum to Rome to gain an audience with the emperor, and they would pace around with the dozens of other delegations from 101 other nations who were likewise waiting to gain an audience with the emperor, except that the emperor never went to Rome, spending his time continually on Capri, so that after a few weeks or months the delegations, their business unattended to, would go back home, only to try and put the same request again to Rome ten or twelve years later.

The Serapeion was a long way from the harbor, out of range of arrows and ballista. The temple, like the Pyramids, would stand forever, the Greeks avowed, and in Philo’s opinion there was something in that. Uri could endorse the idea: a pretty fortification, he had seen it.

“The storerooms in the Serapeion went several floors underground,” said Philo. “They were hewn from rock so the books did not get damp. Like all the bigger temples, it too had been designed with fortification in mind but one couldn’t help dreading that if a major disaster like a flood were to happen, or the roofing were to catch fire, that library of umpteen hundred thousand volumes, which once more brings together in one place just about everything that is worth reading, will vanish from the face of the earth, and all knowledge will be lost with it. It is not at all certain that it is such a clever idea to hold every important work in one and the same building… Other places have libraries, but the one here is devoted to acquiring, even at disproportionately high expense, the rarities that other places own. Ever since the great conflagration there has been an insane purchasing mania for every piece of writing… Cleopatra VII wanted to turn Alexandria once more into the center of the world of learning; she invited the great scholars of the Greek world, devoted a great deal of money to adding to the Library’s acquisitions — which I never tire of approving, even if she did loathe us Jews. But the way it is now, in the place it used to be there are no longer any scrolls at all, and in the place where the scrolls now are… they might well be destroyed along with everything else. It’s lucky the city has little money and so only infrequently does it buy scrolls: it prefers to have them copied: that costs less, and the original is then returned to wherever it was being safeguarded… Even so, of course, a lot of scrolls are damaged in the process, some even disappear completely — odd, isn’t it, that it’s always the most valuable to which this happens?”