György Spiró - Captivity

“I don’t need them,” said Tija dryly. “Every single Roman poet and historian is ideologically subservient. They’re all second-hand annotators, only clever in hindsight, having nothing to do with practical politics. Not one is truly creative, nor is my uncle, in spite of all the brilliant books he writes. I want to be creative.”

“An emperor perchance?”

Tija leapt angrily to his feet.

“I can’t be emperor!” he yelled. “I can’t be emperor because I’m Jewish! That’s how the one and only Eternal One castigates all those who were born into His chosen people! A monotheist can never become emperor in Rome!”

Marcus appeared in the atrium, freshly bathed, beaten with birch twigs and massaged with oil.

“Am I intruding?” he asked politely.

“No,” growled Tija.

A chill set in.

“You were shouting just before now,” said Marcus. “What about?”

Uri gave him a brief outline.

Marcus was hesitant.

Uri chewed it over.

“I don’t quite see why a monotheist could not be emperor,” he said. “Our God is emperor in Heaven, and everyone serves Him, angels and devils alike, in much the same way as the Senate and Praetorian Guard serve the emperor in Rome. Our other world is just the same as if our ancestors had placed present-day living Rome in Heaven. Polytheism was in keeping with Greek democracy and the Roman republic: peoples and factions competed with each other, the gods did likewise. But for the empire? Might the Romans not be mistaken with their plurality of gods? Might they have a false image of themselves?”

Tija frowned and kept quiet; Uri sensed the coldness he was emanating. He was not pleased that an idea one might call a thought should occur to anyone but himself.

“A monotheistic Roman emperor?” asked Marcus in astonishment.

“Fair enough,” said Uri. “Right now that’s an impossibility… Rome is very proud of the fact that it welcomes with open arms all the gods of all the peoples it conquers, and it sets up altars to them in Rome… But if the population were to be believers in the emperor… if it were genuinely to become that… why is the Roman population not monotheistic, I wonder? What do they need those countless gods for? That’s not truly a religion they have there… All those thousands of gods! Then none of them is a god! But the emperor’s power is very real, and all he has is power…”

“So they need a Moses, as my uncle suggests?” Marcus asked. “A divine pharaoh?”

Uri pondered, and a heretical thought crossed his mind. Should he come out with it? But then, logic is logic.

“A Moses who is not Jewish,” he said. “A Latin Moses. Greek for that matter. A pagan Moses. That’s what is appropriate. The emperor dies, his head is knocked off the statues and replaced by the head of the new emperor… Nothing sacred about that — for all that they are deified after they have died, even somewhat ahead of that. They too need a unique and immortal god.”

Tija chuckled:

“So, Jupiter is appointed the one and only god, so the others are sent packing? Pensioned off? Settled in the provinces like veterans? Is that supposed to be a help?”

Uri shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but something isn’t functioning in the world.”

“And it’s right that the Romans appoint one new high priest after another in Jerusalem?” Tija queried, “Does that sort of high priest have some sort of sanctity?”

“No, he doesn’t,” Uri admitted. “Of course, I say that with the proviso that I have never seen a high priest in action, and maybe when they officiate at a service the divine spark manifests in them. I only ever met a former high priest in Jerusalem, one by the name of Ananias… He was wearing a white and blue linen robe, but even so there was no sanctity emanating from him — just a politician, a human being.”

“All being well, Agrippa with our assistance will be a king,” said Tija, “but not much sanctity will emanate from him either — burps and farts are all that emanate from him.”

Uri cautiously, almost unnoticeably nodded: it would not do to admit that he had never seen him.

“Do you think that people have any real need at all for religion?” Tija mused, and a note of excitement entered his voice. “Or have they maybe just become used to this tradition of theirs, and they slosh around in it like in a caldarium?”

What came to Uri’s mind were some Greek philosophers who attributed so-and-so-many elements to an unmoved mover — four, one, whatever — and cogitated about numbers and ratios but never said anything about gods.

“Is there a need for a religion in Judaea?” Tija asked pressingly.

Uri pondered.

“Is there a need for a religion in Judaea?” Tija asked.

Uri mused.

Alexandria, by giving a person time to think, must be a place that was agreeable to God.

Before his eyes ran images of sects, devotees, idlers, sacrificers, mourners, grieving relatives, mutilated corpses, activists, hustlers, robbers, the ambitious… All were images from his journey as a money carrier, as he had not lived prior to that. He had not lived, just read.

Before his eyes appeared the throng of people he had witnessed on the road from Caesarea to Jerusalem. The people who stood in line at harvest-tide, happily chanting psalms. It was a good feeling to be together. Mourners in the cemetery. Everyone feared dying: better to live in the hope of eternal life than to believe that death was a total extinction — that was unimaginable. There had to be a higher power, but that aside, what was it that drove people to religion? The Sabbath, the feasts, and the rules about cleanliness were subordinate; pagans obeyed rules which had similar functions — Egyptians refused to eat pork, and their priests were circumcised in similar fashion — so those were parts of communal life and had nothing to do with religious piety.

In Rome there were so many shrines and religions that the Roman Jews could make do without raptures.

He glanced up: Tija was sipping wine as he reclined on the couch, Marcus stood with his back against the wall.

“There is a need for an emperor who is present in the soul of all his subjects,” said Uri. “Uniformly and exclusively. What a tremendous military power that would make!”

“A pharaoh,” said Marcus. “But the pharaohs were thrown out — there has to be a reason for that!”

“You’re talking about a Messiah,” said Tija.

Uri was surprised.

“Yes,” he deliberated. “I may well be talking about a Messiah.”

“A pagan Messiah?” said Marcus in astonishment. “Tucked away at the bottom of Uncle Philo’s writings there is always a Messiah, but to be honest I can’t understand why. He’s a clever man, cultivated and does nothing but try to reconcile Hellenism and Judaism yet neither the Greeks nor the Jews read what he writes… I never really understood what in fact he does believe in.”

“For one thing,” said Tija, “someone who converts to Judaism might be a Messiah. We should explain the Scriptures to make that possible. Along comes a Roman emperor and gets himself circumcised…” he giggled. “That would be some joke!”

“The idea of a pagan Messiah attracts me,” said Uri. “A Messiah is the salvation for all peoples, not just for the Jews. At most the Jewish dead will be resurrected half a day earlier…”

“Come off it!” said Marcus. “That’s a Pharisaic way of looking at it. In Alexandria everyone is a Sadducee; we don’t believe in an other world.”

“It doesn’t matter what we think,” Tija ventured, “it’s what the people think. A pagan Messiah… A monotheistic Roman emperor… Good ideas! The only hitch is: why should the Messiah come along while we are alive? Even as an emperor?”