György Spiró - Captivity

Uri abhorred silk and muslin, perhaps because a significant amount passed into the great man’s possession thanks to his father’s good offices, but perhaps most of all because they were mainly fabrics for women who bedecked their bodies in silk and muslin to show it off.

For a long time Joseph traded in much the same goods as others; he picked up handicraft goods, traded in timber, dates, and balsam and sold them on for a slight but guaranteed profit. Gaius Lucius demanded that his manumitted former slaves stay in touch, not just through the free gifts he distributed with breakfasts but also in a business sense, and to that extent he was also practicing philanthropy, because he could always be relied upon for orders, though at the same time he also limited their freedom by determining what articles they should deal in. He considered himself to be a decent man, treating his slaves well and acting no differently toward freedmen, as if he had never taken a penny of redemption money from them for their patent of release, though that had to be scraped together over twenty or thirty years from the small change that the knight gave them daily; granted, though, they did not have to pay for their board and lodging, and he did not starve them.

“You are my true family,” the knight would say every morning in the big new atrium that he had built for hosting the salutation, raising his hands dramatically to the heavens and saying a prayer for his clients. His wife and two sons would smile awkwardly because they too were obliged to show up every day for these assemblies; hundreds must have seen that Gaius Lucius was loathed by his wife and sons. In the new atrium stood the statues of the household gods, the lares and penates, the busts and masks of his ancestors. He had commissioned them from the very best Greek sculptors, being able to afford them.

Gaius Lucius had become an exceedingly rich man over the decades, and in all truth he should be a senator by now; indeed, he had been asked to join the Assembly of the Fathers, or Council of Elders, but he preferred to squander his fortune on his clients, banquets, and organizing festive games, and he put nothing aside apart from four or five thousand sesterces that he invested each year in property in the neighborhood of Rome.

As a child Uri had heard, with his own ears, Gaius Lucius tell his father, “I suspect you could make more, Joseph, if you were to import silk and muslin. I’m a ready buyer for any amount.”

This was no stray whim or polite request but a direct order. Joseph had gone pale and nodded; he had wandered around the house at a loss for days on end.

Even Uri had picked up enough rudimentary business sense to know that bringing silk and muslin in from the East was a risky enterprise. The two fine textiles had become immensely fashionable in Rome, where senators and knights who had accumulated fabulous wealth would pay any money at all to pamper themselves and their family; but if a consignment went wrong on a long journey, the investment would be lost, and extremely large amounts had to be tied up in importing these rare materials. The Silk Road stretched from distant China and India, leading back through Abyssinia in Africa or Parthia, via Asia and Asia Minor, among the lands of wild tribes, so that brigands would leave caravans untouched it was necessary to pay off the tribal leaders, of whom there was a great profusion, with the borders of the territory for any one tribe changing every ten or twenty miles, it was said. On top of which the local agents might either hand over the money or else purloin it, and in the latter case the silk would go no farther. Goods that were produced in the provinces in any case fetched a price one hundred times more in Rome, but the price of muslin or silk might be as much as tens of thousands more, so huge were the distances, the risk, and the whims of fashion. The shippers were canny enough to give the impression that they were carrying other merchandise, so the silk and muslin were rolled up and hidden in the most unlikely places, sometimes even swallowed and then excreted at the final destination, but even so, it was worth it: the price would be a multiple of what it would have been if they had swallowed the same weight of gold. They would swallow gold too, for that matter, and much else besides to fool both official and unofficial customs inspectors, who would impose duties on honest, innocent commercial travelers, on the assumption that even if a merchant did not swallow gold or gemstones or silk, he could have. As a result, it was better to swallow it anyway.

Uri could understand his father’s fears, but he also grasped that Gaius Lucius did not seek anything that was out of the question. A large population of Jews lived at one of the stations in Parthia along the Silk Road; they had not returned from Babylon to Judaea with the rest and, through the Jews of Palestine and Egypt, stayed in touch with Rome via Alexandria, and there were also Jews living in that other great eastern port, Antioch, the capital city of Syria, carrying on trade from there. The commercial links were solid, had been established within Jewry centuries before, even war being unable to disrupt it. Trading is always vital; at most, there may be a time when it is necessary to deliver weapons in place of pots, cosmetics, pans, and comestibles.

Joseph had no desire for big profits; for his whole life he had been a considerate negotiator, striving for cordial relations with each link in the commercial chain, near and far, believing this to be a long-term investment.

There was just one time he attempted to be an innovator, which was when he saw at his patron’s place a vase of unbreakable glass; whatever one threw at it just dented, like an inflated bladder, the favorite plaything of emperors and children, and one could always hammer it back to its original shape. It was of Roman manufacture, and it was easy to make contact with the glassmaker. Jews were averse to these vases of unbreakable glass, or vitrum flexile as it was called, even though they had never seen one, with the idea that it was impure, but there would be plenty of opportunity to supply them to the likes of rich men like Gaius Lucius. Joseph paid a visit to the inventor, who was none other than the engineer who a few years before had restored a collapsed old colonnade; he had reinforced the pedestals, wrapped the other parts in wool, bound them with cord, and had them hauled back into place using winches and a lot of manpower. He had been granted a large sum of money by Tiberius as a reward. For some reason, he had also been banished from Rome. Joseph reached an agreement with him on distributing the unbreakable glass when an example of one of the vases was shown to Tiberius. The emperor conjectured that the invention would lead to a steep devaluation of earthenware and golden pots, had the arrogant inventor tracked down and executed, and also banned manufacture of the unbreakable glass. There was a danger that all of the inventor’s acquaintances would likewise be hunted down and put to death on the off chance that they knew the secret of the glass’s manufacture. Joseph had to ask for the assistance of the Elders of the synagogue in effacing any trace of his connection with the inventor. The Elders had heard that the executed inventor was a Jew, and considered that was more than likely, given that glassblowing was a Jewish craft, so it was also in their interests that Judaism should come out of this awkward business with clean hands. There was no way of knowing what the Elders did, but in any event, neither Joseph nor the community was harassed on account of the unbreakable glass vase, and even the inventor’s name was forgotten as time passed.

Uri still had good eyesight when Gaius Lucius urged his father to go into silk and muslin, and being a precocious child he was not surprised when his father let him in on his doubts. Who else would he share them with if not his only son? Joseph had been uneasy yet sober in his assessment. He knew nothing about the details of the silk trade as up till then he had been concerned with quite different sorts of merchandise, but he assumed that with silk, as was generally the case with other articles from far away, there would be at least two big outfits engaged in it, with one of them being almost certainly Arab. He also assumed that the Jewish and Arab mafias would have come to an agreement some time, and that agreement was periodically renewed because there was no break in the supply of silk and muslin to Rome, although the amounts that were made available were fairly modest in spite of the huge demand — no doubt deliberately to hold the price up. That alone was indicative of some sort of gang involvement. It went without saying that he would choose the Jewish bunch, but that had the disadvantage that he, being an anonymous merchant among the Roman freedmen, carried no prestige among the Jews, and as silk was such a massive business you could be quite sure that leaders in Parthia, Syria, Judaea, and Alexandria were up to their neck in it, and those were people who would never have the time of day for the likes of him.