György Spiró - Captivity

On the first day it became apparent that apart from eating, only the physical training was communal.

They were kept hard at work.

They had to race on foot, throw the discus and javelin, clear hurdles, wrestle, spar with daggers, spears, and staffs, and long-jump from the standing position. Only those in their final year learned horseback riding, it was said, because horses were expensive and there were only a few of them. Physical instruction was held in the Gymnasium’s elongated stretch of public park, criss-crossed with paths, which anyone was free to enter, between the columns of the long hall of the stadium, reached from the main thoroughfare, named Arsinoë Avenue, as were many other streets in Alexandria (named after the same Arsinoë, or was it perhaps a different one?). Statues and memorials were scattered throughout the big expanse of grassy, tree-studded parkland, and Uri made special note of a rusted cart that had been placed there once for some reason, perhaps as a sacrificial object. In the middle of the park rose the fir-cone shape of the Paneion, about which the ship’s captain had spoken when they arrived: anyone could climb to the summit and glory in the vista. It occurred to Uri that one could sit down at the top without anybody disturbing you, those who visited from city or from outside being so taken up by the view as to pay no notice, so he took to doing his reading there, that was his favorite hiding place, private for all that it was public, though the wind often made his ears ache.

During his weeks in Alexandria, Uri’s body had grown slack and he found the running hard, stopping more than once to pant, developing a stitch in his side, so that the others, Tija among them, watched him scornfully as he slowly padded along and sweat, whereas they expertly sauntered around the circuits.

He had difficulty even in throwing the discus: it refused to go off in the direction he wanted, or he released it too early or too late from his hand, so that those around him would run off in real or faked terror lest they be hit, and those who were spectating would simply laugh in derision.

The javelin went half as far for him as it did for the others, but worse still, he regularly pulled his shoulder muscles. A left-hander, a southpaw, the others averred, but Uri did not see why that was important until he grasped that in wrestling it was advantage for a person to be left-handed, though in the beginning he was thrown to the ground by everyone else.

The standing long jump was the most complicated movement of all: identical big bronze weights had to be held in each hand and swung backward and forward, and then, when one judged there was a good rhythm, leading with the weights, both legs would be lifted from the ground. A good few times Uri found the weights flying out of his hands, and it was pure luck that he avoided hitting anyone. The others would grin and scoff.

Oratory was also classed as one of the physical exercises, which was not all that surprising as that was also the case among the wealthy of Rome. What was unusual was that the tutor would set a time limit as well as the subject. Both the subject and the time would be drawn by the student from sets of parchment slips placed face-down on the table; the tutor, holding a larger or smaller hourglass in his hand, would then measure the time allotted for the oration, and if the student did not finish with his topic on time, or finished early, a notch would be scored against his name with a stylus on the wax tablet. This meant the student would have to make a renewed oration on the given subject though he would not know for how long as he would again have to draw a slip. The duration of orations made by lawyers was likewise time-limited in Rome.

If a student succeeded in finishing a nicely rounded address on time, the notch would be omitted. All the orations, however long or short, had to be listened to by the others, and at the end they would have to evaluate every one of them. The topics were varied: an indictment in a murder case, a defense in a case of robbery, prosodic problems, historical problems, astronomy, navigation, the conduct of war, the establishment of military supply lines, tekhne — anything at all.

His fellow pupils said that all the best rhetoricians had gone off to Rome, where they were better paid, but Uri was more than happy with Theocritus as his rhetoric tutor, setting high store on his wry, unobtrusive humor.

Their fare was simple: greens, fruit, various kinds of boiled pasta, and meat only on Fridays, which the three Jews did not eat. That was how Uri identified the Jewish Apollonos at lunchtime on the first Friday: he was a stocky, square-headed, insignificant-looking young man who showed no external sign of having a brain. The food they got was simple, but never quite enough as to leave them feeling that they had ate their fill. They were never served wine, only water, and they were allowed no snacks apart from the communal meals. Uri did not notice any attempts to smuggle in anything from outside: he found the slight gnawing of hunger quite easy to take, having known periods of much greater starvation. The others hankered after food, swapping recipes with one another, and meanwhile he read with a gently rumbling stomach: it was possible to borrow scrolls from the Gymnasium’s richly stocked library, which contained many rarities.

The mathematics lessons were given by a mad teacher by the name of Demetrius. Ten of them were assigned to him; he explained outrageous laws, writing things down rapidly with his stylus on the board and then, before the class understood what he was talking about, he got to the end of the board and rubbed it clean before carrying on. Uri considered himself lucky to have taught himself the elements of mathematics when still a young boy, on his own at home, because he at least got an inkling of what this fervent fellow — to whom geometry meant everything and who stoutly maintained that Earth was spherical with a circumference of 252,000 stadia — was trying to communicate to them. Uri was already familiar with this fact from reading Eratosthenes, but only now did he learn how this had been calculated: the Sun’s angle of incidence was measured simultaneously at the summer solstice in Syene and in Alexandria, five thousand stadia away (the distance was paced out by servants in the traditional fashion); the difference was one fiftieth of a right angle, so five thousand stadia was therefore one fiftieth. Poseidonus had come to a smaller estimate, but the teacher stood firmly by Eratosthenes’s result.

The astronomy tutor was Hyperion, a gaunt, slow-speaking man, who could never be asked anything because he would shake his head and continue to say what he had decided in advance to say. Uri imagined this dour man could make a tidy income with astrology outside, in the city, and wondered why he had chosen instead to teach at the Gymnasium. He was surprised, then, when he started to explain the Mithraists’ Great Cycles and that the constellations arose from deviations from the earth’s orbit that had accumulated over the millennia. The others could grasp nothing of this, but Uri considered that Hyperion knew his business, just not how to communicate it.

For philosophy they — that is to say, the five-strong group that Uri was in — were instructed by a short, chubby old man, who chortled hugely during the lectures. True he could not tell Uri anything new, but it was entertaining that he was able to present the greatest of the Greeks, from first to last, even Aristotle, as parodists, although that was of course taking it a bit far. Uri would gladly have spoken to him, but Antonius Lollas, the uproarious old coot, fended him off and so he restricted himself to listening to the prepared essays and praising them to the skies, as did the others.

The military discipline appealed to Uri, and he was highly discomfited at falling so far behind in the physical exercises. The other students did not pay him much attention in the first week, with Tija acting as if he had never seen him before, in response to which Uri did not speak to him either: it seemed that either Tija was disloyal by nature, or that was the custom.