György Spiró - Captivity

Things were going well at the Gymnasium: he was accepted, he made good progress in physical training and found the other subjects easy to master, read a vast amount. Despite that, something was still missing.

So, this was the renowned Gymnasium? The tutors so absent-minded, the students so forgetful? His Greek classmates were friendly, Apollonos Gamma too, indeed Apollonos seemed to have taken a real shine to him; Tija would nod if they ran into one another in one of the Gymnasium’s rooms or in the garden, whereas Isidoros could not let any encounter pass without throwing out some Judaeophobic jest; yet for all that there was something dreamlike, unserious, about this existence. Uri would willingly have brushed the feeling aside, except that Apollonos confirmed it for him: something was brewing.

This was Apollonos’s second year as a pupil at the Gymnasium, and as he saw it the discipline had grown slacker, the teachers more slapdash.

“Everyone has something else going on in the head except precisely the thing he ought to be concerned with,” he said in disgruntlement to Uri. “Everyone has his eyes on Rome and the question of who will be the next emperor. My father told me that no one wants to cut any business deal with him, not even his most longstanding clients, who by now have become almost friends. Later, they say, when things settle down again. But the general climate has been settled for decades, all the time that Tiberius was at the height of his power, regardless of Sejanus’s purging of the senate and of the bucketfuls of blood shed by Tiberius’s men, Macro at their head, when they finally disposed of Sejanus and his gang. In Alexandria no one took such stirrings with any seriousness: it was of no interest to anyone why Tiberius withdrew from Rome and shut himself up on Capri, or why he turned back from the outskirts of Rome the one time he dared to go that far. Rome needed Egypt: Egypt was Rome’s granary. Let them unmercifully massacre one another; either way, Rome’s internal affairs were no concern of ours. Somehow, though, the situation was different now, as if the constellations had slipped to another place in the firmament. Or rather, as if they were still in their places, one can see that; it’s just that some sort of earthquake is getting under way in their souls, and even I can sense that.

At night they would converse in the garden; they were allowed to stay up as the strict order of the Pythagoreans was only upheld formally, for show, but in reality let loose. A fair number of the students would stroll in the Gymnasium’s grounds even by night, and at these hours sellers of water, wine, and food would make bargain offers on the goods they carried on their carts. Uri looked up: the stars were out in the sky on the hot summer evening, though he never saw them, just uncertain spots which would sparkle to life every now and then. He tried to picture the figures of his scrolls in the sky, and in the end he knew all the constellations by heart. He envied Apollonos for having sharp eyes and thus for being able to see the stars clearly.

“Many’s the time,” mused Uri, “that I have felt the whole vault of the sky is weighing down on me with an immense load, and settling on my chest. As if a multitude of gods had come to a decision to let the heavens sink — and straight onto me. I have felt that many times, and the ache in my breast would never stop, and I would get bad heartburn.”

Apollonos nodded.

“That’s where our fates are written — in the stars,” he said. “Rome now imagines it is ruling those stars, and because on every shore of the Great Sea, more out of laziness than conviction, we leave Rome to do as it wishes, and so it rules. If an astrologer whom Tiberius trusts were to come along and kick out Thrasyllus, his current favorite, and the new astrologer were to worm his way into favor by dazzling him with the prospect of eternal life, the weight of the heavenly vault would continue to press on our chests just the same. We would need to know too much to be able to foretell our futures: a person will never know that much, and never has. We would need to live simpler lives, maybe. Not know as much, read as much; the huge amount of superfluous knowledge that we acquire here obscures what is important. This marvelous institution lulls us and dulls us, drives us crazy with all the knowledge we have come by and have yet to come by.”

“Why? What’s the important thing?”

“I don’t know, but it’s probably not anything that we happen to have cognizance of. Quite likely what is actually happening on Earth is not that which we see happening, but something is quite definitely happening right now, even though it’s possible we shall never get to know the truth of the age during which we sojourned with it, temporarily, in our body.”

They fell quiet, staring up at the sky. Apollonos could see the stars; Uri could not.

“Something has made life too complicated and profoundly unjust,” said Apollonos. “Perhaps there are just too many people, they’ve overflowed from the little villages, which have been in ferment, though in earlier times they got along fine there. They have settled down in the big cities, been left to themselves, driven crazy. If we, the privileged, feel weighed down, how do you think poor, primitive people manage to bear it? And there are many of them, a great many. You know them better than I do, after all you have lived among them. What is seething in them? You should know. It’s frightening what a power would be unleashed if Jewish and Greek poor were to unite in a new Spartacist revolt.”

This view surprised Uri, and he set it aside to deliberate more thoroughly.

At weekends the number of spies at the alabarch’s palace grew.

Even before, Uri had seen that the alabarch, sometimes accompanied by Philo or Marcus, sometimes without either, would vanish with messengers who had come to Alexandria from all quarters of the world to pay their respects. They came from Adiabene and Commagene and from Syria; they came from Armenia, under Herod’s successors; they came from Babylon, the capital city of the Parthian Empire, which was longing to lay its hands on Armenia, and had indeed gone to war for it; and, of course, people came from Judaea, Galilee, Italia and all the bigger cities in Egypt. The world is one big spider’s web, and at the center of that web sat the spider, Alabarch Alexander.

It was not certain that Alexander himself financed all these spies, but there was no doubt that he spoke to them. These couriers felt the need to engage closely in his company and whatever they knew — or deemed fit to divulge — they would pass on during these chats. At least that is what Uri supposed, although he was never in a position to hear what the alabarch, the richest Jew in the world, had to discuss with these new arrivals.

Flaccus, the prefect himself, would occasionally turn up at Alabarch Alexander’s palace, accompanied by no more than a couple of bodyguards, and he would always bring a gift of some kind, a lovely carpet from the East or a capacious, wine-filled amphora from Rhodes. The amphora, though simple and undecorated, would be gracefully shaped, and the alabarch was always pleased to receive it, though he had many far more decorative amphoras; Uri was later to learn that an amphora like that could be pricier when empty than filled with the finest of wines, because it was made of a special type of pottery that allowed the wine or seeds that it was holding to “breathe,” so nothing kept in an amphora from Rhodes would go moldy, even if stored for years. Flaccus was a tall, well-built jovial man—“our Aulus”—who conversed informally with one and all. His parents were reputedly well-known collectors of art; his own palace was likewise full of paintings and sculpture that he had brought over from Rome or acquired since then, including a head of the Gorgon Medusa sculpted by Phidias. He gave Uri a friendly pat on the back when they were introduced, and moved around the alabarch’s palace as though at home.