György Spiró - Captivity

Visits by the prefect were not always announced in advance, but on more than one occasion it had happened that a number of Jewish notabilities (Tija called them his father’s bankers) had been waiting at the palace in advance of his arrival.

“What do the bankers deal with?” Uri asked.

“What do you think? They provide lines of credit — what else?” Tija replied.

Uri inferred that the alabarch provided loans at usurious rates of interest, and his men also invested Flaccus’s money.

Uri recognized, though not from close acquaintance, the faces of several important figures from Alexandria’s Sanhedrin; on the day of the Sabbath, after sunset, these chosen individuals often had supper at the alabarch’s home. At one of these dinners, Marcus told one of the council members, a man by the name of Andron, to record Uri among the Alexandrian Jews as a guest of the alabarch; Andron, who ran the Jewish archive, professed his readiness to do so and immediately made a note of Uri’s name as well as his mother’s and father’s names. The records of births and deaths were also in his charge, and he personally made the copies of any changes that were taken to Jerusalem for Passover by the money-carrying delegation. After he had remonstrated that he knew so little about the Roman families, he went on to ask whether there might be a priestly or Levite offshoot in Uri’s family; Uri informed him that unfortunately there was none.

At one of the suppers, Flaccus himself honored them with his presence, taking good care to observe all due Jewish prescriptions. He addressed Tryphon, Euodus, Philemon, and the other elders, making polite talk with the middle-aged council members, too, as individuals with whom he had a long and close acquaintance. Tryphon had also brought along his son, Demetrius, who had sensitive equine features with conspicuously large nostrils and thin, buttoned-up lips. Tija conversed with him at length and with obvious respect.

“Who is that Demetrius?” Uri later asked enviously.

Tija laughed.

“An enemy,” he said. “They loathe us because our wealth is greater than that of all the elders put together.”

Once Uri recognized among the couriers Jehoram, the scrawny interpreter, whom on the way to Samaria he had initially supposed was a thief. Jehoram also spotted Uri but avoided greeting him, turning his head away instead. Uri did not greet him either.

Jehoram may also have reported on me to Alexandria. The interpreter was clearly working for Aaron, the officer, and thus for the Sanhedrin, who had entrapped Pontius Pilate. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the idea for the provocation at Mount Gerizim had originated in Alexandria.

Uri again sensed in his nostrils the smell of the mutilated, festering bodies, and he felt sick with disgust.

It was an unclean place in which he was living.

He deliberated on whether he should make it known that he had met Jehoram in Samaria as an agent of the Sanhedrin. However, Uri was not a spy for the alabarch; he was not asked what he knew. Even if they suspected that Jehoram was a double agent, then that was what they suspected; if not, then they did not. I would never work as a paid spy, he reflected, so why should I work for them for nothing?

He did feel, however, that, even without any return, he was in an awkward position, since the alabarch’s family had been supporting him for months, and his studies were being paid for by Philo. He would have to recompense them later; they were bound to call in the debt.

How could he escape — not from Alexandria, but from the alabarch’s palace?

Despite it being worthwhile to be there.

At irregular intervals, the alabarch would throw a soirée to which Flaccus and the notables of the Greek Gerusia were invited. On these occasions he would put on display the pictures, vases, and statues he had acquired since the last occasion, with harpists and flautists also performing — and, not least, a sumptuous banquet. The alabarch had sole ownership rights over the musicians, and he made a tidy sum of money on them, hiring the group out to wealthy mourners for the compulsory one-week period of burial feast immediately following a funeral.

The alabarch’s agents covered the length and breadth of Greece, and if by chance they came across a work of art that was of note, they would send him a message. Not all of his couriers were of discerning taste, but the supervisor whom the alabarch entrusted with organizing the purchases did: he was Greek and a full-time employee of the Musaeum.

This Nicodemus was a smart man, and had started his career as a sculptor but, as he complained to Uri after the two of them had established a friendship, it had been a long time since there were any master sculptors in Alexandria.

“There’s too much money around,” he explained. “We’re able to buy up everything; we’re stripping the entire Hellenic world. We’re parasites, and we contribute nothing to the arts; there are no significant painters or sculptors here. Phidias had it easy: Athens wanted to put on a good show, both internally and to the outside world; Alexandria, by contrast, does not want to put on a good show because since Cleopatra VII it has had no existence as a sovereign state, and no need to gain acceptance from the world at large.”

Uri mentioned to him that he had heard it suggested that Alexandria was poor, though it had a lot of wealthy inhabitants. So how was Nicodemus able to make acquisitions if the library did not have any money?

“Private sources of capital,” said Nicodemus. “For instance, whenever I buy an art treasure for the alabarch, he offers the city anything from five to ten percent of the price. That’s what the Greek rich also do. It’s a good job that the wealthy Greeks and Jews compete with each other, for otherwise the Musaeum would have received nothing for the last eighty years.”

The vases, murals, and statues that the alabarch had on display in the atrium were marvelous, and Uri had the luck twice to be able to see them. Flaccus was enraptured by them, and of course by those pictures and statues that he received as gifts, solemnly handed over by the alabarch to claps and cheers. Nor did the Greek guests return home empty handed.

The Greek rich organized similar shows, to which the alabarch and his family would be invited, but not Uri. Thanks to Nicodemus, though, he could gain entry to the Musaeum and even inspect the stores, and he would be amazed at the indomitable imaginative power man could have, if only he were allowed.

At the Gymnasium word was spread that they would be ready to put copyists to work in the Library because, they were aiming to collect all the works that had ever been written. He spoke with a few of the Greeks who were accustomed to doing copying work; they were not paid too well, but once a person got into the swing of it, he could make quite a nice sum. They mentioned that in recent times they had not been copying entire scrolls, but a librarian would scan through a scroll and decide what were the important passages, and what were not. It was a deplorable practice because another librarian might decide other passages were important, and who could know what would be of interest centuries from now, but it was all understandable from the point of view of the city’s lack of money. They also recounted that most recently the parchment rolls were not copied onto another roll, because then two mistakes in a column were enough to make it necessary to start with a new roll all over again, but now they would copy onto separate leaves which were then fastened back-to-back and collected to produce what was called a book. If the copyists makes an error, only one side of the parchment needed to be rewritten, not the whole roll. Of course, the books of parchment or papyrus could still burn: a way of impregnating the leaves to make them non-flammable had been discovered two generations ago, but it was not utilised because that was expensive.