György Spiró - Captivity

Popularity must have made that Sotades overconfident, and he met a nasty death on account of a lampoon in which he had mocked Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who had wed his real sister, Arsinoë. “You dipped your wick in an unholy hole,” he wrote, and was imprisoned, only to escape and be hunted down on Crete by Admiral Patroclus, who ordered that the poet be given a lead vest and tossed into the sea. About the only recollection of all this which remained in Alexandria was that it had been Arsinoë after whom an unfinished temple and the broad main thoroughfare on which the Gymnasium lay were named, along with Savior Arsinoë, Miracle-working Arsinoë, Immortal Arsinoë, and countless other streets.

No one could say, the student Sotades told Uri, why exactly they had revered this Arsinoë, who had died when young. We always feel a need for someone to whom, for better or worse, we can address our prayers; maybe it is human nature to do so.

Uri’s friend Sotades was a pleasant, jolly young man, stocky, with brown hair and dark eyes; he was outstanding at throwing the javelin and sprinting, excelled in military theory, and his own impromptu epitaphs more often than not displayed a finely pointed wit. Uri would have liked to be as jovial, free and easy, and sharp-witted as him, and, above all, he envied his talent as a mathematician, so he could not imagine — and did not dare to inquire — why Sotades took a liking to him. Sotades was the first true Greek friend that he had made in his life, and he was not going to put that friendship at risk over a tactless question. All the Greek students competed for Sotades’s friendship, and that was not on account of his family, who had no claims to fame and were not even inhabitants of Alexandria, but purely on his own account; all the same, Sotades good-naturedly brushed them off. Perhaps he is using me as a weapon against them, it occurred to Uri faint-heartedly, yet even so he was thankful that fate had allowed him to acquire a Greek friend in Alexandria.

Sotades towed Uri all around the town on that Egyptian New Year’s day; as Uri ascertained in due time from Tija, Jews were not forbidden from taking part in such celebrations.

The biggest throng was at the Great Harbor; among the costumed crowd it was hard to distinguish the professional mimics, who performed on temporary platforms erected for the purpose across the city, and for whose art the public tossed coins into baskets placed in front of these stages. They performed a variety of traditional and improvised sketches, and although Uri could not establish which was which, he was struck by the fact that some of the mimics wore hooked noses and kept on doubling over, bowing to the east and yammering ludicrous nonsense.

“Is that supposed to be us Jews?” he asked.

“Indeed, that’s right,” Sotades confirmed.

“Why do they hate us?” Uri asked.

“Because you’re dangerous,” Sotades replied in a friendly fashion.

Uri deferred any further inquiries until later, when a madman known as Carabbas, or “Cabbage-Head,” the most popular of the city’s fools, climbed onto the stage to a huge ovation. Carabbas was a homeless vagrant, who often slept on the Gymnasium’s well-trimmed lawn and so was well known to the students. He was also well known to the women of Alexandria, who were the objects of Carabbas’s indiscriminate amatory attentions: any time he saw a shapely woman, he would let out a whoop and, to the delight of bystanders, give pursuit. If the woman turned tail and fled, Carabbas would race for a while alongside her, then stop and drop, panting, to the ground. If the woman halted, Carabbas would roll on his back on the ground and whimper, but he never laid a finger on any of them, never said an improper word. People said that more than once a crowd had beaten up a man who sprang to his woman’s defense by way of Carabbas. Carabbas would get free food and drink, both in the Great Harbor and the Western Harbor, but he did not abuse his popularity and consumed only what he needed.

What distinguished him from other destitute homeless was that he would go around stark naked. He minded neither cold nor heat, and never showed the slightest interest in putting on even a sheet: his skin was his clothing, wrinkled and blackened, and it seemed that, every now and again, he’d shed a used-up cabbage-leaf, either dirt that had stuck to him, or maybe the skin itself, and that may have been the source of his nickname. His testicles, which he would scratch unconcernedly, dangled flatly beside his member.

Anyway, it was this Carabbas who scrambled onto the stage as Uri was wondering aloud why the Greeks of Alexandria hated the Jews.

The mimic actors resented the competition, but they did not dare remove him from the stage: they too were familiar with him, and they did not have the nerve to throw any doubt on his vested rights. Carabbas’s thick mane dangled in tousled shocks into his eyes. He jumped onto the stage, his testicles flapping as if there were ears growing on the underside of his belly; he beat his chest and shrieked incoherently. The mimics stood by gloomily and waited, while the audience applauded exultantly with much whooping: “Carabbas is singing! Listen to Carabbas!” The musicians tried to blow, bang or pluck a tune under his yells but to no avail. The less sense or rhythm there was to Carabbas’s yelling, the more it pleased the public. “Carabbas! Carabbas!” they shouted deliriously.

“The poor wretch,” Uri muttered.

Sotades shook his head:

“He’s got a great role,” he said. “At least he’s found himself: with such manifold lack of talent he manages to make a respectable living through his own efforts in the city. Other untalented dopes have to work themselves stupid, practically run themselves into the ground. That man’s a genius, our collective genius, Gaius Theodorus.”

Uri had much the same thought right then, only he would not have dared to say so. Maybe that was the real difference between Greeks and Jews in the city: the polytheistic Greek admitted it, the monotheistic Jew denied it.

They drifted with the crowds to Arsinoë Avenue, where, to the east of the Gymnasium’s grounds, the Sema, the mausoleum of Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies, was located. The building was only opened on Rosh Hashanah, with the priests and priestesses of Alexander the Great (who for the rest of the year made their living at everyday occupations) standing at the entrance in their white robes, their brows wreathed in laurels. A long line of people stood in a queue, waiting to take a look at the dead emperor’s alabaster sarcophagus, rattle off a prayer of thanksgiving, and add some coins to the coffers of Alexander’s priesthood. It was Ptolemy I Soter who had Alexander’s dead body transported to Alexandria, but his golden sarcophagus was looted and melted down by Ptolemy X to pay his mercenaries, and it was he who had replaced it with one of alabaster. The Sema — the mausoleum itself — was raised by Ptolemy IV Philopater, and it was a square, terraced edifice, surprisingly low given the glory of the king resting within. The Hill of The Bodies, the man-made mound somewhat to the south surpassed the Sema in height, as its designer wished to compete with Alexander the Great even in death. Every ruler since had striven to perpetuate his own name with a temple that was taller than the mausoleum.

Uri and Sotades joined the queue to get into the Sema, but for all their standing around they moved no farther forward, so they gave up and went off for a drink instead. Sotades recounted that when Augustus visited Alexandria after the battle of Actium he had Alexander the Great’s tomb opened, and the emperor had touched the embalmed body, accidentally knocking off part of the nose. Once the sarcophagus had been hastily resealed, he was offered a view into the tombs of the Ptolemies, which he self-assuredly declined, responding that he had come to see a king, not a motley collection of corpses. Since then, for seventy years, they had not reopened Alexander the Great’s coffin for anyone, save for the physicians who every twenty years or so reembalmed the body. Even then nobody else was allowed to look within.