György Spiró - Captivity

“Hedylos must be crazy,” Sotades declared, “If he believes he’s going to get into our good books this way.”

And he went on, Uri at his side, to gorge himself at Hedylos’s expense.

Hedylos was ensconced in the place of honor at the head of a long table, along with his family: his father, mother, and several cousins were also there. The father was a maker of drift-net fishing boats and, as Uri saw it, Hedylos’s whole family were delighted. They partook of the overwhelming feast and drank copiously; the tutors sang lustily, the musicians tooted, trilled, and thumped tirelessly. Uri did not much care for the taste of the beer; he ruminated over why the banquet might be worthwhile for Hedylos.

Perhaps it was for the same reason that Agrippa was constantly in debt.

Gymnasium pupils would recall the party even decades later, and if the “Persian” Hedylos or one of his offspring were to look them up with a request of some sort, they would be much readier to oblige.

Toward daybreak a rather shady set of characters arrived, led by a certain Lampo, supposedly a court recorder and a very rich man. They too got plenty to eat and drink, with Hedylos kneeling beside Lampo and reiterating, “You’re our man! You’re our man!” Hedylos’s father was not insulted, and indeed even went so far as to bless them, Greek style.

The other students said later, after they had sobered up, that Lampo was a crafty chap, because judges were always forgetting what had been said previously at a hearing and as the recorder Lampo could write down afterward whatever he wanted. In short, he would falsify the record, and for that reason he was called a papyrus bigshot and quill-killer: he could bend the record to favor or harm who ever he wanted, and absent-minded judges would scrawl their signatures under it, so it was worth greasing Lampo’s palm if one wished to avoid coming out badly in a lawsuit. Lampo’s reach was long, but it would probably not be such a good thing if he were to become the gymnasiarch, for it was rumored that he had set his heart on that post, but he had not managed to buy over the whole governing body — at least not all of its members. That was just a question of time, according to some, but others claimed Lampo would do no harm: he might be uncultured, but he was smart; perhaps he could tap into more funding for the Gymnasium than the unsociable, standoffish, snooty Isidoros.

Uri was dumbfounded. He recalled now that Isidoros had been present at the start of the banquet, but had left by the time Lampo arrived. May the Eternal One keep Isidoros as gymnasiarch for a long time to come.

Rosh Hashanah was a simple affair: it was announced by a shofar; music was played and there was dancing the whole day long in the Basilica and its surrounds, after which people trooped out to the island of Pharos. It was a dignified, slow stroll along the harbor then the Heptastadion, a demonstrative stroll with the participation of at least two hundred thousand Jews; the Greeks stared at them wherever they passed, and not exactly in a friendly fashion, but nonetheless mutely. Flutes, horns, and twanging harps and lutes accompanied the procession of the mass, which was also joined by processions from other synagogues. At the tip of the peninsula, jostling by the Jewish observatory, pushing one other, they dropped objects into the sea: the carriers of the previous year’s sins, so that they might return happily to the city, cleansed, ready for newer sins. Uri had bought himself a cheap earthenware vase for the occasion, and that was what he dropped into the sea. Strangely, he felt that his soul really had been purged.

On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Uri sat in the Basilica on the first row of benches to the west, which was reserved for the alabarch and his extended family. A huge number of people were packed into the aisles between the rows of benches and by the walls — around 120,000 of them, approximately a third of Alexandria’s Jews — with the rest assembling at their own local synagogues. A priest had even come from Jerusalem for the celebration, but he hardly spoke, reciting no more than the benediction. Priests always enjoyed traveling to Alexandria, but they were never able to spend as much time there as they would have liked, as Alexandria’s high and mighty had them escorted promptly back to Judaea. One after another, as the alabarch called them in turn to go to the east wall — the leaders of the city’s Jewish community would read from the Septuagint. They read, so it was believed, from the original Torah which the seventy-two translators had translated in seventy-two days on the island of Pharos. Every year they would ask the Great Library in the royal palace to borrow the tome, and every year it would be taken back again: this one was authentic, the rest mere copies. After the service had ended, they would all troop out again to the island.

Sukkot was observed even more simply: they did not erect tents, as was done in and around for the throngs of worshipers there, but instead merely set up miniature, tabletop tents fabricated from papyrus and bast, decking them out with fresh leaves; these symbolized the tabernacle which once upon a time was the domicile of God, and until the building of the First Temple had concealed the Ark of the Covenant that the Samaritans had been looking for in the bowels of Mount Gerizim when they were massacred.

Who could say where the Ark of the Covenant was lurking, if indeed it had ever existed.

A few weeks after the festivals, excitement broke out among the Jews of Alexandria: Agrippa had been thrown into prison!

It couldn’t have happened more than a fortnight earlier because news — whatever it was — would reach Alexandria from Rome without fail in under nine days. This was even true for events that happened in supposed secret on the island of Capri, where the master of the world, the Roman emperor, resided. News — carried by spies — reached Rome from Capri in about two days, then it took another two days to get to Dikaiarchia (otherwise known to as Puteoli), and from there a ship could reach Alexandria via the most direct route in a week. Uri was angry in retrospect at the frugality of Rome’s Jewish community: he could have made the trip to Jerusalem in two and a half weeks if only the would have shelled out for the Puteoli-Alexandria-Caesarea route They would only have had to cover the stretches from Rome to Puteoli and from Caesarea to Jerusalem on foot! He was now in a position to calculate very precisely that the five weeks they would have saved — return journey included — would have cost no more than one thousand two hundred sesterces — an absolutely negligible sum in comparison with the amount of the sacrificial money.

He had a suspicion how things had gone among the Jews of Rome: it would not be such a good idea to return home.

Tiberius had imprisoned Agrippa! His favorite, his friend, the tutor to young Gemellus and Gaius, son of Germanicus — all because in conversation he was reported to have said that Tiberius’s days were numbered, and a servant reported this to the emperor.

Philo was devastated.

Tija was unsurprised that Agrippa had ended up in prison, but he was unable to accept the allegations.

“It is quite impossible that Agrippa would have said anything of the sort in the presence of a mere servant,” he was convinced. “He might well think it, but he wouldn’t say it out loud, not even if he was dead drunk! I bet Tiberius has hidden Agrippa away. Maybe he is worried about his safety — perhaps he fears hired assassins?”

Uri, on the other hand, was of the opinion that autocratic despots had a tendency to carry out these sorts of meaningless, inexplicable acts as no one dared to keep a check on them. He referred to the writings of distinguished historians on similar cases.