György Spiró - Captivity

The alabarch jumped up and began to pace around.

“Never saw the likes before! A man takes as a wife in spirit a woman, whose firstborn son he is about to have murdered, with her unquestioning agreement, for the sake of an ideal: for the empire. I was the only witness. My life was in danger from that moment, though I only realized it later on: witnesses like that have a habit of getting snuffed out. Yet that didn’t happen: Tiberius was smarter than anyone who has ever been Princeps. He knew that I knew he could do that, even ought to do that, but he left me alive. Ever since then he has had no supporter in Egypt more loyal than me. He knew that from the start. He knows everything in advance…”

“Even so, he might say who was going to be his successor,” Tija ventured. “It would save us all a lot of trouble and strife.”

Irately, the alabarch waved the notion aside.

At the end of March came the news that the emperor had died, having reached the age of seventy-eight. It was rumored that he had been killed by Macro, stalwart prefect of his Praetorian Guard, or that Gaius, Germanicus’s sole surviving son, had strangled him, or even that Thrasyllus, his favorite seer, had smothered him with a pillow, but these tales were not meant to be taken seriously. The fact is he was old, and even an emperor has to die sometime.

There was commotion in Alexandria, as there was throughout all of the empire along the coast of the Great Sea, then that was overtaken by a deadly hush.

Funeral ceremonies in every shrine. All pennants lowered. Every eagle tipped over. Every shop closed. The baths closed. Every market empty. Prayers for the deceased in all the synagogues. Sports events and theatrical performances postponed. Taverns closed. A ban on all assemblies.

The dockworkers listlessly loaded and unloaded the boats, because even at a time like this the labor of the harbor had to go on. Flaccus’s Praetorian Guards prowled around the city, just as listlessly: they had to pick up any drunkards, nor were they free to drink. General gloom and depression set in. Grieving citizens inscribed their names in a huge tome in the Sebasteion that would later be sent to Rome to be placed on public display among similar tomes sent by other cities. In another book were inscribed the names of those, Greeks and Jews alike, who had pledged to contribute money for the erection of a statue to Deified Tiberius. Let there be a statue worthy of him next to the one of Augustus there, in the Sebasteion. A long queue formed in front of the temple entrance, the grieving soldiers ensuring public order in the brilliant sunshine, their helmets and their armor glinting, sweat dripping from beneath it in the heat. The emperor’s loyal troops, silently cursing all emperors — dead, existing, and to come — to Hades.

The emperor is dead.

But who would become emperor?

It would be nice to know, because only then could the shops reopen, contests be held, the markets function, and finally, in shrines and houses of prayer, could thanksgiving prayers at last be intoned to welcome the new ruler and to signal that one could again take pleasure in life.

Conjecture spread like wildfire: power was now held by a duumvirate of Gaius, Germanicus’s sole surviving son, and Gemellus, the deceased emperor’s consanguineous grandson, who had not yet reached the age of majority. But no, that was not right, Gaius had turned down the title. Gaius had been murdered. Gemellus had been murdered, Agrippa as well and that half-wit Claudius too, who, it was certain, could never have become emperor anyway. Everybody had been killed except Macro, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, who had marched on Rome and taken charge. But no, that couldn’t be right either, because peace reigned in Rome. All the same, there must have been some sort of tumult over the succession in Rome, because the Acta Diurna had not appeared for a fortnight and when it did resume it would surely greet the new emperor in writing, and at a time like this, in the spring with the shipping season in full swing, the newspaper would reach Alexandria from Rome in ten days.

The first week of April had come and gone by the time when the news arrived from several sources all at once: the new emperor was Gaius, who as a child earned the agnomen Caligula—“Bootikins”—and was straightaway called that, familiarly, by everyone in Alexandria, Greek and Jew alike. As if convinced that the emperor would also look upon his subjects from afar more genially and benignly if his they used his nickname.

Few people in Alexandria — the alabarch’s family were among the first — were to learn that considerable wrangling over the succession had in fact broken out in the Senate. In his last will and testament, Tiberius had designated Gaius and Gemellus to be his heirs as co-Principes, and Macro, after racing to Rome with the news of the emperor’s death, had immediately set about having the will nullified, primarily on the grounds that designating co-regents, especially when one of them had not yet attained the age of majority, constituted evidence that toward the end of his life the Deified Tiberius—“Augustus” though he might be — had become senile, and a will drawn up by such a man was invalid. The Senate kept dragged the argument out for a while before finally caving in to Macro, who by virtue of having sole command of the army was the most powerful individual in Rome. The will was annulled, and the Senate proclaimed Caligula as sole heir and emperor. It was in much the same way, Uri reflected, that Master Jehuda had attended to that widow’s plight in Judaea.

As was proper given his new position, Caligula adopted Gemellus as his son, nominating him as Princeps of Youth. That accomplished, it would have been a good time to relax a little.

Except that the emperor’s next step was not to consolidate power in Rome, but to sail the stormy seas to the island of Pandateria, to bring back to Rome the ashes of his mother, Agrippina and his older brother Nero, imprisoned in the Pontines by Tiberius and long dead of starvation.

A fine human gesture.

Caligula sent a message to Rome that from now on the month after August would no longer be September, but Germanicus, after his father. The Assembled Fathers of the Senate instantly rushed to enact the emperor’s will and proclaim it throughout the empire: from thenceforth Rosh Hashanah would fall in the month of Germanicus, not September.

The Jews of Alexandria were perturbed at this for they, through the alabarch, had some hand in bumping off Germanicus nineteen years before. What if the new emperor wanted to avenge his father’s death on Jewry as a whole? Better if he were to restrict his vengeance to the alabarch himself, with whom, of course they had nothing to do, the alabarch being a Greek citizen, barely Jewish at all. One could smell on the night air that the alabarch was finished in Alexandria. And likewise in Rome, with Agrippa, his main liaison with Roman Jewry, still locked up in the clink.

But then the news came that Emperor Caligula had released Agrippa. The alabarch was a canny man, after all, the scent in the Alexandrian night suggested, and through Agrippa he would arrange with the new emperor that the rights granted to the chosen people by Augustus, never thrown into question by Tiberius, and there engraved on the Jewish stele raised high in front of the Sebasteion for all to see, would henceforth not be thrown into question by anybody.

In a marvelous address that he made Friday evening in the Basilica, the alabarch called upon the city’s Jews to express their joy in every possible manner. He praised Emperor Gaius’s cultivation, his masculine handsomeness, the sharpness of his intellect, and the martial skill he had inherited from his father, and gave blessings to the Eternal One for picking such a magnificent person to head the empire. Alexandria’s Jews were already overjoyed at the beginning of this address, but by the end of it they were even more overjoyed.