György Spiró - Captivity

Maybe flatfish wasn’t so unclean after all, judging by local notions, as it was in Rome. No it couldn’t be unclean; in a Jewish restaurant they would not cook unclean food even for Greeks.

On Tuesday he asked Apollos what was known about elephants.

Apollos recounted that Philopator’s African elephants had lost the battle against the Indian elephants of Antiochus the Great…

“What else?”

“There’s an anecdote about Aristophanes of Byzantium. He grew up in Egypt, unlike Callimachus or Eratosthenes. He was a pupil of Zenodotus, Callimachus, and of Machon, the Jew-hating comic poet, and published an edition of the Iliad based on the work of Zenodotus, the Homeric scholar and first superintendent of the Library of Alexandria, as well as Hesiod, Alcaeus of Messene, Anacreon, and Aristophanes the Comedian. His edition of Pindar was especially important, and he also published Aristotle’s Historia Animalium … Anyway, Aristophanes of Byzantium is said to have fallen in love with a flower-selling girl who had an elephant as her lover… Maybe not a real elephant, just the nickname for a well-hung fellow. Eumetes II suspected that he wanted to move to Pergamum, which was not too much to peoples’ liking at that time because of Byzantium’s bitter rivalry with Pergamum, so he had Aristophanes of Byzantium locked up in prison and later strangled…”

Uri sighed. What was there that Apollos did not know? But then he had been able to bury his head in books for much longer than Uri had.

“Anything else?” he asked. “Are Jews afraid of elephants?”

“Yes, they are afraid,” said Apollos, “and with good reason. Ptolemy VI Philometor and his consort, his sister Cleopatra II, charged the Jews with the defense of the realm; Onias IV and Dositheos were the two military commanders… His brother, Ptolemy Physkon, set out from Cyrenaica against Cleopatra II, was victorious, had the Jews of Alexandria stripped naked and bound, women and children too, and had them cast before elephants that were made drunk. The elephants did not trample the Jews, however, but instead turned on the king’s own people. Physkon took this to be a divine portent and reprieved the Jews; indeed, he raised them to the status of councilors, and this day was for a long time a feast day for the Jews of Alexandria, being held sometime after Shavuot, though already by the time my father was a boy, when he spent three years here, it was no longer being celebrated… In my opinion not a word of it is true.”

Uri recounted what he had heard in Delta on Sunday. Apollos just shook his head.

“That’s just nonsense. The elephants are not usually brought from Ethiopia but Nubia and the Sudan,” he said. “But it’s a long time since that happened.”

“All the same, that’s what people imagine.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Apollos.

They both fell silent.

On Sunday Uri went again with Apollos to the amphitheater.

There were several theaters in Alexandria, but the most authentic of them was built near the Eastern Harbor and was sited so the open end of the auditorium faced toward the north, maybe to allow for the observation of fleets of ships by the audience. It was this amphitheater that Uri had seen through the gemstone on the day of his arrival in Alexandria. The actors performed mostly comic sketches as tragedies had never had much appeal in Alexandria, even in its heyday. The audience was comprised mostly of Greeks, with exceptionally few Jews: Apollos pointed them out because Uri could not discern them, and not just due to his poor eyesight. The sketches were performed with little in the way of costuming or makeup, the catch-words and accents of the city’s famous Greeks parodied in half-baked improvised stories which were purloined from earlier Greek comedies and simplified. Uri recognized barely any of the celebrities. Apollos, who had been living in Alexandria longer, would occasionally mutter the name of the person who happened to be featured at the moment. The stories were trite and the jokes vulgar but the audience lapped it up, and even Uri got the point of a fable about goat-shagging Auillios since Avilius was the middle name of Aulus Flaccus. He and Apollos listened aghast to the tasteless witticisms and the terrified bleats of a genuine goat, which was not exactly keen on a man attempting to couple with it.

“That’s Pharoseidon, a stage-name, he’s very popular,” Apollos — who liked going to the theater — whispered. “He will appear on two or three stages in an afternoon.”

“And does he take the goat around with him?”

The mimic left off shagging the goat and stepped to the front of the stage: he was a short, bald, elfin man with a slight speech impediment; odiously perspiring, he began a discourse on the topics of the day, and even responded to questions from the audience — perhaps not entirely unprompted — all the while staying in character as Auillios. How did he, Auillios, see the future of Alexandria? Well, the way he imagined it was that five hundred thousand Jews would be brought in from Judaea, because they eat less than one hundred thousand Greeks and there would be no need to provide shelter for them. Snickers. He imagined changing Greek tarts for Jewish ones because their vaginas were better greased and always wide open. Laughter. He imagined importing loads of pigs from Judaea, because Jews liked them most of all. Whinnies. They like them so much that they don’t eat them, suspecting that fellow spirits resided in them. A load of guffaws. He imagined promoting the use of the Syrian language in Alexandria because nobody understood it. Roars of approval, stormy clapping.

Uri felt sick.

Apollos stumbled wanly beside him as they made their way along the harbor among chuckling Greeks.

It was not impossible that there was Jewish blood flowing in that revolting character, the blood of the most gutless Jews who ever lived.

Gemellus was assassinated — Tiberius’s grandson by blood, whom he had been named co-princeps in his nullified will and whom Caligula had adopted as a son.

Macro was hounded into suicide, together with Ennia, his wife and the emperor’s supposed lover. That’s why he never arrived in Alexandria to take up his post.

Silanus, the emperor’s father-in-law, also took his own life.

It was winter by now, which in Alexandria meant milder weather, with people going about in tunics except for poor Carabbas, who still capered around buck-naked on the Gymnasium grounds, and in the evenings was fed drinks in the harbor area’s taverns. Everywhere everybody was wrapped up in politicking, the Greeks and Jews sticking to their own kind.

Uri reached a decision that he would leave: he would finish this year’s studies and then go. He had no wish to be seen as Greek among the Jews and Jewish among the Greeks. Alexandria was an attractive city, but he was a Roman and he would have to go home sometime.

The alabarch continued his strong belief in Agrippa’s influence, above all confirmed by the fact that the tetrarchate of Philip — which, four years after his death, was amalgamated into Syria — had been awarded to Agrippa by Caligula, so Agrippa had become a king! That is the tip of the iceberg, said Alabarch Alexander, the rest will come soon enough; and indeed, news came through that Agrippa had also been granted the area around the town of Abilene, Lysanias’s former tetrarchy. The second step! Agrippa had been given a golden chain, the weight of his former shackles! “His shackles can’t have been all that heavy,” remarked Tija sarcastically.

“Agrippa is now by the emperor’s side, his adviser!” the alabarch would say as he diligently attended to his business.

Uri waited for the right moment to thank him for his hospitality, but no occasion of that kind arose. Agrippa’s domain was only a tiny realm, consisting of no more than a few cities: Auranitis, Paneas, Trachonitis, Gaulanitis and Batanea in northern Transjordan, but even that would do. He sometimes got to deliberating that it might be better than Alexandria if Agrippa were to take up the tetrarchy and he were to be sent there with a message of some kind. It was not far from Decapolis, and there were said to be good libraries in those ten Greek free towns. He would cast himself at Agrippa’s feet: my king, he would say, under false apprehension I was regarded as being your delegate; now here I am, I am at your disposal. He pictured a fine, dramatic scene, at the end of which Agrippa appointed him head of his library, one that was to be established, and he would travel far and wide to acquire its stock. In reality, however, Agrippa, had not yet set out for his realm and was still rotting in Rome.