György Spiró - Captivity

“They won’t deliver anything! It’s waste of money! They’ll sling their hook straightaway!”

“They will deliver,” said Uri. “They’ve got that much sense.”

“Surely you’re not counting on this lasting for any length of time?” asked the stubborn-looking man.

“Yes, I am,” Uri responded.

That did not go down well with anybody — the elders and the smarter ones really wanted to hear their longings confirmed.

“Flaccus will come to his senses,” said one elderly man sitting in a wobbly chair. “He’s drunk himself stupid but he’ll come to. He’s been good to us up till now, partial to us, but he’s been led up the garden path, drunk under the table…”

They looked at Uri as if he was the one who knew it all. After all, he lived in the alabarch’s palace, knew Flaccus personally, was a student at the Gymnasium…

Uri shook his head.

“Flaccus hasn’t taken leave of his senses,” he said. “He’s very much in command of them, in fact. He’s a man who has fallen out of favor. He made a deal beforehand with the Greeks; in my view he took a payment in advance, and he’s taking a share of the booty right now. He’s amassed a mountain of money so he’ll be able to hide out in the Sudan or somewhere… That’s his only chance.”

“But why at our expense?”

“That’s the only way that was open to him! Do you think he would have joined forces with the Jews when he knows that they support whoever is emperor at the moment?”

A protracted and unproductive argument broke out, with the elders getting bogged down in grand politics and history, while Uri sat quietly and thanked the Eternal One that he had been recognized on the bank of the Taurus.

All the members of the council spent the night at the house; the owner, a silk merchant, did well out of it: there was no need for him to accept others in his house, and the freshly organized forces of law and order protected his property along with the councilors. He had a splendid house, with a pool on the ground floor; the two floors above that had eight big rooms, including three with cubicles. There were ten elders, two of them without families, so somehow there was room for them all.

Uri lay on the floor near the pool, along with many others: the noise just would not die down outside, nor would it die down inside, and he turned over in his mind why it had not immediately occurred to him to paint himself as the alabarch’s man. It had come down to pure chance that he had ended up here and had been given board and lodging. Am I so helpless? He reflected before coming to the conclusion that he wasn’t.

Do I despise the alabarch that much? He was surprised to conclude that he did — as much as he did Agrippa.

Nicolaeus, the most intelligent-looking member of the council, took Uri aside late that evening.

“Where do you think the greatest risk lies?” he asked.

Uri sighed.

“They are going to starve us, come what may. Then an epidemic is going to erupt, and we shall have no way of breaking out.”

Nicolaeus nodded.

“They have a big pile of booty now,” he said, “but that’s just a one-off. Flaccus will not get a share of the real spoils… These wretched little killers will hardly get a thing… You can’t loot the same house twice over… The rich Greeks, on the other hand, will pick up our business partners and our contacts… That’s the real prize! No one in the wider world gives credence any more to the Jews of Alexandria. We’ve foolishly allowed ourselves be fleeced; that sort of thing can happen again at any time, we’ve become unreliable trading partners, that’s the problem! A big problem!”

Uri thought about that and decided it was the unadorned truth.

Whatever happened, this was the end of Jewish Alexandria.

The Greek riffraff on the other side of the wall mocked the Jews who offered to do deals with them, swearing at them, calling them pestilent, cat-murdering slaves, Moses’ leprous people, and then, of course, in the end they took the money and that night brought food and water. The water was not stagnant and though the food might have been less than they asked for, the Jews of Delta were not flagrantly shortchanged. The Greek wretches wanted to make money as best they could.

Late in the afternoon they also hurled over the barricaded walls many copies of a proclamation by Flaccus in which he explained the formation of the Sector as a justified reprisal for countless breaches of the peace by Jews. Hereafter, the document stated, Jews might live within it, but nowhere else in Alexandria. According to the proclamation — and this was what hurt those in Delta most — the Jews counted as newcomers in Alexandria, and the restrictive stipulations that governed foreigners would henceforth be applicable to them as well.

Countless breaches of the peace by Jews? What a hideous lie! We have always observed the law! Our own, God’s law, first and foremost, but also whatever was their prevailing law! Even the infamously Judaeophobic debauchee Euergetes III did not think of anything like this in the days when he attacked us!

Foreigners to Alexandria — us? Newcomers? When our rights were graven in stone by king Soter? Those tablets exist to this day in the Museion. Emperor Augustus confirmed and expanded those rights, which are proclaimed for ever and a day by his stele in front of the Sebasteion — that is, if it has not already been toppled. Us, whose Greek Torah, the Pentateuch, was deposited in the Museion of the king’s palace as a precious document, the most precious of all, also for ever and a day — that is to say, if they have not incinerated that too! Us, who always scrupulously paid every tax to king and emperor and city? Us, who have been living here for three hundred years? Ever since Alexander the Great paced out the city’s boundaries three hundred years ago? We, whose very activities allowed the city to flourish at all?

We have become the foreigners, outlaws, newcomers, slaves?

We were here even before the first Greek simpleton slave set foot in Egypt! We were already here two thousand years ago when Moses led his people out of here! We came home three hundred years ago; we are natives! Homegrown inhabitants!

In spite of which it is now we who are wrongfully burned and massacred!

Uri had to admit it, Aristarchus had been right: these people had been pampered, they were deadly stupid.

The real trouble was not what the proclamation stated — Flaccus’s declaration that the Jews were to be foreigners — but what it implied, namely that he was going to set his armed forces against Delta. That was the real problem. Soldiers would be guarding the Sector from now on, not Greek riffraff who were open to bribes. It would become impossible to acquire food, impossible to break out.

Flaccus, “our Aulus,” had not gone about things in so stupid a fashion, after all. He had managed to create an internal enemy, and by intervening against it he was going to forge unity between the Greeks and the legions. Rome was going to have a tough nut to crack if it wanted to remove Flaccus. It would come to war, and Flaccus’s chances against Rome were not at all bad.

Uri sensed that the sight of the Jews choking to death on the fumes of the pyre had not inspired in him the appropriate sympathy and horror, and he wondered why not. Perhaps because he had already seen that sort of thing at the foot of Mount Gerizim. Thinking back on that scene now, in retrospect, he was astonished to discover that even then he had not been as shocked as he ought to have been. No, not truly shocked.

Ever since he had witnessed the rape and execution of Sejanus’s daughter, nothing had surprised him. Then he’d had to vomit, but since then he’d lost the ability to be sick.