György Spiró - Captivity

The building looked drab on the outside, but on the inside it came out so well that Honoratus exclaimed that most senators would envy it.

“Let them!” whispered the alabarch darkly, and with his next breath ordered statues to be added to the atrium.

Honoratus’s men procured some lovely statues: it was all the rage to acquire any Greek statue that could be moved. One of their finds, this one produced in Rome by a Greek master sculptor, was a superb bust of Germanicus as a handsome young man (after all he was only thirty-two when Tiberius had him murdered). Uri noticed that it bore essentially the same features of Caligula on coins, which was no surprise as sons often tend to resemble their fathers. For that one statue the alabarch paid more than he had for the whole house, including its fixtures. Uri had again gotten used to measuring everything around him in talents rather than sesterces, and it was also rare that a mention of dinars crossed their lips; probably the alabarch’s group had little sense of their value, in much the same way he had been in Judaea regarding the value of prutahs.

Awestruck by the sight of the sculpture, Honoratus asked the alabarch whether he would be taking it back with him to Alexandria. The alabarch pondered before saying that if the mission succeeded, then he would donate it to the local Jewish community. There was no end to the gratitude expressed by Honoratus, a sure sign that he had been hoping he could have it.

But it was far from clear what mission the delegation was serving: Who had authorized them, and to what end. No one asked, and Uri refrained from doing so as well.

On the other hand, he did ask Philo how the matter of his own debt was going to be cleared.

Philo was not pleased to be asked, because at that moment, reclining on one side at the leaf of the jacaranda-wood table in his second-floor suite, he happened to be writing about Flaccus, a work on the prefect’s deeds and misdeeds, to set these out before Caligula. Having been disturbed, he lost his train of thought and let it slip that the alabarch had reached an agreement with the Roman Jewish bankers exchanging his signature for their underwriting all costs incurred by the delegation while they were in Rome. A promissory note or bill of exchange had long been in use in this type of case, which stated that the Romans would be able to obtain an equivalent sum in cash on demand from the Jewish bankers in Alexandria with whom the alabarch held his own money, or else (and this was the more usual case) they would send a courier to Alexandria with word that they were willing to enter into this or that business transaction for such and such a sum at this or that much interest.

“For them it will be worth it,”said Philo darkly, and asked Uri to stick around before he went back to work, because at any time he might have a question that only someone who had lived through the Bane would be able to answer.

Uri dozed while Philo wrote, roused every now and then by the sound of a child’s crying, which could be heard above the ordinary noises of Far Side. Tears would come to his eyes, so much would he have preferred to be with his son, but that was not possible because he was being paid to stay away from him. He felt very strongly — indeed knew for sure — that his father had been reborn in his son, and he regretted every minute that he could not spend with him.

Uri read through those parts of Philo’s draft that had been completed, but he did not recognize what had actually happened.

In Philo’s outline he blamed Flaccus, with his rabid Judaeophobia, for everything; there was not a word about the Greek business interests who had really been behind the events. Uri did not say anything about that, but he did ask if any estimate had been made of the number of Jews who had been killed in Alexandria during the Bane, since he had seen no information on that.

“It’s possible to find out,” said Philo.

Uri waited for him to cough up a number, but nothing was forthcoming.

“So how many was it?”

“Not many,” Philo replied.

“How many?”

“Three thousand four hundred and fifty-two.”

Uri shuddered.

“That many?”

“Not enough to set down before the emperor,” said Philo dourly. “It’s little more than one percent of the whole Jewish population of Alexandria! The emperor will just laugh it off.”

“What, then, would be enough?”

Philo contemplated.

“Two-fifths, four-sevenths? One could get somewhere with that… As it is, we can only plead our case on the severity of the torments… The fact that old people were scourged as if they had been slaves… That Jewish women were made to eat pork… The stress needs to be placed on the quality…”

Uri then asked if Augustus’s stele for the Jews was still standing in front of the Sebasteion, to which Philo answered in the affirmative. Perhaps Flaccus had left it standing as a perverse joke, and now it was forbidden; since peace had arrived it was patrolled day and night by guards, and in the event any anti-Jewish obscenity was scrawled on it — which happened often — then it was quickly washed off.

“The sentries themselves do the daubing, so that they have something to do and the sentry duty isn’t called off,” Philo chortled. “That’s how they make their living — and not a bad one at that.”

“What happened to Flaccus?” Uri asked.

“He was exiled to Andros,” Philo replied. “I’ll include that in the book as well! The voyage, how he was taken to sea in the midst of storms, all the while tormented by his guilty conscience and solitude. And if he should die — that too! Sooner or later people like that are killed… My work will be like the choicest Greek tragedy! I’d never have believed the time would come when I would write a tragedy…”

Philo laughed:

“What do you think, my dear Gaius? Who was it who arraigned Flaccus before the Roman courts of law? You’ll never believe it: Isidoros and Lampo! Yes, Isidoros and Lampo, his former pals! They accused him of corruption, just imagine! A prefect accused of corruption! Surprise, surprise!”

Philo, who had no sense of humor, chuckled for a long time.

“And what happened to Pilate?” Uri asked.

“I imagine he was also exiled to somewhere.”

Uri shook his head. “A risky job it is, governing a country,” he commented.

Philo snorted:

“The only bad thing to be is a tyrannical prefect, because they will be punished by the Eternal One for sure,” he declared. “Emperors have been mistaken, repeatedly, in their appointments to the posts of prefects of Egypt and Judaea! They ought to appoint Jews: they would know how to serve an emperor faithfully, which would make the Jews themselves accept the emperor. That’s what we have to fight for!”

So that was why Marcus and Tija had come to Rome.

Uri figured it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that if Caligula forgave the alabarch, then Marcus would be made the prefect of Egypt and Tija the prefect of Judaea. Before that could happen, of course, he needed to arrange for them to be admitted into the Roman equestrian order. They met the wealth requirement, and the alabarch would no doubt arrange for the senators to be bribed.

Most likely that was the main reason for the whole family being there: if it had simply been a matter of representing the interest of the Jews of Alexandria, it would have been sufficient for the alabarch or Philo to come alone.

A year and a half ago the alabarch’s family had been left out of the list of richest families in the provinces on whom the equestrian order was bestowed, but they were here now, uninvited, and that’s what they were going to arrange. It might be that Marcus would become prefect of Judaea or Egypt, and Tija might become anything, but the family’s prestige in Alexandria — which had taken a tumble in the wake of the Bane — would be restored. The alabarch and his family were providing an escape route, onward and upward.