György Spiró - Captivity

The alabarch dragged Uri around with him as interpreter because neither Marcus nor Tija was up to negotiating in Latin. To In the beginning their father had taken them along practically everywhere, but upon realizing that they were mostly staying silent, ordered them to go out every day to the baths, the Circus, and theater, make friends with the sort of people they wouldn’t find at home, and practice speaking Latin. Marcus and Tija happily went along with that plan, wound togas around themselves every morning, and left for the day, not to be seen again by Uri.

The alabarch presented everyone he met with some knick-knack that had been picked up since his arrival in Rome, telling the filthy-rich patricians the pieces had been brought from Alexandria. The gifts were received with infantile delight. He is a true politician, pondered Uri, thinking ahead.

Uri found himself pulled in different directions by the alabarch and Philo, and it was useless mumbling that he had his own business that needed attending to.

“Through me you will get to know important people, my son,” said the alabarch. “You’ll be able to buy up the whole of Rome within a year!”

There was not a word of truth in that: nobody so much as looked at Uri unless he faltered in his interpreting, and then it was only to give him a dirty glare.

At first the interpreting was hard going; the alabarch babbled and never left Uri enough time to translate an entire sentence, so Uri was obliged to anticipate his train of thought and to formulate in Latin the presumed Greek phrase just half a word behind. But within a week or two Uri had learned how the alabarch’s mind worked — not that this was terribly difficult. However, he was at last able to do the interpreting automatically, and got to thinking that the alabarch would be better off staying home, leaving him, Uri — serving, as it were, as the extra-long protruded tongue of the alabarch — to do the negotiating with the Romans. But given that the discussions were about nothing specific — no business or politics — Uri came to realize it was not what the two parties said but simply the fact that they were spending a certain amount of time in each other’s company that was important.

Still, there were times when meaningful sentences were uttered, and at these moments Uri could scarcely dignify what he was hearing from these senators, the sons of old families of high repute. Among the words he had to interpret into Greek were their opinions about the deeds of the emperors Tiberius and Caligula, including some especially peculiar assertions. He was occasionally tempted to water down his renderings of certain particularly gross Latin words, but he was worried that quizzical senators might in fact know Greek after all and would correct him.

The senators gossiped about the capital crimes that Tiberius was supposed to have committed.

Over the last two decades of his life Tiberius was known as Caprineus, or he-goat, after Capriae, the ancient name of the island. He would have groups of young girls and catamites make love before him to stimulate his jaded male lust, executing the positions he would point to, one after the other, in the books of Elephantis with their lascivious illustrations. Among the performers could be found the sons and daughters of highly positioned Roman officials — for example, Aulus Vitellius, the eldest son of the dismissed Syrian legate. The youths would cavort in the woods and groves near the emperor’s house, disguised as little Pans and scantily clad Nymphs out to lure an innocent passerby — and who would that be except the emperor himself, who was permanently drunk, and known on that account as Biberius.

It was also reported that during a service in a temple Tiberius became so captivated with the form of a young boy of about ten who held a censer that he molested him, along with the boy’s brother who had been playing the flute. After the boys related this to their parents, Tiberius had both of their legs broken, and looked on in lascivious delight at their suffering.

In Tiberius’s bedchamber there was a famous picture, painted by Parrasius (it hangs there still, as Caligula did not have it removed), in which Atalanta is pictured in the act of satisfying Meleager’s lust orally. In his old age, they said, he had unweaned babies brought to him and placed his prick in their mouths to be sucked.

Few friends had traveled with Tiberius to the island of Capri. His favorites, the Greek philosophers, had all committed suicide while the emperor was alive, for reasons they knew best. Nerva starved himself to death because of the emperor’s refusal to implement his economic reforms. All the while, Tiberius begged him in vain to eat, but after he had died, he instituted his reforms after all, these forming the foundation of the bank loan scheme that had been the topic of such heated discussion in Alexandria.

Those he had summoned to the island of Capri had been tortured and flung from a cliff overhanging the sea; soldiers were posted at the bottom to check that the unfortunate men had perished, and if not they beat him with oars and wrung his neck.

Thrasyllus, the emperor’s favorite astrologer, with whom he had become acquainted in exile and dragged along thereafter, barely survived with his skin. While they were walking together in Rhodes, Tiberius had been at the point of throwing him from a cliff into the sea when Thrasyllus spoke to say that he felt death was near at hand. That made Tiberius shudder; he embraced Thrasyllus and let him live. And, by the way, such is fate: Caligula later had Thrasyllus’s granddaughter, Ennia, murdered along with her husband, Macro. Or to be more precise, the couple killed themselves watched by soldiers; all quite lawful, as they had they been planning to murder the emperor.

When Tiberius came to power, it was said, he had his young brother Agrippa dispatched, then the latter’s son, Germanicus, and later Germanicus’s widow, his daughter-in-law Agrippina, mother of the present emperor. He’d had one of her eyes plucked out, then when she went on a hunger strike he ordered that meat be crammed down her throat until she choked to death. He had anyone more popular than he put to death. The bloodbath staged after Sejanus’s plot was discovered was horrible, with hundreds of innocents being killed or driven to take their own lives, with the emperor snatching their estates afterward. Shamefully, the corpses were dragged by meathook down the Steps of Mourning, before being flung into the river Tiber, and on top of that he even had those who dared mourn their relatives themselves killed.

He had no love for anyone: even his very own son, Drusus — whom Livia Drusilla, Augustus’s daughter, bore for him — perished in the excesses, poisoned by her and Sejanus. That was when he set about the torturing in earnest: he had Sejanus’s two innocent sons starved to death. Nero met his end on the island of Pontia, and Drusus in the deepest dungeon of Augustus’s palace on Palatine Hill, where, in his hunger pangs, he ate his pillow. Perhaps out of a twinge of conscience, he left alive Gaius, our own gracious Emperor Caligula. Anyone whom he became suspicious of on the island of Capri he would have his member bound and then force wine down him until he burst.

Tiberius was a coward: for nine months after Sejanus was murdered he did not dare set foot outside the villa of Jupiter on Capri, which he had rebuilt as a fortress, even though a fleet of warships were stationed in the island’s sole tiny harbor. He was terrified by thunder, and would hide whenever a thunderstorm raged; even after the tempest had passed his men had a hard time coaxing him out. Oh, and he confiscated the fortunes of the notabilities of Gaul, Syria, Hispania, and Greece on the most transparent pretexts. And from his youngest days wine was all he quaffed in the camps, and he would go into battle blind drunk, winning only by pure luck.