György Spiró - Captivity

Lepidus had become a significant contact for the alabarch after Silanus had been executed, and now he too had been dispatched. Claudius, Antonia’s firstborn son, was similarly important; only two months ago he had been chosen as fellow-consul by Emperor Caligula, but now he was an object of ridicule.

It wouldn’t hurt for the alabarch to find more suitable and less death-prone benefactors, Uri reflected sardonically, as he assiduously continued the mechanical task of interpreting.

Attending the service was a burden, because there were a lot of people trying to bribe him to drop a good word for them in the ear of the alabarch or Philo. Among the celebrated relatives who came by was Siculus Sabinus, a smith, who brought a bronze menorah as a gift and requested to be allowed to produce the banisters for the stairs in the alabarch’s house, because he had heard that they were still not ready. Uri promised to do so. Distant relatives, acquaintances, even total strangers accosted him; virtually all started by saying how highly they had esteemed Joseph. Indeed, many even mentioned their regard for his grandfather, Tadeus. Some had witnessed Tadeus’s manumission, had seen how had jubilantly pressed onto his head the brimless, Phrygian-style liberty cap of soft felt, its top pulled forward.

Come to think of it, where was the cap? Joseph had showed it to him once. Uri must have been three or four. Had Sarah discarded that too? Tadeus had pulled the cap a few times onto his head, and then he died.

The cadgers requested a bridging loan, an insignificant sum of money, a job, a contact, a letter of recommendation — anything. Uri just gave a forced nod and promised them all that he would put in a good word just as soon as he had a chance. He had no intention of saying anything; the situation was never appropriate. As the weeks and months passed a growing number of individuals came by to thank him for having solved their problems, even though Uri protested he had done nothing, which was the truth, and in most cases they would respond with an even more urgent request than the previous one, to which Uri would give exactly the same answer. There were a few among them who had conceived a strong hatred for him, but then they had probably hated him from the beginning.

Philo had finished the introductory part of his work against Flaccus and set it down before Uri, who read it and did not much like it because it was nothing more than a glorification of Augustus and Tiberius, claiming they had always taken Jewish affairs as very much their own and ruled justly. Uri mentioned that Caligula was hardly likely to read a work which started off by lauding his predecessors, and Philo, reluctantly agreeing that was true, with heavy heart dropped the eulogy.

“Right, I’ll use it some other time,” he said.

Uri outlined his thinking on why Tiberius, at the height of his power, had withdrawn to the island of Capri. By then Tiberius had obviously acquired too many enemies in Rome, but he did not dare put them in check, so he hid himself away, leaving the Praetorian prefect Sejanus effectively in charge of all the machinery of government. Sejanus made full use of his plenipotentiary power and — following Tiberius’s instructions — began the bloodshed, for which he was loathed even more than Tiberius. When Tiberius saw that his prefect had become too strong he overthrew him, pinned all the blame on him, and appointed the next plenipotentiary sacrifice in the person of Macro, who arranged for a stupendous bloodbath among Sejanus’s supporters but did not have enough time to consolidate power, or rather Tiberius by then did not have the strength to overthrow him; that was left to his successor, Caligula. Uri did not rule out the possibility that if Caligula were an apt pupil, then he would likewise withdraw to some spot, entrusting the next round of slaughter to an intimate who in due time would himself be slaughtered.

Philo chewed that over without enthusiasm before saying no more than, “Emperors are not all that bright, my dear son.”

It was a fairly startling opinion given that in the part of his book that had just been ditched Philo had so avidly praised Augustus and Tiberius’s peerless mental powers.

“Should you ever come before the emperor, my dear son,” Philo added gloomily, “you’d be well advised not to lay bare before him that ungodly notion.”

Uri found it amusing that Philo should imagine that a nobody like him could ever end up in the position to offer political advice to an emperor.

Philo suddenly cracked a smile.

“It was Antonia’s notion,” he divulged the secret. “She sent word to Tiberius, who was then still living in Rome but had already begun to have enough of it, that he should study the life of Solon a little bit, with particular regard to his voluntary exile…”

Uri nodded in acknowledgment: Solon had indeed resorted to that stratagem. How come he had never noticed the parallel before?

“Was Antonia that wise a woman?”

“None wiser than her anywhere,” said Philo hoarsely.

There was silence as Philo almost started to weep.

“Did you make her acquaintance?” Uri asked.

“She came once to Alexandria.”

He had probably been quite taken by the woman.

“Who were her forebears?” Uri asked.

Philo looked at him in amazement.

“You don’t know?”

Uri flushed and shook his head. He didn’t.

“Her father was Mark Antony, who else?” Philo stated.

Uri shuddered.

Philo went on to tell him that Augustus had put an end to the many sons sired by Mark Antony who had turned against him, leaving alive only Cleopatra’s sons (with an annuity), and Iullus, who had on one occasion organized games at the Circus in Augustus’s honor, though ten years later he had him executed as well, because he was among the lovers of the emperor’s daughter, Julia. Augustus also spared both Antonias, marrying Antonia the Younger to Drusus, the younger brother of Tiberius, his natural son. Tiberius had then arranged for the murder of his grandson Germanicus, Drusus and Antonia’s firstborn son. Germanicus’s youngest son, Antonia’s grandson, was the current emperor; his older brothers — Antonia’s other grandsons, the great-grandsons of Augustus and Mark Antony — had been finished off by Augustus’s adopted son, Tiberius.

Antonia must have been nothing short of brilliant to make it unscathed through all that.

Though in the end she did not escape entirely: Caligula awarded his grandmother the honorific Augusta, then harried her into taking her own life.

The only one of Antonia’s children left was a son: shiftless, ungainly, sickly, senescent Claudius, who had come to nothing. Uri became interested in him, a grandson of Augustus and Mark Antony in whom a trace of the blood of Marcus Agrippa was still trickling. What if he were to meet him some day, and what if he turned out not to be so inept after all?

It was winter, the weather was rainy and cool; the emperor had taken a boat across to Britannia, had routed a group of fifteen men, and then sailed back to Gaul; back in Rome the alabarch began to display conspicuous signs of weariness, as if he too had been in combat. He was used to the clement air on the banks of the Nile, not the miasmas of Rome, and the foreign food and drink had taken their toll on his belly. Philo remained as shriveled and ageless as before; maybe he had been born that way, and he hardly ate anything.

Firstborn but stunted, Philo had handed over the rights of primogeniture to his younger brother, who was strong at birth, not for a mess of pottage but for the pleasures of dipping into books. Or had their father made the decision? Officially, Philo was the delegation’s leader, but he only provoked smiles from the Roman Jews, who sought to curry favor with the alabarch. Uri was alarmed: what if his second child was a son too? He prayed that it be a girl. He imagined what it would be like if he’d had to fight with an envious second-born who was full of hatred, and he shuddered.