György Spiró - Captivity

When time permitted, Uri threw himself into his own business. The vogue for pitchers from Rhodes declined, and Gaius Lucius ordered no more of them; more to the point, though, he did forgive Uri, who was again able to turn up to the salutations with his sportula. Uri divided his time in such a way that he was the first to arrive at his patron’s house, at daybreak, there loaded up his sportula and raced back across the bridge to get back in time for the end of Philo’s forenoon preparations. Only in the afternoon would the tired alabarch have pulled it together to have himself carried across by litter, with Uri ambling behind the two sturdy bearers and catching a nap with eyes open.

The atmosphere at home was awful; all three women were unhappy with him, the sole male in the family, for neglecting them. His mother was constantly haranguing and criticizing him as if Uri were her husband; his sister inflicted her silent contempt on him for not being able to get her married; his wife was disgusted by him, as Uri was by his wife. All the same, his wife copulated one Friday night or other. Perhaps it had been the evening when, after a brief coitus, Hagar had stuck around to insist that Uri should ask the alabarch to give them enough money for a new house where she and the infant could have their own room. Uri tried to explain that the assumption of the monthly debt payments was in itself a massive gesture on Philo’s part, but Hagar seemed unable to grasp that.

“Where’s the money? Who are you squandering it on?” she shrilled. “Everyone envies me for having an eminent husband, but where’s the money?”

Uri despaired, not so much at his wife’s profound stupidity, but because she had a point. How was it possible that a debt his father had contracted out of necessity and had to pay back to the end of his days was now crippling him, all because Agrippa had laid out a feast for overfed senators? Uri could no longer stand Hagar’s cloying; he simply grabbed a blanket and stalked out in the middle of the night. He pulled the blanket over his head, and lay down next to the water tub in front of the house. It was cold, but he managed to fall asleep; he woke up with his nose running and sneezing. When he went back into the house Hagar started hissing again:

“The shame you bring on us! You think no one saw you? Such an embarrassment!”

Uri decided that was it: he would not speak to her again.

“You can’t do that!” his mother yelled.

That morning Uri did not so much as look at his son and simply rushed out of the house.

Business was faltering, and in the end he went into the business of trading balsam, which he had been invited to do by men who had really respected his father: The money was paltry but certain, they would say with conviction.

A person is never free from what he has been born into: not from his mother, not from debt, not from balsam.

The Eternal One, however, must have wanted life to sparkle in Rome and for Uri to be temporarily freed of his worries.

The emperor arrived!

It was already spring when the news arrived, and souls this side of the Tiber and beyond were imbued with joyful expectation. Something was happening at last! The least of it was that the emperor would stage a parade and make citizens presents of money, entrances to the Hippodrome, and a banquet.

The news proved to be partially false in that the emperor did not cross the city border but remained outside it, encamped in his favorite Hippodrome, the miraculous gardens his mother Agrippina Major had set out on Vatican Hill. Caligula would amuse himself, receiving embassies there, if he received anyone. It was unclear why he was unwilling to cross the city boundary; Uri’s hunch was that he was wrangling with the Senate, a majority of which did not wish to grant him a triumph, at most they could only permit a lesser triumph, which from an emperor’s point of view was so insulting that it was better if they granted him nothing at all. Uri shared that suspicion with Marcus, who confirmed that he had heard gossip of that kind; he did not speak to Tija, who continued to avoid him.

Vatican Hill lay close to Far Side, and the members of the Jewish delegation laughed at how, by chance, they had gained a big advantage over other delegations.

Rome was teeming with hundreds of delegations, who had been hanging around the city for months on end on unfinished business, and now they were all racing about, jostling and shoving to be among the first whom the emperor received.

There were many matters on which only an emperor personally could be of assistance. That had been so in the time of Caesar and Augustus and up through the first half of Tiberius’s rule: land disputes with neighbors; disputes over authority with degenerate, power-hungry family members; problems with tax and excise remittals; grave religious disputes over major issues of prestige; quarrels over precedence as to which tiny island this or that divinity had originally hailed from, and who had a right to erect a temple in his or her honor; which nation stemmed from which, and which was the more ancient, the more authentic; who owned fishing rights on the sea coasts; and so on and so forth. Any party who won a concession from the emperor could, for at least a decade, exercise arbitrary rule over his own little dunghill back home. In any of these far-reaching matters neither senators nor consuls were competent to reach a decision in place of the emperor, who now had arrived at last — or almost arrived.

Nevertheless, news did arrive that back in winter unrest had broken out in Jamnia, where the largely Jewish population had destroyed a Greek altar erected in Caligula’s honor; Herennius Capito had pitched into them with his troops and killed many. This was the same Capito who a while before had captured Agrippa and demanded he pay up on three hundred thousand sesterces of debts, though Agrippa had escaped to Alexandria.

No friend of the Jews was this Capito, supervisor of imperial property for Jamnia and Ashdod, Phasaelis as well as Archelais, with its celebrated groves of palm trees, and also a large palace in Askelon that had at one time belonged to Salome, the sister of Herod the Great. Upon his death Herod had bequeathed these to Livia, Augustus’s spouse; Tiberius inherited them after his mother died, and after him they passed to Caligula. The territory was thus a personal property of the emperor’s, and it was always the imperial prefect who administered it, with its own special taxation. Herennius Capito had acted as prefect under Livia and Tiberius, and Caligula, exceptionally, had retained him.

Philo lamented: Of all times why did it have to happen now? Why now? The Jews of Jamnia might have waited. What was the purpose of injuring the cause of Alexandria’s victims with such idiotic capers?

Tija was sure it had been a provocation, coming directly after the Bane.

“Of course it’s a provocation!” The little old man’s anger flared. “But why couldn’t they wait until the emperor had reached a decision in our case?”

Not knowing any details, Marcus bet that the Greeks had deliberately built the altar too close to a Jewish house of prayer, possibly letting Capito in on the plan. That sort of thing was bound to happen so long as Rome had Greeks and Latini serving as prefects for Jewish territories, he added.

Philo noted that more Philistines than Greeks lived in Jamnia, at which Marcus fumed that it made no difference.

“It serves as a good pretext for the emperor not to intervene in either matter,” Tija surmised. “That way he settles the matter in a balanced manner, without bias: Alexandria in one pan of the scales, Jamnia in the other.”

Marcus went on:

“Jamnia and the surrounding district are able to raise forty thousand soldiers, compared with none from Alexandria and Egypt… Maybe that was why Jamnia weighed more heavily in the balance.”