György Spiró - Captivity

Agrippa turned purple and clearly wanted to say something; he was about to raise his right hand, possibly in protest, but before he could complete the motion he fell flat on the ground.

Agrippa lay in bed unconscious for two days. The emperor sent his best physicians to minister to him: they opened his veins to bleed him, slapped him, yanked his tongue out of his mouth, turned him on his side, smeared him with unguents, and induced vomiting — he still refused to come around. His pulse beat, but only feebly and falteringly. Half a dozen physicians were constantly in attendance; Uri and Iustus took turns standing guard at the door while Philo was relieved by Marcus, and Marcus in turn by Tija; Fortunatus, Marsyas and Stoicheus seemed to be present throughout.

Agrippa finally stirred and opened his eyes at the end of the second day.

He drank water only, refusing wine.

He cast his eyes around him and beckoned Philo over.

“Write to him,” he whispered, “and I’ll sign it…”

Philo grasped Uri by the hand and pulled him out.

“We’ll write to him!” Philo declared enthusiastically.

Uri suspected the worst: that meant it would be long.

Philo on this occasion did not rely on Uri to write a draft but, driven by divine inspiration, himself dictated while Uri swiftly scribbled it down in shorthand. Thanks to Narcissus he had already got in some good practice on that, but it was tough work putting into fair copy.

The draft letter to Caligula included all that the emperor needed to know about the Jewish faith, the fidelity of the Jews toward the Roman emperors, and the Creation in general. After a few hours Uri felt that his hand was going to break at the wrist and his eyes were watering so badly that he could no longer see his own scrawl, but Philo would not let him rest. He went on steadily with the dictation, only breaking off now and again to cast a glance at the shorthand and shout out “what’s this?” or “what’s that?” before resuming. Uri would never have thought that so much energy could reside in the old man’s frail frame.

The outline ran to some two scrolls’ worth of text, and Uri was well aware that once he had made a fair copy and Philo got a chance to work on that, it would come out much longer.

Uri implored him to stop; the emperor was not going to read thirty lines of it. It was enough to stick to the essentials and there was no need to digress on to so many points. Despite Uri’s heeding, Philo’s head nodded in the happy heat of inspiration — now the emperor would really learn a thing or two!

Uri told him again that these sort of people, the emperors, never read anything, but Philo never so much as heard him.

“Read it back!” he ordered.

Uri started off. At the second sentence Philo groaned.

“What was that you wrote, you wretch?”

Uri held his tongue: he had only written what Philo had dictated.

“We can’t have that! That’s impossible!” Philo cried out and, pacing up and down in the room, started dictating the right sentence, out of which grew two long paragraphs.

Uri resigned himself to his fate and went on recording.

Philo put scintillating arguments into Agrippa’s mouth in defense of the faith of the Jews, and even Cicero, the celebrated Judaeophobe, could never have written a more rhetorically perfect speech than Philo’s. It covered what great friends Caligula’s grandfather, Marcus Agrippa, and Agrippa’s grandfather, Herod the Great, had been, and how Marcus Agrippa in person had made sacrificial offerings at the Temple (though it did not cover how Augustus had reproved Drusus for doing the same thing). It covered how Augustus and Livia, Caligula’s great-grandmother, had donated many splendid gold dishes to the Temple, and it covered how ever since, every day without fail, in the Temple two lambs and an ox were sacrificed to the Roman emperor. It covered how the Jews had never rebelled again Rome’s prefects — aside from Pilate, whom Philo set in an extremely unflattering light, inveighing against him for high-handedness, brutality, extortion (which had, of course, been no truer for him than it had been in the case of any prefect), and, on the basis of reports by messengers from Judaea, for having had Jewish prisoners executed without court hearings and sentencing (which was true). It covered Agrippa’s gratitude to Caligula for restoring him to liberty, releasing him from his iron shackles (though Philo had forgotten, and Uri did not remind him, about his being given a golden chain the same weight as his former shackles).

Even in that improved manuscript, though, there were still things to correct and that night Uri slumped over the table and fell asleep between two well-turned but lengthy sentences, not responding to any further dictation.

Fortunatus brought news that in the meantime the emperor had set off for Rome.

They pondered what they should do. Agrippa decided that they too would go to Rome.

They got there before the emperor, who had set up camp in a multitude of places along the way, popping in unexpectedly to get avail of the hospitality of total strangers; in one case it turned out to be a place where the banished Agrippina, his mother, had been held prisoner, and he had it demolished.

In Rome Agrippa was placed under treatment by the costliest physicians, not that they had much to do because the king had gotten better of his own accord, albeit he still dragged his left leg.

He ran through Philo’s text and approved it. Philo beamed.

Agrippa received emissaries who confirmed that Petronius had departed with legions from the Euphrates and was heading for Galilee; the next day another envoy arrived, according to whom Petronius was already in Galilee. Agrippa raged when he heard that Petronius had invited the elders of Judaea to a conference in Tiberias — Herod Antipas’s capital city!

“The bastard is going to bring back Antipas!” he became so apoplectic that it was feared he would have a fit. “Tiberias! And Jews went there to confer! They had no authorization from me but still they went! I’ll exterminate them one and all! What does Silas believe he’s doing? Or Cypron? Complete idiots!”

The physicians opened a vein again.

The emissaries reassured him that Petronius was playing for time by saying he could not find a suitable statue, that it would take a long time until a worthy one was produced in Sidon, where the master sculptors were slow in their work, as slow as they could possibly be, because Petronius really had no wish to march into Jerusalem.

The physicians opened another vein.

Uri volunteered that he would be very ready to travel anywhere with a message from Agrippa; it would be good to get as far away as he could from Rome, because Kainis would soon be returning with Claudius’s household, and it would be good to escape from Sarah and Hagar. He felt that even getting mixed up in a war would be better, but Philo said he would not let him go anywhere.

to spare him, the magnitude of the danger facing Jewry as a whole was not discussed again with Agrippa, nor did they discuss the matter any further among themselves. Uri was astonished.

August 31, the day of the ovation, was approaching when Caligula unexpectedly sent a message that he was awaiting the Jewish delegation in Maecenas’s garden.

Agrippa was talked out of going himself; Marcus and Tija were suggested as representatives, but the king decided that Philo and Uri should do the representing.

We’re no great loss, Uri thought. He is fond of his own servants, and he has plans for the alabarch’s sons, but Philo is already old and I’m a nobody.

The gardens of Maecenas and Lamia were near each other, two days walking distance from Rome, so they traveled by coach. Once again they took along with them the work Philo had written on Flaccus, adding to it Agrippa’s speech. The tiny old man carried out a series of breathing exercises, holding his breath and pulling in his belly, then pushing it out because, he asserted, he could circulate it there too; then he would wriggle, mutter to himself, and sit motionless for a long time — all tricks he had once learned from an Indian magus. He claimed to be able thereby to reduce his pulse rate by two thirds if he wished.