György Spiró - Captivity

He had aligned himself with the Greeks, ostensibly against the Jews, but in reality against Rome.

Caligula had comprehended what Flaccus had placed trust in; the emperor himself had continued his desperate undertaking with a substantially higher chance of success. Like a second Mark Antony, in alliance with Egypt and the Greek world, he was girding for a war against Rome, and Rome had no other allies — only the paltry Jews. This community did not fully appreciate their position and did not understand that by remaining faithful to Rome, they were fatefully consigning themselves to standing alone wherever they were living, alienating themselves in the villages and towns with mixed Greek and Jewish population.

That had been a fateful error on the part of the Jews: they needed to come to terms with their Greek neighbors, not place their trust in faraway imperial help. The Jews had made exactly the same mistake under the Persians, likewise under the Ptolemies, and now it was going to be repeated yet again, for a third time.

Who should he speak to? To Philo, who as it was had spent his life urging Greco-Jewish conciliation?

The emperor was also a descendant not only of Agrippa and Augustus, but of Mark Antony. Philo would have been better advised to refer to this heritage in the lengthy self-justification they’d never had the opportunity to hand over. Caligula really did want to be a second — and this time successful — Mark Antony. That was his plan.

The moment in which Uri drew this wide-ranging conclusion was exceptionally clear; he had a sense that he had gotten a glimpse into Caligula’s head.

If Kainis were here she would ponder a little, her marvelous deep eyes gazing at a point in the far distance, then she would break into a smile and nod.

There was nobody else but her whom he could tell.

No one else would understand.

Even if they could comprehend, they would not dare agree. Cultured, clever, political, shrewd they might be — Philo for sure, Tija even more so, and Marcus was no dimwit either — but still they would not understand it. Maybe Tija… possibly he also saw it, because he was a second son. But he would not be pleased to be told something that he himself suspected; he might even decide to have his revenge.

Though he was not sure that Tija saw it. Something was clouding the eyes of the Jewish aristocracy — prejudice, perhaps — but more likely personal goals for what they wanted to achieve; that is what prevented them from seeing clearly. The Jews felt that they were the chosen people, and that was what made them so blind; Apollos had already said as much. They placed their trust in the Creator, and Philo did so especially. He was confident that the Eternal One would soon send down a Messiah; decent, dotty old man that he was, he made a habit of referring to this in his works.

Maybe that was what he was deliberating about right now, staring vacantly ahead, absorbed in himself, jolting along in the coach.

A shocking thought flashed into Uri’s head: polytheism pictured the human world more realistically — more immorally anyway, closer to the way things are — than did faith in a remote, faceless God.

He banished the thought.

Isidoros knows, it occurred to Uri, and he would be far from pleased if the emperor were to become a pharaoh because then Isidoros would lose the leading position he holds in Alexandria. He must fear that he — along with Lampo, Helicon, and all the other Greek favorites — will be executed by the pharaoh-emperor the moment his plan of shifting the seat of the empire to Alexandria succeeds. Isidoros was not defending the Jews but himself.

A clever man, cultivated, he had read a lot of historical works; he was not seized by ideas as Philo was but by politics — he saw things more clearly.

Uri wondered what he himself still wanted from life.

He did not want anything. He wanted to live out his days somehow, seeing that the Creator had bestowed life on him, and he wanted to raise his son, and he would like it if his son were present when he died.

That was all, nothing else.

By then the news had reached even non-Jewish Rome that Petronius had marched into Galilee at the head of the legions, taking a statue of Zeus with him, the Temple in Jerusalem being the destination. What they were unaware of was that the emperor had withdrawn his order — or maybe he hadn’t after all. His stipulation that the Greeks were free to erect their shrines anywhere they pleased, and the Jews were not permitted to obstruct this, would stand as casus belli in every place where Greek and Jewish communities co-existed, which was true of all the Greek islands, Syria, Armenia, Palestine, and Egypt, the entire eastern half of the Roman Empire. From now on it would be possible, in principle, for the Greeks to raise altars even in Far Side, or anywhere, in the direct neighborhood of the synagogues. Altars and statues — just as they had done in Jamnia.

Agrippa recovered nicely, and as he had lost weight from dieting his human features reemerged; the physicians heartened him that he would be able to take part in Caligula’s ovation, which was his most fervent wish, and they announced to him that the emperor had retracted his order.

“A real friend he is!” Agrippa burst out ecstatically. “My friend and pupil! I’m the only one who can exert an influence on him!”

He asked for meat.

It was in this period that a fire broke out in the alabarch’s unoccupied house in Far Side. The watchmen, the vigiles, not being Jewish, were unenthusiastic about turning up, as was the rule for fires in the XIVth District, and the house burned to the ground. The only object to escape harm was a statue of Germanicus, only the paint was burned off, and that was easily fixed. The statue was taken into Honoratus’s house. Pure accident, said the elders, but people talked of arson. Sarah even knew who had done it: demons, but Uri did not ask who they might be.

The guard on Agrippa’s house on the Palatine was strengthened.

Uri had the feeling things were not looking good.

He spent little time in Far Side but he could not avoid seeing that homeless Jews were crammed into the alleyways, lying in the mud and muck, their infants crawling about on all fours on borrowed blankets, the elderly begging, their emaciated, trembling arms stretched out.

These were Jewish refugees from Alexandria, and they did not stop coming. They had envied the wealthy Jews of Alexandria who had been left with enough cash to bribe the authorities and boatmen at home as well as the Romans in Puteoli or Ostia. Even those who’d had the money to buy fake relatives in Far Side found that these relatives would not support them once they’d arrived. The Jews of Alexandria, not so long ago still rich and so high and mighty, were now floundering, praying and cursing in the Far Side mud, reviling the alabarch and his family for stealing their money.

They did not starve, at least: they could count on the fund — to which all members of Rome’s Jewish community coughed up, though with much groaning — to provide minimal assistance for the poor and visitors, but that could not cover the cost of a residence. Several dozen families had installed themselves between the warehouses in the harbor area, while others had moved in among the non-Jewish homeless on the island in the Tiber, subject to flooding every other month.

Uri wanted neither to hear nor see them, but they were there, and in ever-greater numbers at that, and they were right. However many families he might accept, they did not have enough room for themselves in the first place, and soon enough another child would be born.

News spread in Far Side that peace had not been restored in Alexandria; one time it would be the Greeks demonstrating, another the Jews, and the prefect could not cope with breaking them up. The still-imprisoned alabarch was barely spoken of at all in Far Side; if he was mentioned, it was only in terms of the widely shunned new arrivals.