György Spiró - Captivity

The letter covered nothing more.

Isidoros shook his head; he had no time for reading in recent years, and he had no knowledge of Rome.

“Do you want to dictate an answer?”

Isidoros declined.

“You can say as much,” he declared.

There was a silence. Uri would have quite liked to chat with the former head of his school, and it seemed Isidoros was not against it either. They said nothing.

After some reflection, Isidoros broke the silence: “Tell him that Caligula is planning to sail to Alexandria in the winter.”

Uri was astounded.

“In between he is going to make many pronouncements that he is setting off soon,” said Isidoros. “He will keep on repeating that and putting it off to the point that no one believes he is actually preparing to go. But Caligula is very cunning; it would be a mistake to underestimate him. There is a space of a few days around the middle of January when it is somewhat less risky than usual to set sail in winter. It will be organized so that ships are standing by in Brindisium to make the voyage to the Greek coast, but Caligula will not be going on them. Meanwhile a decrepit-looking merchant ship will arrive in Ostia — he’ll travel with that, with no accompanying flotilla, straight to Alexandria. If I’m still alive, I’ll give a signal when the ship arrives; if I happen no longer to be living, keep your ears to the ground for word that a man called Apollonius of Tyana, an Egyptian soothsayer, has appeared in the emperor’s entourage.”

Musing further, Isidoros added:

“Caligula is dangerous,” he said, “not out of political premeditation, I don’t think, but genuinely dangerous. It’s incredible how a man as cunning and calculating as he is can be so faint-hearted; he’s boundlessly insecure. He is seeking to prove, to himself first and foremost, that he is able to successfully confront even Poseidon.”

Uri shivered.

“I think,” Isidoros said, “that Alexander the Great may well have been a similarly uptight, unfortunate, pocket-sized tyrant. He was oppressed by his father’s greatness, oppressed by Aristotle’s greatness, oppressed by his midget size, and that’s why he threw himself into his lunatic military ventures, which, quite by chance, happened to work out.”

“Who should I give that message to?” Uri asked.

Isidoros again pondered.

“To Tija,” he said finally. “Let him decide who to pass it on to, but he mustn’t forget: it’s a message from me.”

Isidoros appeared to be weary. Uri watched him. Isidoros smiled and recited:

You despised us giddy-goat Jews, Isidoros;

Now God has His own back by resurrecting you, along with us.

Uri almost broke into tears as he was so honored.

Isidoros shook his head.

“There in the tavern at the time I did not notice that the caesura in the hexameters is not observed. You should correct that when you get a chance.”

It is not done to inform on one’s bread-giver, even if one takes side against him and is in agreement with those who have been robbed. Uri did not keep his ears open. He passed on to Philo the request Julius had made, and Philo sighed; he too was taken by the wretched fates of the many immigrants, indeed it was with their interests in mind that the delegation was doing all it could with the emperor. There needed to be a full restitution of the rights of the Jews of Alexandria, then the immigrants could go back to their homes.

“It’s not worth trying to press Agrippa; he’s got no money,” said Philo. “Up until now he has been living off credit; he has hardly any revenue from his kingdom, and he was only given Galilee a short while ago. Once he is granted Judaea, that will be the time to turn to him.”

Philo also promised that he really would make Uri’s loan payments for one year in advance.

Caligula spent his time attending competitions, and the Jewish delegation followed suit. The senators and knights of the equestrian order idled away their days at the Hippodrome or at the Diribitorium, if the sun was particularly severe. There instead of outside in the amphitheater, they could organize fights in the Diribitorium, which was covered with canvas and furnished with benches, and they even stretched a canvas roof over the Forum. The reason for their idling was because Caligula would turn up at whatever time his fancy dictated and if he found that any one of the nobles was not there, be it dawn or late in the evening, he would take revenge. It became customary for the Senators to wear a cap, Thessalian fashion, to avoid distress from the sun’s rays, and Caligula permitted them to set their behinds upon cushions instead of the bare boards.

One day there were not enough prisoners who had been condemned to die by being cast before the wild animals, so the emperor looked around the upper rows and had some of the spectators picked out of the crowd and led away, their tongues sliced off so that they could not yell out. All were devoured by the animals.

Among the charioteers he was strongly attached to the party that wore the green, which was also called the Party of the Leek, and hated all the others. He no longer drove a chariot himself as he had done two years before, but even today the place where he used to practice was named the Gaianum, after him.

Uri had a slight breather as he was not invited to the races and was able to get on with his own business affairs. He raced around the city, which carried on with its normal daily business, until he came to the realization — something his father had never been able to see — that it was not worth seeking out merchants in their homes, walking seven or eight miles a day; it was simpler for him to arrange all his transactions at the Forum, because anyone who had any business at all worth mentioning would eventually put in an appearance.

There they made deals and gossiped about actors, charioteers, and gladiators as they had always done; they were far from affairs of state and Uri had a strong suspicion that more than one of his business partners had no idea who happened to be the current emperor.

That warm autumn many people met far from pretty ends.

Caligula had Sextus Papinius — whose father, Anicius Cerealius, had been a senator and was an ex-consul — tortured and put to death, though nobody ever found out what he had been charged with.

Titius Rufus took his own life after being charged with having declared that the members of the Senate were cowardly.

Scribonius Proculus was heard daring to criticize the emperor whereupon the others who were present in the Senate, so it was said, surrounded their fellow senator and tore him to pieces.

Calvisius Sabinus, a former legate to Pannonia, and his wife committed suicide before standing trial. Caligula, possibly recalling the heroism of his own mother Agrippina, could not stand the thought that Sabinus’s wife had visited some military outposts and had done sentry duty, so sentenced her to death. Sabinus’s crime, on the other hand, had been buying slaves — one to know Homer by heart, another to know Hesiod, and a special slave for each of the nine lyric poets.

Carrinus Secundus was banished because an informer claimed he had made a comment about the emperor.

Protogenes, one of Caligula’s slaves, used to walk around with two large books to the Senate’s sessions even though under the law non-senators should not have been present in the room; in the books were bound each and every denunciation that senators and knights of the equestrian order had sent to Tiberius during the emperor’s rule. At the beginning of his reign Caligula had pretended ceremonially to have these burned but they had, strangely, survived, or perhaps it was only copies that had been burned, or else these were copies, though they were authenticated by the Sphinx used already by Augustus on his seal, and on the basis of these documents Caligula sentenced to death or exile those at whose fortune his mouth watered, and the Senate tolerated it.