György Spiró - Captivity

The documentation in Puteoli was sketchy because Neapolis was the older port and a Jewish colony had been established there earlier than anywhere else in Italia; indeed, for a long time every Jewish document in the whole of Campania had to be taken there. Free Jewish merchants had set up a Neapolitan community many centuries ago, long before Far Side emerged in Rome; they were making the voyage from Alexandria to Magna Graecia, and many settled down there. But even their descendants never mixed with the later Jews of Rome, who had always been considered by them to be just the progeny of wretched slaves, and so purely on this account they regarded Uri condescendingly. However, since Uri had paid plenty of money to inspect the archives they let him browse, and he conscientiously foraged in the archives; Jason paid enough to allow Uri, on the pretext of earning his income, to travel away from his family for weeks on end. Neapolis lay near Puteoli and could be reached in under a day by boat, cart, or even on foot, but it was still another city, making it reasonable to claim it was too far away for him to return home for the night.

In one fell swoop, Jason was able to calm down the hysterics of both his own abhorred wife and Uri’s Hagar.

Uri took his time with his work in the Neapolitan archives, happily wandering around the town, eating and drinking a lot, and meanwhile his family also enjoyed a good life — without him. I’ve managed to escape from them at least for a while, Uri reflected; it may be a sin but the Lord will surely forgive me.

Milka finally died, but not Jason’s wife, who continued her nagging at him thanks be to the Eternal One, who was unchanging in her hatred for her husband.

Uri came across some interesting documents in the Jewish archive at Neapolis and also visited some of the Greek libraries now that he was again free to spend his time reading. It was like being a student all over again, but he was free to learn whatever he wanted, unencumbered with stupid teachers. He knew nobody in Naples and, what’s more, did not want to get to know anybody, being pleased to have his time to himself.

Naples had become a glittering, boring, and quiet town under Caligula, and became even more so under Claudius. Both emperors had spent considerable sums of money on it and the surrounding area that when they took summer holidays they would find suitably distinguished shrines and theaters of Roman standards for them to visit; they had also given generously toward the restoration of Greek relics. There were few bordellos and taverns in the town, with Puteoli offering more in that line. The volumes held by one of the larger Greek libraries had been housed in one of the annexes of an enormous new temple to Castor and Pollux; construction had been started by Caligula given his infatuation with the Dioscuri, and completed by Claudius, seeing that it had been started. Uri befriended the librarian there, a man called Daphnos, who also produced some of the rarities for Uri to inspect. He was middle-aged and a freedman, initially fearful that Uri was seeking to oust him from his position, but Uri brought the matter up of his own accord, without any prompting, telling him that he had no need to worry as Uri had no wish to live in Naples. In gratitude, the librarian took a day off to bring Uri to see Virgil’s nearby grave; later, after they had drunk themselves into a fine state in one of the nearby taverns, they tried to outdo each other in reciting from his poems. Uri recounted tales about Alexandria, Daphnos, for his part, about Tarsus, from which he originally hailed.

“They loathe Jews there,” Daphnos said, “but no one can say why. There even the Jews hate themselves and denounce one another to the Greeks; it’s been like that for generations and no one can say why that should be. All Greeks from Tarsus are terrible, and the Jews no less.”

“So, does that make you terrible, too?” Uri queried.

Daphnos mused on that:

“I would have been so if I had not been taken away from there as a child.”

Daphnos was all for taking Uri over to the island of Capri now that it was possible; for enough money anyone could inspect Tiberius’s pavilions with their erotic pictures. Uri was not interested; he could well imagine them.

It turned out that Daphnos’s wife was a converted Jew. Uri told some stories about how in Alexandria Jewish wives who were converted Greeks were made to eat pork in the theater during the Bane, and how those who were unwilling to do so had been flogged, and about the ensuing tragedies that had resulted in Delta.

In return, Daphnos told Uri about how his father’s Greek owner, along with his parents, grandparents, and children in Tarsus, had been wiped out by Greek enemies. They had even set fire to his house only because he had been a decent man; all his slaves had been set adrift at sea. Then they had traversed Thrace, Dalmatia, and even Pannonia, which is inhabited by particularly wild tribes. In Germania, Daphnos’s father had become a Germanic warrior and had eventually fallen in battle and taken prisoner by the Romans; he found it useless trying to explain to them in choice Greek that he came from Tarsus. Indeed, there was not a single person in the Roman army who understood a single word of Greek — or even Latin, for that matter — because they too were Germans and only spoke other dialects of that, though by then Daphnos spoke six varieties of Germanic. There were countless Germanic tribes, some of which were called Gauls or Sarmatians, though that was mistaken, they were all Germanic, and they all hated each other and hacked one another to pieces. He went on to give a list of the fabulous and fanciful names borne by the various tribes: Usipi, Tencteri, Chatti, Langobardi, Angrivarii, Chamavi, Frisians, Chauci, Cherusci, Cimbri, Suebi, Hermunduri, Naristi, Marcomanni or Manimi, Quadi, Marsigni, Cotini, Osi, Buri, Lugii, Harii, Helveconae, Helisii, Naharvali, Gotones, Suiones, Aestii, Sitones, Peucini, Venedi, Fenni, and so on. Daphnos told Uri about their origins and mythology, and meanwhile Uri found himself nodding off from time to time as they drank on inside the library in a small room where this pleasant chap hid his drink, because his wife would not stand for any drunkenness.

Over eighteen months of work Uri had still not come up with a Kohen Levite ancestor for Jason’s wife, but just when the situation was starting to become insupportable he came up with one. Jason’s wife had a copy of all the documents sent to Jerusalem, and it took a year for the ancestor to be corroborated by them, and nobody was more surprised that Uri: seemingly they were slapdash about their work there as well. Jason’s wife was happy, though the find had no practical consequence save for the fact that hereafter she could justifiably reproach her husband with not even being a Levite.

Jason had provided Uri with a sinecure for four complete years, and his children were thus able to grow up in a fairly well-to-do manner, albeit often in his absence, but then the benefactor suffered a stroke from which he died immediately, thanks be to the Eternal One, who, it seemed, did not wish that this decent man suffer for any length of time.

Jason’s wife was all for engaging Uri as a secretary but he politely declined.

He paid one last visit to Naples to take leave of his friend. They went off for a drink. Daphnos told him that people had come from Alexandria with books, saying that Claudius had put a considerable sum of money into expanding the Mouseion, with new rooms added onto the wing of the royal palace housing the old Great Library so that it would now be U-shaped, rather like a small covered amphitheater, with room for five hundred readers, and in the middle a long table on which reciters could set out their scrolls.

“Every blessed day,” said Daphnos, “orators with the finest voices read aloud from the works of Claudius! They read through his history of Etruria, and once they get to the end, they start all over again from the beginning.”