György Spiró - Captivity

“Let’s buy them!”

“There’s no one to buy from.”

“What, then?”

“We can steal them,” Salutius suggested, “but I can’t cope with them on my own.”

Uri reached under his tunic and produced his money pouch, which with great difficulty he detached from a chain around his neck and offered it to Salutius.

“Hire men to do it,” he said.

Salutius accepted the pouch and weighed it up in his hand.

“I haven’t counted,” said Uri, “but it’ll be a good sum.”

Salutius was not sure where to hide the pouch, so Uri handed over the neck chain. Both pouch and neck chain disappeared under Salutius’s tunic.

Late that evening Uri made his way back from Far Side to the Via Nomentana both happy and half-drunk with the feeling that a heavy load had slipped from his shoulders.

That boy understands, he does.

He may not know it, but he understands.

I’m going to have a son.

It’s interesting that men have an instinct like that. To have a son. Those lunatics will find out one day that the Anointed in whom they pin their beliefs is actually the Creator’s own son.

Careful now, Uri cautioned himself, avoiding two drunks who were staggering along, clutching to each other. Just don’t lean too heavily on the kid. Don’t get too close; leave him his freedom. After all, he’s an adult.

In accordance with Nero’s plans, a site was marked out for a new imperial palace ornamented with parks, glades, and lakes, in front of which was quickly raised a colossal statue, something like one hundred feet high, of bronze covered with gold. The best master sculptors were unable to equal Phidias’s command of perspective, and it was only from a distance that it could be seen to have human form, but then it was not possible to view it from a distance on account of the nearby houses and a tall, multistory aqueduct, whereas seen from close at hand, from below, the head looked tiny and was dominated by the jaw. They haven’t got a clue, Uri decided smugly.

Nero, so tongues wagged, had kicked his pregnant wife, Poppaea Sabina, in the belly, killing both mother-to-be and fetus. According to Salutius, the Jews were in mourning because Sabina was pious and had procured for them many concessions from the emperor, which was why not all Jews had been exterminated, only the Nazarenes.

Nero regretted this deed, calling the deceased Venus and setting up a shrine to her, then took a boy who strongly resembled her, castrated him, and treated him as his wife, appearing in public with him from then on. The boy’s name was Sporus. It was said that Nero married him with all due legal ceremonies, but he kept another likeness of Sabina in the form of a slave girl, with whom the young emperor also lived, as well as another slave girl who bore a striking resemblance to his mother.

The emperor also had his cousin Julia executed, along with all kinds of other relatives; he also wanted to marry the freedwoman, Acte, but was talked out of that, and he later debauched one of the Vestal Virgins, Rubria, who was made to disappear. Nero also devised a kind of game, in which, dressed in a tiger skin, he was let loose from a cage and regularly had himself taken from behind by his freedman Doryphorus while he took Sporus, and meanwhile they licked and bit the private parts of men and women tied to stakes — which is to say there was peace and quiet in Rome, so the people were free to gossip leisurely about such abominations, business blossomed, and the imperial city was reconstructed at breakneck speed.

Eventually the emperor had his two freedmen, Pallas and Doryphorus, dispatched, Pallas because he had been a lover of the lovely mother, Doryphorus because he thought that he could do anything with impunity just because the emperor was in the habit of screwing him in the backside.

The emperor made his first public appearance as a lute player and singer in the amphitheater of Naples but then, in view of his triumphant success, in Rome too. He was encouraged and praised by Seneca, but then the emperor sent his tutor a message to slit his veins, reasoning that two years previously the Brits, under the leadership of a giantess by the name of Boudicca, had rebelled because Seneca had compelled them to take on massive loans at usurious interest rates, it was out of this that he made his enormous fortune, but the Brits had gotten fed up with it. Admittedly, Boudicca and the Iceni had been put down two years previously, before the Great Fire, but the reasons for the rebellion only came out later. A conspiracy was also talked about, of which Calpurnius Piso was supposed to be the leader, and Seneca had been implicated in it, along with several other writers. Seneca willed his fortune to the emperor and with his young wife Paulina, who was determined to go with him, severed several veins, but she was saved, her arms being bandaged to check the bleeding. She eked out a few more years, though the pallor of her face showed the drain upon her vital powers. Imperial Rome shot up at a mad pace, providing Uri with immense opportunities to work, so that every two or three weeks he would take a pouch of money to Salutius, who soon reached a point when he did not know where to store the scrolls and books assembled from gluing pages together.

A storehouse had to be found.

Again they sat down by the dockyard in Far Side, drinking another kind of wine, though in truth that was not particularly good either.

“It needs to be somewhere secure,” said Salutius.

Uri grunted.

“If it’s true that the Jews are in danger,” said Salutius, “then it ought to be somewhere on the left bank of the Tiber.”

“But then again, it’s just possible that the Jewish quarter will be the safest place… There’s nothing here to offend the eyes of any future ruler.”

“You mean there won’t be any persecution of the Jews after all?”

“That there will,” said Uri with conviction, “most certainly, but there is also going to be civil war. In Rome there’s no knowing what will burn down, or why. The holiest shrines will be the very first things to be set alight. In my mind’s eye I sometimes see even the Capitoline in flames.”

“You could get yourself a job at Delphi,” Salutius remarked mischievously.

“It’s too far away,” Uri complained. “My legs hurt and walking is difficult for me.”

“But there’s been a huge demand for sibylline prophets ever since Augustus annihilated them…”

Uri laughed.

“It’s a great business,” he acknowledged. “Only one can soon get bored with the wording.”

Salutius was interested in specific details of the civil war, so Uri sketched it out: Nero would be assassinated, in the same way as Caligula and Claudius had been dispatched, and this would mark an end of the descendants of Aeneas, as even Nero’s little daughter had died and he had not managed to sire a boy, so as a result innumerable self-appointed warlords would go after one another, with Rome, sooner or later, being the battlefield.

“You have an unrivaled talent for prophecy,” Salutius teased.

“I only tell it as I see it.”

“Where’s the warlord who has ever won anywhere? There isn’t a war in sight! Nero reached peace with the Parthians on such terms that they worship him even more stoutly than they do their own king!”

“Local wars will be sparked so that victories will be obtained in big battles.”

“That will require large loss of blood.”

“There will be immense bloodshed.”

Uri recounted what had happened with Pilate.

“Perhaps on the suggestion of a Jew, Vitellius engaged a false prophet who worked the Samaritans up into thinking that the Ark of the Covenant was buried in Mount Gerizim. The faithful assembled there and were butchered by Vitellius’s men, after which it was reported that Pilate had given the order. That was the downfall of Pilate. Cooped up idly in the tower of Phasael in Jerusalem I had a nightmare vision of a devilishly cunning prefect of Syria who stirred up such a huge revolt among the Jews that it could only be quashed by the concentration of huge armies, and he marched into Rome as a great commander by the Porta Triumphalis. It’s been a long time since Rome has celebrated a real triumph. It’s been a long time since Rome has had a military commander who has slaughtered hundreds of thousands. If anyone wants to become a successful warlord in one of the provinces or even has a wish to be emperor he need do no more than get provocateurs to egg on the devout populace and then mercilessly put down the agitation… Jews are eminently suitable for that.”