György Spiró - Captivity

Uri engaged the best Greek sculptors Rome offered and, working with them, devised a way of making the fountains harmonize with one another to resonate like a water organ. They were delighted with the idea, though one sculptor did remark that Nero had himself designed an organ, only he had not yet put it on show. Uri took fright and broached with his commissioners the matter of Nero’s plans, which, as it turned out, had been produced by an old Syrian slave, so he manumitted him and pulled him into the planning work. He conversed with him in Aramaic, and they took a liking to one another. The old Syrian had never read in his life, but had at his disposal incredible talents for mathematics and music; Uri while at work would whistle two-part melodies, with the old Syrian joining in with his deep and hoarse voice. Their performances would be entirely ad libbed, but they still always managed to stay in harmony; the other foremen would gather around to listen and applaud.

The fountains were completed, but the music they made was jumbled, as Uri could hear; he was not at all happy with that. The old Syrian then hit on a way of regulating the pressure in the water pipes that ran in the garden, allowing the three fountains to play a melody as if they were parts of a single flute. Uri had the pipes relaid, and on the fourth attempt it worked. He made sure it was engraved on the pedestals of the statues that the water organ had been the invention of divine Nero.

So much was Uri involved in planning that his mind would not rest, and just coincidentally he worked out how it would be possible to lift beams and marble tablets several stories high with minimal human exertion. His first effort was by hydraulics: cylinders filled with water and linked together underneath by parallel tubes, and the screw devised for raising water by Archimedes of Syracusa helped somewhat, but this needed a lot of water and the tube would always puncture somewhere, resulting in a minor local flood. He was then reminded of the principle of a device that used compressed air to project missiles, developed by military engineers in Alexandria, which fired all right but usually inaccurately.

Air may be invisible but if it is compressible it must be present. But then an idea he had entertained a long time ago came again to mind: if it was possible to compress air, it must also be possible to rarify it. If it is rarefied, then it will be pressurized by the surrounding air. What if that idea could be used for raising weights? Heavy weights might be packed into a tube resting on the ground, and a second tube, which ended high up, would lift the building materials if an appropriate quantity of air could be sucked out. The only question was how accurately the cylinders could be manufactured, so that air did not leak back in. He even made drawings but then he found had no need for them because in the meantime work on the palace had been finished and he did not get the chance to build the special crane. He therefore took the plans to the library and got Salutius to enter them in the catalogue under the heading “Gaius Theodurus’s Pneumatic Crane.”

What would Plotius say to that? Not the drunken, sick-minded beast he had become but the individual with whom he had once drunk wine in a tavern in Syracusa.

When Nero took up occupation in the palace a big housewarming was held, those leading the architects and builders were granted huge bonuses and banqueted with the emperor. Uri got nothing and was not even invited to the celebrations. The fountains did not make music: the tubes had been sawn through the day before.

By then the Jewish War was in full swing.

Unbelievable stories were told throughout Rome proper and Far Side; it was hard to tell what was exaggeration and what was outright fabrication, but then a stream of refugees arrived in Ostia and made their way by foot to Rome and Far Side. At first the elders only accepted those with money, but the pressure grew so great that the others had to be admitted too. The municipal authority placed on the Jews the entire burden of responsibility for keeping discipline, so the elders recruited a Jewish volunteer police force. Iustus issued an order for them to put a lid on the talk, and that they did, only somehow or other news continued to get around. Salutius used to walk out to Uri’s place from Far Side to take the air, as he put it, and he would relate what had been going on in Far Side.

Uri now lived on his own in the Via Sacra, having bought the whole house; he now took rent from the jeweler. He got no more commissions from the state, but private builders passed him on by word of mouth and he could take on just as much as he wanted. Hagar eventually moved back to Far Side into Eulogia’s place, solemnly swearing that she would drink no more; Uri gave them money to extend the house.

The story that went around Far Side was that the war broke out when on the Day of Atonement one of Gessius Florus’s soldiers bared his prick to a crowd of Jews from the roof of the Temple colonnade. As a matter of fact it had broke out when the Greeks of Caesarea assailed the Jews and massacred ten thousand of them in the course of a single night. That marked the start of a general slaughter in the cities of Syria, with Sebaste and Askelon being razed to the ground; at Scythopolis the Jews wisely came to an agreement with the Greeks that they would not harm each other, then during the night of the third day of the compact, as they lay unguarded and asleep, all the Jews — more than thirteen thousand persons — had their throats cut.

The number of victims was doubted: it was far too high.

Those who had fled from Caesarea asserted that many high priests, such as Jonathan and John, the alabarch of Caesarea, had been slain. Florus was a poor commander, constantly losing against Jewish troops who were led either by the scions of high priests or robber chiefs of peasant parentage. Eleazar, son of the high priest Ananias, had acquired a considerable name for himself as a military leader, it was said, permitting his soldiers to commit all kinds of cruelties. At breakneck speeds, the Jews of Jerusalem were digging tunnels beneath the Temple with their exits at the Sheep’s Pool or Bethesda, but no, that could not be right, because it was past even the northern wall and anyway those passages have existed for a thousand years and more. This was the northern wall that Agrippa I was so assiduous about having built, but construction on which he was forced to halt on strict orders from his friend Claudius.

Then news came through that in clashes between pro- and anti-Roman Jews the house of Ananias the high priest, Herod’s palace, the palace of the Hasmoneans, and the Antonia fortress had been set fire to, along with the repository of the archives — indeed, that had been the very first target, including all contracts belonging to creditors.

That was quite credible.

The list of the edifices did not hold any great significance for most of Rome’s Jews, as few of them had ever been to Jerusalem.

There was also great turmoil in Alexandria; Tuscus, the prefect in Egypt, was not master of the situation, with constant clashes occurring between Greeks and Jews. Nero had Tuscus replaced and executed for bathing in the bath that had been specially constructed for the emperor’s intended visit to Alexandria. That visit did not come about, and Alexandria was left without a prefect for a while before Nero finally appointed Tija prefect of Egypt.

Alexandria at last had a Jewish prefect at its head!

The Jews of Far Side were ecstatic, although there were the eternal whiners and gripers who insisted that in his time as prefect of Galilee Tiberius Julius Alexander had executed Jewish malcontents, though to no avail because a certain Menahem — the son of a crucified rebel leader called Judas the Galilean, who was said to be literate — had taken up his father’s generalship and broken open the armory at Masada and given arms not only to his own people but to other robbers. Then he had entered Jerusalem with his hordes, had the high priest Ananias pulled out of his hiding place in the aqueduct, and killed him along with his younger brother Ezekiel. All the same, Far Siders were on the whole delighted that at last Rome had a Jewish prefect of Egypt, and in any case since then Menahem had been captured, tortured, and slain by the men of his rival Eleazar.