György Spiró - Captivity

He would have liked to ask a few other things about the whole setup but he did not dare. Plotius guessed what he was thinking.

“The carriers to Rome do not usually give the names of anyone except those who have actually paid,” he said. “It’s not possible to squeeze in anyone who has not paid. That sort of thing comes to light sooner or later, and the consequences would be serious. There’s a tariff for everything; you can’t gain citizenship free of charge. Just think how lucky we are; we acquired Roman citizenship because it was tossed our way when we were kind enough to be born.”

Uri nodded in agreement. He really had been lucky; he had to thank his grandfather, who perished in the effort to free himself for his grandson, whom he never saw, to become a Roman with full rights of citizenship.

“So Judaean Jews who are full Roman citizens and therefore no longer taxed can move to Italia without hindrance,” he deduced wisely.

“That’s not the point,” said Plotius. “They still have to pay all the Jewish taxes, and they cannot leave the province that they have been living in up till now without special permission, but they do escape the control of the Sanhedrin and fall under Roman jurisdiction. The Jewish authority has no powers over them; it cannot even arrest them but has to turn to the prefect responsible for the matter, who is a long way away. The Roman municipal administration sends the prefect the official list of new Roman and Italian citizens if they happened to live in Judaea; from that moment they cannot be touched by Jewish courts. That is what the real point is, because that is a legal security that does not otherwise exist in Judaea. That is priceless.”

Uri was astounded.

“There was a time once in Jerusalem,” Plotius continued, “when I was arraigned, and not to get hauled up before the Sanhedrin I had to prove that I was a Roman citizen. I told them, and they were so scared they backed right off, did not dare lay a finger on me, though they kept me under close observation and I was unable to leave the city. So I wrote to the prefect in Caesarea, and they got an answer two and a half weeks later that I genuinely was a Roman citizen. Letters between Caesarea and Rome get a response in a fortnight because of the state diplomatic bag. As a result the Jews were forced to leave me alone.”

“What were you accused of?”

“I don’t recall,” said Plotius.

Uri had the sense to let it go at that.

Then Plotius said something else to which Uri did not pay any attention at the time, adding with a smile, “The mail in Rome is slower than the Jewish. News gets from Jerusalem to Antioch in a day and a half at most, because it is passed on by beacons on hilltops; it might take only a day, but one is best advised to avoid Samaria, because those scum light interfering flares to make it impossible to read messages.”

It felt good to idle about in the dark at the back of the tavern; Uri could dimly see colorful figures moving past on the sunlit street, many carrying the same sort of sportulas as they did in Rome, which indicated that here there were likewise patrons and clients, just fewer of them; they were the spitting image of the sportulas in Rome. Evidently Rome dictated the fashions — something that filled Uri with pride. There, inside, he looked at Plotius’s cheerful, mocking, deeply lined face over a thick, unkempt, black beard. He could see that nearby face well, and because he could make it out well, to him it felt familiar. If he did not know he was a Jew and Plotius were to shave his face, anyone might easily take it to be the profile of a Roman noble, complete with dignified aquiline nose in the middle. His baldness was utterly Roman in character. It would be worth having him sit as a model for a bust of a Latin patrician; more than likely there had been patrician blood flowing in the veins of his slave grandfather or great-grandfather.

The wine loosened Uri’s reticence, and he asked Plotius about his trade.

Plotius recounted that he earned his living as a joiner. It did not pay badly; indeed, after a commission in Jerusalem a few years ago he had been hired to build villas for the rich in the Roman style, and he accepted because he had learned all the house-building tricks of the trade back at home, in Rome. In recent times massive new villas had been going up in the center of Jerusalem; they were so big and splendid that they vied with the best in Rome, and not a few of them were graced by his own handiwork; he would show Uri later. Well-off Jews were willing to pay to be able to display their wealth in the city center, above all in the fashionable upper city, rather than on the outskirts. Homo novus , the lot of them, he added contemptuously. He had spent years building villas in Jerusalem, being passed on by personal recommendation from one satisfied customer to the next, and they did pay handsomely, whereas he hardly spent anything because the cost of living in Jerusalem was incredibly low, as compared with Rome.

“Are they rich merchants?”

“No,” said Plotius. “Landowners.”

Vast latifundia — estates — had come into existence in Judaea over the past decade or two since peace had been secured, because the first-born sons who had inherited land were generally unable to come to terms with the other siblings about how that land should be divided, so generally the land would be sold and the money split up, with everyone getting very little, as a result of which they would move into town and become homeless plebs; for that reason the supply of land had swollen so much that it was only possible to sell at prices well below its true value. In other words, the same thing was happening in Judaea as in Italia, the only difference being that in Palestine the land was communal in principle; that is, it was supposed to be redistributed every fifty years, but that had long not been the case, and as a result there was even more ownerless land in Palestine ripe for stealing.

Anyone who had any capital to invest put it into land, including the families of the high priests, even though in principle they were forbidden to do so. They did not buy in their own names, but the land was nevertheless theirs; by now three quarters of Judaea was the personal property of members of families of the high priests, and they sold bits of this on at huge premiums to others, including Romans, even though it was not permitted to sell any part of the Holy Land to non-Jews. Then again, land was supposed to be left fallow for one year in seven to let it recover, but nobody did that.

“There’s not one law that is not transgressed in Judaea,” asserted Plotius. “That’s true in Rome too: every law is transgressed if people can get away with it, but it’s even easier for them to get away with it in Judaea.”

Uri inquired why Plotius did not stay in Judaea if things were going so well for him. Had his family called him back, perhaps?

“I’ve got a wife and I also have a son — Plotius Fortunatus, he’s called. But I don’t see them often, and I don’t miss them very much,” said Plotius. “They have gotten used to the fact that this is my line of work, it’s not they who are the reason. The fact is that Judaea is of no interest; Jerusalem is a hole. It is said that the Temple will be magnificent when it’s ready, but that’s just tripe; there is nothing to see of it, it’s been surrounded by scaffolding for decades. The crowds that flock there during festivals are just appalling, to say nothing of the infectious diseases they carry! Jerusalem is tedious; there’s nothing to do, just a bunch of whores — and those are all wretched: even they are no pleasure at all. Even the Transtiberim is more interesting than Jerusalem, where nothing ever happens or ever will!”

“It did now.”