György Spiró - Captivity

His physician, people in the crowd commented, goes with him everywhere and if necessary will even open a vein while he is orating. An outstanding doctor; learned his craft at the feet of Celsus, no less.

Uri looked on disappointedly as the burly philosopher, supported by two servants, made his way with great difficulty up the steps to the platform. Even though the folds of the toga were nicely arranged on the ground, somehow it still sat badly on him, pushed out on both sides by his huge misshapen hips. On the basis of the scrolls, Uri had pictured someone with quite a different exterior: a tall, angular figure with sharp features, a pointed nose, irreverently flashing eyes. This man had a turned-up nose and drooping eyes. Admittedly, Socrates also had a totally deformed head; his pug-nosed bust stood in the Capitoline along with all the other Greek greats, whose exteriors were similarly unprepossessing with the sole exception of the dashing Euripides.

The crowd was noisy; a small table was placed on the platform next to the philosopher and an amphora, which may well have contained wine. The servants stood in a semicircle at the back, sunk into reverent immobility; the physician hung around next to the platform. The philosopher raised his right hand; a hush fell on the crowd. Then the philosopher spoke, his deep, sonorous voice filling the space.

He started with a humorous subject: a crocodile wanted to be a man and asked the camel, being a servant to man, what the distinguishing feature of human existence was, so the camel enumerates them and goes on to advise the crocodile on how to be a camel, because that was only one step away from being a man. After the second or third sentence, Uri had the vague feeling that he had already encountered the text — indeed, knew it by heart. The people in the audience chortled with glee as they followed the twists and turns in the witty but rather undemanding text, until Uri realized that he had read the tale among several other works of a similar kind in a scroll by another author. He hoped he was mistaken, but then he saw in his mind’s eye the scroll itself, and he could even recall where in the scroll the words were placed.

The philosopher delivered the text as if it were one of his own compositions.

Uri looked around at the heedlessly chuckling audience.

Plagiarism: the philosopher had pilfered another philosopher’s text. He had not even taken the trouble to write a new one, or at least declaim one of his own older texts.

That grieved Uri. When the orator, having reaped his well-earned success, bowed deeply to ovation, took a sip of his wine, and again raised an arm to request silence to strike up on a new subject, it came as no surprise to Uri that he was also familiar with this tale. It concerned another philosopher’s happy-go-lucky make-believe composition about a cobbler who pretends to be Zeus to win over his friend’s wife, and how the virtuous lady asks Zeus for his assistance, and thus the lady partakes of divine love.

The unsuspecting audience laughed, with the females (there were rich, bejeweled ladies seated among the spectators in the company of their husbands or lovers) demurely gasping a bit at the more indelicate runs of the story, but no protests were to be heard. Uri felt a strong urge to stand up on behalf of the plundered authors and to thunder against the thief, but he controlled himself and watched scornfully at the way the fat man who called himself a philosopher managed to play in his one person the various roles. Not that he was bad at ham-acting: while portraying the female character he even wiggled his hips, simpered and whined in a falsetto tone.

Grown-up men and women enjoyed the infantile stories — grown-ups but utter morons nonetheless.

Uri trailed home despondently. He had wasted sixteen asses, which were not even his, on a shameful farce. He brought to mind the two works of the philosopher he had just seen and considered that they were good, despite his newly found, jaundiced distaste. They were not comparable with his great works but there was in them a certain seriousness, a dignity, a loftiness of the mind. It was terrible that a serious philosopher had to earn a living as a buffoon, filching texts from others.

He made an attempt to guess how much the philosopher might have earned that afternoon. The thirty rows had been roughly two thirds full, and one row seated about 150 people, so there must have been something like three thousand there. Fifteen hundred sesterces. There would have been expenses, like the hire of the theater, and who knows what that would have been: say one third of that, then of course there was the pay of his permanent attendants, which again was hard to assess. The lectica was obviously hired locally; the physician was certainly expensive, and each one of the servants probably cost more to maintain per day than his whole family in Rome.

So, the wretched thief cannot have earned all that big a sum of money if he had to support so many hangers-on. How much would be left for him personally? Not more than two hundred sesterces. Uri’s family could live off of that for months, of course, but it was still a measly remuneration.

He wondered how the clown planned his tours of the Italian provinces. Quite possibly he would make an appearance in some other town every three or four days. In prosperous towns maybe he not only glittered in the amphitheater but was also invited into the homes of the well-off. There were plenty of wealthy people in Syracusa, judging by the villas; who knows, maybe he would be bowing and scraping in private houses tomorrow, and make more from that than he did in the theater. Maybe he even declaimed more serious texts on such occasions.

It was not the sort of thing that Plato or Aristotle went in for.

Uri felt obliged the next day to report to Matthew on the philosopher’s performance. He honestly confessed to having been disappointed that the philosopher had ripped off the works of others.

“I enjoyed it,” said Matthew.

Uri was staggered.

“I was sitting in the back row,” said Matthew. “His voice carried clearly that far off. I saw you sitting in the second row; you kept turning around to look at the audience.”

He’s watching me, Uri thought. Following and watching me. What does he think I am, then? Some sort of spy who had a secret rendezvous with someone in Syracusa’s amphitheater?

“I tried to catch up with you in the crowd,” said Matthew, “but I got stuck at the exit, and by the time I managed to push through you were nowhere to be seen.”

Uri sighed. Once again he had supposed the worst of someone when in reality there had indeed been a big scrimmage on the way out.

In the end, a ship did arrive from Judaea, docking on Friday afternoon, two or three hours before sunset and the onset of the Sabbath.

Valerius happened to be keeping watch at the harbor; he announced that he had already managed to reach an agreement with the captain, who said that he would pick them up at first light on Sunday and would be setting off back to Caesarea. Matthew was none too pleased to have the glory of securing the boat stolen from him; Valerius was elated and described in detail the bireme on which they would be sailing. Uri was astounded at the rich nautical vocabulary Valerius commanded because he had never before so much as heard reference to the various types of masts and sails. Evidently shipping must be a mania for Valerius, assistant to an archisynagogos, and Uri asked him as well whether he had ever sailed before. Valerius replied that yes, he had; a few days ago he had sailed on a ferry from Italia to Sicily. But just wait, just wait, he said, his eyes glittering like a crackpot. Uri was less sanguine: it would take only a stray little storm for them to find themselves on the bottom of the sea. Now that a boat had turned up, he would most willingly have turned back.