György Spiró - Captivity

They had to pass a huge temple. Mounted atop a tall stone pillar at the top of the steps in front of its Doric columns was a huge marble statue of a person who was identifiably the emperor Tiberius. The statue was at least as high as the one of Augustus in Rome.

“The Tiberium,” said Matthew. “It took five years to construct. Pilate started building it the moment he was appointed, bringing the plans with him from Rome. The site had been picked out in advance, and a lot of expensive villas had to be demolished to make way for it, and the owners were given a considerable amount in compensation, albeit none too readily, as the lawsuits dragged on for years. Inside the edifice there are statues of Julius Caesar and Augustus, as well as Jupiter, Venus, and Priapus. There was also one of Sejanus, but when he was disgraced Pilate had his head smashed.”

“The torso has been put in storage,” Plotius snickered. “Malicious tongues say it is waiting for the next emperor. It only needs a new head to be carved and joined on.”

Uri went closer to the temple while his companions stopped and watched impatiently. He walked up the steps and around the statue.

The colossus was at least sixty feet high. From below all he could see clearly was Tiberius’s jutting jaw, which blocked out his nose and other features. The sculptor, whoever it was, had fashioned an enormous, pugilistic chin for the figure. In Rome there were numerous busts of the ruling emperor, so Uri looked on him as almost a personal acquaintance; nevertheless there were not all that many depictions of him, as early in his reign he had forbidden statues of himself to be raised. Later he did give up on the ban, but sculptors worked slowly and had to fulfill commissions from cities all over Italia.

Uri searched for the edges of the marble blocks that had been fit together, but these had either been so well finished they were hidden, or else they were too high up for him to see clearly, so even from close up the statue seemed to him to have been carved from a single block. That could not possibly be the case, however. He wondered how much a statue of that size cost. The marble alone must have cost a great deal, to say nothing of the transport.

He stopped at the top of the steps and looked back toward the harbor.

Streets laid out in straight lines, carefully planned buildings, marble, gilded roofs, blinding white colonnades. He blinked hard and squinted through a crack in his fingers.

It was a cold, unfriendly town. No alleyways, or random narrowings and widenings. It was a planned city; it did not live.

“You’ll have time later to gape at everything,” Matthew called out angrily, when Uri got back to the group. “Let’s go! People are waiting for us.”

There were few people in the streets; they were not hurrying. Peace reigned on all sides, and boredom. Nothing in this sleepy, pretty town suggested that disturbances of public order had taken place a few weeks before. The messengers had exaggerated as usual.

They clambered up the mountain, with Uri’s companions also stopping every now and then to look back at the harbor. They went by gardens with rich, dense vegetation screened behind high stone walls in the depths of which no doubt lurked immense villas that were obliterated from sight by the wall and the vegetation. By the entrances to several of the villas there were sentry cabins for the guards. In his belly, Uri sensed a strange emptiness; there was something threatening in the Roman prefect’s seat of residence that he had not felt elsewhere. The fate of the Jewish people could not have been too good under Herod the Great, who had conceived the town.

The hillside was not completely deserted, with laden carts creaking their way up and here and there a pedestrian carrying something on his back or head. But the artificial miniature city, named after Caesar Augustus, stood out in such a sharp contrast to everything that they had seen up till then on the route, and most especially with Rome, that Uri wished, more than ever before, that he was anywhere but where he happened to be.

“We’ll be there any time now,” Matthew panted, “but if you want we’ll climb a bit higher up to the peak, because from there you can pick out Jerusalem.”

Hilarus and Iustus ran on ahead, with the rest trudging on behind toward the top of the hill. They stopped. Matthew pointed to the east rather than southward. The weather was clear, with the sun shining on their backs, and Uri deduced from the whoops of his companions that they could genuinely see it. He turned in the same direction but saw nothing but an endless twinkling blur of blue and green.

“Can you see it?” an exultant Valerius inquired of him. “The Temple!”

“I can see,” said Uri.

He couldn’t see it.

It was time to pray. Matthew poured water from his jug into a bronze dish, and one after the other they rinsed their hands, got out their paraphernalia, affixed the phylacteries to their upper arms or foreheads, turned toward Jerusalem, and bobbing forward and backward said the Sh’ma: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” It seemed to Uri that Israel was not listening; there was no one passing nearby. He rebuked himself for the thought; he was in the Holy Land after all. Valerius, Hilarus, and Iustus prostrated themselves with outstretched arms, while the others prayed standing up. Alexandros was weeping, but Uri felt nothing. He thought of his father: would he feel anything himself were he here?

They made their way down the mountain.

“You didn’t see it, did you,” said Plotius.

“Yes, I did,” Uri rebutted him angrily.

Plotius uttered a soft reproving gurgle, confidentially, so it would not have reached the others. Uri gritted his teeth; he is hurting me, but at least he’s watching. The insult did not please him, but the attention did.

The stone wall at the gate they halted at was covered with vines. Matthew rang a bell to announce their arrival. They waited. Matthew rang again, but there was no response.

“There must be servants around,” he said, troubled.

They might have been there, but either they did not hear or they did not want to open the gate. Alexandros, Hilarus, Valerius, and Iustus in turn pounded on the gate — all to no avail.

“Where are we going to stay?” Plotius queried, and, leaning against the wall, he put down his sack on the ground.

“With Simon the Magus,” Matthew replied. “He’s an important man. Physician to the prefect’s wife.”

“Oh!” was Plotius’s response. They waited to see if he was going to say anything else, but he did not speak, so it became no clearer whether he knew him. They lay down on the western side of the wall, the sun shining strongly on them.

Matthew made excuses: he knew that Simon still lived there; he had been renting the gorgeous residence ever since he had become a confidant of the prefect’s wife. He had not been notified that Simon might have moved; he had also stayed with him on his last two trips, the last time not six months ago, in the month of Tishri, when he had led a delegation for the Day of Atonement. He would know if anything had happened to him. But if he had moved nevertheless, then they would go back to the harbor, because he had an acquaintance there, the secretary to the representative of the Jewish fleet, who had sailed with him for years; he was certain that he’d be able to put them up at his place.

“Never fear,” said Matthew. “You’ll have a roof over your heads.”

They still had a bit of unleavened bread, so they snacked on that, and they still had some water from the boat, which they drank, and went on slumbering at the foot of the wall.

Uri cogitated on what sort of delegation Matthew might have been leading to Jerusalem six months ago. Money was not taken for Yom Kippur, only for Passover. There must be a continuous exchange of information and business between Jerusalem and Rome. Strange that his father had never spoken about it.