György Spiró - Captivity

Pilate’s arguments were to no avail, however; the crowd had been stirred up against him.

Then the Jews had marched to the stadium, and there they were surrounded by an armed detachment. What else were they supposed to do? The Jews had thrown themselves to the ground and demanded to be executed, but then Pilate had arrived in great haste. He ordered the soldiers to leave the stadium and told the Jews that, though it was a grave affront to imperial dignity, in the interests of keeping the peace he would have the military insignia withdrawn. That is what happened, and not a single hair on anyone’s head was harmed. The malcontents trooped home, and it’s been peaceful since then.

“Is it true that a letter of complaint was sent to Tiberius?” Matthew asked.

“I’ve heard rumors of the kind, but I don’t know for a fact. Allegedly Tiberius wrote back immediately and chided Pilate. But then that’s only gossip; Pilate’s couriers aren’t in the habit of opening his correspondence.”

“So, it’s been peaceful since then?” Alexandros asked.

“Yes, peaceful,” said the Magus, but shook his head to show a lack of conviction. “Except for people: the numbers of crazy people grow by the day. I haven’t visited Jerusalem or been around the two counties for months. The time has come for me to leave this nice, cool villa behind; time to do what I can for the crazy people whose troubles I can sense and recognize. Here I have only one crazy person entrusted to me, and I can do nothing for her any longer.”

After a short pause he added, “It’s been peaceful for too long. A second generation has grown up now that has not seen war. From what I see, people can’t stand peace, because when left in peace there’s time to think — and that is painful. There’s as much deception and lying as ever, but now there is time to get caught up in it. Injustice may be a slow-killing poison, but it does kill. Left in peace, the soul becomes crippled — in war, only the body. It will come to war sooner or later. The Creator planted it in us; somehow the soul must want it that way.”

Alexandros livened up, his eyes flashing:

“And what does the Lord want?”

Simon the Magus look wearily at him.

“The Lord God let us choose for ourselves what sort of trouble to get into with each other and ourselves,” he said, now slipping back into Aramaic. “‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ He said. All interpreters of the Law also say it: ‘Do not do unto your neighbor what you would not do unto yourself.’ That is the Great Commandment, the Last Word, on which even the schools of Hillel and Shammai agree. Nobody in their right mind can expect anyone who does not love himself to love his neighbor.”

That was the most comfortable of all their lodgings so far, and Matthew allowed them to wander around as they wished during the day.

“But be back by nightfall,” he ordered. “I don’t know when we will be moving on. We have a whole week to get there.”

He also added, “Don’t take anything with you; everything must stay here.”

That “everything” meant the sack, which contained nothing except a jug, tefillin, and a cloak.

“There are not enough berths in Jerusalem,” Plotius explained to Uri. “Many hundreds of thousands make pilgrimage for the feast, often more than a million, and it is not easy to find accommodation, even though we are privileged persons. The later we arrive, the happier they will be; it doesn’t matter if we make a nuisance of ourselves here until the last minute.”

Uri was delighted that at last he would be left alone and could ramble on his own. Maybe Matthew would manage to arrange an audience with Pilate for them. Pilate himself was of no great interest: Gaius Lucius must be wealthier than him, a provincial governor was no big deal, but if he happened to be there, he would quite like to see Herod’s palace from the inside.

He got to the vicinity of the palace. It was a vast edifice, as imposing from the outside as Matthew had described it. There was little chance of being able to inspect it from the inside; Simon the Magus was preoccupied with calling in the money that was owed to him, but without him Matthew could not present himself to the palace saying that they had an audience with the prefect. They were an important delegation, but not so far as Pilate was concerned.

No trace of preparation for the feast could be picked up among the Jews in Caesarea. Of course, for them it was simple: it was enough for them to set off four days beforehand. Matthew wasn’t making much effort to make contact with the Jews of Caesarea; they wouldn’t be able to offer them a more pleasant or comfortable place to stay than Simon’s. There they were given an ample breakfast, and the suppers were marvelous; the table in the dining room was permanently laid and the servants saw to it that they should instantly be given fresh food and drink whether they appeared on their own or with several of the others. Even so, Uri was starving during the day; he had not an as to call his own. He had not the slightest idea what the money here was worth, nor had he even seen any, as he was unable to sit out on the terrace of a tavern to have food or a drink.

In the evenings his companions talked mostly about money. Plotius and Matthew would attempt to explain how much each coin was worth. From the second evening onward that became a daily task for them before going to bed; Uri would lie on his couch, listening to them, perceiving their disputes over exchange rates as a monotonous psalmody. Stupendous amounts of money were in circulation, it turned out, virtually all the denominations that had ever been minted within the field of attraction of the Great Sea, and the exchange between these was impossibly complicated. “Tetradrachma, sela, shekel, sacred shekel, ordinary shekel, dinar. Tropaik, asper, ma’ah, tresith, pondion, issar, prutah, zuz, mina, shekel, dupondius, zuz, mina, shekel, dupondius, drachma, drachma, drachma, dinar, prutah, lepton,” Uri crooned to himself on the couch the names of the coins that he heard, and as he drifted into sleep these magic words droned on of their own accord. The one conversion factor that he registered was that one lepton was worth one eighth of an as, or in other words half a quadrans. It amused him that the smallest coin in Rome also had a half counterpart here, though even a Roman pleb like himself did not measure value in quadrans back home but in asses, and it particularly tickled him that this tiny coin, a lepton, had two names, its Semitic name being the prutah. He had taken note of that because his companions were constantly teasing Hilarus to tell them how many prutah made a lepton, and every time the teacher would give them some other figure for the exchange rate, never realizing that it was the same coin.

It pained Uri that in Syracusa he had been so brazenly robbed of half a sestertius: never again will I be such a numbskull, he vowed keenly.

Early on in the morning all his companions would leave the house, so Uri supposed he could not stay either. Each set off alone and also arrived alone. Uri did not ask them what the devil they were up to; he would have a good feed in the morning and until the evening would stroll aimlessly, hungry and thirsty.

He had seen a house of prayer, a fair-sized building; even the largest synagogue in Rome was not that big. Maybe that was the one that stood on the Greek’s plot of land. He would have gone in, but it was closed. There were a lot of Jews living there, so why was their house of prayer closed? Was there another one? He asked a Greek, and of course there was another. Uri followed his directions and walk there. That too was closed.

That evening he questioned the others. Matthew explained.

“In Palestine houses of prayer are only left open on market days. Mondays and Thursdays are the market days; that is when peasants come in from the villages, bringing their produce, and if they are able to sell anything, they buy themselves something. That is also when they would visit the house of prayer, if they were going that way — not to pray, mind you, but to litigate. That would cost them, so they would take home less money than they had come with, even if they managed to sell something. The Jews of Palestine adore litigation. The courts hold their sessions in the refectory of the house of prayer, hearing cases late into the evening. The houses of prayers are open on the Sabbath as well, of course, but on those days only the members of the local congregation would eat supper there because, being the Sabbath, peasants are not allowed into the city.”