I began this chronicle in an unusually rainy late spring and have laboured at it, with what little result you have already been able to judge, through an unusually hot summer. I have suffered bitterly from the bite of the insect we call in Greek kounoupi and in Aramaic yitusch, so that my right hand, scratching its Greek and Aramaic letters under the lamp, has swollen to a red ball and my bare ankles have bled with the scratching of my left. I have had difficulty in breathing, waking gasping in the dark and begging for some god or demon to fell me with a heavy club, quelling not so much life as the agony of trying to sustain life with lungfuls of invisibility. My stomach has been out of order too, so that wine, the stomach’s cheerer, has turned sour on me, sending me off groaning to a particular bubbling fountain in Savosa that, as I should have expected, has dried up this dry summer. I have eaten little except broiled lake fish and honey and black bread bought in the market at Lucanum, and not much of that simple diet has stayed down. Today the ninth month, termed the seventh, starts in a ferocity of heat with no promise of autumnal mellowness, but doubtless soon I shall be complaining of morning and evening chill. Neither heat nor cold pleases us; afflicted with the one, we long for the other. I dream of opening death’s gate on to a quiet green field under a mild April sun, there to lie undisturbed for ever with a donkey grazing companionably by.
It is without doubt unseemly for an author to impose on his readers reports of his bodily condition, since the writer’s hand is to be considered a mere abstract engine, along with the complexities of nerve, muscle, blood and digestion that have some part in the driving of that hand. The writer’s words alone count, though even they may be begrudged as a barrier (though, in grumbling concession, a necessary one) between the reader and what he is reading about. The writer as a living and suffering being is set, as it were, in parallel to what he writes. We do not enquire into the condition of Virgil’s bowels when he wrote this or that line of The Aeneid, nor do we seek to relate the love poems of Catullus to the love pangs of Catullus. Still, the engine can break down, as the hydraulis broke down last year in Rome at the games, to the fury of Domitian. Any author who has undertaken a lengthy enterprise must wonder if he will see the end of it. If he has sense, he will put himself out of the way of danger for the work’s sake, refusing to swim lest he be caught by cramps and drown, avoiding tavern brawls and shellfish. But death, somewhat like God, is a great joker and can lurk in a speck of dirt on the table’s edge. The unwary author, shut safe in his writing cell, chokes on the stone of the plum he sucks for refreshment or finds that life, suddenly grown bored with the monitoring of the drum of his heart, leaves him as he stands to stretch. He falls forever, seeing bitterly as his head sinks below the level of the desk an unfinished sentence that will not now be finished.
This is gloomy stuff, and I apologise for it. I would do better if, instead of expending an hour’s writing on the prospect of leaving this chronicle incomplete, I pushed on with the chronicle itself, seeing all time as precious. But, as I observe now, I am reluctant to write of the Emperor Gaius Caligula (whose birthday yesterday was, I should surmise and hope, universally forgotten or, if remembered, remembered with a shudder). I have summoned my own dyspepsia, philosophical gloom, disenchantment with an oppressive summer as a pretext for deferring a necessary account of a wretched reign. Let me then postpone until tomorrow our first visit together to the bloody city on the Tiber, rendered bloodier still by its new master, and swelter with you briefly in a village not far from Jericho, where two decent young men, fired by opposed ideals, by chance or not chance encounter each other.
Philip the flame-haired Greek Jew Nazarene was ready to start his evangelical mission in Samaria. He arrived weary at the village of Mamir, a league or two from Jericho, shortly before noon, the day a scorching one, glad to find shelter under a wide-crowned raintree near a small tavern. He sat, dropped his scrip to the dust and, from the large-breasted serving girl who came from the open kitchen, ordered a small loaf and a mug of wine. She wondered at his golden handsomeness and at his accent, which combined Judaea and the ancestral Greek islands. While he broke his bread and sipped his wine, conducting his own service of unity with his divine master, Caleb the Zealot came from the interior of the tavern, saw Philip, thought he knew him at least by sight, walked boldly up to the sunwarped table and bench and, after a shalom, sat. The two looked at each other with some wariness. Philip at length remembered the name. Caleb’s reported work of subversion in Samaria had been driven out by more recent and privier events. Caleb had seen Philip around in Jerusalem but did not know who he was or what he did. Jerusalem was a great city crammed with citizens. ‘What news in Jerusalem?’
‘Persecution,’ Philip said, ‘of the Greek-speaking Nazarenes. I was lucky to get away. I’m taking the gospel to Samaria. By that twisting of your lips I guess you disapprove.’
‘Who are persecuting – the Romans? No, of course not. The Nazarenes bow down to the Romans. The other cheek. Love your enemies.’
‘One particular Roman. Who is also a Jew.’
‘Saul of Tarsus. My old fellow student. He was hot against the Nazarenes. And now he’s persecuting them. Well. Do you know a man named Stephen?’
‘I knew a man named Stephen.’
‘A good man. I suppose I owe my life to him. Knew, you say knew.’
‘Stephen is dead. He was stoned to death. For being a Greek-speaking Nazarene.’
‘Saul did this?’
‘Yes. You could say that.’
‘And what happened to Stephen’s family?’
‘The mother and father are good children of the Temple.’ Philip spat out the word with some bitterness. And then: ‘Ah yes, ah yes. You ask very obliquely and discreetly and with fear perhaps. You mean your sisters. The soldiers took them to the procurator Pilate. Pilate sent them as a gift to the Emperor. Along with camels and horses and dried dates and figs.’
‘And,’ Caleb said, his colour not yet changed, ‘my mother?’
‘I heard something from Stephen about the mother of Caleb being dead. And very quietly buried. Your eyes and changed colour tell me you blame yourself for all this.’
‘I should have thought.’
‘If thought always had to precede action there’d be little done in the world. Though most of the things done are hardly worth doing. We heard of your inciting the Samaritans to rise. And of the crushing of the rebellion. The outcome of which you will know, perhaps. Pilate’s no longer procurator of Judaea. Vitellius summoned him—’
‘Who’s Vitellius?’
‘The legate of Syria. Pilate’s been forced into premature retirement. It was a mistake, apparently, to try to sack that temple on Mount Gerizim.’
‘You’ve been learning something about Samaria.’
‘It’s as well to know something about the people one proposes to convert.’
‘Your friends or overseers have made a good choice from one point of view,’ Caleb said. ‘You don’t look like a Hebrew.’
‘Whatever a Hebrew looks like.’
‘They detest the Hebrews. They accepted me because of the stripes on my back. They spit at mention of the Temple in Jerusalem. Go carefully.’
‘It’s a strange thing,’ Philip said. ‘And I wonder if our master foresaw it. The Nazarene faith is already splitting into two. Stephen was condemned because he diminished the worth of the Temple and the whole hieratic order of the Temple. But Peter and the rest still look like good sons of Abraham and Moses.’
‘You split already,’ Caleb nodded. ‘You will split more yet. There’s no health in you, no unity. There’s no grip at the centre. You react to Rome in the wrong way. You’re as bad as the Sadducees.’
Philip smiled, though thinly. ‘And your way is what, now that you’re rid of Pilate?’
‘Not to be caught by the next procurator, whoever he is. That, for a start.’
‘There’s talk of your dream being fulfilled without knives or fuss. A client king, Herod Agrippa. No more procurators.’
‘A client king is only a procurator in fancy dress.’ Caleb gazed at the lively street scene without seeing it: a camel haughtily dropping its sand-coloured dung; the basket-carrying women, veiled to the eyes but the eyes lively; a girls’ quarrel about the precedence of water-drawing from the well, eyes and teeth a flash of toy knives; an old man drunk asleep under a clump of dusty palms. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘to strike at the centre.’
Philip, with Nazarene tenderness, rescued a wasp that was trying to swim, against a current of waspish drunkenness, round and round in his half-full winecup. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘go to Rome?’
‘First things first, you’re right, go to Rome. I take it my poor sisters will have been sent to Rome, capital of a slave empire. The first strike at the centre is the stroke that frees my sisters. If they’re still alive.’
‘Slaves for the Emperor will, I think, be immune from rough treatment,’ Philip said in his cool Greek manner. ‘I refer to the voyage under hatches and the clanking of the chained gang from Puteoli or wherever they land. I mean that there will have been no whipping or rape. The slaveowner expects whole skins and a look of health. What happens afterwards depends on the temperament of the slaveowner. And the slaveowner is the Emperor. No longer the wretched mad Tiberius. The sane and well-loved Gaius of the little boots.’
‘You seem to get good fresh news in Jerusalem these days.’ The wasp staggered with feeble wet wings about the tabletop. Caleb saw himself in Rome, a city he knew only from fantastic visions: marble palaces with flights of laborious marble steps, gardens of planes and pines and oleanders closed to the rabble, ladies with predatory unveiled faces, wooden tenements quick to burn down, gigantic effigies of false gods. Caleb wandered the streets of Rome, a stranger speaking moderate Greek but bad Latin, living off bruised fruit and wormy cabbages discarded by the stallholders of monstrously huge markets, drinking at ornate fountains. The Jews gathered on the Sabbath at the many synagogues, and Caleb was ready to harangue about a free Israel: strike, spare the Emperor for the moment, but kill the Greek civil servants, metaphysical enemies of the Jews. It all seemed hopeless. Men in chestmoulded armour stood around, speaking all the tongues of the bad Empire, alert for dissidence. Hopeless, yes. But he was glad to have a small focus of action: to free his sisters, bangled and ankleted in slavish copper, was an act of piety that even the Romans might approve though forced brutally to punish. First things first. Philip said:
‘Strike at the heart. Stephen’s way was better.’
‘Any fool can die,’ Caleb said, seeing his own death, five or six Roman spears lunging. ‘You Nazarenes will achieve nothing.’
‘Has it ever struck you,’ Philip said, ‘that the Empire is already decaying? Decaying because force breeds nothing but force. There’s a terrible emptiness that has to be filled.’
‘We’re the only ones who can fill it,’ Caleb said. ‘It took a long time to arrive at the fulfilled vision of a single God. The whole world will have to worship Jehovah. Jerusalem is the capital of the real empire to come. And in the heart of the capital the empire’s heart, which is the Temple. This has to happen.’
‘Battering rams,’ Philip said. ‘Pilfered gold and silver. Human hands can destroy what human hands have made. I think we’re right. I’m sure.’ But he delayed finishing his wine and trudging through the dust to the Samaritan capital.
I met an old man named Livius Silanus who, cautiously at the centre of Roman affairs as an efficient but not brilliant court advocate, had seen the whole of Gaius’s brief reign and noted the point at which madness supervened on moderation. ‘I remember,’ he told me, ‘the day when Gaius escorted the corpse of Tiberius to Rome from Misenum. He was dressed in full mourning and maintained a countenance of great sadness, but he was so greeted by the plebs that one would have taken the funeral procession for a military triumph, as if the young weeping Gaius had subdued some kingdom of darkness. They yelled mad endearments at him – our little pet, our own imperial baby, our son who is yet our father, star of the east and the west, our chicken who shall yet be an eagle, and so on, all quite nauseating to look back upon. I was one of those unauthorised citizens who pushed their way into the senate house to witness the setting aside of Tiberius’s will and the conferment of absolute power on Gaius, rendering totally invalid the claim of the joint heir Tiberius Gemellus. The celebrations were of a dangerous extravagance, what with the public sacrifice of nearly two hundred thousand beasts and, it was said, human beings as well, slaves naturally, in his honour, in the space of no more than three months. Extravagance of one kind condones extravagance of another. The wonder is that Gaius did not yield more readily to the intoxication of absolute power. The adoration of the people was demented. When Gaius fell briefly ill of a surfeit of turtle’s eggs, there were people ready to give their own lives – they went round the streets bearing cards lettered to that effect – if only the gods would grant his recovery. With Gaius recovered they forgot their pledges quickly enough.’
The September heat has somewhat abated. Last night there was much rain and, as I write, my two slaves Felicia and Chrestus are busy mopping up its inflow. Livius Silanus continued:
‘Gaius endeared himself to the Romans by showing filial piety to what I thought an excessive degree. He sailed to Pandataria and the Pontians in very rough weather to transport back to Rome the remains of his mother and brother Nero (a name not at that time redolent of evil: all names are neutral, to be smeared with faeces or honey according to the temperament and acts of their possessors). He honoured their ashes with prayers and tears and placed them in their urns with his own hands. He organised days of funeral sacrifices and of circus games to the glory of his mother. As for his father, he renamed the month September Germanicus, a change about which many of us have ambiguous feelings, for we approve the honour while loathing him who bestowed it. Need I go on in this recital of acts altogether worthy? His uncle Claudius, the limping stutterer, the Balbus who built no wall but erected an ill-written pile of dubious Roman annals, was at the time of Gaius’s accession a mere knight, but he was swiftly elevated to the rank of consul, fellow to the Emperor himself, while poor Tiberius Gemellus, who had as good a claim to the imperiate, he adopted and gave the title of Prince of the Young. His sisters, with whom he was soon to commit incest, he associated with his own glory, bidding consuls and senators end their official proceedings with the prayer ‘Good fortune go with the Emperor Gaius and his sisters’.
‘He cleansed the city of its perverts, called spintriae, wishing to drown them in the Tiber but restrained from an act of such excessive virtue. He abolished censorship, resumed Augustus’s practice of publishing an annual budget, revivified the electoral system, pleased the plebs with new games – panther-baiting, boxing and wrestling with the best of the African and Campanian professionals, night-shows with the city illuminated, with lavish throwing of gift vouchers for the people from his own hands. The greatest of his shows was presented in no arena but on the stretch of sea from Baiae to Puteoli. He anchored all the merchant vessels of the west coast in two lines, and then he had mounds of earth laid on their planks. Wearing an oak-leaf crown and a cloak of cloth of gold, sworded and bucklered, the Praetorian Guard behind him and some of his friends in chariots brought from Gaul, he rode on a richly caparisoned stallion from one to the other end of this fantastic bridge. This, I gather, was to give the lie to a prophecy of Thrasyllus the soothsayer: ‘Gaius has no more chance of becoming Emperor than of riding a horse dry-shod across the Gulf of Baiae.’ Here, perhaps, you see the first public manifestation of his madness.
‘He seems first to have proclaimed his divinity in a discussion with certain foreign potentates, including Artabanus, the king of the Parthians (who hated Tiberius but did everything to ingratiate himself with Gaius). At this time he had already insisted on being named by such titles as Father of the Army and Best and Greatest Caesar, but, in the kingly argument, conducted in the friendliest terms, as to which of the monarchs there present was the most nobly descended, he cried that he outranked them all. He was greater than any king, he insisted, and the greater than a king must of necessity be a god. From that moment on he began to forge proof of his divinity. He extended his palace as far as the Forum, so that the shrine of Castor and Pollux there became a mere annexe or vestibule. Standing beside the statued brethren, he put himself in the situation of one who had to be worshipped along with them. Some worshippers went too far and called him Jupiter Latiaris, but he was soon to regard himself as greater than the whole pantheon lumped together. He had a shrine built, with a lifesize golden image of himself, the clothes of which had to be changed every day to be identical with those which the divinity wore in the flesh, and there were sacrificial victims of great cost and rarity – peacocks, flamingos, pheasants, guineahens. He would converse with the statue of Jupiter of the Capitol, threatening to cast the heavenly father down to hell if he did not raise himself, the divine Emperor, heavenwards. It goes without saying that his ritual copulations with the moon goddess continued, though no longer in secret. All the statues of the gods he had decapitated, and an effigy of his own grinning head placed above the muscular stone or metal. A conversation with a Greek craftsman is reported from this first phase of his mania:
‘“All these gods – you know what the Jews believe?”
‘“No, Caesar.”
‘“That there is only one God. Clever people, the Jews. You understand my instructions about placing the head of the one God on this multiplicity of divine bodies?”
‘“Yes, Caesar, but what do we do about the goddesses?”
‘“Easy, you fool. Put my head there, but also hair, hair, hair in abundance.” And he made the gesture of conjuring a sprouting of lavish locks from his own bald scalp, at the same time giggling manically. Gaius Caligula – the name still makes me shudder. It even induces a physical nausea. Ask me no more about him.’
It was to a Rome ruled by a still reasonable and indeed benevolent Gaius that the two sisters of Caleb were marched, though not lashed, in light chains. They had both been violently sick on the voyage from Caesarea, huddled under the hatches with too many other slaves, some of them Samaritan captives, but the Cytherea, a sailing ship wholly dependent on the winds and not on banks of wretched slave rowers (who were indeed only employed on the biremes, triremes and quadriremes of home waters at that time), was often becalmed and put in at many ports of the Roman Levant, thus granting periods when the tossed stomach might recover. Both Ruth and Sara had become thin, unable to eat salt pork and drink foul water though they later devoured broiled fresh fish with the hunger of animals, fighting for it. Ruth wept much but Sara set her beauty to a fierce grimness which, even when, as you shall hear later, she was manumitted, she never entirely lost. She was determined to live and dreamt much of revenge. She had also a sense, perhaps perverse, that it was better to learn about the great world even through slavery than to sit muffled at home in the metaphysical servitude imposed by the Jewish law. There was nothing metaphysical about Roman whips; there was indeed a kind of brutish honesty in Roman doctrines of buying and selling: no hypocrisy about the Romans: you knew where you stood or lay or tottered. It was a three days’ march along the Via Aurelia, with an exhausted flopping-down in the fields under guard when nightfall had brought its tubs of water and its hurled bread ration.
And here at last was Rome: the Janiculum, the Marine Theatre of Augustus, the bridge over the Tiber that led to the Palatine. In the streets low people jeered at the slaves and some spat; Sara, unveiled now for ever, spat back, but the wind blew from the east. There north were the Forum and the Temple of Jupiter and the Circus Flaminius and Pompey’s Theatre, but the slaves were to see none of these things: they were split into groups and impelled according to their imposed functions to this or that part of the slave quarters that lay beyond planted groves to the north of the imperial palace. Sara and Ruth were to be put to kitchen duties. They were greeted by a slavemistress from the Rhineland who barked at them. Sara barked back and was cuffed. They were herded with other women, many of whom wailed, to a windowless barracks filled, like a monstrous stable, with straw. Ruth lay down and wept for Jerusalem. Sara saw there was no way of escape.
‘Our master said that we should be his witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and also Samaria,’ Philip told the Samaritans in one of the synagogues of Sebaste. ‘So I am here.’ The sun from the high window enflamed his hair and made it seem a sign of something. ‘You have a word which you use much, and that word is ta’eb, meaning him who shall restore. What shall he restore? He shall restore health and wholeness after sickness and wounds. He shall restore the lost vision of the faith as a faith of love. The ta’eb appeared in Judaea and I bring his message. A message of tolerance, forbearance, charity. A glib and useless message, so some of you will say, smarting as you are from the fury of the Romans, the predations of an unjust procurator. Some of you dream of vengeance and a new rising of the people. We Nazarenes do not dream. We offer instead a practical answer to tribulation and pain. We must love our enemies, and such love, which it would be foolish to believe capable of gushing spontaneously from the heart, has to be learnt as any other skill is learnt. You burn your finger in the fire, and the throbbing finger causes you pain. Do you then hate your finger? No, for it is part of yourself. So when men cause you pain, blame the fire that is in them, but remember that such men are your brethren, are part of the body of God as much as yourselves. Love is a hard thing to learn, but if we do not learn it we are lost.’
The members of the synagogue listened not because they found great sense in the words but because Philip had been showing a certain therapeutic power which the simpler of the folk deemed thaumaturgical. A couple of cripples had been healed, and in public too. The imputation of the miraculous troubles me, as it must trouble any rational person, and I insist, along with my old dead sadly missed physician friend Sameach, Efcharistimenos in Greek, that certain conditions of the body have a basis in the soul, and that a cure may consist in unlocking the soul and plucking out the cause. Thus, a man who had struck his mother in rage found, as he thought, that God struck that hand and rendered it paralysed. He repented of his act, but that repentance was unheard by the deaf and dumb organ of grasp and touch. Philip apparently soothed him to an acceptance of his human lot, the unexorcisable devil that got into man with Adam, presented his own unfilial rage and violence as part of an ineluctable condition, and released him from an inner tension that, by some inexplicable traffic of the nerves, had stiffened his hand to an unbreakable stoniness. Alleluia, cried the man, wagging his fingers, Christ Jesus is great.
After his discourse in the synagogue, Philip was engaged in effecting what looked like a cure at a street corner in Sebaste. An old woman had fallen in a faint and lay as if dead near, but not on, a heap of uncleared camel dung. The Samaritans always had the reputation of a dirty people and employed no municipal streetcleaners. Philip knelt near to the woman, put his ear to her breast, heard a faint but rhythmical heartbeat. He knew she would recover so, with Greek cunning, used the circumstance to the advantage of the faith. ‘Ponder on the goodness of God and his Son Christ Jesus,’ he told the surrounding crowd, including a couple of uneasy armed police on its fringe. ‘To God all things are possible. Let us pray.’
Two men, with staves and bundles, heard the prayer which Philip was teaching the crowd – ‘Our Father in heaven, may your name be blessed,’ and so on – and praised God that the work was proceeding. When the old woman was shakily on her feet again, though shrieking at the sight of camel dung, they pierced the crowd to greet Philip. Philip cried:
‘Peter. John. You come in a good time. There’s plenty to do in Samaria.’
‘A bad time in Jerusalem,’ Peter said. He was white as a baker with the dust of the road, but John, of an exquisite frail body that accorded oddly with his thunderous voice, had cleansed and brushed himself in a tavern at the town’s end.
‘Saul?’
‘Having suppressed the Greek Jews he starts now on the Hebrews,’ John said. ‘As Peter’s always saying, we never thought we’d be kicked into preaching the word abroad. Have you room for us?’
‘I’m staying,’ Philip said, ‘in the house of a certain Simon. The Great Magician he calls himself, or used to. A performer of tricks that make the mob gape. He called them Egyptian miracles. He’s reformed now. I baptised him last week. I think you’ll be welcome there.’
Simon had made much money from his street and theatre performances and his house was large and furnished with Alexandrian bad taste. At the moment he was in the main room of that house, a neatly dressed man with a beard trimmed and greased in the Assyrian mode, looking gloomily at a dead sparrow that lay, legs up, on a salmon-pink cushion. The girl who was his mistress as well as his conjuring assistant sat on the floor beside the little bird, weeping. She was a pretty girl in blue silk, her hair a black lustrous river, and her name was Daphne. She sobbed:
‘It hasn’t helped much – your joining this new faith.’
‘The subject has to believe. You can’t expect a sparrow to believe. Although, according to our friend Philip, God watches even over sparrows. No use. I’ll buy you a new one at the market.’
‘But it won’t be the same. Death’s a terrible thing. Even the death of a sparrow.’
‘My sweet Daphne, you’re too tender-hearted. Only animals know death. Men and women live for ever. That’s the new teaching.’
‘You believe that?’
‘It’s a consoling thought. We die – but then we start a new life – somewhere. I’ve never much cared for the una nox dormienda.’
‘You know I don’t know Latin, if that is Latin.’
‘One long night to be slept through. With no awakening. Catullus wrote that. He also wrote a poem on the death of a sparrow.’
‘Poor little thing.’
Philip arrived with Peter and John. ‘Peter,’ Philip said, ‘John.’ Daphne looked up at them, drying her tears with her hair. ‘Simon. Daphne.’ John saw a pretty girl with black lustrous hair like a river and felt an all too manly response. Was it right or wrong to respond thus? This girl might be that man’s wife, though he thought not. There had been little time for feeling just glandular responses to female comeliness. It had been a hard time, no doubt of it. ‘We would all be grateful,’ Philip said, ‘if you would allow my friends to share my room. These are very exceptional friends. They were the first followers of the Lord Jesus.’
‘Most welcome,’ Simon said, now on his feet. ‘Friends of Philip are friends of mine and of my ah helpmeet here.’ John had been right to think not. ‘So,’ Simon said. ‘You are come here to add to the miracles Philip has already wrought?’
‘That’s not the main task,’ Peter said. ‘The main task is preaching the word of salvation. That poor bird there looks dead.’ Daphne renewed her weeping. ‘There, there,’ Peter said. ‘Best bury it and get a new one. I had a pet thrush when I was a boy in Galilee. When it died my mother cooked it. There was not much meat on it.’ Daphne wept.
A man walked in, a stranger to Simon. ‘Open house,’ Simon said with sarcasm. ‘All welcome.’ The man was chewing, as if he had run here from his midday meal. He swallowed and said:
‘It’s my brother. He’s leaping like a fish and making strange noises. The man Philip has to come.’
‘Has to? Has to?’ Simon rebuked. ‘He’ll come when he’s ready. The fowls should be cooked by now,’ he said to Daphne. Fowls of the air. She wept. ‘Unseemly,’ Simon said, ‘to cry in front of our guests. Go to your duties, girl.’ So she went to the kitchen.
‘We’ll have a look at your brother,’ Peter said.
He was in the house round the corner. Baked fish lay cooling on the table, and there was a great spilth of wine on the floor. A large family ranging from a great-grandfather to a wondering thumb-sucking child kept to the walls, allowing a young man, naked with a hairy body, to leap about the floor, crying words like nagfalth and worptush. He had evidently torn his clothes off. Peter, John, Philip and Simon watched. Peter growled: ‘Out of him, quick.’ He meant devils. He cried, more formally: ‘I conjure you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to depart from him. Leave. Torment him no more.’
I suppose that some doctrine of possession by evil spirits will serve to explain, at least for the unlearned, such phenomena as we often see in our cities: men and women, usually young ones, who thresh around, froth at the mouth, emit what sounds like strange language but may be merely the mechanical grinding of organs of speech which are out of control. I would refer this ecstasy or riot of the limbs to some physical cause such as faulty diet. It does not last long. The sufferer becomes exhausted and lies still, exorcised as the exorcisers would say. After Peter had growled or shouted further objurgations, the young man’s open mouth gave out a stream of filthy language which made the women of the house tut and shut their ears. Then he snored in his exhaustion.
‘Another miracle,’ Simon said as he led his guests home to eat.
‘Beware of that word, Simon,’ Peter said. ‘I too am named Simon, by the way, but that’s another story. We did nothing. The grace of the Lord did it all.’
‘But,’ Simon said, ‘the power is in you. And in Philip. It’s a kind of magic.’ He led them in and to the set table, where the scorched fowls already sat, legs in the air. Peter sat, looked at him sternly, said:
‘And what do you mean by magic?’
‘The power to change things that are not changed in the course of nature. I once had the appearance of that power. I called it magic but it was trickery. I learnt it in Alexandria. Moses too learnt this trickery in Egypt. You can take a drugged snake that stiffens itself to the appearance of a stick, then you throw the snake down, it comes out of its trance, it wriggles and hisses.’
‘We learnt this nowhere,’ Peter said. ‘The power is not in us. The power is in God.’ And, famished, he began to work at a chicken leg, showing strong brown teeth.
‘I’d like that power,’ Simon said.
‘Why?’ John asked. ‘Why would you like that power?’
‘Well,’ Simon said, ‘to do good in the world. To show the world that I am one of God’s favoured people. Like you.’
‘You mean perhaps for your own glory,’ Peter said, licking his fingers.
‘I did not say that. I did not mean that. I was once a magician. Then I learnt, with Philip’s help, to follow the Christ and abjure all that trickery. Now I am no longer Simon the magician. I am a man without a skill. But you three have a skill, and a very precious one. I would like that skill.’
John had found the wishbone. He smiled at the red-eyed Daphne, who stood by the table in the manner of a servant. He offered her the wishbone to pull with him. But she would not. Peter said:
‘The curing of the sick, the healing of the lame and the blind – these are nothing, Simon. They’re but sparks out of the flame of faith in the Lord. They show God’s power, yes, but it’s more important that we learn of God’s mercy.’
‘Bob’s buv,’ Philip went, his mouth full. Then Simon said:
‘I want the power. I can pay for it.’
They all looked at him, silent over the ravaged fowls.
‘I can pay well. I made much gold and silver out of duping the people with my tricks. Now that money can go to you – to do with as you will or as God wills. But I ask that in exchange you give me the power.’
Peter turned to Philip, who sat to his left. ‘You’ve not taught him much, Philip. He understands nothing at all. Nothing of the mission or the faith.’ To Simon he said: ‘You want to buy God’s grace, power, mercy?’
‘I wish to do only good – to heal the sick, to bring the dead back to life—’
‘To your own honour and glory,’ Peter said.
‘The power is in your hands. I have seen that same power in the hands of Philip. I wish, to the glory of God, to have that power in my own hands. I can pay well – ten thousand sesterces, twenty thousand—’
‘To hell with you,’ Peter said. ‘To hell with your money. Repent of your wickedness while you still have time.’
‘Wickedness?’ Simon was genuinely puzzled as well as hurt. ‘What wickedness?’ John said, with unaccustomed faintness:
‘You perceive no wickedness in trying to buy God?’
‘A question to be asked is this,’ Philip said. ‘Is there as much wickedness in wilful ignorance as in wilful sin? Is sin a kind of ignorance, as ignorance is a kind of sin?’
‘Let’s have none of your Greek nonsense,’ Peter said. ‘We have a hard case here. I don’t know whether to be sorry or glad that I’ve eaten his victuals. I can’t cancel the hospitality he’s already given us, but I don’t think I want any more.’
‘But,’ Simon said in his bewilderment, ‘Philip taught here in Sebaste that Jesus Christ himself made a bargain with God. He sold himself on the cross. He bought our redemption, isn’t that what you said, Philip? The whole of life is buying and selling. Again I say – sell me the power.’
‘It’s been a brief stay,’ Peter said, ‘and I thank you for the offer of free lodgings. But we must go elsewhere.’ He got up and made a clumsy bow in the direction of the girl with the black lustrous river and the red eyes for the loss of a sparrow. The two others got up with him. Simon was still bewildered.
Marcellus, the new procurator of Judaea, had already landed at Caesarea. The ship, named The Heavenly Twins, with a wooden painted effigy of Castor and Pollux embraced on its prow, lay at anchor, its cargoes human and mercantile discharged, new cargoes of furlough and time-expired troops, as also of sweet Palestinian wine and dried fruits of the country, to say nothing of tax money in strongboxes, ready for boarding when repairs to the hull had been effected as well as a torn topsail resewn. Caleb the Zealot was in Caesarea, his hair cropped in the Roman fashion and his beard shorn. He spoke Greek in this town of Greeks and offered himself at one of the port offices as a trained ship’s cook whose papers had been stolen by dirty Jews. He wished, he said, to work his passage back to the Italian mainland where his family lived. He was told there was no berth available. In conversation with the boatswain of The Heavenly Twins in a dockside tavern, he discovered who the undercook was – a Syrian, sweaty and of great girth. With no compunction Caleb knifed him in one of the streets of brothels, not mortally but enough to ensure that he would undertake no voyage for a time. On presenting himself again for employment on a seagoing vessel he learnt that he was in luck. He gave his name as Metellus.
‘If you’re Metellus,’ the overcook said, ‘I’m Pompey the Great.’ He was a small wiry Calabrian whose first language was Greek. The ship’s stewards were insolent, and their insolence was prized as a comic speciality of Caesarea by the ship’s officers.
‘It’s being caught now. You said you wanted it fresh.’
‘Watch your manners.’
‘Aaargh’ (leaving, clearing his throat).
‘I wouldn’t have that man’s temper for ten thousand sesterces.’
Let us now look at this new Caleb, with his Roman crop and strong blue jaw, bare legs plentifully flued, bare feet firm to grip the deck, girt like a scullion, tending the wood fires in their iron prisons in the galley, frying eggs taken aboard at Tyrus, gutting fish caught off the coast of Cyprus, slicing the hard bread of Aspendus. He is wide of shoulder and very muscular. He is a temporary cook, and soon he hopes to earn his bread on Italian soil as a wrestler. He knows Greek holds, Judaean feints, points on the human frame which, if pressed, can induce temporary paralysis. He has always seen himself as a frustrated warrior, training for the day of liberation. He has worked at the use of dagger, sword and rope for garotting. He has a clear mission, the liberation of his sisters, and a cloudier one, the liberation of the Jews from the Roman heel. What he can do in Rome to further this he is not yet sure. He has vague dreams of collecting bands of young Hebrews who will so terrorise the Roman population that they will cry out to the Senate to let God’s people go. But the fulfilment of such dreams lies very much in the future, for he tingles with quiet excitement at the prospect of seeing and living in Rome. He sees himself wrestling to Roman applause, hailed as the great Metellus. This, of course, is unworthy, since as a good fighting Jew he wants nothing from Rome except the withdrawal of the armed tax collectors (procurators are nothing more) from the sacred territory. But, like his sister Sara, whom temperamentally he much resembles, he feels it is better to be impelled by great misfortunes to the seeing of the world than to sit at home immersed in the narrow universe of Jewish law and custom. Our glands take precedence over our ideals. It was ever so.
‘Hurry up with that fish soup,’ the overcook cries. ‘The captain’s belly’s arumble. What did you say your name was?’
‘Metellus.’
‘If you’re Metellus I’m Marcus Antonius. You look like a Jew to me.’
‘How,’ and Caleb shows all his teeth, agleam in the marine sun as they draw near to Crete, ‘would you like this fish soup poured all over you, you insolent bastard?’ And he takes the handles of the iron pot in ready hands. The Calabrian sees the snaking of the muscles and says something about some people being unable to take a joke.
In the Aegean Sea a storm strikes up and drives the vessel towards the Achaean coast. Caleb is sick in his bunk and is jeered at. He recovers on the smoother run to Syracuse and wrestles with the bulkier of the jeerers, a man of mixed ancestry from Pergamum. Roman order converts the snarling violence into a formal match on the foredeck. Caleb hurls the Pergaman overboard. He cannot swim but Caleb can. He dives with grace and to cheers, and both are hauled up in a net. A patrician named Aureus Gallus or some such name, a treasury official who has been enquiring into allegations of peculation in Alexandria and Petra, speaks words of praise and admiration to the dripping Caleb. He seeks to work in the arena? Can he memorise the name he is now to give him? His is a manly trade; sybaritic Rome, that is becoming effeminate, needs to see muscle at work, recalling more primitive glories. I thank your honour, says Caleb.
They spend three days in Syracuse, where Caleb and the lout from Pergamum get drunk together. Then they sail north through the straits and hug the Italian coast. Soon they meet in the roads of Puteoli a mass of mercantile ships awaiting orders to ease in to the quays and start unloading. There is much grain from Egypt; Rome is forgetting the agricultural arts memorialised in Virgil’s Georgics. The Heavenly Twins has a lading of troops and imperial functionaries and thus claims priority. Soon Caleb steps ashore; his now sandalled feet grip the earth of Italy. There is a grinning statue of the Emperor Gaius looking out to sea. Bales are rolled massively in and out of the godowns. Vessels strain at the lines secured to the bollards. Standing on a heap of bales a bearded man seeks the attention of sailors from Israel. He cries out in Aramaic:
‘You who sail the seas, you have come to your harbour. But what of the harbour of the soul which all men seek? It is to be found in the bosom of Jesus Christ, Son of the one God, Saviour of mankind, who died and rose again.’
So, thinks Caleb, the new faith is spreading already. Strange that so passive a cult should show such energy. Then he bethinks himself of what he has heard of Saul’s work: it is Saul pushing the Nazarenes on to the sealanes, Saul, the pagans might say, doing the bidding of two opposed deities. A third deity, the grinning Gaius, seems to point his thumb towards Rome, so Caleb the Zealot takes a deep breath and the road to the heart of the kingdom of the wicked.
The new procurator of Judaea rode with the senior centurion who was his temporary deputy from Caesarea to Jerusalem. A courtesy visit, call it. Marcellus, who had modelled his visage on masks and busts of Julius Caesar, frowned at something he saw on the Street of the Smiths – respectable-seeming citizens being dragged from their homes by armed Jews he took to be Temple guards. Mothers and children crying, men bruised. His horse snorted, as at some dim memory of battle under another owner, as the flats of swords smacked on backs and howls of pain rang. Marcellus heard the word meluchlach and asked the centurion what it meant.
‘It means dirty,’ Cornelius said, ‘and it’s being applied to these Nazarenes here.’
‘What are Nazarenes?’
Cornelius forbore to say that it was the duty of a procurator of Judaea to have picked up at least a smattering of recent Judaean history.
‘They follow a new prophet and they’re being punished for it.’
‘Ah, the slave Chrestus who said he was a god?’
‘Not Chrestus. He was termed Christus, which means anointed. A confusion of vowels. And because Chrestus is a slave name it got around that the cult is a slave cult. These people, as you can see, are not slaves.’
‘Disorder in the streets, Cornelius. Roman discipline has got slack in the ah interregnum.’ He meant the period between Pilate’s dismissal and his own accession.
‘This is a religious matter, procurator, and we’re instructed not to interfere in religious matters. The Jews are permitted to exercise their own discipline.’
‘I don’t like it, Cornelius.’
‘He said he didn’t like it,’ Caiaphas said later, as he took wine with Gamaliel and the priest Zerah. ‘He pointed out that his duty was to keep the peace here. He wouldn’t interfere for the moment, he said, leaving the restoration of order in our hands. But I can foresee his eventual interference.’
‘Which, in a way, would be right,’ Zerah said, pulling out single hairs from his black beard; this fired a brief pain which to him was a pleasure: he was not a married man. ‘The Nazarenes are troublemakers. Let the Romans subdue them. If, as I suspect, there are some false arrests – that old Ezra turned out not to be a Nazarene, after all – that was a pity—’
‘He died of natural causes,’ Caiaphas said.
‘If,’ Gamaliel said, ‘you can call death by thirst and heat exhaustion natural courses.’
‘What I’m saying is,’ Zerah plucked, ‘that it’s always better to leave disciplinary action to the Romans, when, that is, the situation permits it. It leaves our own hands clean.’
‘Unfortunately,’ Caiaphas said, ‘the procurator Marcellus doesn’t see it that way. He sees Saul and his little army as the real troublemakers. After all, they spill blood. That camp he’s set up is, I must say, an affront to anyone with humanitarian principles.’ He did not smile, but Gamaliel did, acidly. ‘I watched an old man die yesterday. His family droned out the Nazarene formula about forgiving one’s enemies. Then they prayed rather a good prayer, nothing heretical in it, the one that begins Our Father. I think Saul has to be stopped.’
‘Thank God,’ Gamaliel said.
‘And yet,’ Zerah said, ‘his work may be glossed as good and holy. You will not persuade him to see it otherwise. Why not send him to do his good work somewhere else?’
‘That,’ Caiaphas said, ‘is rather a brilliant idea. Samaria, for instance?’
‘The Samaritans would tear him to pieces.’
‘He would be torn to pieces,’ Caiaphas said, ‘in a good and holy cause. But you’re right, to denazarenise the Samaritans would not necessarily mean that they’d grow closer to the heart of the faith. We need somewhere with a large Jewish settlement where the Nazarenes have achieved a proselyting success. How about Damascus?’
‘On foot, of course,’ Zerah said.
‘Oh yes, there need be no hurry about his getting there. On foot, certainly. But he ought to start soon.’
‘He will need a lot of persuading,’ Zerah said. ‘But the Jews of Damascus are children of the Temple here. They must be saved from themselves.’
‘By having their blood spilt?’ Gamaliel said.
‘I see no great harm in physical molestation,’ Zerah said. ‘It’s the salutary shock that matters. If these Damascus Nazarenes won’t listen to the warnings of the priests – well, Saul’s way is a good way.’
‘Efficacious,’ Gamaliel said. ‘Hardly good.’
There were few of the original disciples now left in
Jerusalem. No one knows whither they dispersed, though I am fairly sure that the preaching Jew Caleb saw on the wharf was Matthew. James, son of Zebedee, stoutly refused to leave his post; he was almost pedantic about his attendance at the Temple, he was scrupulous in his refusal to distinguish between true Jew and Nazarene in matters of charitable bestowal, he preached not at all, he dared the forces of persecution to arrest him but Saul was wise enough to leave him unmolested. The night before Thomas was due to be seized, the news broke concerning Saul’s new mission. Thomas left for Samaria none the less, having promised Peter and John he would join them there. It was he who, though difficult to understand because of his fierce North Galilee accent, planted unwittingly in the minds of the converted Samaritans the conviction that Christ had chosen them before he had chosen the Judaeans. ‘Ay, mark that, all of ye. The travellers from Jerusalem to Jericho ignored the poor bleeding man by the side of the road, the Levite ignored him, all ignored him except this Samaritan merchant. The good Samaritan, the Lord called him, and no doubt had he not been done to death by yon hypocritical forces of law and order, the Lord would have brought the word here himself, instead of leaving the duty to us his humble followers.’
On a rainy morning Peter decided that Samaria could now look after itself. He had appointed an episcopos or overseer named Justin and a number of deacons. If what Thomas reported was true, there could soon be a general church assembly in Jerusalem to discuss the allocation of missions and also—There was a problem Peter found difficult to articulate. With a burst of sun Simon the magician appeared on the street. Peter, John, Philip and Thomas watched him from the open door of the tavern where they had broken fast. He had set up a small rectangular tent, and the girl Daphne, her eyes no longer red but her hair still a river of lustrous black, had entered it through a flap that Simon ceremoniously held open. ‘Now see,’ Simon told the crowd of idlers. He had a fistful of daggers which he drove into the canvas from all its four sides. Ample blood poured from the incisions. He reopened the flap and the girl reappeared unharmed.
‘Miracles, miracles,’ Simon cried. ‘Every day here you will see miracles. Can the Nazarenes bring the dead to life? No, they cannot.’
‘At least they don’t ask us for money,’ a one-eyed man in the crowd called. Then the rain poured out of a cloud, and the crowd ran. Simon sought shelter in the tent, but it was far from rainproof. Daphne, standing in a doorway, laughed at him. John felt the stirring of his glands again. Peter said:
‘A thing that troubles me, lads, is this. What are we really supposed to be doing – preaching the word or healing the sick? It’s the healing the sick that the people take to be the proof of the truth of our preaching, but shouldn’t the preaching be enough in itself? I mean, the truth is the truth and the doctrine’s either sound or it’s not sound. I mean, they’d believe anything you told them if you followed it up with what they call a miracle.’
‘It’s God’s truth,’ John said, loud over a thunderclap, ‘and he had to show them that he was the Son of God. No use in just saying it. The only way he could show it was by going against nature.’
‘Is healing the sick going against nature?’ Thomas asked.
‘Of course it is,’ John said, ‘if nature does nothing to cure the sickness.’
‘But we,’ Peter said, ‘are very far from being the sons of God. And a lot of the things we’ve done – like that withered arm that began to fatten out when the girl said she believed – a lot of the things could be explained. Bartholomew said so, and he’s a man of physic. What I mean is I’d be a good deal happier if people didn’t bring their dropsical grandmothers and paralytic nephews along to the preaching. It’s not the preaching they care about. The real changes of heart are when nobody asks for anything. You see how that Simon over there, I’m cursed with having the same name, you see what he thinks it all is. And he’s one that worries me. I’d better go and have a last word with him.’ So Peter, a man used to water, strode sturdily into the vertical lake and put his head into Simon’s poor shelter, saying: ‘Your heart isn’t right with God, Simon. I can’t leave you like this. Repent of your wickedness and the Lord may forgive you.’
Simon, wretched in the rain, began to snivel.
‘You,’ Peter said, quoting something he had read, he could not remember quite what, ‘are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.’
Simon began to shake with hysteria or ague. ‘Pray for me then,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go to hell.’
‘You won’t if you repent. Do you repent?’
‘All I wanted was to do good in the world. All I wanted was the power.’
‘Ah, to hell with you,’ Peter said. He went back to his companions, soaked and sighing. ‘He still doesn’t understand,’ he said. ‘I wonder if he understood what I was saying. How is it that everybody could understand what I was saying at Pentecost and now I have trouble? I don’t know anything now except my mother speech, and there are plenty who don’t care for the Galilean twang. I’ll have to go around with a whatyoucallhim.’
‘Interpreter,’ Philip said. ‘I’ll give you Greek lessons on the way back to Jerusalem.’
‘I’m too old for it, that’s my trouble. Well, the rain’s clearing and we’d best move. There’s a fair number of Samaritan villages to visit on the way back. Then you, Philip, you’re a young fit man, you ought to go west to Gaza where Samson had his eyes put out.’
‘It’s all desert there,’ Philip said.
‘Then go north to Caesarea, where it’s all Greeks. There’s plenty for you to do.’
I now (on, thank heaven, a September or Germanicus day of most grateful cool, with the first prickings of a delicate fall melancholy) have the agonising task of presenting to you a mad Gaius presiding over a mad imperial banquet for which few of the hundred or so guests have much appetite. Imagine the great hall of the imperial residence on the Palatine (whence the word palace is derived), with its pillars festooned with flowers and foliage, all the strong noon-light shut out with heavy samite curtaining to give a semblance of night (the Emperor is powerful: he has conquered the sun) and thousands of lamps reeking of oil scented with ambergris. A grinning statue of Gaius, or rather of muscular Mars with Gaius’s head, is garlanded as in triumph in the centre of this field of marble, but there are lesser ingenuities of the sculptor’s craft, all foully erotic: a donkey thrusts its member into the antrum amoris of a howling boy; two fat naked women, set head to tail like the fishes of the zodiac, suck at each other’s vulva; a virginal girl chokes on the phallus of a laughing Priapus; the goddess Venus, with Gaius’s head half-hidden in a flood of stone hair, is pedicated by a Gaified Jupiter. The huge marble table, C-shaped for Caligula, has strewn upon it, like casual sweetmeats, Alexandrian pictures showing specialities of the Alexandrian brothels – copulation with dogs and goats, with corpses newly beheaded, with corpses half rotted, and other enormities that make my gorge rise sufficiently to make me forbear to list them. The food served, seen let alone tasted, would induce a vow in a reasonable man to live henceforth on bread and water. Nothing is what it seems. Dog faeces and horse globes have been moulded to the appearance of delicate cakes with silver icing. Stewed pallid veal has been sculpted to the shape of human hands. Human hands, conceivably, are to be found nesting, along with more orthodox meat, inside huge smoking pies. Boiled lobsters crawl up an effigy of a crucified man. Rolled beef slices are crudely phalloid. Sucking pigs are, of course, sodomised by other sucking pigs. Wearisome, wearisome. There are limits to the most scabrous ingenuity. Here and there a guest may find a dish banally honest, though he little knows what sudden minor horror may lurk in the depths of the confection. The bread is gilded, but it tastes of bread. The wine at Gaius’s part of the table is served in small gold chamberpots. He reclines, the grinning Emperor, already tipsy at the start of the banquet, with his sister Drusilla on the same couch (her whom he ravished before he came of age, whom, when married to the consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, he openly abducted), while the Empress Ennia Naevia (whom he stole from Macro, commander of the Praetorian Guard) is couched ignominiously alone below the salt. Lollia Paulina, starrily bejewelled, the wife of Gaius Memmius, a governor of consular rank not present, is there, though discarded, forbidden by imperial decree ever to sleep with another man. Opposite Gaius sits Herod Agrippa, bloated and sulking. Gaius says to him:
‘Never satisfied, are you?’
Herod Agrippa is bold enough to say: ‘An emperor should keep his promises.’ Gaius says, though not dangerously:
‘Don’t you tell this emperor what he should and should not do. The whole point of being an emperor is the total freedom it confers. Total. And that includes the freedom to break promises. Be satisfied you have what you have, King Herod the Little.’
What Herod Agrippa has is the title king and the tetrarchies that once belonged to Philip and Lysanias in southern Syria, as well as, newly bestowed, the territory comprising Galilee and Peraea, once the domain of his uncle Antipas, now, with arbitrary wielding of a stylus, deposed by Gaius. But Herod Agrippa says:
‘My throne should be in Jerusalem.’
‘Oh, don’t be tiresome,’ Gaius says. ‘Judaea remains a Roman province under Roman rule. The Senate says so and sometimes I listen to the Senate. Don’t I, Uncle Claudius?’
Claudius sits some way down the table: sits, I say, since he is too tense to be able to recline. He is in middle age, with a shock of hair prematurely white. He nods at his nephew’s question tag.
‘Don’t I, Uncle Claudius?’
‘Occccasionally.’
‘Entertain us, Uncle Claudius. Stand up and recite us some poetry. A little Quintus Horatius Flaccus.’
So Claudius tremulously stands as well as he can, since his couch is right up against the table, and emits the following:
‘Pppppone sub cccccurru nimium pppppropppppinqui—’
‘Oh, sit down, you old fool,’ the Emperor cries. ‘My friend King Herod Agrippa the Little will oblige us with a little Hebrew poetry. Won’t you, your majesty?’
‘All our Hebrew poetry is sacred, Caesar. The Psalms of David are not to be recited over lobster and sucking pig.’
‘Why is everybody so tiresome? Why is everybody so glum? Why are the musicians silent? Aufidius,’ Gaius says to a near-naked freedman who stands ever behind him, ‘Lash those pipers and drummers into life.’ Aufidius always carries a whip, the imperial whip, many-thonged and with lead pellets, its handle of the most chaste elephantine ivory. The players hear the threat and, though they finished their last piece a mere three seconds ago, at once throw themselves into a galop of Parthian provenance. There are four flutes, a harp of twenty strings, a mournful shawm, and a number of drums of oxhide, some to be struck, others spanked.
We, in our secure invisibility, may look with pity and a certain contempt on the great half-circle of guests, who peck at the food, drink sparingly, and fear for their lives. Is life so great a gift that a man or woman should so feast in humiliation at the feet of a mad emperor? They are no better off, any of them, than the slaves who scurry in with new dishes, or the Praetorian troops who, in festal kirtles which hide protective daggers (what madman may not rush in to kill a mad emperor?) stand watchful on the marble staircase that leads down to the great vestibule or line the corridor that connects the banqueting hall and the imperial kitchens. Some of these troops remember an occasion when, in public too, they were ordered to strip naked and then line up to bugger the imperial person. The first buggering was enough. The Emperor screamed at the third or fourth thrust and cried that he was being murdered. But the buggering was being done on orders, the senior centurion insisted, and punishment of the overthrusting guardsman was out of order. Oh, very well, but don’t let it happen again. That slave there has an undeferential smirk on his face. Whip him, whip him, Aufidius. The senior centurion was, and still is, Marcus Julius Tranquillus, who has again applied for transfer to a fighting legion but whose application has been rejected. Let me thrust (ha) all that is now to happen into the perfect tense. It is done, it is long finished, it belongs to the bad past.
Marcus Julius Tranquillus was much, though distractedly, taken by the looks of a Palestinian girl who brought dishes from the open fires and ovens to the servery counter. She was handsome but, more, she was unsubdued. She wore no anklet of servitude on, as it were, her fierce spirit. She had equal contempt for the screaming cooks and the timorous popinjays whom they fed. She was, however, most tender in her solicitude for another Palestinian girl, like her, younger, tremulous, totally subdued. This bangled fellow slave seemed to be her sister. Marcus Julius did not understand the language they spoke, but he caught the passage of charming exotic names – Ruth, Sara, as brief as birdcalls. The elder girl was Sara. She wore the grey of slavery with an apron cynically over it. Ruth, the younger, was, as a waitress, more becomingly dressed in silver-painted sandals, a white smock to the ankles but her thin brown arms bare, her black hair in a fillet. Marcus Julius’s gorge rose, as mine rises in the telling, to see the object, presumably esculent, that Ruth had to bear to the table. It had the look of a human head, moulded pastry of some sort with Jupiter knew what filling, hard-boiled eggs with grapes set in them for eyes, hair of spun candy, and it was set on a dish awash in a fruit sauce that looked like blood. There were twelve of these monstrosities all told, and all the faces were different: one or two of them looked familiar to Marcus Julius – surely that was Cremutius Cordus and that the lady Lollia Paulina?
‘If,’ Gaius was saying, ‘you will not entertain your Emperor, then your Emperor must entertain you. The imperial whip, Aufidius.’
He took the whip at the moment when the girl Ruth was nervously approaching the table with her swimming head of pastry. With glee and some skill Gaius let the lash fly and trepanned it. There was a gush of what looked like heavy brown cream which bespattered three grave senators. Gaius laughed high; some of the guests laughed too, though low. The frightened Ruth dropped her dish. Dropped her dish. Smashed head and crimson gravy and a heavy silver dish on the marble. Gaius spoke with great kindness, saying: ‘Clumsy, clumsy. Where are you from, my little pigeon?’ The girl did not understand. Herod Agrippa translated.
‘Ayeh?’ she repeated. And then, in Latin, ‘Judaea.’
‘Jewish,’ Caligula said, ‘but not one of your subjects, Herod Agrippa of my heart. Tell me, your majesty, what was the name of your grandmother?’
‘Salome.’
‘I thought so. She was a dancing girl, was she not?’
‘That was another Salome – stepdaughter of my uncle.’
‘She danced naked, did she not?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
‘And she was given a prize for dancing, was she not?’
‘The head of—’
‘Somebody’s head, yes. Good. Princely entertainment. Dance, girl. Whose head shall it be? We will decide after. Dance, girl. Music.’
Drums began to thump in a variety of rhythms. The flautists were not sure what to play. The shawm began to skirl. Ruth stood bewildered. ‘Rikud,’ Herod Agrippa said. Gaius climbed over the back of his couch and confronted the girl at the mouth of the tabled C.
‘Rikud, as his majesty ordered. Dance.’ And he whipped her to it. She began tearfully and clumsily to move stiff limbs. ‘Faster, girl. Faster.’ He stood back, granting her space and his whip too. He lashed.
At the servery counter Sara saw. She went over to the carvery and grasped a knife. Marcus Julius was ready. He took it from her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It will do no good.’ Her ferocity was astonishing. Her eyes lamped the scene and her mouth snarled deep gutturals. ‘No,’ he said, and he held her. ‘We are living in madness, we can do nothing.’ Dangerous words from a servant of Caesar.
‘Dance, Salome. Ah, I see. Your dress hampers you.’ Gaius very neatly whipped off the upper part of her garment. She shrieked in more shame than pain, her arms protecting her breasts from eyes more than from the whip.
‘Dance, Salome. Like this.’ And Gaius clumsily turned and turned, crying: ‘Applause! Applause! Plaudite! There was some feeble clapping. ‘Dance, girl.’
‘Lo, lo,’ she howled.
‘Very well. I will make you dance.’ He lashed her about the floor. She was all rags and bloody weals. Marcus Julius was strong, but soon, he feared, he would not be strong enough. The girl in his arms raged like a lioness in toils and, like that beast, bit at her constraining ropes, the tense muscles of Marcus Julius.
‘You can do nothing,’ he wished to cry, but instead he uttered a Roman obscenity at the sudden pain and the welling of blood. He impelled her to the safety of the seething kitchen. The Greek eunuch officer of imperial catering saw his territory invaded by one of the military clutching a fighting girl and squealed protest. ‘Out of my way,’ Marcus Julius snarled. Then, the sardonic Roman supervening, he said with taut reasonableness: ‘This girl’s sister is being whipped to death. Part of the imperial entertainment.’
Ruth now lay quite still on the floor, not yet dead, weals and blood and rent garment. Gaius handed the imperial whip back to its warden, saying: ‘Now, dear Salome, you shall have a severed head as a reward for dancing so well. Whose shall it be? Whose? Whose? Whose? Choice is so tiresome a thing. Whose? Ah, yours.’ He meant an old senator who had seen everything and was now a retired student of the Stoic philosophy. He had been surprised to find himself on the guest list, probably some mistake, his younger brother perhaps, now in exile at Mytilene, had been intended, but the guest list was a very arbitrary compilation. He had been, during the whipping of that poor slave girl, trying to induce in himself a coldly stoical attitude: life is evil, we cannot change it, to show compassion may result in more evil. He had been meditating earlier on the nature of absolute power: no power can be absolute if it is expressed solely through the enactment of evil, since there has been a limitation of choice self-imposed; in becoming a mere agent of evil the Emperor Gaius had forfeited his own freedom and was no better than a slave. ‘When shall it be, you, whoever you are?’ Gaius was baying. ‘At the end of our banquet? Or perhaps now, as the crown of our entertainment?’ The old senator showed no fear. He raised his cup to his lips and, with a straight face, pledged the Emperor. Whereupon the Emperor said: ‘Oh, I’m so bored.’ The boredom of forfeited choice, the senator said to himself. ‘You,’ Gaius suddenly said, pointing at a young officer of the municipal board, who was protectively embracing a handsome young woman clad in simple linen with a rather ornate headdress in the form of a thickly populated thrush’s nest, bequeathed by her dead mother. ‘You – take your hands off my wife.’
‘With respect, Caesar,’ the young man bravely said, ‘she is my wife.’
‘Oh, she can be yours again tomorrow, if the gods – I mean the god – kindly permits her to live. But tonight she’s for me.’ And he advanced grinning on the young woman, more a bride than a wife. She could not forbear screaming, nor her husband, or groom, tightening his protective arm. Gaius, with the swift changeability of a dog, seemed to lose interest in her. ‘I’ve forgotten who it was we decided to behead. Never mind,’ he smiled pleasantly at the young man. ‘You’ll do.’ He clicked his fingers for the guard, crying: ‘The banquet’s over. Thank you all for coming.’
Let us breathe a sweeter air, though the air of Jerusalem is as it were baked, the flesh of the city seething under a crust of heat and the pie brutally spiced with the odours of the unwashed and of camel dung. We are in the city only to observe certain personages leaving it. Saul, with an entourage of four armed men, one of whom is his old fellow student Seth, is at the market buying some fruit for the journey to Damascus. The Greek Philip has evaded Saul’s last spectacular arrest of Jewish Hellene Nazarenes and is on his way to Gaza. In a day or so he is to meet a man on whom Saul and his companions are just now looking with curiosity. The man is big, muscular, very black, brilliantly dressed in the Ethiopian manner, and he is riding in a covered carriage drawn by two bay horses. He has a driver black as himself in costly livery, and the driver does not hesitate to use his whip to clear the way through the gawping crowd. The Ethiopian, if that is what he is, ignores totally his surroundings. He has a scroll from which, in the manner of that day, he is reading aloud. There are indeed, even now, very few who see reading as a silent activity. Saul catches certain words. Greek. He catches a whole phrase: As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearer is dumb – Saul grins at Seth and says: ‘So one of the black tribe reads the prophet Isaiah. You see how the holy word may spread. Come. Ten miles before sundown.’
Philip was on a road opposed to that of Saul and his escort. He was on his way to Gaza, and had spent a flybitten night in Eleutheropolis. The Gaza he was going to was not, despite what Peter had said, the town where blind Samson, dreaming of old circuit judgements and abiding the regrowth of his shorn locks, had, under the lash, ground corn for the Philistines. That town had been destroyed a century before the birth of Jesus by the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus. Its ruins were still to be seen, an abode of snakes and lizards, and the name Desert Gaza applied to them. There was a new Gaza by the sea, erected some thirty years after the razing of the old by Gabinius. It was to this Gaza that Philip, his hair near white with sun and dust, was sorely trudging. The road was empty and so was the sky, except for far wheeling vultures, and the view on either side was of sand.
When Philip heard an octopudium of hoofs and a rumbling of wheels behind him and, turning, saw a nimbus of dust, he at first thought that Saul, expensively equipped from the high priest’s own stables, was in extravagant pursuit. He shrugged (the game is up) and waited by the side of the road. Soon the carriage drew up with a snorting and stamping of two sweating bays. A black man dressed in crimsons and purples hailed Philip cheerfully in Greek of, considering his muscular bulk, a strange shrillness. His round face shone with sweat and amiability. On his head was a scarlet cap intricately patterned with gold thread and in his hand a fan of peacock feathers. He was sheltered from the sun by a white linen canopy. On his knees was an unrolled scroll. ‘To Gaza,’ Philip said. He was invited to climb into the carriage and sit on yellow cushions. Black but comely. Philip sat smiling.
‘Gaza is on my way home. I go to Napata in Ethiopia. I have been visiting the holy city.’ He waved to the driver and they clopped on.
‘Holy,’ Philip said cautiously, ‘surely not for your people?’ The text on the man’s knees was Greek. Philip read: Hos probaton epi sphagin ichthi …
‘You know my people?’
‘I know that your king is worshipped as an offspring of the sun. That he is too holy to be permitted to rule. That rule is in the hands of the queen mother. Whose name is always the same. I have forgotten it.’
‘Candace. It is always Candace. My uncle served the old Candace and I serve the new one. He was court treasurer and so am I. My nephew will doubtless follow me.’
‘You do me great honour.’ And then: ‘So the office passes through a nepotic line? Not from father to son?’
The Ethiopian gave a laugh like a neigh. ‘The court treasurer must always be a eunuch. You did not know that? Court officials must not breed and thus form dynasties. But we have learnt to think of our nephews as surrogate sons. My nephew has already been castrated in expectation of his succeeding me. He becomes barren like me to serve a barren commodity. As Aristotle said, money does not breed.’
‘You seem, from your scroll here, to be a Greek scholar. This looks like the prophet Isaiah.’
‘I wondered whether you might not be a Gentile like me. You look Greek. And yet from a few words you know it is the prophet Isaiah.’
‘I’m a Greek Jew who follows the new law of Jesus the anointed. I go to Gaza and thence to Caesarea to spread the word.’
‘I saw this new way being persecuted in Jerusalem. I took it to be an aberration from the true faith.’
‘You worship the scion of the sun and yet you talk of the true faith? Tradition says you’re one of the children of Ham, cut off from the family of the chosen.’
‘Well,’ the Ethiopian said, whisking his peacock feather fan. ‘This doctrine of heliolatry is a mere convention with most of us. We’re an ancient people and not foolish. I cannot be a Jew but I can be what is termed a God-fearing Gentile. According to the twenty-third chapter of Deuteronomy eunuchs are not admitted to the society of the faithful. But Isaiah seems to promise a change.’
Philip closed his eyes and quoted: ‘“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths and hold fast to my covenant, to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters.”’
‘Good,’ the Ethiopian said. ‘You are a better scholar than I. I know little by heart. I do know, however, what the priests of your temple have hammered into my skull: “No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.” They say that Isaiah merely fantasises and that stern edict of Moses cannot be superseded.’
Philip took the scroll from the Ethiopian’s knees and said, smiling: ‘Ara ge ginoskeis ha anaginoskeis?’
The Ethiopian laughed and said: ‘The Greek language is graceful. It makes the word toread almost the same as the word to understand. The tongue of the Romans captures the same grace. Intellegis quae legis? But in my coarser language it would be bluntly: “Do you understand what you read?” Well, my answer is simple: No, I do not. Read the passage to me, and I will see if in your Greek mouth it makes more sense.’
So Philip read to him about the suffering servant. ‘“He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”’
‘Who does he mean? Does he refer to himself or to somebody else?’
‘The prophet,’ Philip said carefully, ‘is being truly a prophet. He is speaking of someone who, in his day, was yet to come. But now he has come. Killed, as Isaiah predicted, three days silent in the tomb, then alive again, the marks of the executioners upon his body to show himself truly suffering man, yet also the Son of God and the everliving witness to—But the story is long to tell.’
‘There’s time enough. There’s nothing to see except desert. Tell me all.’
There was a wadi north-east of Gaza. Children playing by it at sunset, women filling their pitchers with water squinting against the dying blaze, saw with some surprise a young man with hair like a flame and a large black man in robes as of the sunset alight from a carriage drawn by two bay horses and walk together to the place of running water. They had not heard the words spoken before the drawing tight of the reins and the grinding of the wheels: ‘Here is water. Is there anything to prevent my being baptised here and now?’
‘If you believe with your whole heart nothing hinders.’
‘I believe the Son of God to be Jesus Christ.’
Philip baptised by aspersion not immersion, murmuring the words of the ceremony. Then the Ethiopian, now a Nazarene, resumed his journey towards the first cataract of the Nile and Philip walked towards Gaza. It was fitting, both felt, that they part now. They did not wish an anticlimax of either talk or prayer or exegesis of Isaiah. Both hearts were full. But that night in a wretched inn in Gaza Philip awoke from deep sleep clutching a pain in his side. Had he done the right thing? This stoneless man was uncircumcised, unacceptable on two counts, said Deuteronomy (and both centred on the genitalia), in the company of the faithful. Christ had come to redeem Israel, not Ethiopia. And yet to assume circumcision before baptism – was not that a manner of grim joke to play on one who had known the knife of a more demanding if less spiritual covenant? Come, cut all off while your hand is in. And why had God decreed that the snipping of the foreskin, and not say the tip of an earlobe, should be the condition of entry into the army of the chosen? Because the foreskin capped the tree of generation, human procreation being the moon that reflected divine creation’s solar light. This eunuch born in Meroe and travelling to Napata (and Philip had already forgotten the name he had murmured in the ceremony of baptism) possessed no tree of procreation, only a limp conduit for the discharge of bodily waste, unworthy of the blade of the covenant. Uncircumcised, uncircumcisable, hence unbaptisable? As he trudged from town to town northward on his mission, Philip half expected some gesture of displeasure from God, a bolt for the blasphemer (for to conduct a surely empty ceremony was – surely – blasphemy?), yet God did no more than he usually did, that is hauled the sun to the zenith and then let it slide slowly down, let grass grow at the rate of the growth of a fingernail (which he also let grow), killed some and allowed others to live.
When Philip arrived in Caesarea, he was half inclined to vow never to set foot in Jerusalem again, except muffled and anonymous for Passover, for he did not dare put the question to the leader of the Nazarenes. He did not know that the baptising of an uncircumcised Ethiopian eunuch would later be seen by some as God’s first intake of breath for a gust of silent laughter. For the sons of Ham and Japhet were to partake of the patrimony of the sons of Shem, and many of the sons of Shem were to be excluded. It was not by coincidence that Saul was, a day or so after Philip’s chance-seeming encounter with a black eunuch, to suffer an epileptic revelation and, a month or so after, Peter have a shocking dream about food.
Philip married one of his converts in Caesarea, a handsome girl named Deborah whose father was a ship’s chandler. Philip entered the trade and preached the word now only in his spare time. God denied him sons but granted him four daughters with black married brows, all of whom became most talkative proponents of the new way.
About three miles from Damascus, one of Saul’s escort, a glum wiry man named Esra, had a vivid dream in which an angel of the Lord told him that his wife and daughter were to be ravished by Syrian troops of the Roman procurator and that he had better hurry back to Jerusalem to forestall the outrage. In agitation he recounted this dream to Saul, who nodded and nodded impatiently over the morning breaking of bread in a frowsty inn. He said:
‘Your heart doesn’t seem to be in this mission.’
‘They should have given us horses. Or camels,’ one of the other men said, Enoch, who had limped ostentatiously all the previous day. ‘It’s not a question of heart, it’s a matter of feet.’
‘I heard the voice clear as the chirp of a grasshopper. Go back, for the heathen will shoot seed straight as an arrow into the vessels of election.’
Saul said: ‘You three have grumbled ever since we left Jerusalem. Doubtless Seth and I will find honest Jews enough in Damascus. Men whose hearts will be in the holy work of persecution. You three may go back, though it baffles me why you should wish to go back now when you have come so far.’
‘We were told we had to get you to Damascus free from harm, since you have enemies who might be lurking in the bushes, not that we see many bushes. Well, Damascus is there ahead, quivering in the haze of the heat. We have performed our mission.’ This was Jethro, a long-faced man whom the flies got at.
‘That was not the way your mission was put to me,’ Saul said. ‘Nevertheless, go back. Enoch will limp but Jethro will support him. You, Jethro, have had a face that would turn milk sour all through our journey. You, Esra, had better run.’ And he and Seth turned their backs on the three and proceeded in good heart to Damascus.
Neither had ever visited the city before, but the priest Zerah had briefed Saul sketchily on its history and present condition. It was a very ancient city, having been the capital of the fierce Aramaean kingdom until its overthrow by the Assyrians some eight centuries back. It had been part of the Roman province of Syria since Julius Caesar’s time, but the Romans more or less left the rule of the city to the king of the Nabataean Arabs, whose realm stretched from the Gulf of Akaba to the outskirts of Damascus but who insisted, because of the large number of Nabataean nationals within the city walls, that he possessed full rights of dominion there. The Romans did not seriously contest this claim, but they showed a fresh polished eagle occasionally and demanded friendly tribute. This was sometimes the Roman way. Zerah had emphasised to Saul that it was by God-given right that he, Saul, was going to harry and torture the Nazarene heretics among the Damascene Jews, he being an agent of the high priest, but in truth it was by virtue of a treaty made by the Romans with the Jews in the ancient Hasmonean times that the high priest in Jerusalem could claim the right of extradition in respect of Palestinian breakers of the laws who had sought refuge in other Roman territories. The Romans, well over a century and a third thereof before the birth of Jesus, had given instructions to Ptolemy Euergetes II of Egypt and other allies in Asia to hand over to the jurisdiction of the high priest, Simon as he was then, all such offenders, and this privilege had been freshly ratified by Julius Caeeeeeeeeee—
Seth was shocked nearly out of his skin by the high scream, the sudden eruption of froth at the mouth, the going down of Saul on to the dusty road at high noon. The falling sickness. He saw that the open mouth would soon close and the teeth bite off the blade of the tongue, so he fell to his knees and placed lengthwise in Saul’s mouth the thin staff he had been carrying, so that Saul now had the ludicrous appearance of a dog struck with hydrophobia while fetching the thrown stick of his master. Saul tossed to and fro as in desperately uneasy sleep, but the ends of the staff set a limit to his rolling. Soon he was still, eyes closed, staff gripped in strong teeth, snoring and when not snoring groaning. God help us, Seth kept muttering over and over in distress but also in a kind of relief, for Saul might take this when he came to as a sign from heaven that he had better intermit his persecutory activities, of which Seth had always had a qualified approval. He went too far too often, and there was, when you came to think of it, something a little unseemly about haling dissident Jews out of their beds in a strange city where one could claim no right of residence nor even possessed a minimal knowledge of topography, custom, or secular law. To Seth it was an embarrassing commission, but his admiration of the energy of Saul, let alone his devoutness, had led him to a vaguely reluctant acceptance of an invitation (which, if unaccepted, might soon have turned into an order) to help him haul back Jewish Nazarenes from Damascus to Jerusalem, there to consider their crime in an already crammed camp of other wailing defectors.
When Saul came to he said nothing: all his attention was being given to an aftermath of the attack that he evidently could scarcely believe. His eyes were dead as stones. They rolled about as though sight had been snatched from him only to be playfully hidden in one quarter or another of the fierce noon sky, thence to be with ease retrieved. Seth said: ‘Saul, Saul, how are you?’ The staff fell from Saul’s mouth.
‘You heard? He has brought the night on me. Help me to rise.’ On his feet he turned and turned clumsily as though, in some game, the withholder of vision were ever slyly at his back. ‘You saw nothing? Heard nothing?’
‘I heard you scream and saw you fall. It was an attack of the falling sickness.’
‘There was thunder and lightning and a voice said Sha’ulSha’ul ma’att radephinni?’
‘It spoke Aramaic?’
‘And in Aramaic it said something about a horse and a rider. God has the reins and he dug the spurs in. You must lead me, Seth.’
‘Back to Jerusalem?’
‘To Damascus.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘The voice said Damascus.’
‘Well, then, if I tie this girdle of my robe to yours—’ Seth did it with trembling hands. ‘Perhaps the blindness will not last. Perhaps it’s just part of the falling sickness.’
In total blackness Saul, led by the tautness of a cord, a dog on a leash, saw, as in a preternatural sunlight, the rooms and corridors of his own brain. It was the same brain as before, though the voice still echoed in it. The knowledge was the same, as also the banked ferocity, but the knowledge was presented as it were from a new angle of vision, which cast light and shadow not seen before. The ferocity was still in the service of destruction of great wrongs, but the wrongs had changed. He was everything he had ever been, except that now he must promote where formerly he had persecuted (the voice had thundered the accusation with a kind of glee), and yet he recognised now that the fury of persecution had always been the fury of belief. He had always known that no compromise was possible, and he had been the chief agent of Stephen’s bloody witness against compromise. He was the same man that he had always been, and he recognised that the blindness was the bandage of some game in which he was turned about and about, finally emerging sighted as before to confront the world from a new angle. The same world and he who viewed it the same, but the light different. The God of the new faith wanted the zealot of the old but, with a flick of divine thumb and finger, the cause had been transformed. Yet in a way it remained the same cause, for between the old and the new there was no true division, one flowed into the other.
So, pulled like a placid beast, he was led through the southern gateway of the city. He heard its noise – wheels, the cries of vendors, the snort of a horse and the roar of a camel, girls giggling at the blind man, a bird twittering in a cage close to his right side. ‘What is the city like?’
‘Like any other city.’
‘We must go to the house of Judas. On the Street that is Straight. You will have to ask where that is.’
‘This one seems straight enough. He expects us?’
‘A Jerusalem man. With lodgings for Jerusalem men.’
Saul stumbled. A cat, or other small beast, had darted between him and his leader. There was childish laughter as he stumbled. Seth seemed to shorten the cord, for Saul was aware of his bulk and warmth as much closer before him.
‘Let’s walk side by side,’ Saul said, and he himself in a confident voice called to the darkness: ‘The house of Judas on the Street that is Straight.’ Judas the cobbler? someone wanted to know. He might well be a cobbler. And so soon Saul felt heat and noise exchanged for coolness and quiet, except for the distant hammering of, it could be, an apprentice making a sandal and the quiet introduction Seth was making to, it had to be, Judas of himself and his blind companion, the quietness being appropriate to a sickroom. But Saul was not sick, merely blind and very tired. He was led gently to, he could tell from the bounce of the voices against its walls, a small cell of a room and lowered to a hard pallet. There, foreknowing that sleep was a part of the act of transformation, he had a few seconds of drowsiness before being lowered into sleep’s deep pit.
I can only guess at Saul’s dreams, which must have been manifold and complex. Let us say that he saw the Temple, its main door blinding to his inner sight in the dawn, and that it dissolved gracefully, its angles softening to the arcs of the human form, and that the human form was that of a woman, naked and comely. The face was not clear, but the voluptuous contours of limbs and breasts aroused in him a lust which, though unsanctified by any legal contract of betrothal, seemed altogether wholesome, nay holy. He knew in his dream that his own body, formerly made tense by a zealous hatred, was relaxing to an acceptance of its functions, unbound by that fear of the body which had characterised his former comportment. The falling sickness, his dream told him, would not recur, and that disease had been the body’s protest against rigidity of muscle and faith alike. What God had made was good. The human form was a miracle of workmanship and the whole of the human sensibility too precious an achievement to cast to the dust. God had accepted to be housed in it and return to the world of the pure spirit to will it to be modified by the nerves and blood. God had ascended to heaven as man, his human sensibility purified, true, but with that sensibility exalted to a new order that was not nameable under the terms of the ancient hierarchy. As man God had gone homeland man as man would follow him, not angelic, for angels were pure spirit, but in flesh transfigured to—a new word was needful. Sainthood?
The word love – amor, agape, houb, ahavah, ai, upendo – filled the fierce blue over the dissolved Temple, which now ran as liquid gold and ivory through the gutters of a transformed Jerusalem. Some of the languages in which the word was rendered he did not know, but meaning transcended the accidents of the tongue and teeth. Love was the proclamation of the unity of the divine creation, in which man was altogether at home, if only he could will it so. But, seen anew as a figure of God’s cosmos, home in its humblest sense was holy and demanded a love that was more than mere comfortable habituation. The ants on the stone floor marching off with a fragment of bread smeared with honey, the slant of light from the casement and the motes in the shaft of sun, the old streetsinger with the cracked voice who passed his sister’s house daily, the grey mouse that peered out from its cranny – all were part of the unity. Hearing the word one – ena, wahid, echad – he saw the gold and ivory that sang in the gutters flow back and the Temple fill the space that it had deserted, reconstituted in all its former beauty and strength. Nothing was to be destroyed or desecrated, since all was part of the unity of the Godhead. He heard various voices trying to call him, but their owners did not seem to know his name. Saul, he replied, but he was no longer Saul.
He woke and felt the raising of eyelids still heavy with sleep, but to his surprise and all too human disappointment he still could not see. He was aware of the groan of someone sitting by his bed, a man much disturbed. ‘Seth?’
‘Can you tell me yet?’
‘You heard the voice?’
‘I heard nothing save your cry when you fell.’
‘It was his voice. He asked why I persecuted him. I will persecute no longer. You may go back to Jerusalem, Seth.’
‘You mean – our work’s over?’
‘My work. You are your own man.’
‘I stay with you. No more – of what we did to the Nazarenes?’
‘I am to become a Nazarene. You may do what you wish.’
He heard a deep groan of pain and bewilderment.
‘You’re to join the Nazarenes – just like that?’
‘I was fighting all along against what I had to be. I was trying to prove to myself that the old way was fixed, immutable. Soon I must go back to Jerusalem – to put things right. Meanwhile – you remember the name of the chief of the Nazarenes here?’
‘Ananias, the son of Ananias.’
‘Find him. Bring him to me. Tell him of a change of heart.’
‘He may not believe me.’
‘He has to believe. I must put myself into his hands.’
‘Very well. Will you take some food before you see him? You’ve fasted a long time.’
‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘Almost three days.’
Saul, as we must still call him, pondered on that. It had seemed no more than an hour. ‘I can’t eat,’ he said. ‘I must take water first.’
‘I’ll bring you water,’ Seth’s voice said eagerly.
‘No. No. I meant in another sense.’
He was led, two hours later, to a stream called Mayim, which name, like the names of many streams and rivers, means no more than water. He could not see Ananias, the son of the Ananias dead of shame for his lying, but he could hear the gentle voice of a decent young man. He shuddered with the shock of his immersion. ‘I baptise you, Saul, to the remission of your sins and in the plenitude of the grace of the Most High—’
‘Saul no longer. Saul is the name of another man. Now dead.’ He was becoming slowly aware of the remission of darkness as well as sin. He saw a dim vista of trees he could not yet name, a sheet of what must be water. He turned to take in the face of his baptiser, but he saw only a vague form with a raised arm, a generality called man. That generality would soon sharpen to the particular: soon he would be dealing with men. ‘I am Paul,’ he said.
So Paul, as we must now call him, sat later at the table of Ananias, eating with appetite. New bread, mutton somewhat overroasted, the tang of the wine of Damascus. A young woman, sister of one of the as yet nameless Nazarenes who sat at the table, poured him more of it. He felt the tingle of life in his groin as he saw the curve of her forearm, lightly flued. He said: ‘I see now what should have been all too obvious but was not. What did Jesus say? “Because you are neither hot nor cold but are lukewarm I will vomit you out of my mouth.” I was chosen for zeal, not for virtue.’
‘And so,’ Ananias said, ‘you take over the work here?’
‘Knowledge preceded hate. That same knowledge preceded love. But the knowledge is insufficient. May I learn more by teaching?’ Seth sat at the table, but as far away from Paul as he could. His bewilderment still showed; he did not know at all what was best for him to do.
‘Very often,’ young Ananias said, ‘the words come out of my mouth unbidden. Only when I’ve spoken the words do I see what they mean. Yes, teach in our synagogue. We Nazarenes have to be cunning. Our cunning now lies in using you. Saul turned into Paul. Tell them your story.’
‘Will they believe it?’
Some were all too willing to believe. Others would not have believed if that airless small synagogue had turned into the Damascus road, the roof into the vault filled with the thunder of divine Aramaic. Paul said to the crammed congregation, and this stench of sweat and garlic too had to be loved: ‘I imprisoned, I whipped, I stoned, I put to death the followers of the Christ. Yet all the time, like yeast fermenting in the dark, the grace was working within me. Unwanted, unbidden. In a thunderflash the revelation came. The truth came not in a pale dawn when I was fuddled with sleep but in the effulgence of noonday—’ The orthodox looked at each other, the pagan God-fearers listened. ‘I was a horse disdainful of its rider, kicking against the spurs and the whip. Now I submit to the horseman—’
A heavy man stood, a leatherseller named Rechab. He said: ‘You, Saul of Tarsus, known to all here and revered as the scourge of blasphemy and falsehood, were to come to Damascus to the joy of the faithful that the heretic and infidel might be seized and bound and taken before the chief priests of Jerusalem. But you are revealed as worthy yourself to be seized and judged and punished—’
‘May not a man change?’ Paul cried. ‘Is it forbidden to the light to enter? What I was I was. What I am you see – a man reborn, refashioned, even renamed. In my flesh transfigured and in my soul irradiated I know that my redeemer lives and I know the name of my redeemer – Jesus the anointed, true Son of the Everlasting, slain and re-arisen. Believe as I believe—’
‘Get out of Damascus,’ Rechab countercried. ‘You shame the faith. You defile the House of the Lord.’
‘Oh, I will leave Damascus soon enough,’ Paul said. ‘The faith is strong enough here with no need of the buttress of words of mine. Do not fear, you faithless. My way lies where the word is still to come. I must tread strange roads and sail unknown seas.’
Transfigured within and yet the same, Saul or Paul showed no sign of transfiguration without. His hearers saw a young man growing untimely bald, his height below the ordinary, swarthy and with a sparse beard, the close-set dark brown eyes moist and luminous, though the luminosity might be as much from madness or disease as from inspiration. He dreamt of unity, but sometimes the body mocks the spirit. The frame was of one who seemed in prospect already chained and whipped, somewhat bowed, the movements of the body in speech as it were wincing from blows. It should not be so easy, the transformation from persecutor to evangelist; it should not be possible to snap away, with the hard thumb and fingers of a tentstitcher, so many martyrdoms. He had done much wrong, and the punishment had partly to be in the disguise of his own persecution for the teaching of the good. God is not mocked. Wrong is not negation of right but a positive quantum of great weight. Paul carried Saul on his back.
The Castra Praetoria lay to the north-east of the city, between the Via Nomentana and the Via Tiburtina, a structure of grim right angles with a great parade ground in its exact middle. Here one day the men and officers of the Guard, Marcus Julius Tranquillus with them, were forced to watch a display of gladiatorial skill. The taller and stronger of the two combatants was all too evidently holding back with the painted wooden sword he wielded. The other, shorter, fatter, clumsier, squealing with little breath as he thrust his own blunt toy at the guts of his opponent, did not observe the grace of permission with which this latter fell to the dust, clutching a make-believe deathblow. When he fell the victor snapped his fingers at the uneasy referee, who at once handed over a real dagger that caught the noon sun. The squealer shoved the point in, tittering as the vanquished in surprise tried to get up, his two hands filling with the gush of red from his intestines. ‘Plaudite, plaudite,’ Gaius Caligula cried. Those at the front did so with no enthusiasm; some at the back retched.
Gaius Caligula strutted in his little boots towards the gateway leading to the Via Tiburtina (Vetus), followed by staff, cushionbearers, sweetmeatcarriers. There was a shrine being erected not far from the guardroom by the gate, and the bust of the Emperor was already in its place, the cement affixing it not yet dry. The effigy, laurelled, held its modest eyes averted from the legend GAIUS CALIGULA DIVUS, but the mouth smirked. Gaius Caligula said:
‘One god, one god. Well, the Jews have their one god and now so do we. Not an unwashed tribal deity but a lord of lands and oceans. Our holy mission is to bring this new belief in the single godhead to the barbarous places of the earth. Britain. Germany. Thrace. Other places.’
The tribune Cornelius Sabinus said: ‘Palestine?’ He had heard a loud contention between the Emperor and Herod Agrippa about this, the Emperor graciously yielding to the more serious view of monotheism, but the mad changed quickly. Gaius Caligula said:
‘They already have their—You heard what I said. But still – logic, logic, there’s a certain logic in it. All right, parade dismissed.’ And he saluted his own bust before treading the purple carpet as far as his coach, a tasteless crusty gold affair. Some of the officers went off to bathe before the noon meal in the mess. The body of the dead Opsius was already being prepared for its obsequies. Nobody’s appetite was much impaired; death was, after all, their playfellow. Marcus Julius Tranquillus stripped off his armour as though it were defiled and left it strewn for his servant to scour and polish. Then he hurried to the stables to the north of the barracks, there to saddle and mount the piebald mare Euphemia, who chewed the last of her meal and gave no whinny of greeting.
He rode west to the Viminal, turned on to the Vicus Patricius and with some difficulty trotted through the central streets of the city, which were thronged with noontime crowds. The Via Sacra. The Forum. The Palatine. He had right of entry into its grounds. Its slave quarters were thrust back to the northern limits of the estate, hidden by a grove of mixed planting – pine, poplar, cypress, chestnut. Marcus Julius found Sara waiting for him some yards away from the slave compound, in the territory of the masters where flowers grew. She was twisting a rose in nervous hands. Marcus Julius took her hands. The flower fell, depetalled. This situation was absurd, and both knew it. They spoke Greek; they were much on a level in Greek. Ruth? Ruth had died two days before, untended save by her sister, a nuisance, slave flesh no longer useful, give her to the compound incinerator alive. Sara had shown fire briefly respected, there is nothing like fire, and claimed burial in earth and the services of one of the rabbis of the city, the intoning of the qaddish. But slaves had no rights, much less in death. So Ruth had been buried like a dead dog. Sara was calm about it, with the calm of one who cannot bring with profit the rage of a known country to an unknown: rage here would be a useless language. But rage is liquid and calm is stone, and stone can break heads. Sara guarded her stone against a day, some day. ‘I should not be here,’ she said, meaning this zone a few footsteps beyond slave territory.
‘Nor I. And I mean that in a wider sense. The madness grows worse.’
‘You could go.’
‘Go? Family tradition. Service to the Emperor. My father and my grandfather too. Their emperors were different. There were free men in those days.’
‘How will it end?’
‘It will end with someone sticking a dagger into the divine Gaius. As he stuck a dagger into Opsius this morning. No, don’t ask me about that. It happens all the time.’
‘Why are things as they are?’
‘You need to ask why – when you saw what happened to your sister? Power divorced from reason. I call that madness. When I strike there will be reason in the point of my dagger—’
‘You?’
‘Someone like me. It will be the army, certainly. He thinks the army loves him. Pathetic. The army may well be the striking arm of the people.’
‘I don’t understand these things. Rome isn’t real.’
‘The torture and death are real enough. So is the bankruptcy. Millions spent on temples and shrines to the divine Caligula. The people taxed to the limit. You’ve been sold into Roman madness. And we were always taught you Jews were the mad ones. You had to learn the virtues of Roman stability.’
‘Oh, there’s madness enough in Judaea. Agh – look who’s coming.’
She referred to a middle-aged woman once one of a family brought in chains from the Rhineland, gross, with greying strawy hair in plaits, in the blue gown of a slave overseer of slaves. This woman growled in bad Latin: ‘You – whatever your name is – didn’t you hear me call?’
‘If you don’t know my name, madam, how could I know you called?’
‘There are a hundred fowls to pluck. Come on, get to it. You Jewesses are an idle lot.’
‘You, whoever you are,’ Marcus Julius said, ‘are interrupting a private conversation.’
‘Slaves don’t have private conversations – whoever you are.’
‘I am Marcus Julius Tranquillus, senior centurion of the Praetorian Guard. Learn your place, woman.’
‘Don’t,’ Sara murmured in distress. ‘I’ll go.’
‘And,’ Marcus Julius said, ‘mind your behaviour to this lady here. Yes, lady. Slave means nothing. Queens have been slaves before now.’
‘It will do no good,’ Sara said, going.
‘Things will change. Things will have to change,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to see you tomorrow.’
Tomorrow had a different meaning for Caleb, the brother of Sara, who was in training as a wrestler at the foot of the Palatine hill, in one of the gymnasia which fed the imperial games. ‘Metellus,’ he had said, mentioning also the name of that patrician sponsor whom he had impressed on the voyage hither. Strip off, he had been told by the games editor. Stripped off, he had been grinned at, though not unkindly, by all there present. Nullum praeputium. If you’re Metellus, I’m the ghost of Julius Caesar. Let’s see what you can do, lad. Aye, naked, balls all adangle. Testibus ponderosis, to quote Cicero. And Caleb had faced up to a lithe wiry one-eyed half-Greek half-Arab, whose body was already sleek with olive oil. Caleb knew that trick, an Arab one. He grabbed a towel and bade the man wipe himself unslippery and grippable. No, who was he, the Jew, to give orders? So Metellus took him in his slipperiness by the long strangely ungreasy hair and flung him to the sand of the wrestling pit, rolling him over and over with his foot like fish for the frying in flour. Then, when the sandy Greek Arab rose protesting, Caleb showed some of his Palestinian holds. You’ll do, lad. In time, that is. Style, grace are needed. You can’t feed Roman audiences just anything. Come now, let the German giant knock you into shape. Or out of it. We all have to learn. This German giant was a Goliath with a wart in his brow like an embedded stone from a sling. He was strong but slow. His body was sown with sandy flue like a lawn, except for his wide chest, which was thick with hairs like three housebrooms. He tossed Caleb about like a mealsack and threw him down to grovel at his great flat German feet. Caleb sank his teeth in the left little toe and would have bitten it off had the giant not dealt him a nape chop, howling. The chop hurt Caleb sorely and lighted a rage which he knew must be subdued: rage was liquid, calm a stone. With the twin stones of his clenched fists Caleb leapt to smash the German’s nose, whose thyrls sprouted hairferns like twin cornucopiae. The German went mad and flailed, shaking blood from his upper lip. Caleb leapt to gouge out his pale German eyes. Caleb was smashed in the jaw and felt bone seem, with surprise, to change its place. He took two seconds off, dancing away from the wind of new blows, to resmash his jaw back into position. He dove for the great mossy tree trunk of a right leg and held it in an embrace he refused to allow thwacks and fist-thumps to dislodge. He would have him over, by the Lord God of Hosts he would. And did. He danced on the huge bare belly. Enough, lad, you’ve shown what you can do. Make reverence to your opponent. Move into barracks tomorrow.
Tomorrow in the other sense meant the day of reckoning, but with whom or what was not yet clear. Fire the palace. Arm the Jews. Hold the Emperor in an excruciating armlock and cry: Let my sisters go. One thing at a time. Tomorrow would come, though not tomorrow.
‘Tomorrow?’ Paul said. ‘But he may be dead tomorrow. I say tonight, I say now.’
‘I don’t speak as a Nazarene,’ Seth said, ‘because I’m not a Nazarene, at least not yet. But I take it you still regard me as a friend.’
‘Friend and brother. And you’re concerned for my life. Well, I’m also concerned for it – I’ve much to do and I start late. But the cause isn’t helped by cowardice.’
‘The streets,’ Ananias said, ‘are always dangerous at night. It’s madness to go out.’
‘Who,’ Paul asked, ‘is the danger from? The Jews or the Arabs?’
‘As far as you’re concerned,’ an old man sitting by the fire said, ‘both.’ Paul nodded: that seemed reasonable. He had been out of the city into Nabataean territory. He had even made a pilgrimage to Mount Horeb, thinking things out, but the God of Moses and Elijah had proffered no special signal, unless signally evil weather meant such: lightning had flashed about the summit like bad temper. The Nabataean Arabs he had preached at outside the town limits had understood his Aramaic but had responded rather viciously to his message about the Son of God. They wanted to be left alone with their bleating kids and cooking pots. They did not like bald-headed strangers dropping by and disturbing the decent monotonous day with new ideas. The ethnarch of the city, responsible to King Aretas, a most conservative man, was undoubtedly willing to side with the Damascene Jews when they shrieked against the turncoat blasphemer. The doctrine of love was highly subversive. Paul looked into the fire that Ananias’s mother had lighted: it was a chill evening. In the fire, which spat like Nabataean Arabs and their camels, he saw no good auguries. He said:
‘A fellow Nazarene lies dying because he was beaten by these thugs of the man Rechab. He needs my comfort. Am I to skulk here because of a few bravos with breadknives? Besides, I have a bodyguard. Have I not?’ He smiled but got no answer from Seth, Ananias, and the burly but not notably brave twins Adbeel and Mibsam (if those were really their names). These last two were always biting their lips. Paul rose from the fire and said: ‘I’m going.’
The house of the dying Nazarene lay not far from the city wall. The lane which skirted this wall was a narrow curve; labyrinthine alleys made twisted radii to it. The moon was near the full but had to fight with sluggish rainclouds. Paul strode, and his friends had to trot to reach him. They were in no position to guard him against daggers, being votaries of love and hence unarmed. But Seth, mercifully as yet unconverted, still had his knife. When three cut-throats sprang out of the shadows with foul cries that were oblique expressions of holiness, it was Seth who struck out. Paul saw Ananias, he was sure it was Ananias, go down gurgling. In the throat, true to their name. Paul stumbled against some stone steps to his right. At the top of them someone was swinging a lantern. By its light he saw Seth held struggling by two while the third swung his dagger back for a stroke in the belly. Then the lantern swung away. The one holding it called down: ‘Paul! Paul! Here! Quick!’ Paul mounted stumbling and found the steps led to an open door. A house whose walls were part of the wall of the city. ‘In! Quick!’ He heard a gasp below, which he assumed was Seth dying, and the feet of men running away, the lipbiting twins no doubt.
Paul panted and looked about him in the shadowy house. Its master, whom his swinging lantern dramatised into red and gold facets with inky shadows, seemed to be a robust man in middle age. With his free hand he shot three screaming iron bolts. This house had been perhaps a sentinel’s post in the days before Rome had pacified the region. Paul heard dagger hefts and ringed fists hammering at the tough wood of the bolted door. We want him, Saul the renegade, cut his throat, give him to God’s good justice though summary. The householder yelled: ‘Rebecca! Leah!’ Two old women came from a dark hole of a room with one little lamp between them. The man came up to Paul and breathed on him the comfort of home and safety – goat’s cheese and onions for supper. ‘I’ll have to open up to them. Come quick with me.’ Leah and Rebecca went up to the door, nodded to each other, then began a loud gabbled curse on evil men who disturbed good women in their naked beds. Paul was led to an opening with shutters drawn back, beyond it the gloomy night, beneath it, the lantern showed, a precipice of stone wall, that of the city, with no toeholds. He shook his head. ‘Wait,’ the man said. He brought, yelling ‘Wait wait’ to the hammerers, a network bag of the kind called by the Greeks a sagrane, used for hoisting bales of hay. There was a rope already affixed to it. The two old women cursed heartily but with head-shakes towards each other: this cursing was proving of little avail against godly persecutors. Paul got into the bag. ‘Now,’ the man said, ‘easy does it.’ And tugging on the rope while at the same time easing it free with the rhythmic giving of his hands, he watched Paul descend. Paul saw him high above, plying his tug and slack, and he waved when he felt earth bump benignly. The man could not see but he could feel the emptying of the bag. Paul got into the shadow of a buttress, listening. Where is he? Not here, your worships. Where do you have him hid? Very elusive these Nazarenes, slippery customers you might say. Grumbling and the slamming of a door, shouts and more grumbling and then silence on that peripheral lane. There was a whistled tune from above in the shape of a question. Paul whistled back the shape of an answer. Then he was left to the night and his tears of rage.
In the Hebrew manner these tears had to be deferred, along with the shouts to high heaven, until he had walked some way from the city. He rested, shivering also from the night wind, in the lee of some haystooks in a field. Cows lowed from their byre and an ass gave him a brief lesson in braying. He brayed an anger that no Nazarene could have taught him. What was the difference between the stoning of Stephen and the cutting into the flesh of Seth and Ananias? He had been responsible for both. He was the same man as always, a deathbringer, and the bringing of death had hardly begun. Better not to have been born, so clucked some far off fowls. Words of his own, spoken in bitterness during his studies under Gamaliel of the holy word. No man had ever been able to do right by that dyspeptic and capricious God. The smell of burnt flesh pleased him, as well as the snipping of infant foreskins. He gave wholly irrelevant answers to the just plaints of suffering Job. How far had he changed under the humanising influence of his blessed son? I have chosen you, Saulpaul, for your deathbringing rigour. Owls hooted, hunting for mice. The night world breathed the terror of pursuit. There was no unity, there was only a bitter division, and the division was the work of a creator who, secure in his own unity, was amused by the spectacle of pain, doubt, the law of eating and being eaten. The clouds had scudded off above the south-west road to Tyrus, leaving the moon full and veined like a bloodshot eye. The moon gave the flat fields and the hills beyond a mock blessing of silver.
Love. He would have given much to be in a woman’s bed, she faceless as Eve and with Eve’s body to comfort him, our first mother, our first mistress, her mind removed, impenetrable as God’s, in the dreams of betrayal, her brain a maze of caprice. But the love of a woman’s body was but God’s cunning device to breed more creatures for suffering. He wished, of course, to be back in bed with his mother, comforted to sleep out of the bad dreams that had brought her to his cot, a mother’s sleep ever quick to be disturbed by the cry, even the almost soundless whimper, of her child caught in the snares of nightmare, God’s gift to the innocent. But he knew now he was totally alone with the burden of a very different and perhaps useless love. No woman’s body would ever comfort him. That vision of acceptance had been the work of his nerves and muscles, announcing that the incubus of the falling sickness was at an end. Pain was henceforth to arrive from without. He was strong and girt and ready for teaching that all men have the falling sickness, a gift from Eve. He had a strange presentiment that it was against Eve that he must do battle. Eve stood silvered on that near hillock, her body sprouting breasts like monstrous warts. He dried his tears on the sleeve of his robe. Then, trying to fill his brain with love for the loveless world, he began to walk, staffless and scripless, the long road to Jerusalem.
In Caesarea early the previous day the first thing to be unloaded from the merchant ship from Puteoli was a huge crate. Marcellus the procurator and the senior centurion Cornelius knew what it contained. They stood on the wharf and watched it dragged from the hold and set, with wholesome cursing from the stipatores or stevedores, beneath the hook of the crane which would lift it, swinging from its copper binding, to the shore. Marcellus said: ‘What do I do, Cornelius?’
‘Temporise,’ Cornelius said. ‘Delay. The true art of the ruler. On the other hand, if you want a general massacre – on both sides – obey the man, or the god as he thinks he is. I needn’t point out to you the utter blasphemousness of this business.’
‘Blasphemy,’ Marcellus said. ‘Blasphemos. I hear this word all the time from the Jews. I don’t understand it. It’s not a Roman concept. I’ve had the wrong sort of education perhaps. If they believe in one god – well, why can’t they have the image of this one god in their damned Temple?’
‘Yes,’ Cornelius said. ‘A Roman education isn’t much good here. Unless all Rome wants from them is money. You must often have considered the true meaning of the name of the rank you carry. A procurator is here to procure. So nothing else matters except their obols and shekels. They ought to be glad to pretend that the image of the deified Gaius Caligula is really the image of Jehovah. Bow down before it, worship. But God has no image. And God isn’t a man.’
‘You served here how long, Cornelius?’
‘Long enough to learn about what they believe. Not long enough to learn to speak their language well enough to get their confidence. Not long enough to learn how to read their books. Now I’ve three years before retirement and a measure of spare time for getting down to it.’
‘This, you know,’ Marcellus said, ‘is all wrong. You’re not here to get their confidence or read their books. They’re a colonised people. We’re here to give orders.’
‘They’d rather die than obey some of the Roman orders. Besides, it’s laid down that their religion is inviolate.’
‘Is what?’
‘Mustn’t be interfered with. Tell them that the Emperor is God and you’re interfering with their religion.’
‘But, damn it, they have to obey the Emperor.’
‘They have to obey his tax-gatherers. No more than that.’
Marcellus groaned. The vast crate was now on the quay. A slat of oak had loosened. There was a gleam of warm metal from within. He said: ‘According to this new sect of the Jews God turned himself into a man. The slave called Chrestus.’
‘A slight confusion there, procurator, as I’ve taken the liberty of mentioning before. Chrestus is, I grant you, a common enough name for a slave. What does it mean? Cheerful, helpful, useful. But the name you mean is Christus. This man was not a slave but a son of the royal House of David. If you have in mind pretending that this statue of the Emperor is really a statue of Christus, then you’re in terrible trouble from both sides. You won’t get it into the Temple. You won’t get any image into the Temple. You’re in a cleft stick. With respect, of course.’
The dawn wind sighed and Marcellus sighed with it. ‘I must stop seeking information from you, Cornelius. You always give me too much. But I accept your advice. The divine Caligula must go into temporary storage. We make some excuse when or if that senatorial visit takes place. Or if the powers that be in Syria become inquisitive. The effigy badly cast or defaced by an angry mob, something of the kind. Our best workmen busy repairing it. We have enough trouble with these damned Jews without seeking more.’
But, as is too well known, good intentions, and this cunctatorial policy of the procurator might be regarded as good, are often foiled by the very people for whom they are implemented. It was in Rome that Judaea was put into peril of revolt. Philo Judaeus, leader of the Jewish community, demanded and obtained an interview with the Emperor himself. He wished to register a protest. He came to the gardens of the Palatine with a deputation of five of his race and faith, good Romans though heavily bearded and capped and robed in the style of their people. Gaius Caligula lounged in a garden chair, stroking the limbs of a Greek boy, taking wine but not offering it, half listening under the cypresses as Philo said:
‘The concept of a single God – not of a pantheon – Jupiter, Saturn and the rest—’ Philo looked at the pantheon of stone figures that lined a garden walk – bodies varying in musculature and implements of pseudodivine office, thunderbolt, trident, wings on heels, but all topped with the same smirking head. ‘Well, Caesar – it has long been accepted by the Roman state that the Jewish concept is to receive the respect of the occupying power—’
‘Only the Emperor,’ the Emperor said, ‘exacts respect. Your faith, which I know something about since it is the faith of my old friend Herod Agrippa, is certainly tolerated, and that should be enough. It is bizarre, exotic, amusing. It adds its own colour to the gorgeous tapestry of our Empire. It has even taught something to our Empire – this very notion of one god you talk of. The Emperor is this god, this god is the Emperor. What could be more satisfying?’
‘It is not very satisfying to the Jews,’ Philo said. ‘God to us is a spirit – unborn, undying. Even the Emperor has to die.’
Gaius Caligula squeezed the thigh of the Greek boy and made him squeal. ‘You will not speak to me of death, do you hear? A god is by definition immortal.’
‘I beg Caesar’s pardon,’ Philo said. ‘Let me confine the petition to this. Do not, we beg, for the sake of the tranquillity of your Palestinian possessions, insist that your statue be installed in the holy Temple of Solomon which is in Jerusalem.’
‘It has already been installed. To the great satisfaction of the Jewish people. At least I hear no complaints. Now they can see their God. They have a solidity to bow down to.’
‘I would be shaming the faith of our fathers if I said: yes, Caesar, that is so. But it is not so. Your procurator Marcellus appears to be a man of sense and a credit to Caesar’s capacity for choosing good administrators—’
‘I did not choose him. The Emperor Tiberius chose him. I know nothing of him. Has he,’ and he leant forward gaping, ‘has he disobeyed our orders?’
‘Letters from Jerusalem inform our community here that he has very wisely delayed his obedience. But now orders from your governor in Syria force him into a situation of immediate compliance. I need not, I hope, stress the—’
But Gaius Caligula was on his feet, stamping with his little boots. He frowned viciously at Torquatus and Strabo, two state officers in attendance. ‘Why,’ he yelled, ‘have I not been told of this? Why are things kept from me?’ They could not answer. Philo said:
‘To conclude, your procurator Marcellus has been forced to order that your statue – We beg of you to have the order rescinded – It is in the interests of peace and tranquillity—’ Gaius Caligula frothed and danced, crying:
‘Get out of here, you unwashed Jews. I shall be rid of your oh so friendly procurator. I shall have him recalled and punished. You shall have his head in your synagogue here to croon over, your one Roman friend, alas dead. You’ve always wanted a Jewish king over Jewry, have you not, eh? Well, you shall have King Herod Agrippa, a real friend of Rome. He will see that my image is installed. He will see that it is worshipped according to the sacred imperial rites. Take your unwashed bodies out of here.’
‘With respect, Caesar,’ Philo said calmly, ‘it is you who are the unwashed people. You are also uncircumcised. It is the mission of the Jews to cleanse the world. You propose making it even more dirty. Much blood is going to flow, believe me—’ But the Emperor got his whip to them. They padded down a walk of symmetrical arbutus with such dignity as speed would permit. Then the Emperor, dressed in a kirtle of sky-blue embroidered with yellow crocuses which showed much of his hairless thighs, stormed at Torquatus and Strabo. Garotting, crucifixion, confiscation. They nodded sagely; they had heard such things before.
‘Confiscation of goods,’ Strabo eventually said. ‘I am glad that Caesar has raised the matter. Whatever you wish to be done with the Jews, your other proposal is unacceptable.’
‘What other proposal? What is unacceptable? To whom unacceptable? If a thing is acceptable to Caesar that is enough.’
‘With respect,’ Strabo said, ‘it is against all our traditions to have Roman patricians arbitrarily executed in order that their estates may be confiscated.’
‘It won’t be arbitrary,’ the Emperor said, calmer now, ‘if you fasten crimes on to them. I need money. I intend to have money.’
‘There are commodities,’ Torquatus said, ‘that may be sold at auction. Being of imperial provenance they will fetch good prices.’
‘I,’ the Emperor cried, ‘selling his own goods and chattels?’
‘Things Caesar has but does not use and will not miss,’ Strabo said. ‘There is, for example, the older of the golden chariots. The five hundred acres near Neapolis. The imperial household has more slaves than it can use.’
‘Go away,’ Gaius Caligula said. ‘Go away. Your faces make me sick. A god selling off what he has by divine right. Some of your notions are of a headswimming lunacy.’ And then he screamed: ‘Damned Jews. You, Strabo, take ship to Palestine. See that that order is obeyed.’
‘With respect, Caesar—’
‘With respect respect respect. That’s all I hear, that’s what I never see. Am I the Emperor or am I not?’
For the moment, Torquatus said to himself.
Paul arrived hooded in Jerusalem. He also arrived at nightfall. But Joseph Barnabas recognised his gait. A rumour had come through from Damascus very hard to credit. But Saul was alone and not hooding himself against mere pacific Nazarenes. Joseph Barnabas watched him make for the street where the former house of Matthias lay. He took the chance and hailed him.
‘Saul!’ Saul turned.
‘Joseph Barnabas? Yes. Has news come from Damascus?’
‘News not easy to believe.’
‘Nevertheless you must believe it. Will you accompany me to the brethren? You see me alone. I’m also unarmed.’
‘A man,’ Barnabas said, ‘doesn’t change from a hater of the faith to a preacher of the faith. Not like that, not overnight.’
‘It was much less than overnight, Joseph Barnabas. Your faith tells you to accept miracles, after all. You see a man changed. Even my name is changed.’
‘We heard that too.’
There were only Peter, Thomas and the two Jameses at home. The house was as unclean as it always had been since the Nazarene appropriation. The apostles sat around their dining table, on which a lamp sat spluttering like a poor substitute for dinner. They eyed Paul warily. Peter said:
‘What I don’t understand is this – if you’re so frightened of arrest and retribution and the rest of it, why did you come back to Jerusalem? Damn it, man, it’s right into the arms of your killers—’
‘I came back for instructions.’
‘Well,’ Thomas said, ‘that’s honest, anyway. Tell the chief priest ye’re pretending to be a Nazarene and what do I do now your holiness. Oh, very clever.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Thomas,’ Peter said. ‘He means instructions from us.’
‘A swift change, I know,’ Paul said. ‘I’m still an instrument. But now for other hands. What do you wish me to do?’ Thomas muttered something about a man that turns his coat once will turn it twice.
‘Quiet, Thomas,’ Peter said. ‘What I say to you, Saul—’
‘Paul.’
‘—is to get away from here. Think things over.’
‘I’ve thought things over. Or shall I say it was done for me?’
‘You’re no use dead and it’s dead you’ll be if you stay. Go back home. You’ll be safe there.’
‘Get back to your father and your mother or whatever you have and your books and your tentmaking. Convert a little. Try it out.’
‘I wish to try it out in Judaea. Not necessarily here in the city. But it’s a kind of justice, preaching to the Greek Jews – that’s what I have in mind.’ His voice faltered. ‘Talking of Greek Jews—’
‘As soon as you’d left,’ James the son of Zebedee said, ‘they let your suffering lot out of the place where you’d had them put. It’s been pretty quiet since you left. But if you start preaching here they’ll chop you down and then bethink themselves of the rest of us. We’ve had enough trouble,’ he added in his innocence.
‘The Lord,’ Paul said, ‘told me what to do. He said nothing about running home to avoid persecution. I’ve a lot to make up for. I must take my chance.’
‘Look,’ Peter said, ‘you come here all humble saying you want instructions. And then you start on about the Lord telling you what to do. The Lord told you nothing. You’ve never seen the Lord. We have. And the Lord was pretty clear about everything being in our hands. So will you be told by me or will you not?’
‘What he could try,’ James the Little said, ‘is that concentration of Greeks down in Bethany. It’s a powerful weapon, you see, the big whip becoming one of the faithful. It’s a bit of a waste, sending him off home to think things over.’
‘I’ve thought things over,’ Paul said once more.
‘Go on then,’ Peter said resignedly. ‘Stick to the fringe of the city. But as soon as they break your head with a stone come back here for your passage money. Barnabas and Thomas had better go with you. See how you get on. We don’t just let anyone preach the word, you know. You can’t just suddenly know it all, just like that, with a twist of the wrist.’
‘Leave me out,’ Thomas said. ‘I’m too old for yon stone-throwing.’
Marcus Julius Tranquillus breathed northern sea air, looking out in a chill dawn across bilious green waters to a ghost of white cliffs. He had a woollen cloak wrapped about him. He admired the steam of his breathing and that of his companion on guard, Rufus Calvus, who was neither bald nor haired reddish brown. ‘Britannia Britannia Britannia,’ Marcus Julius sang, stamping on the shingle near the long line of landing craft. ‘What do the natives call it?’
‘There’s no one name. Each tribe has its own little region which it thinks to be the big world.’
‘And now the real big world rushes in. The Roman eagle spreads its wings—’ There was no need to complete the pleasantry, known, in many languages, all over the Empire. Rufus Calvus laughed guiltily. He said:
‘This is known as building an empire. Ultima Thule. The edge of the world. And what do we bring?’
‘Law. Order. Roads. Temples. For worship of the divine Caligula. A more pertinent question is: what do we take back?’
‘Slaves. Tribute. Gold. Silver. To replenish,’ Rufus Calvus spoke the words in a mockery of the senatorial rhetorical manner, ‘depleted ah coffers. Britannia as a cure for imperial poverty.’ A bucina brayed. There was soon a whole ringing consort of bucinae all over the camp that lay behind them. ‘We’d better take post.’
Vast forces for the invasion. The camp sprawled far. Troops put on breastplates round fires that had been kept alight all night long, shivering. Piled shields and pila clashed and squeaked. Drums rolled. Tuba and bucina groaned in antiphony. Soldiers lined up by companies under barking under-officers. Horses were dragged whinnying towards their sea transportation. They smelt cold and did not like it. There was a swish of swords removed for inspection and then sheathed. A forest of spears arose from the dunes. Officers bawled, faces red raw with the morning’s razor. Tents were struck and loaded on to carts that were wheeled towards the boats. Waves crashed, gulls wailed. The tribune Cornelius Sabinus inspected in preparation for the imperial inspection. Trumpets. From his tent yawning came Gaius Caligula, queasy from the night’s wine. He walked pompously, staff lined up behind him, to the inspection of the legions, to which had been attached a segment of the Praetorian Guard. The inspection was long, shivering, thorough. The Emperor complained bitterly of the cold, an affront to his divinity. The sun was well up by the time he was ready to be helped on to a cart in order to address the assembly. He addressed the assembly with due solemnity, though not well heard in the rear ranks:
‘Soldiers of the Empire. Your brave hearts and fine bodies have come to the northern shore of our province of Gaul. From here you will embark and sail to the shores of Britannia. Britannia will fall to us and be ours. This is an exceptionally solemn occasion. The last province of the Roman Empire awaits our acquisition. But first – there is an important thing to do. You see these shells spread all along the shore as far as eye can reach? They are Roman property. Hence they must go back to Rome. Gather them.’
No one there could believe what he had heard. The Emperor repeated pettishly:
‘Gather them. Gather them. Quickly. Put down your arms and gather them.’
Cornelius Sabinus’s voice was near inaudible.
‘All of them, Caesar?’
‘Gather them. Gather them.’
Incredulous, trembling, the great disciplined force was reduced to a horde of children gathering seashells on the shore.
‘Where – where shall they put them, Caesar?’
‘Let them gather them in their helmets, which might have been made for the gathering of shells. And then empty their helmets into those transport wagons.’
‘This will do it. This,’ panted Marcus Julius faintly, gathering shells.
‘What?’ white-faced Rufus Calvus asked.
‘He can’t survive it. The humiliation of the army. The shame of it. He can’t he can’t—’ Gathering shells. All along the coast. Shells being gathered. The dry rustle of the shellfish market in Neapolis multiplied abominably. Gaius Caligula examined a single shell with minute attention, saying:
‘Beautifully made, aren’t they? Exquisite workmanship. That old god, whoever he was, had remarkable creative gifts. But the new god gets the benefit of them. That’s as it should be.’
The knuckles of Cornelius Sabinus whitened and whitened as he gripped and gripped the hilt of his sword.
But Gaius Caligula was still a god. His effigy was being manhandled out of one of the dock warehouses, ready for dragging to Jerusalem, while Paul was stepping aboard the ship that would carry him to Tarsus in Cilicia. His head had, true to Peter’s prophecy, been split, he had bruises on his jaw, and he limped. It was Peter and Thomas who had accompanied him to Caesarea, safe for the Nazarenising mission in the hands of Philip, this not being too far beyond Joppa, whither Simon Peter had been summoned by another Simon, a tanner, who had found some as yet undisclosed aspect of his evangelical work beyond him. The wind already filled the sails and the tide was flowing. Peter and Thomas saw the ship glide with pagan grace into the roads. Peter said:
‘I ought not to say this perhaps, but I say it.’
‘Ye mean thank God we’re done with him?’
‘We ought not to think it let alone say it.’ He took in some lungfuls of sea air as though he would not again have the opportunity, though Joppa was on the coast. ‘He’s a difficult sort of a man. Has his own ideas too. Best to leave him in Tarsus, see what he can do there. I certainly wouldn’t want him back in Jerusalem.’
‘Ye know what I think’s the matter with him? He thinks too much.’
‘Well, it’s the place he comes from. I’ve heard tell plenty about Tarsus. Big colleges there, people go there to study. And have done so for a thousand years, so they tell me. He’s read a lot of books and now he’ll have the time to read a lot more. We’ve not had much bookishness so far.’
‘There was—’ Thomas did not like to mention the name: it tasted bad in his mouth. ‘You know who I mean.’
‘Yes yes, look where his book learning got him.’ Peter thought a space. ‘Poor lad, though. Too innocent to live.’
‘So he died,’ Thomas said brutally. ‘Are we to go and call on the Greek lad Philip?’
Paul paced the deck, his feet flat to its rolling, and savoured the aches in his body. He had been punished, though not yet enough. He foretasted the next punishment. For my sake a man must leave his father and his mother. So be it. The neat house of a man grown prosperous on sailcloth would be sullied by the very presence of the sole son of the house. There had always been a bust of the Emperor set on a voluted pedestal. Now it would be the bust of a god, perhaps with a votive lamp before it. Don’t talk to me of heresy, father. You’ve joined the Roman pagans. You have your god in the sitting-room. And his father blustering: That is no more than respect. I remain a good Jew and a good Roman. And I, sir. Except that I accept the Jewish Messiah and have too much respect for Roman order to wish to see it collapse under a madman. You speak thus of the Emperor? I acknowledge only one master now, father. I abjure the world’s madness, whether of Gaius Caligula or the man who was Saul of Tarsus.
Painful, painful. His mother, dressed as a Roman matron, crying: To abandon your own name. The name you answered to when dinner was ready or it was time for bed. Oh, Saul, Saul – Sha’ul Sha’ul ma ’att radephinni? (You always had to persecute someone.) I will not believe it, will not, moans his father. You must, father. And you must be reconciled to it. Things change. History ordained it. An empire broken from within, the faith torn by its contradictions. Double heresy, double. Don’t talk to me of heresy, father.
You must know there is no room for you here. Paul, as you now call yourself. I expected that. Disinherited and disowned. Your grandfather served Rome when Julius Caesar was in Egypt. I served the faith of our race from the very first day when I could recite the verses of the Torah. A good Jew and a good Roman gets his reward. And you will get yours some day perhaps soon – the headman’s axe or the stones of the outraged faithful or the shame of the cross. Not shame, father. Don’t speak of shame. And his mother: Sha’ul, Sha’ul, lama sabachthani?
He foresaw all. His homecoming and homeleaving for ever would be mere ritual. Well, Tarsus was as much his city as his father’s. He would go to old Israel (entitled to the name, he would say, having been given the name of Jacob) who had taught him the tentmaker’s trade. He would sit in the sun outside the shop and wrestle not with God but with tough canvas and bodkin. A man with a trade was a free man. He would not disrupt the gatherings at his father’s synagogue. Filial piety was a vice with sharp claws. It would be, he thought, a matter of waiting. He could wait, stitching in the sun. He was, though bald, still young.
It is not, since Paul and he will some day be in close contact, as inapposite as it would appear to set down now the filioparental dialogue of Marcus Julius Tranquillus’s imagining in the bath or on his hard military bed or, on the square of the barracks, awaiting a tribunal inspection. The sitting-room of a neat little house on the Janiculum, a bust of the Emperor on a voluted column, his father saying: ‘This will be the end of your career. A career, I may remind you, that the family has followed since the days of the republic. It was always our intention that you marry into the family of Callidus Marcellus, a family with a fine tradition of loyalty to the Roman state. I have always hoped that you would beget sons who would carry on the tradition our families share.’
‘A tradition, if I may say this, father, of trimming to the wind. Policy rather than conviction.’
‘That is unseemly.’
‘Oh, the world is changing, father. The world is breaking down in order that it may be remade. I wish to be involved in the remaking.’
‘By marrying a Jewish girl,’ his mother says, her face a well-made mask of suffering, ‘a slave?’
‘Slavery, dear mother, is a status decreed by tyranny, not by blood or lack of talent. Our civil service is in the hands of slaves, or freedmen with the ring-piercing of their ears hard to hide even by the most effeminate growing of the hair. If a girl of good Palestinian family is, thanks to the vindictiveness of a Roman official, turned into a slave, she is not by that act rendered contemptible. It is the Roman system that is made contemptible.’
‘Strange words,’ his father says, ‘for a son of Rome.’
‘Rome is not what it was. God knows when it will be what it was again.’
‘What is this word God? Have you been learning something from the Jews?’
‘The man who calls himself God is selling part of his household. The divine Caligula is heavily in debt and taxes can no more come to his rescue. I wish to buy a well-born Jewish lady out of slavery. Have we the money to do it?’
‘We? We? This is your own affair, son, not mine or your mother’s.’
‘There is such a thing as my patrimony.’
‘When I’m dead, not before. And it doesn’t amount to much. A professional soldier, as you’re beginning to learn, doesn’t become rich easily.’
Raising money to buy a bride. Talk about the world’s madness. It would be necessary to talk quietly with the tribunus militum who, it seemed, was well enough disposed. For had not Gaius Caligula emptied whole strongboxes into the regimental funds at the time of his accession, one of his acts of sanity? Was not the freeing of an imperial chattel whose sister had been flogged to death by her demented master a legitimate employment of funds that were no longer a pledge of loyalty? Let his dirty money go back to him. Marcus Julius Tranquillus, stiff on parade or relaxed in the bath, saw hope in that sentimentality which the tough military carapace often hid. The senior centurion is in love with a slave. Read your Lucretius: Venus strikes where she will. Empty the coffers to buy him his bride. Talk about the world’s madness.
Peter and Thomas rested outside a seaside inn in Joppa or Jeppa or Jeffa or Jaffa, the name was not at all clear when you heard the natives utter it. Thomas slipped off his sandals and flexed his stiff old toes in the sea’s breeze. ‘I’m getting too old for this foot travel,’ he said. ‘My bones creak.’
‘You needn’t have come,’ Peter said. ‘There’s work enough back home.’
‘Home. Aye, Jerusalem. I’ve a mind sometime to go back to real home. Across the big lake. Ye remember when we met there?’
‘It’s not so long ago, Thomas.’ The serving girl brought cups, a jug of wine and a small pitcher of water. Peter sadly watched her pert departing buttocks.
‘There I was working in this garden for this family, and then the poor girl goes into a decline and the whole world thinks she’s dead and then you come along, with him.’
‘Talitha cumi,’ Peter remembered. ‘Rise up, girl. And by God she did. And the big meal afterwards, with you helping to wait on. We were always hungry in those days.’
‘Still are. Not that an old man needs much. Good air is what I need and this is good sea air. They’re not too bad of people either.’
‘Simon’s a good man, but he expects too much.’ Peter looked into the winejug with a kind of sacerdotal concentration, as though inspecting entrails for auguries. His fingertip went in and brought out a fly. He dried the fly in the sun and then watched it wing off shakily into the blue sea air. The waves breathed like tired runners. ‘He thinks he ought to be able to work miracles.’
‘As I keep on saying,’ Thomas said, ‘it depends what ye mean by a miracle. It’s the other business that’s more worrying, especially after Philip’s story about the big black without ballocks.’
‘He can’t do it,’ Peter said. ‘There’s no argument about it. If the big black went off thinking he was saved, well, let him have his satisfaction till the day he gets disappointed. Because he will when the word gets through to him on his next Jerusalem trip. If I’m alive I’ll watch out for him. A big black with a high voice shouldn’t be easy to miss. That was Philip’s one and only mistake. But friend Simon has been pouring whole gallons of good blessed water on Gentiles, and it won’t do. There was never anything said about Gentiles. Nazarenes eating pork in their foreskins. No, it won’t do. And this other thing won’t do either, but we have to give them what comfort they expect.’
‘How long has the body been kept there?’
‘Too long, I’d say. But these women swear it’s still – you know, in what they call a state of purification.’
‘Meaning the opposite of putrefaction.’
‘I may have heard wrong.’ Peter took a good draught of wine and water, belched and said: ‘Better.’
‘Not stinking, to put it blunt and honest. More than can be said of Simon. He stinks of his trade. So does his house.’
‘Tanning’s a smelly trade,’ Peter said. ‘It’s done with camel dung, did you know that?’
‘Something I don’t want to know. Well, there’s plenty of camel dung around here. Look at that big roaring brute. I never cared much for camels. Well, we’d best get there and see if the stink’s started. It ought to be a decent sort of ladylike stink.’ They got up wearily and went off leaning on their staffs through a throng of fruit stalls and loud chaffering. Too much, I don’t pay that much down the road there. Lady, I’m losing money charging you what I do. Outside the gate of a house with closed shutters two women in black were waiting for them. They went into darkness but no smell of putrefaction. There were a lot of lilies about in pots. Two more ladies in black were sitting drinking some kind of hot herbal decoction. Stay seated, ladies.
‘Let’s have that name again,’ Peter said.
‘Dorcas, Dorcas.’
‘Or Tabitha.’
‘Aye,’ Thomas said. ‘Both names mean that sort of animal that runs fast.’
‘Gazelle.’
‘Gazelle, aye. Run off to the next world, has she?’
This callousness started them all off weeping. One woman wept while sipping her brew.
‘Discretion, Thomas,’ Peter said. ‘Where is the er—?’ They led the two of them up a short flight of steps to a bedroom. The shutters were closed but the scent of nard was overpowering. Also (Thomas sniffed cautiously) camphor. A candle at her head and one at her feet. A quite young girl, a gazelle no longer footfleet, pretty too, not unlike that daughter of what was his name, Jairus.
‘Aye, she seems dead all right, but ye can never tell.’
‘What were his words? Yes, Talitha cumi.’
‘And now ye have to say Tabitha cumi. Ye have to do what he did, Peter. He said we had to.’
‘That’s not for us.’
‘Sometimes nature plays tricks like that Simon Magus did. Seems isn’t the same as is.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Peter said. ‘But there’s no harm in trying. Tabitha cumi. Rise up, girl.’
There was no response from the girl’s body. ‘It’s a lot to expect,’ Thomas said.
‘Too much. He was him. We’re just us.’
But Thomas, his eyes widening, put his hand on Peter’s sleeve. He muttered something like a prayer that what seemed to be happening should not happen. Both looked with mouths stupidly opening at a mouth gently opening to let out what seemed a small store of breath kept shut in there. One of the candleflames flapped. That old breath once let out, new breath possessed the body, its rhythm as feeble as in a body about to die. Both men dreaded the opening of the eyes, with their message of light from a world nobody wanted to visit if he could help it. So falling over each other they got out of that room. Having fallen downstairs, Peter said to the women: ‘You can go up there now.’ The herb decoctions were spilt on the worn Greek carpet with its key pattern. Peter now saw for the first time a gaudy bird in a cage that looked at him, head cocked, as though from another world. A flight of heavy black birds went up those stairs with black wings flapping. In a minute, in the manner of women, they would start wailing joy that sounded like grief. The two men got out of that house with the speed of robbers.
At that moment the centurion Cornelius was holding a meeting of the senior under-officers of his century. It was in his own house overlooking the bay of Caesarea. His wife was singing in the kitchen and his small son dribbled on to a toy centurion the garrison carpenter had kindly carved for him. ‘Look, lads,’ Cornelius was saying, ‘the situation’s not clear. No situation ever is these days as far as Rome’s concerned. We stay but he goes.’
‘No procurator?’ said the decurion Fidelis. ‘Ever again? Who are we responsible to?’
‘You’re responsible to me for the moment. And it looks as if I’m directly responsible to the man in Syria, Lippius.’
‘Caius Lippius,’ young Junius Rusticus said, a boy given to needless pedantry.
‘But we also have to take orders from this Herod Agrippa who’s on his way from Galilee. The King of Palestine, as he calls himself. Sort that out if you can.’
‘So we get moved to Jerusalem?’ Fidelis said.
‘We’ll be needed more in Jerusalem than in Caesarea,’ Cornelius said. ‘Especially if he has that statue moved in.’
‘I can’t see that,’ the decurion Androgeus said, a half Greek and very olive-skinned, one who was on his third decurionate after two demotions for brawling. ‘I can’t see how a Jew can do that. Even if he calls himself like a king. The other Jews will cut his bleeding gorge for him,’ proleptically. Cornelius said:
‘It seems to be up to the Roman army to see that they don’t. Meaning us. And the lads from Syria, a mean lot. The god Caligula, eh? For Jews and Romans alike. I don’t think I can stand much more,’ he said, singing in unconscious unison with another centurion many miles away, ‘of the world’s madness.’ He went to his little balcony and looked out on the sea and the massed shipping. All that seemed sane enough. Then he turned and surveyed the room, not seeing his men. He was in his home, such as it was. Full of ornaments picked up in a variety of foreign bazaars, most of them cheap except for that bronze buffalo, all of them probably tasteless. He said: ‘You know where sanity lies, don’t you?’
‘You’ve said something about it, centurion,’ Junius Rusticus said.
‘We need somebody to talk to us,’ Cornelius said, eyes down. ‘The man I have in mind was here a couple of days ago. The Greek man in the chandler’s store, he said he’d gone off to Joppa or Jeffa, whatever they call it. He’s a fisherman, this man Peter I mean. He’s in charge. They say he’s done strange things. A humble man for humble men, just the same.’
‘Strange?’ Fidelis said.
‘Oh, you know what I mean. I don’t know what word to use. Even words are losing their meaning in these days of the world’s madness. Ask for the man Peter in Jappa or Juffa. Everybody’s bound to know where he is. You, Rusticus and Androgeus, you two can volunteer.’
Where Peter was now was on the roof of his host Simon the tanner. He had got up there for two reasons. One was that the fumes of dinner cooking below could not easily overcome the stench of the trade that was carried on in the sheds at the back of the house. A hunk of elderly mutton was being turned on a spit by an elderly woman who turned the handle grousing, Simon the tanner’s mother. You’ll have to wait for it, she had said ungraciously. Time and tide wait for no man, irrelevantly. The other reason for being on the roof was to get away from the crowd that had heard about the sudden recovery of the gazelle girl, one who had been orphaned early and spent most of her very adequate inheritance on garments for the poor. A lot of these garmented poor were down there, exhibiting running sores and withered limbs and demanding to be healed by faith, not that many of them had any. There was a staircase leading to the roof and a door at its head that he, Peter, had bolted. He lay exhausted with the strain of feeling under a whitish canvas canopy that kept the sun off. His only company was cauldrons of sea water that Simon used, along with camel dung, in his unwholesome trade. There was a fist knock on this door.
‘Who is it?’
‘Me, Thomas. Your presence, sir, is requested for further miracles.’
‘Tell them it’s a blasphemy. Tell them to pray. Tell them I’m nothing. You too.’
‘Aye, I know well I’m nothing. What I will tell them is that ye require a nap before your dinner and they’d best be away.’
‘I need the dinner before the nap. You can bring it up here.’
‘Ye’re right, aye. The stench down here is no good for the appetite. But it’s no ready as yet.’
Peter, not needing the nap, nevertheless dozed off. He had a dream almost immediately, and it was a dream that told him how hungry he was. The light of the dream was the light of this rooftop, and it shone on the right number of sea water cauldrons, or perhaps there was one fewer, as well as the two or three withered plants in pots that were there. A cat came on to the roof to stare at Peter and then, spotting an alighting sparrow, it lightninged after it and out of the dream. The whitish canvas canopy did not stay where it was. It flew off from over Peter’s head and stretched itself very taut in the sky about nine feet in front of him. It began to fill up with the materials of one of these Roman banquets he had heard about. Haunches of deer, a whole roasted infant camel, writhing lobsters, crabs fighting each other though steaming from the pot, sucking pigs, pigmeat sausages (this he knew though his eyes could not penetrate their skins), a kid seethed in bubbling milk undoubtedly its mother’s. Milk, of goat or cow, in crocks nudging the roast pork. In the dream all this was no abomination. A voice that filled the four corners of the world cried that it was all good. ‘Eat, eat. Nothing is forbidden. All is from God.’ Peter heard himself say: I can’t. It’s unclean. And the voice boomed: ‘God has cleaned it. Eat.’ Peter woke. The awning was back where it had been. He heard Thomas fisting the door, calling: ‘Ye said ye wanted to eat. Eat.’ Peter stumbled to the bolts and drew them. Thomas had a wooden tray with steaming meat on it, bread, a jug. Peter blearily said:
‘Pig flesh. Washed down with goat’s milk.’
‘Urrrgh. Ye’ve been having a bad dream.’
‘We can eat anything, Thomas. He just said so. We can be like the Gentiles.’
‘Get yourself properly awake, man, then eat your dinner. All good kasher provender. Milk and roast pig. The devil’s been at ye. Urrrgh.’
It was while Peter was tearing into the roast mutton that two men of the Italian speira arrived at Simon the tanner’s house on horseback. ‘You want who?’ Simon’s old mother asked. ‘What’s he done wrong, then?’ No wrong. He’s needed in Caesarea. ‘Somebody dying?’ You could say that somebody’s dying for something.
Peter sat at the rear of Rusticus and Thomas at the rear of Androgeus. They had never before been on horseback. It was a jolting experience that did little good to their dinners. They had to hang on to the belts of the two riders and grip the hot flanks of the mounts with their thighs. Too many new things happening. Thomas yelled against the wind: ‘It’s no done. To enter the house of the uncircumcised. He never did it. It’s again the law.’
‘Which law? The law that’s been persecuting us?’
‘We’re Jews, man. The followers are still Jews. We keep the law.’
‘My dream broke the law. This voice from heaven broke the law about what to eat and what not to eat.’
‘And ye’d take pig flesh? Lobsters out of the sea?’
‘I know what the dream meant. If I hadn’t been such a fool I’d have known when the new law began. When Philip baptised the black man—’
‘He’d no right to. Not only an uncircumcised one but a eunuch too. For all we know, a damned cannibal.’
‘Your brain creaks like your joints,’ Peter yelled. ‘The faith has to go to the Gentiles as well.’
‘Who says so?’ Thomas snarled over Androgeus’s horse’s snort. ‘I’m no going in, anyway. On your own head be it.’
Cornelius had got a large company together to welcome Peter. He heard the octuple clop coming up the road and said: ‘Right. We’ll go out to meet him.’ Alighting, Peter nearly fell. Thomas sat till he was helped down. They were in a small garden with a wide gateway. Thomas dissociated himself from the whole business and went to sit on a stone bench under a figtree. Peter stood uncertainly smiling and was shocked when this centurion got down on his knees. Others, anxious to do the right thing, also got down. Peter hurriedly raised Cornelius, saying:
‘Up, up. I’m nothing special. I’m a man like yourself. Well,’ with fisherman’s honesty, ‘there are certain differences. Law, I mean, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know the law of your fathers, sir,’ Cornelius said.
‘Not sir, please please not sir—’
‘That it’s unlawful for you to mix with the uncircumcised. That you’re defiled by association. And for me, us, you’re going to break the law. You’re coming into my house. That’s why I knelt.’
‘Into your house,’ Peter said firmly. He heard Thomas groan from under the figtree. ‘God seems to be no respecter of persons. Every nation that fears him and does right – well, it seems as if he accepts. You want baptism?’
Cornelius gave a solemn nod. He was in full uniform as if on parade. ‘If you’d come inside—’
From the figtree a fig fell on to Thomas’s lap. He picked it up and began to undress it. It was red and ripe. He started to eat it, shaking his head. ‘A fig from a Roman tree in a Roman garden. Have I your permission, O Lord? Och, a bad business.’
The ceremony, performed by aspersion, took place in a small salt lake by the shore. Aspersion rather than immersion seemed in order. You did not ask men in uniform to get it all wet.
The name Cornelius had become common in Rome shortly after Publius Cornelius Sulla liberated ten thousand slaves and let them enrol in his own gens Cornelia. That had been some eighty years or so before Jesus was born. Things were different now. Slaves were property and only fools gave property away. For the seven-day sale of imperial property, which mingled slaves indifferently with golden chamber pots, Greek statuary, nags past their best, title deeds to distant fields of tare and hemlock, the Emperor, with an unwonted gust of shame, preferred to absent himself from the city. He witnessed some second-class games near Neapolis and rather admired the wrestling displays. The Jew Caleb, who called himself Metellus though nobody was taken in, was coming to the end of a provincial tour and, it was said, was now ripe for Rome. Caleb Metellus sent a Pannonian giant to the dust and broke the arm of a sneering Athenian. Gaius Caligula commended his performance. If Caleb had been in Rome, along with his Emperor, he would have been able to see his own sister up for sale in the market off the Via Sacra by the Forum. ‘Any advance on that?’ the auctioneer cried. ‘Good Syrian muscle there, not an ounce of fat.’ He referred to a scowling slave woodcutter. ‘Come, come, citizens, straight from the Emperor’s own household. No rubbish here. You can do better than that – did I hear two thousand five hundred?’ The Syrian’s scowl could not compare with that of Sara, who had contrived also to make one leg appear shorter than the other and twist her shoulders into a pose of paralysis.
‘A girl from Jerusalem, magic city of the East. Stand up straight, lass, wipe that dirty look off your face. A great joker, as you see, but speaks Latin and Greek, a real asset to any household. Broken in, if you gentlemen know what I mean. Who’ll start the bidding at five hundred sesterces? Seven hundred and fifty that noble senator there. Good day, my lord Lepidus. Anyone make it a thousand? Fifteen hundred? Nobody? Sold to the citizen in the green toga for one thousand. Gold and silver, please. No promissory notes. Emperor’s orders.’ Sara was led off scratching by an unknown buyer. He said nothing. He led her to a small park near the Vicus Patricius. Then he took a small shears from a pocket under his robe and began to cut off Sara’s chain. She looked down, astonished. Marcus Julius Tranquillus appeared from behind an umbrella pine. He said:
‘Thanks, Gracchus. I’ll see about getting the bangles off.’
Peter was considered by his colleagues in Jerusalem to have spent more time in Joppa than was necessary. They had a grave charge to raise against him, and he had reverted, they said, to being a fisher of fish and not of men. ‘I fished enough men there,’ he said, ‘and women too. There was plenty of work, believe me, and if I went back to my old trade it was to earn enough to get the work done. I couldn’t stay in the house of Simon the tanner any more, the stink was killing me, and I found my own lodgings. Lodgings cost money. I joined a kind of fish thing—’
‘Yes, that’s the word they used. Then I bethought me that I’d better come back here, though I liked the sea, good air, not like here, better come back here to see how things are going. After all,’ he said defensively, ‘I’m in charge.’
James the son of Zebedee forbore to say that he had himself taken charge of the church in Jerusalem. ‘Thomas,’ he said, ‘told us something rather disturbing.’
‘Where is Thomas?’
‘Thomas has gone south.’
‘South? What does that mean?’
‘He said he fancied travel before he was too old to take it. He left his good wishes. Whether he was to spread the word or not he wasn’t all that sure. Meditation under the sun, he said, whatever that meant. We’ll hear from him, he said.’ Both the two Jameses looked gravely at Peter. There were only three of the disciples left now in Jerusalem. The others assembled in the house of Matthias were mostly new converts, Pharisees chiefly, one or two robed priests among them. They looked even graver than the two Jameses. James the Little said to his namesake:
‘Shall I speak?’
‘Speak.’
‘Well, then. The story is that you’ve flown in the face of the law of Moses.’ Peter frowned ferociously. ‘Everything we practise is laid down in the scriptures, Peter. The law of Moses isn’t changed by the new law.’
‘What am I supposed to have done that flouts the law?’
‘You’ve eaten unclean food for a start. And you said that there was no such thing as unclean food. You claimed to have heard the voice of the Lord saying that everything was equally good – pigs, lobsters, for all I know toads and spiders—’
‘I had this dream,’ Peter said, ‘and it was a dream from God. You only have my word for it, but perhaps you’ve got beyond accepting the word of the rock on which the church is built. As for eating stuff with blood in it, yes, I did. It was in the house of this Roman that I baptised into the faith. What was I to do – scorn his hospitality?’
‘Yes,’ James son of Zebedee said. ‘You shouldn’t have been in his house in the first place. It was a Roman centurion, wasn’t it?’
‘It was,’ Peter said. ‘And he and his family and a lot of his men wanted to become Nazarenes. The grace of the Lord lit them up. I suppose the grace of the Lord had done wrong.’
‘We understood,’ a priest named Kish said, ‘that the destiny of Israel was being fulfilled with the coming of the Messiah. A Roman centurion seems rather remote from Israel, except of course for helping to bleed Israel dry and sending blasphemous statues to desecrate the holy city.’
‘What’s all this about blasphemous statues?’ Peter asked.
‘We’ll come to that later,’ Little James said. ‘One thing at a time.’
‘Very well,’ Peter said. ‘So a man has to have his foreskin sliced off before he can have the baptismal waters—’
‘That’s a crude way of putting it,’ Kish said. ‘Circumcision is the pledge of God’s choice of one people. That one people is redeemed by the coming of God’s son.’
‘So,’ Peter said, ‘I have to turn a Roman centurion into a Jew before I can turn him into a Nazarene?’
‘You can’t turn a man into a Jew,’ another priest named Nathan said. ‘You have to be born a Jew. And if you’re born a Jew then you can become a Nazarene. It’s as simple as that.’
‘And so,’ Peter said loudly, ‘we ignore the Gentiles? As I remember, we were told to get out over the whole damned world and take the message to whoever would listen, and no question of lifting their kirtles up to see if they were circumcised. And we were told nothing about being made unclean if we went into the houses of Gentiles. Damn it, the Lord himself was ready enough to go into the house of another Roman centurion to cure his servant or whoever it was.’
‘He didn’t go,’ James son of Zebedee said. ‘The centurion said he was unworthy, which he was—’
‘And the Lord,’ Peter cried, ‘said he hadn’t met such faith among the damned Israelites.’
‘We didn’t have to be told,’ Little James said, ‘about going into the houses of the unclean. We knew it already. It’s all laid down in the old law.’
‘Right,’ Peter said, breathing heavily. ‘So I baptise a dozen Roman soldiers who believe Jesus is the Son of God and I do wrong. Is that it? And I eat a piece of Roman beef and wash it down with a cup of Roman goat’s milk, and that’s wrong too. Is that it?’
‘Urrrgh,’ went someone in the assembly.
‘You gentry,’ Peter said, ‘seem to forget sometimes who was put in charge. He sends down a vision. And I accept the vision. And you say I’m wrong. I get the call to convert a gaggle of Romans. And that’s wrong too. You’re slow to learn. Poor young Stephen wasn’t slow. That’s why they killed him. Stephen saw that the old way was finished. Priests, synagogues, circumcision, the bill of fare laid down in Leviticus – the lot. We’re not what we used to be.’
‘I can’t take it in,’ James son of Zebedee moaned. ‘I can’t.’
‘Won’t is more like it. Some of this damned stubbornness has to be knocked out of you. And if the bloodstained Caligula himself saw the light and said he wanted to turn Nazarene – what do we do? Do we say no, your bloodstained majesty, you can’t be a Jew so you can’t be one of us, better go back to slicing heads off and having ten wives and buggering little boys? It strikes me you’ve all got a lot of rethinking to do.’
‘And how about the Temple?’ James the Little asked.
‘What about the Temple?’
‘Is it still our Temple? Do we join up with the Jews who aren’t Nazarenes and die for the Temple?’
‘Nobody,’ Peter said, ‘dies for a chunk of stone even though King Solomon himself raised it.’ Peter saw that the devil was in him today, but it seemed a clean and salutary devil. ‘When he could take time off from the Queen of Sheba and ten thousand concubines.’
‘This is all very unseemly,’ the priest Nathan said. ‘We did not expect such frivolity. The matters under discussion are of a considerable gravity.’
‘You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying, Peter,’ Little James said. ‘We’re still part of the history of the Jews. Which means we have to defend the Temple. He would have stood up there in the Temple with a whip – you know that.’
‘Defend the Temple against what?’ Peter was plainly bewildered. He had been away. All sighed.
‘The statue of the Emperor Caligula,’ John son of Zebedee said, ‘is waiting on the outskirts of the city. Surely you must have seen that?’
‘I saw a cart with troops and a load of Syrian slaves. There was something on the cart covered with a purple cloth. I didn’t think more about it. Some new Roman nonsense, I thought. So it’s the Emperor’s statue. Ah. You don’t mean—’
‘The Emperor has declared himself to be God,’ a priest named Nebat said, the rise and fall of his Galilean accent seeming to set the ghastly blasphemy to harmless music. ‘He demands that his effigy be placed in the Holy of Holies. We await the arrival of King Herod Agrippa to arrange for its installation. Or, we pray and hope, to make some statement which will save Judaea from bloodshed. He will probably merely temporise, so we hope and pray. He has become a pagan Roman and has long been a friend of the Emperor. But he is also of the faith of our fathers. One thing will doubtless now be fighting against the other. The Zealots are arming. He will not want bloodshed.’
‘Desecration, desecration, desecration,’ the priest Kish intoned.
‘Well,’ Peter said, ‘he said, he said – he said it’s not what goes in that makes a man dirty but what comes out. We’ve work to do. We can’t afford to be knifed or strung up on a cross – not yet awhile. We’ve work to do. I’m not going to be sliced by a Roman sword because I—’ He did not finish; he saw that he was going too far. ‘The statue of Gaius Caligula in the Temple. We can’t have that, oh no. What a filthy blasphemy.’ And then: ‘What’s all this about Agrippa being king? You mean king of Judaea?’
‘He’s already king of the other places,’ James son of Zebedee said. ‘Now he says he’s waiting for imperial confirmation of the greater appointment. The Emperor sent the procurator off to Syria. It looks as if Judaea’s going to have a king again. Not for long, though. He takes his choice of being butchered by the Romans or his own people.’
‘We have to speak out,’ Nebat sang. ‘We even have to take the lead in speaking out. We have the responsibility of an Israel fulfilled by the redemption of the anointed one. We are Israel’s true voice.’
‘And,’ Peter said, ‘we have to deny the first of our martyrs. We have to die for the Temple. There’s something wrong somewhere.’
‘It may not come to that,’ Little James said.
But next day, in the glare of noontime, a huge golden smirking effigy was unveiled before the eyes of a sullen people. It still stood on its cart, and it was insolently just outside the Temple precincts. It awaited a further brief and final journey. Troops from Caesarea had raised a forest of spears around it. None of the Zealots dared yet to strike. They only murmured or cursed.
Herod Agrippa, elegantly enrobed, was carried on a litter towards the holy city. At the city gates the senior members of the Sanhedrin awaited him, headed by Caiaphas. A choir sang one of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The mournful melisma accompanied the slow procession to the palace built by Herod the Great, at present untenanted. Herod Agrippa deigned to mount the exterior marble steps, each step long as a short street, on foot. The throneroom was dusty, but the throne had been dusted. He did not seat himself on the throne. He chose a humbler seat some yards away from it. This seat was dusty. A chamberlain dusted it with the edge of his robe. Herod Agrippa sat. The members of the Sanhedrin remained standing. To Caiaphas Herod Agrippa said:
‘I know the protocol, your eminence. Forgive my speaking Greek, by the way. My Aramaic needs – ah, dusting. I recognise,’ and he twanged off the like terminations with sardonic relish, ‘that my elevation requires imperial confirmation and the ratification of my coronation. You will know that I am king when I sit on that throne. I understand that a ship is just now putting in at Caesarea. It carries a particular document – with the imperial seal. In that document will be the imperial confirmation of Judaea’s restoration, God be praised, to the company of the kingdoms.’
‘A client kingdom,’ Caiaphas said.
‘The whole world acknowledges its clientage. Freedom has always been a relative term. Caesar is Caesar.’
‘As you are not yet quite the king of Judaea,’ Caiaphas said, ‘I can speak without excessive humility. If the statue of Caesar goes inside the Holy Temple of Jerusalem—’
‘The Jewish people will cut their throats. I know.’
‘The Jewish people will cut Roman throats first. And then accept their annihilation.’
‘Your eminence, be reasonable. The Emperor Gaius believes himself to be a god – indeed, to be the one and only god. You and I know that the Emperor is mad, but madmen have to be humoured. Place the statue within, as a gesture of acceptance of Roman rule, and no great harm is done. It can be regarded as a mere decoration.’
‘You must know the answer to that.’
‘I do know the answer. And therefore I temporise. Let the effigy stay where it is for a while. Put it about that it symbolises the deference of Caesar to the God of the Jews. Gaius the god acknowledges the existence of a greater than he. His statue stands at the border of the Temple precincts as a symbol of his fealty to the Lord God of Hosts. Put this around. Your people, my people, will be content to believe it.’
‘Put round a lie, you mean.’
‘What is truth? Let the people grow used to the imperial image. The next step may be deferred.’
‘For how long?’
‘Who knows? The next step will be to move the statue into the Temple precincts themselves. One step at a time. Habituated to its presence, even the Zealots will forget to object. Besides—’
‘Besides what?’
‘Nothing. Nothing for the moment.’
What Herod Agrippa may have been thinking and yet, for superstitious reasons, unwilling to state outright was that Gaius Caligula’s days might well be, as the saying has it, numbered. Caligula’s own dreams were telling him this, but he would pay no heed to them. Some of these recorded phantoms of his sleeping brain have been confused with recorded fact, so that some believe that the statue of Olympian Jupiter, on being removed from its immemorial plinth for transportation to Rome (so that Gaius could have his own grinning head substituted for the grave bearded visage of the father of the gods), burst into giant laughter and shook the scaffolding to collapse, so that the workmen ran away in terror. This was undoubtedly a fantasy of a sleeping and fuddled brain, like the one that woke the Emperor during the night before his assassination: he dreamt that he was standing before Jupiter’s celestial throne and the god kicked him with the great toe of his left foot (not his right, as some would have it) and sent him tumbling screaming back to earth. As for the assassination plot, this was contrived by Cassius Chaerea and Cornelius Sabinus, both military tribunes, and the chosen instrument for the act was none other than Marcus Julius Tranquillus, newly married, and deliriously happy in his bride, who was discovering that no man ever got anything for nothing. The three men had their conspiratorial meeting at the house of Cornelius Sabinus, in his study with its trellis shelves filled with scrolls, for he was a reading man. Cassius Chaerea said bitterly:
‘I could forgive the crimes. The crimes are nothing—’
‘Nothing?’ Sabinus said. ‘Rape, incest, mutilation, confiscation of property, arbitrary executions, buggery. Have you seen the list of them?’
‘You can’t make,’ Chaerea said, ‘a quantitative judgement. Accept the evil of the man and you must accept his killing of the entire world. What I cannot accept is humiliation—’
‘Your own humiliation?’
‘Well, I will say this. I am sick of his taunting me with effeminacy in public, calling me Venus indeed. At my age too. Sticking his middle finger out for me to kiss but keeping that finger always at the level of his crotch. It is sometimes small things, endlessly repeated, that will drive a man to madness. But no, I think of the humiliation inflicted on the military in general—’
‘The Guard or the legions?’
‘Can you separate one from the other? I refer to the pretence of the invasion of Britain that he proposes. A raid or two. A few prisoners. Himself to stay snug in his tent and impose on the army the lie that he led it to battle, to victory in the southern tribal areas. A triumphal procession back to Rome. The gathering of the seashells was bad enough, but this—’
‘And his successor?’
‘Can you doubt who? A good man who drinks his wine in the Praetorian mess like a soldier but never loses the sense of a seemly humility in the presence of his military betters. A safe man given to study. Indeed, the only man.’
Sabinus chewed on that for a moment and then he addressed Marcus Julius Tranquillus. ‘Centurion,’ he said, ‘you know now why I summoned you here.’
‘You propose a terrible thing.’
‘Oh yes, to kill a self-proclaimed god is undoubtedly terrible. Ask that charming bride of yours what she thinks of the lex talionis.’
‘I do not think I—’
‘Come, man, the law of retribution. You’ve told us all about her sister’s being lashed to death. If the enormity of striking Caesar chills you, think of the referred satisfaction of familial revenge. Anyway, you won’t be alone. Who killed the divine Julius your namesake? In effect, a whole perturbed and apprehensive nation. Your hand will not be your own hand. Besides, we shall have our daggers too.’
‘But I,’ Marcus Julius Tranquillus said, ‘will be the only paid assassin. That sum, when I can save it, will be repaid with interest into the Praetorian funds—’
‘Forget that, man. The freeing of a slave of Caesar’s was itself a blow against Caesar.’ He poured some wine for the three of them. ‘So we drink to it then and bind ourselves with the pledge.’
‘Where and when?’ Chaerea asked.
Before the last banquet of Gaius Caligula a Jew named Caleb who called himself Metellus strode, in Roman tunic and leather wristbands, towards the imperial kitchens. He had at last arrived at the previously unattainable, namely the Palatine, because he was due to appear before the Emperor again, though this time at a private party, in a wrestling bout with a golden Greek of immense strength named Philemon. A whole troupe of imperial entertainers had assembled early in an antechamber to the banqueting hall – Parthian swordswallowers, dancers from the island of Lesbos, Syrian musicians with gongs, shawms and zithers, a small pride of performing lions, a pair of young panthers, one of them a female on heat, which would copulate in public when their well separated cages were opened on the round tiled floor of performance. The human performers had been fed weak wine and kickshawses, and Caleb followed one of the servants back to the kitchens, first having asked him a question he was not well able to answer, having had his larynx removed. So he strode into the great fiery hell where innumerable fantastic dishes were being given their final touches of ornamentation. An undercook accosted Caleb at once and, lifting an iron skillet in threat, said out. ‘You have two slaves here,’ Caleb said. ‘Girls from Palestine.’ This he did not know, but it seemed a fair guess. Get out. Here, Bubo, throw him out. Bubo was a surly boily man who was scraping pans before washing them. He advanced on Caleb with a vast jellymould of copper. Caleb showed his muscle and Bubo growled. An old crone scouring a baking dish showed to Caleb an open mouth with few teeth. She said: Palestine? ‘You know who I mean?’ Caleb asked trembling now. Well, it’s a bitof a long story—
Cassius Chaerea and Cornelius Sabinus were guests at the banquet. When he entered with his freedman Aufidius, who carried a leather bag with the imperial whip undoubtedly in it, Gaius Caesar, who had perhaps seen these two wading in blood in a dream, said: ‘Fear not, gentlemen. I’ll get you before you get me.’ Then he giggled. He reclined without grace and bade the first course be served. It was some fantastic monstrosity – perhaps pastry moulded in the shape of newborn babies with minced lark brain protruding from the anus – and called on his uncle Claudius to recite something. Claudius rose with dignity, pushing his couch back to give standing room, and, with very little stuttering, announced that he would deliver a passage from an unknown philosopher. The passage was as follows.
‘He who is all powerful is free to perform both good and evil acts. And because ggggood is harder to perform than evil, he will best show his ppppower in the enactment of good. He who pppperforms nothing but evil is clearly enslaved to evil and has forfeited his power of choice. The evil ruler is no ruler at all.’
He sat to an uneasy silence. Gaius Caligula said: ‘Who wrote that? The fool Seneca? One of the bleating followers of the slave Chrestus? I hope I do not hear the ring of treason in it.’
Claudius, back on his feet, said calmly: ‘An unknown philosopher, as I said. About fifty years of age with no wealth but a wealth of white hair.’ And, having thus made the identification, he reclined with a certain grace on his couch. Gaius Caligula said:
‘You’ve become quite agile with your tongue, Uncle Claudius. Are you as agile with your body? I’ve a mind to see you strip off and wrestle. I like an occasional bout of – what’s the term? – ah yes, gerontomachia.’
‘Alas, I’m-a slow mover, Caesar,’ Claudius said. ‘I limp, nephew, I claudicate, as my name proclaims. I could afford you little sport.’
‘Anyway,’ Gaius Caligula said, ‘old as you are, you’re not quite old enough. Let’s have the really old. You, sir – and you.’ He addressed two ancient senators, bald, toothless, emaciated.
‘We would rather not, Caesar,’ the less ancient, though there was little in it, said.
‘Dravernotsheezer,’ the Emperor mocked. ‘Come on, reverend sirs. Entertain your master. No prize for the winner. But for the loser an eternal crown. Eternal darkness, I mean. Una nox dormienda. Strip them, Aufidius.’ So the two ancients were rudely rendered totally naked to only imperial laughter. They stood bewildered facing each other. ‘Fight, come on, fight, you gerontomachoi. I demand sport.’ They engaged in a show of earnest. The son of one of them, an importer of wild beasts named Licinius Calvinus, stood to protest but was swiftly dragged back to his couch by his burly wife. ‘Must I get my whip to you?’ called Gaius Caligula. ‘Oh, signs of a misspent youth. Too much gloomy philosophy. Not enough cultivation of the pride of the flesh. Fight.’ They grappled arthritically. The younger was blue at the lips. He fell with both hands on his heart. ‘That looks to me like cheating, reverend sirs. That looks to me like natural death. Oh, take them away,’ he cried petulantly. ‘Bring on the professionals. I wish to see blood.’ He was at least seeing a simulacrum of it, for the second course was an innominate crimson pudding containing heaven knew what. Licinius Calvinus came to drag his father away: he was not dead, merely feigning to be. It was now that the imperial master of ceremonies ordered on the Jew Caleb, somewhat dazed with the news he had heard, and the golden Greek Philemon. They made formal obeisance to the Emperor and then started to grapple. Hot butter squirted, by a quaint device, out of the blood-coloured pudding. Gaius Caligula laughed to see the exquisite Lollia Paulina’s exquisite face embuttered. Then he watched the wrestling with critical care. He was not satisfied; he was seeing no blood. ‘Take that golden giant away,’ he called. ‘Reserve him for my bed. It’s a long time since I’ve been as it were punitively sodomised. Now, you, sir, your Emperor will show you how to fight. Aufidius – puss puss puss, miauuuu.’ Aufidius took out of his leather bag a beautifully made catmask of Sicilian workmanship and a pair of catskin gloves with pointed claws. Gaius Caligula turned himself into an unagile cat, an overfed tom, left his couch and advanced on Caleb. Caleb was disconcerted. He stood and allowed the Emperor to gash his arms. He looked at the catmarks welling blood and wondered what to do. There was a rumble of talk from the couched watchers and he could not guess at its meaning. ‘Come, boy. Miauuuuu. Grrrrr.’ The Emperor struck at Caleb’s left eye, missed, caught his left temple. Caleb saw with astonishment what looked like a falling curtain of blood, and then let his sister Ruth enter his body. He circled, wiping the blood off, and Gaius Caligula, complaining breathily of unfairness, found himself scratching at empty air. He caught Caleb’s cheek with a lucky lunge, squealing in triumph, and then found himself pinioned from behind, flailing in impotence. ‘Unfair,’ he tried to yell. ‘Let me go! Make him let me go! Kill him!’ Caleb had the vainly scratching Caligula off his feet in an easy lift, and the little boots kicked at nothing. Then he dropped him. The Emperor did not resume his catplay. Instead he called for Aufidius to kill, kill. Cornelius Sabinus stood and yelled:
‘No!’
The tone of authority took even Gaius Caligula by surprise. Caleb ran off. The Emperor saw more inimical faces than had ever before dared to unmask. He tore his own mask off and grumbled: ‘Spoilsports. No sense of humour. The banquet is finished.’ He left with unimperial speed, his sycophants after, their hands making apologetic gestures to the statues, pillars with their garlands, uneaten dishes. Claudius looked at Cornelius Sabinus, his mouth open in a nervous rictus, desirous of saying something but his speech organs unable to engage.
Gaius Caligula would have been wise to remove to Antium that night. Masquerading as a cat gave him none of a cat’s instincts. He went to the theatre the following morning to watch a mimed comedy entitled Laureolus, at the end of which the protagonist, a leader of a gang of highway robbers, died while vomiting copious blood. Following the custom of the time, the action was comically exaggerated by the performers in a kind of antimasque, who filled the stage with apparently regurgitated red syrup. Gaius Caligula, having prematurely brought the banquet to an end the previous night, had later declared himself hungry and had gorged on a cold grouse pie with pickled gherkins. The sight of stage blood now made him feel sick though unable to vomit. Perhaps he needed to settle his stomach with a light luncheon. He could not make up his mind. His uncle Claudius was with him on his orders: some instinct, not quite feline, was warning him not to let Claudius out of his sight for too long. Claudius last night had not behaved like a fool; the nephew had heard like an aureole round the uncle’s voice the hollow echo of the senate chamber. Claudius now said to him: ‘Give your stomach a rest. Come for a little walk.’
‘It’s too cold to walk.’ It was too, a week from the end of the month of January.
‘The ccccovered way.’ Meaning the enclosed passage that led from the auditorium to the actors’ greenroom. They walked – Gaius, Claudius, the actor Mnester, a handful of nameless effeminates. In the passage Gaius Caligula was charmed to see a rehearsal of a Trojan wardance by a group of noble youths who had recently come from one of the Asian provinces. ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Most exquisitely done. We will have a special performance this afternoon.’
‘I’m not at my best, Caesar,’ one of the youths frankly said. ‘I have a bad attack of the rheum. Rome is a cold city.’
‘Sometimes at this season,’ Gaius Caligula said kindly. ‘You will see if you stay with us, and you are most welcome, a glorious spring and a summer whose heat is sometimes insupportable.’ Chaerea and Sabinus now appeared from a passage set at right angles to the covered way, part of the first cohort of the Praetorian Guard behind them. This was led by a senior centurion whose face the Emperor knew well. He trembled, perhaps with ague, as he slapped his chest in salute. It was not cold enough to shiver. Sabinus said with deference:
‘Caesar, what is today’s watchword?’
‘Oh, that. Let us say Jupiter.’
‘By Jupiter, now!’ Chaerea cried. Marcus Julius Tranquillus drew his dagger and struck his Emperor in the ribs. The point seemed to meet resistant bone, but Gaius Caligula staggered and turned. Chaerea struck out and split the imperial jawbone. Sabinus brought two conjoined fists down on the Emperor’s head. The Emperor fell, yelling through blood: ‘You can’t do it! I’m immortal!’ Then the entire cohort drew swords and fought each other to get their thrusts in, thirty all told, the thirtieth in the genitals. The imperial litter bearers struck out in loyalty though feebly with their litter poles. The German bodyguard came in running, slashing whoever was in their way. Cornelius Sabinus was slashed to the wristbone. The Germans, howling from the pits of their throats, were fought off. Caesar lay in his blood. Chaerea pulled away the imperial purple robe, sending the corpse rolling. He looked for Claudius. All looked for Claudius. Claudius had taken shelter behind one of the painted drapes (the one of the rape of Lucrece) that lined the passageway. The Praetorians saw the drape that bulged tremulously and, violent impulses not yet abated, yanked it off its rod. It billowed about Claudius, who went kkkk. Chaerea went up to him with the purple.
The news took less than a month to reach Caesarea. An officer had been sent from Syria to act as a temporary procurator pending the confirmation of Herod Agrippa’s elevation to monarch of Judaea. He, Junius Saturninus, stood on the quay with Cornelius and a maniple. They expected one or two messages: the confirmation, the renewal of the order to trundle that statue into the Holy of Holies, under pain of instant execution for—names need not be specified. What was not expected was news of Caligula’s assassination. After all, it had been a rule of merely three years and ten months, and the Emperor was only twenty-nine years old, with a lot of villainy still in front of him. An officer courier or frumentarius could be seen as the ship eased in, clearly fretful at the delay in fitting the gangplank. He ran down it and handed a sealed scroll to Junius Saturninus.
‘Here, you open it,’ the temporary procurator said to Cornelius.
Cornelius read trembling and said: ‘Thank God. Four men to ride at once to Jerusalem. You, you, you, you.’
‘What news?’
‘No more trouble about that statue.’
Thirty miles from Caesarea to Jerusalem. At sunset the speared guard dispersed and left the smashing of the effigy to the Zealots. It crashed first into the dust and, when their hammers and cudgels got to work on it, it was found to be not pure gold but rather inferior stone with a beaten gold masking fitted on to it. This gold was melted into an ingot which was eventually turned into Temple money. That was no happy ending to a bad story, since there is no end to anything except doomsday. Zealotry became more watchful, better organised, spending Caesar’s money on arms. The failure of the Jerusalem Nazarenes to betray more than a lukewarm concern about the proposed defiling of the Temple did them no good, and the appearance of Cornelius in the city, to bid farewell to Peter before his retirement from the service, signalled the growing separation of the new faith from the old. A dirty Roman, uncircumcised, kneeling for the blessing of one who had been born a good Galilean Jew. Herod Agrippa awaited a new Emperor’s confirmation of his kingship and, having narrowly evaded one kind of blasphemy, learnt that one of his tasks was to put down another.