To my shame I observe that it is just one year since I began this unhandy chronicle, and the new May is no better than the old. Rain, cold, rheum, and the grass too wet for scything. Of my bodily ailments I will say nothing, except to blame them for the long intermission of my task, for I had to travel to Mediolanum to consult a Sicilian physician reputed to have skill in healing diseases of the lower bowel, but he could do little for me except prescribe a blander diet than I am accustomed to and to advise that I not fight overmuch a chronic constipation which, he said, at least relieves through inaction the irritability of the nether tissues and—But what have you to do with this? You have your own troubles. Nevertheless, as body and mind are a unity, some deficiencies in my writing, and in the memory that serves it, have to be ascribed to an intestinal sluggishness that afflicts flesh and brain alike. I bring a headache daily to my desk, lowering myself delicately to the cushions of my chair, and the pain thrusts like a knife into my syntax. Also I suffer from failure to recall with the right precision the details of my multiple story, which is founded on what I have heard at one time and another and can hardly at all be checked through reference to documents of proven authenticity. And then I wonder about the utility of what I am doing, since I tell of a dead time and a dead faith and have no inner image of a possible readership. But, with a kind of hopelessness, I proceed.
I am now into the imperiate of Tiberius Claudius, who came to the purple at the advanced age of fifty and seemed to have little to recommend him except the referred glory of his brother Germanicus, for he was weak of body, shivered even in the heat, limped and stuttered and had cocooned his mind for too long in useless scholarship, as he cocooned his cold body in wool. What amazed the people and the Senate on his accession was the rigour of his sense of justice, which demanded open trial and subsequent execution for the assassins of his predecessor Gaius Caligula. Marcus Julius Tranquillus, who had struck the first blow, was for a time in mortal terror, but it was conceded that what he had done he had done under instruction, was a mere limb obedient to the controlling intelligence of his superiors, and so punishment was not truly in order. But Julius suffered in other ways.
Many a night he dreamt of the terror stricken face of Gaius as the dagger was raised, of the stuck-pig scream as the point pierced and the blood oozed, and he sometimes awoke his wife with his yelling. He and Sara were living in a small rented house on the Janiculum, from whose tiny garden the whole of the city could be seen. It was on a January morning that he had his twentieth nightmare and was glad to awaken from it to the wintry light and the protective arms of Sara who, despite her unfailing sympathy, was growing a little sick of these dreams.
‘The same?’ she asked, and he nodded, scooping sweat from his forehead. ‘But you had to do it,’ she said.
‘It had to be done. It was the only thing to do. So why should I have bad dreams? Perhaps I was never intended to be a killer.’
‘Meaning a soldier.’
They lay quite naked, holding each other under the loosely woven wool coverlet. ‘To kill barbarians isn’t quite the same,’ Julius said. ‘Not that I’ve ever killed any. Part of Rome’s civilising mission.’ He spoke with irony. She did not understand the Latin phrase he used. Though now a sort of Roman, the Roman tongue was still a foreign dress to her, like the belted long kirtle she wore out of doors and the upcombed hairstyle she disdained: her black hair flowed over the white wool. ‘We have to discipline the lesser breeds.’ Those words she understood: she had heard them in Jerusalem. She said:
‘To kill is to kill. Life is supposed to be sacred.’
‘All life? The life of a Gaius?’
‘The Nazarenes would say that even Caligula’s life was precious to God.’ She thought about that and shrugged it away. Julius kissed her brown shoulder. He said:
‘Soon I may have to kill Britons.’
‘What are Britons?’
‘Tribes who live in a northern land, twenty sea miles off Gaul. I saw its chalk cliffs. What Gaius wished to pretend to do Claudius says he will do in all truth. Men with yellow hair and long moustaches. Barbarians. Their speech is all bar bar bar. They have to be brought under Roman rule and made to take baths.’
‘Palestine to the east and these people to the north. Everything under Rome.’ She yawned. He had wakened her too early.
‘This is your destiny, O Romans – put down the arrogant, spare the meek. Vergil wrote that. And yet the peoples we conquer and rule are sometimes less of children than we are. The Greeks have philosophy and you have a religion. All we have is troops, games, roads and orgies.’
‘I trust you don’t voice these ideas in the officers’ mess.’
‘I was never cut out to be a soldier perhaps. I just follow the family tradition. But what else can I do?’
‘What time are you on duty?’
‘Noon.’
‘Today is our Sabbath. I’d forgotten. You make me forget too much. Another Roman conquest.’
‘Hardly.’
For it was she who proffered the first embrace. Jesus Naggar was said to have sanctified the coupling of man and woman not only through the institution of what he termed holy matrimony but in the affirmation of its essential privacy: ‘Even God himself,’ he once said, ‘turns his eyes away from the embraces of lovers.’ Have I then the right to look on as these two kiss, stroke and moan beneath the coverlet? Yet I find that the contemplation of their ecstasy is, in a manner, therapeutic: it draws the blood away from my suffering zones and feeds glands too long sunk in hebetude. At it, then. Mingle your salivas, happy pair, feel the excitation of the membranes of your lips provoke, as in the sympathy of the unstruck lyre string for the string struck, the tingling of other membranes and soon a demented act of obedience to the goddess which culminates in a vocable of prayer in a universal language. This is religious enough: the fire of a sort of beneficent hell transformed into a heaven from which God is absent, and then the coolness of a limbo whose name is gratitude. Venus exists, whatever the rabbis say. This was as good a celebration of the Sabbath as any.
Those who took the Sabbath more seriously, that is to say devoted it to God, were at their synagogues, which were mostly decent edifices built in the Roman style out of the wealth of Jewish merchants and the pennies of the Jewish poor. In more than one synagogue that day there was trouble. The Nazarenes were at it, preaching the gospel of God’s fleshly son and his doctrine of universal love. In the synagogue that stood not far from the Theatre of Marcellus there was a particularly eloquent votary of the Christ, probably that Matthew who had been a tax gatherer. There were the usual cries of blasphemy, stone him, this is an abomination before the Lord, but one distinguished and moderate Jew named Eliab bar Henon stood, prayed silence in a loud voice, and said:
‘Brothers, what you call blasphemies and abominations are no new thing to us whom exile has driven to Rome. For we are surrounded by worse blasphemies and abominations than have been spoken. These are still, I would suggest, a matter for debate and cogitation, whereas the horrors of Roman paganism are the furniture of our daily lives. We tolerate them and, tolerating them, we ourselves are tolerated. But there have been instances lately of unseemly brawls and stonings outside our sacred edifices, of harm offered to what to many of the orthodox seem to be the diabolic agents of a heterodoxy so harmful that the very archangels must stuff wing-feathers in their ears so as not to hear. Now how must all this seem to the pagan Romans? It must seem that the Jews are become an unruly lot who have outlived their welcome. And how will the Romans respond to what they will term Jewish disorder? They will, at best, exact heavier taxes, at worst proscribe our faith as inimical to Roman order. Therefore I beg you to listen to these heretical doctrines, as you will name them, in calm of spirit and the desire to offer no more than intellectual or theological opposition. Let these men say their say, and let them be answered in a cool spirit of debate. Then let them depart in peace. I speak thus not to the end of saving their skins but rather to the end of saving ours. I have done.’ Then he sat down again.
His reasonable words had little effect among the hotter and less tolerant of the assembled brethren. These resumed their vilifications and some of them went outside to gather stones. But Eliab bar Henon spoke sense and better truth than he knew. One thing he could not know was that a respectable pagan senator named Licinus Novatus, taking the air not far from the Ara Pacis on the Campus Martius, was shortly to be mobbed by a gang of young Jewish reprobates, who swore he was the heretic teacher Azaniah bar Jeshua. If there was a likeness it could only be most superficial, for Licinus Novatus was beardless and short-haired and wore no Jewish garment. But a number of Nazarenes had put off the habiliments of the Jewish people, and some of these renegade Jews were Greeks, who had been indifferent to matters of external distinction. The mob of bearded youth had been driven off and trounced, but Licinus Novatus, who had not been seriously hurt and despised the vindictiveness of the law, a Stoic too and a friend of Seneca, had not wished to take the matter further. But when, outside a synagogue at the foot of the Janiculum, there was an antinazarene riot that resulted in the accidental breaking of the head of a Roman child out walking with his nurse, this question of the unruliness of the Jews became a matter for senatorial debate.
The Emperor Claudius had his enemies in the Senate. One of them, a certain C. Silvius Rusticus, delivered a long speech against him in his presence, before a packed house, but his chief theme was more radical than the one of the obstreperousness of the Jewish community. He said:
‘It is well known that the imperial designate has bribed the army into the sustention of his irregularly conferred status. The Senate has still to confirm it, and I doubt if the Senate will. Our recent experience with emperors leads many of us – and I would say a majority – to a wholly reasonable desire for the restoration of the republic. As a republic Rome flourished and will flourish again. As an imperial monarchy it has been disgraced, bathed in the blood of the innocent, and its slaughterous stink will not easily be expunged.’
There was loud applause, as also a noise of objection. The Emperor rose and was greeted with some boos, but the thrust-out jaws and bristling spears of his military escort silenced the more timid. Claudius said:
‘Honourable senators. It is with gggggreat ddddiffidence that I that I—’
His stutter set off farmyard noises from the white-robed dignitaries farthest from the military escort. Claudius grew red and his neck swelled noticeably. By some temporary miracle his speech impediment was almost completely quelled and he spoke with clarity and vigour, saying:
‘Yes – those among you who greeted with silence or even approbation the excesses of Tiberius Caesar and Gaius Caligula Caesar are quick enough to find schoolboy pppppleasure in my oratorical limitations. I address cowards, self-seekers, murderers, nonentities, ready enough to cringe at the tyrant’s whip but not at all willing to see that the sickness of Rome can be cured only by a change of heart, not by a mere adjustment of its pppppolitical constitution. You see standing before you the physician, nay the surgeon who will administer the emetic and excise the ulcer. Rome will be what it was – a polity in which no man need fear injustice, its capital a city in which men may walk freely at night, its people united in a return to Roman virtue and the worship of the Roman gods, untainted by effeminacy or Oriental pollutions. And I call for a wider ccccconcept in the defining of the very term Roman. Those who subscribe to the Roman ethos – whether from Gaul or Germany or Asia – may call themselves true Romans—’
There was an outcry at that, but Claudius rode bravely over it.
‘The Romanisation of the Gauls has already begun, and with what consequence? That we have not had to raise the sword in Gaul against dissidence or rebellion. I look forward to seeing Gauls in this noble Senate—’
C. Silvius Rusticus got up, sneering. Claudius was not sorry for the interruption. His throat rasped and, without the swig of barley water he now took covertly from a flask, might collapse in grotesque cawings. He had more to say, but Rusticus was now saying:
‘Take it further, Caesar. Fill the Senate with Oriental riffraff that despises the ancient Roman virtues and spits on the Roman gods. Make Rome the mongrel centre of a mongrel empire. Bring in the bearded Jews muttering prayers to their tribal deity. Conquer Britain only that the blue-bottomed oystercrackers, covered with lice and stinking of the dogskins which barely conceal their nakedness, may mouth their barbarities in this noble house and defile its sempiternal marble.’
There were loud roars of approval. Claudius wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and cried:
‘Like too many professional rhetoricians the noble senator emits more noise than sense. Britain will be conquered, yes, but it will be many years before it can be converted into more than a sullenly obedient tributary. As for the Jews – they are not wanted in Rome.’
At last he had the Senate’s near total approbation. Not the least among those who fisted their palms and cried aye aye aye were the improvident who had mortgaged their estates to Jewish moneylenders.
‘The Jews,’ continued Claudius, ‘cannot or will not assimilate to the Roman way of life. With their sectarian squabblings they are a disgrace to public order. They are a wandering race. Let them wander back to Palestine or to other of the barbarous places of the Orient. Whether they worship their own god or the deified slave Chrestus – both blasphemies against Rome – they will be content to find a Jewish king awaiting them. A king appointed by Rome. They will continue to belong to Rome but at a salutary distance. They will pay their taxes but will not nauseate us with their superstitious piety and their lack of discipline. And if that is not policy acceptable to the Senate, then the Senate is unworthy to advise its Emperor.’
On principle there were some catcalls, but there were also some cheers. Claudius turned to look at the leader of his bodyguard, in whose gripe the swordhilt had been relaxed. He nodded with quiet self-approval. The Jews were a useful people. An excellent device of loyal unification.
Herod Agrippa I, his unseemly fatness hidden in purple and gold, was borne on a litter towards the Temple. Before him walked the elders of the faith. Before them strode the discoursers of solemn festal music, the players of sackbuts and citherns and the thumpers of drums of various sizes. Alleluia. Judaea greeted its monarch. He was to ascend to the immemorial sacring place of millennia of kings, there to be endued with the robe and crown of rule. The people roared his name in jubilation. He acknowledged without smiles their plaudits, being, as he had to admit to himself, not well in his body, the salves and potions administered by his physicians having induced only a nausea and a thumping of the heart that was out of phase with the triumphant drums. He would have preferred to be in bed.
On the outer fringe of the crowd that filled the Temple precincts, whipped away from the path of the procession by guards in newly polished breastplates, Peter stood with James the son of Zebedee. James said: ‘This should quieten the Zealots. They have what they want at last.’
But it was like a dissatisfied Zealot that Peter spoke. ‘Don’t you believe it. It’s only Rome in fancy dress. The worst of both worlds, if you want my opinion. Roman arrogance and priestly intolerance. At last he gives our enemies an official whip.’
‘Do we wait for the whip?’ James asked. ‘Or do we travel?’
‘Some of us travel. Some of us stay where we are.’
The royal procession was mounting the streetwide steps to the great portal. The musicians had ceased to play. Voices of men and boys intoned an anthem within. Herod Agrippa I was carried to his crowning. He would be glad when it was all over.
The Jews had not yet been driven back from Rome to their royal homeland. The expected act had still to be promulgated. But those Jews who had official if lowly positions in the state – treasury accountants, municipal functionaries – were being summarily dismissed. Some of these had pretended to be indigenous Romans, ready to prove their respectable paganism by sacrificing to the gods, but there was much grim lifting of kirtles; certain things could not be dissimulated. In one of the imperial gymnasia Caleb alias Metellus looked sadly for the last time as he believed on wrestlers and gladiators in training. He snuffed the lively sweat and heard the thump of falling bodies as the games editor kindly broke the bad news.
‘It’s like this, Metellus – or do you want to be called by your real name?’
‘There’s no further point in pretence, is there?’
‘If you were rich, like one of those fatbellied usurers, well, you know what you could do. Buy it. Not officially, of course. But it’s being done. Her whorish majesty the Empress Messalina is making a quiet fortune. It’s never been known before – citizenship for sale.’
‘Well,’ Caleb said, ‘so much for a promising athletic career.’
‘I’d keep you on, you know that – Greek, Jew or blackamoor makes no difference to me. You have the qualities, boy – but it’s more than my job’s worth. They’ve got it in for you people.’
‘You know why I came to Rome,’ Caleb said.
‘To half-throttle the Emperor. Well, you did that. No, I know. Do you know the name of the man?’
‘An army man, that’s all they could tell me. Talk about – what’s the word – pollution they’d call it back home. A Roman marrying a Jew.’
‘That turns her into a Roman. She’s safe anyway. And don’t start this talk about clean and dirty blood with me, son. All blood’s the same. I’ve seen enough of it to know. I’m as good a Sicilian Arab Roman as you’ll find anywhere. There’s nothing wrong with being a Roman. So there it is. Sorry. Good luck.’
He shook hands with Caleb, a decent nut-brown man with a nose like a beak, his former muscle settling to middle-aged fat. Then he shuffled on his worn sandals through the sand towards the new Pannonian giant, seven feet if he was an inch, who was waiting to be taught how to gouge out eyes and break fingers. Caleb sadly left.
He walked sadly through the lively streets, set in the habit of hopelessly looking for her. Women. Roman matrons of the patrician class on curtained litters, beggars cawing for alms, the occasional white-bangled wrist revealed from the curtains, throwing a coin. Crones selling figs. Pert Roman girls giggling among themselves. He passed through one of the lesser markets, where mimosa was on sale and crocuses in small tubs, and lowly housewives did their own shopping for carcases of young lamb, wine-red joints of beef, little birds, palm grapes and fat gourds. There was a woman chaffering with a vendor much in the lively manner of Jerusalem. He could see her only from the back; her black hair flowed. A lump like hard bread filled his throat. He was ready to call ‘Sara!’ but it was not Sara. What was he to do now? Join the beggars? He was sturdy, young, employable, but he was a Jew. Perhaps outside the city, in the farmlands where a man could work as a day-labourer and nobody was interested in checking on the covenant with Jehovah, he might find dull work with plough or hoe. As well take ship for Palestine if he were to abandon his quest in the city. He saw and heard a tuneless street-singer. Sing us one of the songs of Zion. He tried a limp: old soldier, lady, hacked at by dirty Jews in a far place, serving the Empire. But he was not old. He was hungry, though. When a loaf-seller turned his back to take two-pound loaves from his basket behind the stall, Caleb snatched a plain bun from the pile unattended. He shoved it beneath his Roman cloak. There was plenty of free water spurting from the Roman fountains. A few streets away he sat in the mild sun not far from a tentmaker who seemed to be of his own race, though neither spoke greeting to the other. Caleb munched his dry bun and later had a couple of mouthfuls of spring water. God knew what he was to do about the future.
Paul’s future began. He sat in the sun stitching at his tentwork on the main street of Tarsus and saw a man he was sure he knew looking lost in the crowd. He sightlessly stepped into an ample mound of camel dung, cursed soundlessly, removed his sandal and hopped to the wall, where he began scraping off the ordure with a bit of shard. Paul thought the man had been thinner when he knew him in Jerusalem. He could not remember the name, but then the word encouragement swam into his head. That was it: son of encouragement. ‘Barnabas,’ he called. Barnabas smiled and hopped towards him, his sandal not yet wholly clean. ‘I wondered,’ Paul said, ‘when somebody would come.’
‘It’s been a long time,’ Barnabas said, shaking the proffered hand, the fingers hard from the pressing of the bone needle.
‘Not too long to learn. Read. Think. Preach a little. But I have to confess to a certain impatience. Life is not long, even when it’s everlasting.’
Barnabas nodded. Epigrams, subtleties, paradoxes. He would have to shed all that when he—‘I made the mistake of going to your parents’ house. They turned the dog loose. I’ve come from Antioch. You and I are to work together there. You know the place?’
‘I’ve been there twice. But not in my new incarnation. A town full of prostitutes.’
‘They prefer to call themselves servants of the goddess. But believe it or not, it’s the Gentile pagans who want conversion. Not the Jews.’
‘I believe it. Pagans don’t have prejudices.’
‘Well, there’s no trouble about preaching the coming of a messiah when they don’t even know what a messiah is. They understand Kyrios and they understand soter and they understand Christos. They call us Christianoi. That’s our name now, Christians.’
‘You look well fed. I see no bruises. The work goes well, does it?’
‘I need help.’
Paul made a vague noise of discontent. ‘No arguments, no theological engagements. Clay, not stone. Like that, is it?’
‘We preach to the Jews first. That’s laid down. But there are a fair number of halfway Jews – you know, those who want God without having to have their prepuces torn off to get him. A lot of those come to the synagogue and when they hear about Christos they see that’s the answer.’
‘I never thought of the new way as a compromise,’ Paul said. ‘What do you preach – redemption from sin and the need for brotherly love?’
‘I preach the essence of the faith,’ Barnabas said. ‘And love is the essence. Of course, you have to redefine the word. For a lot of them it’s tied up with the goddess and what the Romans call Daphnici mores.’
‘I don’t think I know the expression.’
‘The morality of Daphne, Daphne being this place about five miles out of the city where they worship Astarte or Artemis or Diana or whatever she’s called. I can’t see much difference between her and Venus or Aphrodite. You worship fertility and you have a big-breasted earth mother, but then you leave fertility to nature and worship what they call the act of love. You’ll see the place.’
‘I’ve seen it already. Do you preach the resurrection?’
‘The resurrection of Christos? Well, that’s the cornerstone, isn’t it?’
‘I mean our resurrection. If he rose again we rise again. If he took his flesh to heaven we take ours. And I don’t mean cart our bones and guts up to the sky. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, Barnabas. It’s a subtle business. The flesh is transfigured. We don’t join the angels, who’ve never known the flesh. We’re a new order – those of us who are saved, of course.’
Barnabas sighed. ‘They’re simple people. They understood about sin and love and redemption. I don’t think they’re ready for anything deeper. Not yet.’
Paul had been stitching away, his eyes on his thoughts, his fingers displaying a skill independent of their master. ‘When do we leave?’ he asked.
‘As soon as you’re ready. I have passage money. It’s a big city, Antioch, third biggest in the world. There’s plenty of wealth there. No trouble about money.’
‘We don’t trudge overland then. A quick boat across the bay.’
‘You’re ready?’
‘Spare sandals and a spare gown. I’ve been sleeping over the shop here. I must make my farewells. Pedaiah, the man I’ve been working for, he has a rather good young apprentice. I won’t be missed.’
At Daphne, on the borders of the Syrian desert, there stood a pagan temple well endowed with pagan money. It was dedicated to the goddess Astarte, whose effigy in gold, an opulent bas-relief twenty feet high, was nailed to the brickwork of the façade. This effigy was fanciful, and the ample body of the deity was studded with breasts supernumerary to the bountiful pair which linked her to her mortal votaresses and, indeed, to the blessed virgin Mary mother of the Christ. All round the building, twelve feet above the eye of the beholder, were incised representations of the erotic act, man with woman but never man with man nor woman with woman. The holiness of the act in its generative aspects might seem thus to be proclaimed, but only one image showed the frank thrust of male sword into female scabbard, the others glorifying a variety of fancies whose end was not natural fructification – anal, buccal, axillary, intercrucial penetrations, kisses of gross ingenuity, appetites bordering on the cannibalistic. This was Greek and Syrian work, and it pointed the large difference between the Hebrew concept of the purpose of the divinely implanted sexual urge, which was to people the tribes and fill the land with soldiers and herdsmen, and the more sophisticated impulses of the cities of Asia and the Mediterranean, where the means was exalted over the end and the means was encouraged to exfoliate in a diversity of forms bounded only by the restrictions of anatomy. So that the goddess of many breasts, who had once stood for fertility, stood now instead for ecstasies unrelated thereto. She could not be Venus, who is, as Lucretius reminds us, the divinity of rutting beasts as well as of philoprogenitive humanity, and beasts know nothing of ecstasies which transcend the simple needs of biology. So the goddess was Astarte or Ashtaroth or was Hellenised to Artemis and Romanised to Diana. Diana, of course, was a virgin goddess, but virginity could be glossed as a state disdainful of the generative end of love. Love, as Barnabas had said, needed, in the Christian dispensation as Antioch now bids us call it, to be redefined. Paul, he thought, was just the man to redefine it.
One day, a month or so after the arrival of Paul and Barnabas in Antioch, a young physician named Luke, a pagan Greek, dismounted from the horse he named Thersites (perhaps because of its ugliness and bad temper) and entered the sacred edifice. He was dark, small, well knit, not unprosperous, and he wore a golden bangle or two to proclaim the modest success he had achieved in his profession. He entered the temple soberly, a doctor called to the treating of a patient, and he sniffed the perfumed air, on which nard and sandalwood smoked, without even the faintest stir of erotic enchantment. A priestess tended the fire from which delicious scents arose to a smiling ivory icon of the goddess. All about the temple, whose floor was cunningly embellished with Graeco-Syrian mosaic work depicting the coupling of Apollo and Artemis (for the cult of Astarte had arisen out of solar-lunar myths of western provenance, on which an Asiatic mysticism had been imposed), were booths closed for delicacy’s sake with silken curtains, and the priestess, a handsome dark woman past her first youth, pointed to one of these. Luke nodded and entered the booth thus indicated. On a bed he found a young girl lying in some distress. She was a temple prostitute, her favours available to such as would or could pay a handsome tribute in gold to the goddess whose power she evoked: initially these favours had been available to all and freely, but complaints of the secular professionals of the town, as well as the healthy acquisitiveness of the ruling priesthood, had imposed a rational limitation of availability. This girl, whose name was Fengari, was ink-haired, pale as her lunar namesake, exquisitely shaped, straight-nosed and with her great black eyes set well apart. She was naked and unashamed. Luke treated her nakedness as a clinical necessity and examined closely the brown blotches that, like mushrooms about a tree, encircled her pudenda.
‘They hurt when touched?’
‘Like fire.’
‘You’ve been in contact with a dirty man. This is not a clean occupation. Take this ointment, rub it in freely. Take this draught in water. And,’ Luke added, ‘give up this trade.’
‘It’s not a trade. I’m a servant of the goddess.’ She was indignant.
‘I’m not impressed. I call this no more than a high-class brothel.’
‘The goddess will strike you down.’
‘It’s you she seems to have struck down.’ She pointed, pouting, at a couple of silver pieces laid ready for him on a cedar press. He took these and empursed them. ‘Your service to the goddess is temporarily intermitted,’ he said with mock gruffness. ‘I’ll call again in a week’s time.’
Riding back to town, he recited to the warm air the verses he had written that morning. Like many physicians, he desired to produce a book. He was not satisfied with what he had been writing: a kind of epic poem in Homeric hexameters about an Odyssean wanderer around the Greek islands who was searching for the Ithaca of philosophical truth. Where was reality? Did it lie in the invisible world of ideas or was it the crass tangibility of the natural order? He had read Plato. Plato would not have approved of the poem simply because it was literature, but could literature, meaning tales of wondering and strange adventures, properly encompass philosophy? Entering the town, he saw philosophy curl in the air like smoke and then get lost on the wind. For the material world shouted its primacy – traders and beggars and dirty naked children tumbling in the dust, above all women and girls with thrust breasts and haunches aware of their role in the world of pleasure, Daphnici mores. Juvenal had, in one of his satires, the third Luke thought it was, complained of the sewage of the Syrian Orontes, Antioch’s river, polluting the Tiber. He read Latin as much as he read Greek. As though to provide a ready emblem of pollution, the horse Thersites stopped, as was his habit, to dung heavily on the cobbles. Finished, he responded again to the bit and clopped towards his stable. The stable was a rented one, two hundred yards from the little house which Luke also rented and where he lived alone. It was also on a lane at whose shady end, a four-storey warehouse leaning over it, stood the synagogue which Luke, an uncircumcised seeker of the truth, sometimes attended. Clutching his satchel, he walked to it, having spread hay for Thersites and locked the stable door, intrigued by the crowd outside it. They apparently wanted to get in but could not because of the many already congregated there. He knew the two Jews who complained to him. Amos, who had a hump like an ingrafted near-empty mealsack, said:
‘When a reverent believer can’t get into his own place of worship – crammed with Gentiles – no offence, doctor – catchpenny eloquence – foreigners too.’ The other, who was one-eyed, they were brothers in deformity, cackled:
‘Keep out, you Greek heathen, if you don’t want your innocence ruptured. Preaching resurrection and curing the sick. You’ll be losing some of your patients.’
‘Who is it?’ Luke asked.
‘The bald-headed runt from Cilicia.’
Luke pushed through politely and saw a bald pate and pair of waving hands. He heard: ‘He leaves us the truth of his immortality and that of all who believe in him. Our spirits came to earth and joined with our bodies even at the moment of conception. The spirit cannot be extinguished as the body can, but when it departs this life with our death it leaves in a changed state. We live eternally through him, who took back to heaven the transformed lineaments of man. If he returned pure angelic spirit he would not be one with the father, his substance would be indistinguishable from that of the father and hence could he not properly be termed the son. It was through his taking on of flesh that he became the son, and the son he remains. But we too are the sons of heaven, of an unangelic substance. He has conquered death and we are his partners in that conquest. You seek renewal, we all seek it. The beginning of renewal is the acceptance of a covenant with the divine whose symbol shall be the act of baptism. And what is baptism? Let me explain.’
The one-eyed one was named Eliphaz. To Luke, leaving, he said: ‘Impressed?’
‘He’s powerful.’
‘Powerfully wrong. Why can’t these people leave well alone? Why can’t things stay as they are?’
Why, thought Luke to himself, cannot all the world be one-eyed? He went home to his simple meal of boiled beans and broiled riverfish. He took out his much punished manuscript from its press – all deletions, rescrawlings, interlineations. He studied it, sucking his teeth free of an enrobing beanskin. ‘I sing the search of one who, despised of his fellows, / Sought in the seas and islands, beneath an indifferent sun / That gave no answers, answers to a single fevered question …’ Perhaps he was not cut out to be a poet. Poetry was more than versification. Nor cut out to be a philosopher. And again, to write of a voyager when he himself had hardly moved ten miles from the Orontes. He needed to make the search himself. He was glued to a trade not over-respected in a city where magic and superstition paid better. He was growing stale.
It was by chance next day that he passed a baptism ceremony in brilliant sunlight on the left bank of the Orontes. He saw the little bald man at work, the drenching of the patient as he might be called, the announcement of the hope of a cure. Barnabas was with him; Barnabas he vaguely knew. Magic, a sort of. He rode on to the village where he had been treating a child ineffectually for a hydatid cyst. Larvae of tapeworms lodged in a swollen belly. They could not be purged. The child grew thinner. He saw the baptisers still busily at work when he rode back. There was, he supposed, no harm in it. A ceremony, a gesture of faith and hope, outward sign of inner grace, whatever that was.
An elderly man named Agabus came to Antioch. He was large and muscular and he had the exophthalmic gaze of the prophet. He wore a drab long shirt that left bare his hairy shins. Around his neck on a string he carried a cross, saying ‘The emblem of shame is transformed to a sign of victory. Alleluia.’ He sat with a Christian group in the house of the converted widow Agatha, a former pagan, where Barnabas and Paul shared a room, and ate heartily and, for the most part, silently of what was put before him. He smacked his lips over the sweetish Syrian wine, belched discreetly and said:
‘He told you to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty. Am I not right? I am. Well, there are going to be enough of the hungry in Judaea, I can tell you. I never, to be honest, thought that this giving drink to the thirsty was more than a verbal flourish in a land where there is no shortage of water. Am I right? I think I am. Not only dreams, my friends, but factual reports. Three bad harvests in a row and corn already rising in price beyond the reach of the purses of the people.’
‘Not only Judaea,’ Barnabas said. ‘Even Italy. The Emperor Claudius is going to have his hands full. Empty, rather.’
‘Let him feed his own,’ a middle-aged man named Asaph said. ‘And his own ought to include the people of Judaea. With the Romans it’s all take and no give.’
‘Judaea has her own king now,’ Agabus said. ‘But he is above such petty matters as the feeding of the people. Am I not right? I am.’
‘What do you want?’ Paul asked.
‘Let your new Gentile Christians learn about corporal works of mercy. There’s plenty of money here. Get it to Jerusalem. You and Barnabas here talk of going back there.’
‘For fresh instructions, yes,’ Barnabas said. ‘But only when we’ve finished our work here in Antioch. We’re still short of deacons.’
‘You’ll find no better work for the moment than taking money to Jerusalem. There’s corn to be bought in Egypt and figs in Cyprus. The price is high, but what can you expect? It’s going to get higher, get in there before it does. Am I not right? Let your Antioch faithful think of their Judaean brethren. This is a rich town.’
‘How are the grain stores in Judaea?’ Paul asked.
‘Enough for two months if there was a just distribution. But the rich are hoarding and Herod Agrippa counts his gold. You’ve an urgent business on your hands. I’m right there about the priority, I think. I know I’m right.’
The brown blotches around the genitalia of the temple prostitute Fengari had yielded less to Luke’s medicaments than to time and nature’s own secret curative juices. Luke left the temple with his couple of silver pieces and was surprised to find bald Paul standing some ten yards away from the façade, looking up at the goddess in no posture of worship. Luke could not forbear to say:
‘Drinking your fill of the enemy?’
Paul looked sharply at him. ‘Those too many breasts make her a very unseductive one. Have we met?’
‘Luke the physician. I heard you one day in the synagogue on Aish Lane, as they call it. Where the flour stores are.’
‘I think I saw you one day on the riverbank, looking like a man who would like to swim but fears the water may be cold.’
‘I wasn’t too happy,’ Luke said, ‘about that thaumaturgical cure of yours, if I may call it that. The old man who believed he couldn’t use his left arm. Then I thought: well, a cure is often a matter of confidence, which you would probably call faith.’
‘And what is your faith, Luke the physician? You have just come out of where I would not for the life of me go in.’
‘I was practising my skill, such as it is. One of the diseases of love.’ Paul winced at that, but the term eros was distinct from agape: still, in marriage, which might be called the licensing of the gifts of that goddess up there, one was supposed to be expressed through the other. Luke said: ‘You have walked all this way to frown at the polycolpous one? I rode and I ride back. There’s my bad-tempered nag Thersites. You’re welcome to ride behind me.’
‘Thank you,’ Paul said. ‘As for the polycolpous one – a grotesque term but it has a kind of Homeric ring – she is both the enemy and not the enemy, if you understand me. I was thinking of our mother Eve, who brought us into the world and, with woman’s curiosity, meddled where she should have not and made the discovery of sin. Fleshly embraces are here glorified in a manner that goes against nature. Eve is somewhere behind all this. I fear the enemy but I too had a mother.’ He stood there brooding while Luke’s horse, finding no grass here and fretting, gnawed at the hitching post in the temple’s forecourt. ‘I do not,’ he said, in a manner somewhat defiant, as though countering an accusation, ‘wish to make war on women. The goddess, however, is no wraith or fiction – she is real enough. She has to be fought. There is the desert all beyond her, as you can see. She presides over no grass or trees or cornfields.’ He sighed. ‘The goddess is a great nuisance.’
They rode together into town, Paul’s hard tent-making fingers digging into Luke to keep his balance. Paul said: ‘You did not answer my question. About your faith.’
‘I’m not yet ready to step into the water,’ Luke said. ‘It’s still too cold.’
‘Some need time to think. Others are very briskly assaulted and thought hardly comes into it. Well, take your time. When I come back you may have taken it.’
‘You’re leaving Antioch?’
The moon was coming up, gibbous like the fractious Jew Amos. ‘The goddess,’ Paul said, ‘is only dead metal. But dead metal buys food. Yes, leaving for Jerusalem with Antioch money. But I shall be back.’ And then, entering the town, lively with the unregenerate, ‘I wish to God that were true. About her being dead metal, I mean.’
Marcus Julius Tranquillus was transferred from the Praetorian Guard to the Ninth Legion; this could be interpreted as a sly gesture from the Emperor himself: if Julius wished to draw blood he had better do it with barbarians. For Claudius, whom the Senate had offered triumphant regalia, scorned such a bestowal without a genuine triumph, and he sought such a triumph in Britain. The Emperor whom Julius’s family claimed to have been a kinsman, though on the patrician side, had invaded Britain but achieved no conquest. Of Caligula’s sham you already know. Claudius sailed from Ostia, Julius with him in an officer cadre which would be assimilated into the Ninth Legion, at that time stationed in northern Gaul. It was not an easy voyage. They were twice nearly wrecked off the Ligurian coast, and there was a close shave when a storm suddenly broke off the Stoechades, but they made Massilia safely enough and then marched north to Gesoriacum. Thence, in clear weather, they crossed the water sleeve of the Channel and found the barbarians waiting for them. They were easily subdued.
Claudius set himself up in an ornate tent on rich downland and admired the agricultural potential of southern Britain. But the time for intensive colonisation was not yet: now the simple aim was to collect barbaric loot and cart some yellow-locked prisoners back to Rome to grace an imperial triumph. Marcus Crassus Frugi, an experienced general officer, ordered the burning of a few native encampments and the slaughtering of their inhabitants, regardless of sex and age. On to Roman carts were loaded a great number of native artefacts which demonstrated that intricate art was not necessarily an index of high civilisation. The shields, swords and vessels were of bronze and iron and most elaborately ornamented with curlicues.
Julius’s active military career did not last long. Two miles from the coast he and his raiding party chained up a line of prisoners and started to march them to the boats. Out of a thicket a pair of lone British warriors peered, saw a barelegged Roman officer giving orders, then launched spears at him. One of the spears went nowhere; the other, razor-sharp and well aimed, struck him deeply in the right leg. He cursed and tried to pull it out with both hands, but it was profoundly embedded. He had to call a common soldier. This soldier clucked commiseration and wrenched out the shaft, leaving the point in. Julius fainted. He came to to find himself lying in a barge, at the prow, with a misty vista of chalk cliffs receding. Disdainful brawny British prisoners looked at his agony and expressed no satisfaction. There was an orderly there staunching the blood with white wool whose fibres stuck to the lips of the wound.
‘Something seems to have got cut there, sir. Something inside. Have to leave it to nature, as they say. You won’t be on the march for a long time.’
The imperial report spoke of no battles and no casualties, meaning Roman deaths. A great part of the southern section of the island had been subdued and garrisoned. The slow process of colonisation could, some time in the near future, be undertaken with right Roman seriousness. There was a splendid triumph in Rome, in which Marcus Julius Tranquillus did not take part. He was at home with his wife, who had just given birth to a daughter. This girl Sara insisted on naming Ruth, though the father wished to commemorate a loved aunt by calling her Flavia. Flavia or Ruth – one or the other, depending on circumstances. Julius limped round their bedroom, rocking the howling child. Sara looked from the bed, expressing no emotion. The noise of the triumphal bucinae could be heard even here on the Janiculum.
Claudius beamed from his chariot, wearing the naval crown, which had a frieze of stylised ships’ beaks on it; it symbolised his conquest of the ocean, meaning twenty-odd miles of channel. Behind his chariot rode the Empress Messalina, beautiful as the moon. She had demanded that morning from her uxorious husband the gift of a military escort. She had, she said, enemies. Claudius had said that he would see what he could do. The victorious generals marched behind her, trouncers of bare-arsed barbarians who smelt like old dogs, wearing togas with purple borders which signified the honour they had won. Marcus Crassus Frugi, having earned the right to wear such a garment in a previous campaign – one waged against a real enemy, red-haired Danubians – disdained to wear one again. He rode a horse richly caparisoned, dressed in a tunic embroidered with palms, trees not native to the misty northern island he claimed, on the Emperor’s behalf, to have conquered.
Back in Jerusalem King Herod Agrippa I was supervising the torture of a young Nazarene or (we had better stay with the Antiochian term) Christian, Simon the son of Cleopas, whom we have already met and abandoned. He said to the torturers:
‘Try again.’
The two robed men – it was proper for torturers to go half-naked, but the royal cellars were cold – twisted the arms of Simon son of Cleopas round his back, upward till they neared breaking point. Simon yelled: ‘I don’t know, I tell you!’
‘The man Peter,’ Herod Agrippa demanded. ‘For the last time – where is he?’
‘They’re not in Jerusalem – any of them.’
‘Liar. They’ve gone to ground, haven’t they? I want to know where.’
‘I don’t know.’
The king sat on a little stool and looked sternly at Simon. This was a historic cellar, and it still bore the marks of history – rusty bloodstains on the whitewashed walls. Here his grandfather, Herod the Great, had overseen the torture of servants of the Magi, those kings from the east who would not say where they were going. They knew, and the servants ought to have known too, but they had died of broken hearts or some such organ before disclosing their knowledge. What he, the grandson, was doing now had everything to do with Herod the Great’s failure to elicit the right response to his bone-cracking. That child had got away to Egypt but was, in a sense, responsible for the brutal deaths of all those innocents. If he had not been born those murders would not have taken place. Herod Agrippa now proposed more politic murders. He said:
‘You were seen with one of them yesterday. Who was it?’
‘I wasn’t – I didn’t—’
‘His name?’ The boy fainted.
‘Give him another baptism,’ Herod Agrippa ordered jocularly. A wooden bucket of Hebron water drenched the lad and brought him shuddering to.
‘Come on – his name.’
This time a bone snapped, not at all audible in that wide empty cellar. Before the breaking of another, exacted more punitively than in the cause of interrogation, Herod Agrippa got what he was after. Then he went to a meeting with old Caiaphas who, these days, had to be carried everywhere, his legs having lost all power of locomotion. As they sat together in one of the royal parlours – its furnishings distressingly pagan to the old priest’s eyes – Herod Agrippa could see that Caiaphas was covertly disapproving of the swollen royal belly, which looked like a monstrous fruit of overindulgence rather than what it was – illness, illness, and grave illness. It would be cured, however. The chief physician was awaiting an infallible purge from Cyprus. Herod Agrippa thought much of death, but not for himself. He said now:
‘This James is by way of being the resident leader of the Nazarenes. But it’s Peter I’m really after. He’s the head of the whole body. Lop him off and the whole movement will die.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Well, whether I am or not, it will please the people. And one of my royal tasks is to keep the people happy.’
‘You could best please the people by giving them bread.’
‘Things will come right. We’re going to have a bumper harvest. To return to James. I’ve found out where he is. We could have a quick trial in which all the blame for the grain shortage could be laid at the Nazarene door. God’s displeasure and so on.’
‘James,’ Caiaphas said, ‘has not greatly offended against the Jewish law. Even in the conduct of Nazarene policy he’s been scrupulous in avoiding talk about the equality of Jew and Gentile. Most take him to be a good orthodox Jew who believes that the Messiah has arrived and departed. He has no enemies that I know of.’
‘All right,’ the king said. ‘But if it’s Peter we want, and such of his confederates as are still here, the beheading of James will smoke him and them out. But it’s him I have chiefly in mind. He’s the true blasphemer. James is merely available.’
‘I’m uneasy about this,’ Caiaphas said. ‘A little. The man about whom I have no scruple of conscience at all is the Saul who now calls himself by another name. There is a renegade self-confessed, and I understand he is now in Judaea.’
‘But very cunning. And ready to plead the rights of a Roman citizen. Too dangerous, too difficult. And anyway it wouldn’t be expedient to catch him even if we could. He’s brought money from Antioch to buy bread for the people. The people are stupid. It would be hard to persuade them that such a man is a criminal.’
‘Criminality is never expunged by good works.’
‘Tell that to hungry Jerusalem. I prefer to tell them that the present shortages are the fault of the Nazarenes. God’s displeasure at their heresy is visited on the whole of the Jewish people. The blood of James will gratify the Lord God. It will smell sweet in his nostrils.’
‘And yet your majesty, if I may speak boldly, believes none of these things.’
‘Oh, I believe in a single faith for a single people. That’s policy. And, of course, I believe in the godhead. I even believe in those human attributes we attach to the godhead. The Emperor Gaius, now rotting in hell if there is a hell, taught me some things. The king is the Lord’s anointed and therefore God’s visible representative on earth. When does my effigy go into the Temple?’
‘That cannot happen – this you know. The Sanhedrin is unanimously against it. For your majesty’s own protection. And, whatever your majesty wishes, we have a faith to uphold.’
‘Oh, yes. The sacred eternal Jewish faith in the great unloving loving merciful vindictive father of the tribes. Forgive my private scepticism. I’ve lived in the great world. Rome, I mean.’
James the son of Zebedee was picked up without much difficulty in the cellar of Cleopas. He was imprisoned without trial and led out to the forecourt of the Temple for his execution in the Roman manner – head on the block, decapitation by sword – a hefty broadsword sharpened on both its edges to an exquisite fineness. He came, hands bound before him, aware that he was the first of the apostles to meet a martyr’s end and perversely content accordingly. With him was his personal guard Ezra. These two and the executioner marched to a soft drumbeat towards the block. The crowd was murmurous but not loud. Herod Agrippa sat on a portable throne. He raised his finger for the drumbeat to cease and then he addressed his subjects, crying, and each impulse of his voice caused a stab in his vitals: ‘People of Judaea, brothers in the holy faith, we are met to witness a just act of execution. Our faith has been assailed by a noxious heresy. The heretics have met great tolerance, for the Jewish people are large of heart and unprejudiced of mind, but Gentile pollutions have sickened our stomachs and quelled our tolerance. Israel is a unity and must stand as a unity. We are one people and one faith and the strength of that faith must find expression not solely in passive piety but in the occasional flash of the sword of just punition. Especially, I may say, when the Lord God shows his displeasure. Has he not shown that displeasure by striking us with famine? The man James stands condemned. Executioner, do your work.’
Ezra the bodyguard now spoke clearly. ‘King of Israel, if I may be allowed to speak, I have been the custodian of James since the moment of his arrest. I find nothing but good in him. I am become one of his faith. If he deserves to die I too deserve to die. But I will not die without denouncing the injustice of this butchery.’
Herod Agrippa yelled: ‘If you seek the executioner’s sword, lay your head on that block. You will serve to test the sharpness of the sword’s edge. You add to your heresy the greater sin of disloyalty. Executioner!’
Not everybody watched the severing of Ezra’s head. There were women who averted their eyes and the eyes of their children, and there were also Temple guards and secret policemen who had been ordered to keep a sharp watch for such members of the Nazarene faith as had slunk from their hiding places to witness the death of the first apostolic martyr. While Ezra’s head, severed far from neatly, was being hurled to the dogs and the blood on the block was being wiped off with a wet rag, one of the guards pointed. An old man with a grey beard looking shiftily about him. This old man saw that he was being pointed at and he tried to lose himself in the crowd. James, waiting for the block to be thoroughly cleansed, looked about him and betrayed a sign of distress that his execution should be the occasion of one or more of his brethrens being put into danger. This sign was noted. But soon James was incapable of further innocent betrayal. He laid his head down without waiting for the executioner’s assistant to do it for him, the cleansed sword was raised to the innocent sun, then it swept down and sliced through James’s neck as through a cheese. Blood fountained, the crowd groaned and then began to disperse. The guards and policemen followed the path that was being pointed.
Peter was not arrested until the beginning of the week of the unleavened bread, that is on the eve of the fourteenth day of Nisan, also called Passover Eve. He was found almost by chance in a disused cellar under a burnt and abandoned house in the north-west of the city. A child’s ball had rolled into it, the child went down to recover it, there being stone steps leading down but no door, and happened to come up when a couple of policemen were taking time off to eat a bit of bread. ‘Man down there,’ the child said. When taken, he admitted freely to being who he was, and was hauled at once to the fortress of Antonia, which was not far away. He was a valuable prisoner, and four relays of soldiers took turns in guarding him. On the first night, when a scullion brought food and water, with a guard standing behind him, Peter said:
‘How long?’ The guard said:
‘Lucky, you are. You’re kindly allowed to live till after Passover. Gives you a bit of time to brood over things, doesn’t it? Eat your nice dinner.’ The metal plate with its dry bread and a ragged chunk of nameless overboiled meat clanged on the stone floor; along with it thudded a clay pitcher. Then the door clashed shut. Peter ignored the food. He knelt on the cold stone and prayed aloud, saying:
‘Lord, I heard you say that night that now seems a long time ago: not my will but your will be done. Those are my words now. Yet you made me head of the church, the first mortal father of the faithful. I have work to do, and I pray by your power I be allowed to do it. But everything is in your hands. Lord, I believe. Lord, I trust. Lord, above all I love. At least, I think I love. May our enemies be forgiven. May the faith live. May I see the kingdom. But not,’ and he raised his voice as if addressing a fishing confederate hard of hearing, ‘until I’ve finished the work. Amen.’ He sighed, drank some water and nibbled at the bread. Then he went over to the hard pallet and lay on it. Soon, prayer being the best of soporifics, he began to snore.
In his palace bedchamber Herod Agrippa brooded on the purge from Cyprus. It had so far done little except augment his pains. He considered, in that phase before sleep in which fantasy rows away from the shore of reason, that he deserved better of his body than this. He had caught and imprisoned the chief enemy of the state. He was not sorry that the time of the paschal celebrations forbade the spilling of blood. There was leisure to prepare for a full-dress trial in which the secular and the sacred would conjoin in the rhetoric of abomination, the case against the Nazarene faith could receive its most considered articulation, and the beheading of the father of lies who was also an ignorant fisherman could be presented as an act of piety shedding the ultimate credit on Israel’s monarch. He would go down in history as the saviour of the race. He basked, just before sleep, in the contemplation of that ennoblement; it was almost as good as a medicine.
The Empress Messalina obtained her military escort, whose commander was Marcus Julius Tranquillus. The maniple of picked veterans, some of whom wore Britannic gashes like medals, marched before and behind her gilded litter, which had handles left and right as well as fore and aft and called for the brawn of eight carriers. These were all rather dull Germans, who had the look of men who thought, in so far as they thought at all, that they might as well be doing this work as any other. The covered litter had a couch in it, on which the Empress lay. Occasionally a chosen male friend would lie with her. It pleased her to copulate while being borne through the busy Roman streets; it made the act almost public. Marcus Julius Tranquillus did not lie with her; nor was he yet commanded to. He was somewhat severe of countenance and took his duties seriously. Moreover, he seemed to be in pain and, when he walked, he had to lean on a blackthorn stick. He did not walk much in the Empress’s service; his place was with her in the covered and curtained litter, sitting primly at the foot of her couch. He intrigued her rather; he was handsome and evidently brave and had been in battle; he was serious and she liked seriousness for ten minutes of the day or thereabouts.
The undoubted beauty of Messalina and her immoral kind must always create problems for such philosophers as, discoursing on beauty, truth and goodness as related values, end with a mystical desire to promote the relation into an identity and even conjure a deity who possesses these values as attributes. God, say some philosophers, manifests himself in the sublunary world in particular beauties, truths and acts of benevolence; properly, the values should be conjoined to shadow their identity in the godhead, but this happens so infrequently that one must suppose divinity condones a kind of diabolic fracture or else, and perhaps my book is already giving some hint of this, he demonstrates his ineffable freedom through contriving at times a wanton inconsistency. If this is so, we need not wonder at Messalina’s failure to match her beauty with a love of truth and goodness. She was a chronic liar and she was thoroughly bad. But her beauty, we are told, was a miracle. The symmetry of her body obeyed all the golden rules of the mystical architects, her skin was without even the most minuscule flaw and it glowed as though gold had been inlaid behind translucent ivory, her breasts were full and yet pertly disdained earth’s pull, the nipples nearly always erect, and visibly so beneath her byssinos, as in a state of perpetual sexual excitation, the areolas delicately pigmented to a kind of russet. The sight of her weaving bare white arms was enough, it is said, to make a man grit his teeth with desire to be encircled by them; the smooth plain of her back, tapering to slenderness only to expand lusciously to the opulence of her perfect buttocks, demanded unending caresses. The face was the face of a virgin whose dedication to chastity transcended the mere forms of the Dianan cult, which is for the most part a pure hypocrisy; the brown eyes were wide and widely spaced, the nose disdained that excess, interpreted as strength of will, which disfigures most Mediterranean countenances, and the lips were less than perfect only perhaps in their excessive moistness, which seemed to argue a superfluity of saliva, and in their slightly thrust attitude suggesting a permanent pout of dissatisfaction. Her appetites, indeed, were not easy to satisfy, and they were seated not only, as with most women, in the crucial nerves that guard the centre of generation, but in outlying sectors of her body which might be thought too remote to catch fire. Her hair, Julius thought with a disloyalty which he was quick to quell, was of a richer and more odorous darkness even than that of his wife Sara. Messalina found only one man in her life capable of granting her the multiple satisfactions she craved, and her meeting with this man led to her undoing. Her imperial husband was old and as incompetent in bed as in other fora of activity, and their marriage had been sprung by Gaius who, knowing Messalina’s proclivities, had thought to humiliate his stuttering uncle by the mismatch.
On their first journey together, Messalina engaged the captain of her guard in pleasant conversation with no hint of condescension in it. Her voice was as beautiful as her person, suggesting doves and honey and wallfruit reaching the highest pitch of ripeness. She said or sang: ‘They tell me you did well in Britain, Junius.’
‘Julius, madam.’
‘Of course. The Caesar who was killed. But you have been killing the enemies of Caesar.’
‘I would hardly call the Britons enemies of Caesar, madam. Tribes quite content to be left alone to get on with fishing and ploughing and fighting among themselves.’
‘So,’ she cooed, ‘you disapprove of the great civilising Roman mission, as my imperial husband calls it?’
‘I didn’t say quite that, madam.’
‘Oh, you may speak freely with your Empress. After all, you and I are to be friends, isn’t that so?’
‘My Empress is too good. I am the least of my Empress’s servants. But I have to confess – this is a little difficult to adjust. My trade was killing. And now – I sometimes wonder at my appointment.’
‘Simple enough, my dear friend. The captain of my personal guard should be brave, honourable, discreet – presentable. I have it on your superior officer’s testimony that you are the first three of these things. The other I am able to judge for myself. Tell me – are you a married man?’
‘Yes, madam. And I recently became a father.’
‘Good. Married men are more discreet than single ones. They have to be. They have something to lose. Tell me about your wife. Is she beautiful?’
‘Very. But, of course,’ (the courtier creaking to life) ‘not so beautiful as—’
‘Yes yes yes yes. And her name? Is that beautiful too?’
‘Sara. A Jewish name. And our daughter’s name is Ruth. Short sharp names.’
‘Like birdcalls, yes. And why should a Roman officer of ancient Roman stock choose to marry a mere colonial?’
‘Love, madam.’
‘Oh then I approve. I approve of love, Junius I mean Julius. Love is the whole of life. Life is nothing without love. Love cuts across all our barriers, our formalities, our vows, our duties. Tell these slaves we’re here,’ she added, pulling the curtain aside the width of three fingers. Julius knocked with his stick against the outside of the litter. And then, with some pain and difficulty, he got up and got out. ‘Poor boy,’ Messalina cooed. They had arrived at an estate beyond the Servilian Gardens, in the thirteenth district of the city, just north of the Ostian Gate. Julius thought he knew whose estate this was. Discretion, he told himself. Messalina said: ‘I shall be here for an hour or so. You’d better dispose the guard around the house, in the grounds, very discreetly. You know whose house this is?’
‘No, madam,’ discreetly.
‘Good, very good. Full marks for discretion.’ She smiled bewitchingly and then swayed towards the gate. When she was lost to view, one of Julius’s men, not known for his subservience, looked his captain full in the eyes and made a throat-cutting gesture. He said:
‘If she was mine—’
And so the work went on, if you could call it work. There was also the question of Julius’s glandular responses to the almost daily propinquity of his Empress, so naked under her lawn. The body followed nature, blind goddess, sister of Fortuna, and knew nothing of words like love and fidelity. What precisely was his work? This Sara, giving the breast to Ruth, had asked often enough. Oh, I have to guard the Empress’s quarters. Do you see much of the Empress? Hardly anything. She’s pretty remote from us common soldiers. I’ve heard different. From whom, Sara? Everybody knows about her. One of these days, Julius feared, she would issue a command while they swayed towards a discreet indiscretion of hers on the Esquiline or near the Naumachia Augusti, the Marine Theatre not far from his own rented house, or beyond the Gardens of Lucullus on the Via Pinciana. So, Junius I mean Julius, you find your Empress unattractive, I have had men whipped for such ingratitude. Come over, put your hand here. His nights in bed with Sara were, thanks to blind nature, becoming riotous. Women were not fools, women always knew what was going on. He could well imagine Sara confronting the Empress, woman to woman, with ‘Leave my husband alone or I’ll scratch your eyes out.’ Eyes would be out, certainly, but no woman would do the scratching. There were cruel Syrians and Pannonians on the imperial payroll, adept at that manner of punishment for laesa maiestas.
Julius rose early one morning in country air, hearing the crowing of cocks and the snuffle of pigs. He and his men had slept soldierly rough in farm quarters. The farm bordered the estate of a certain Laturnus, just south of the gate which opened on to the Via Asinaria. In the manor house the Empress was staying the night with—Julius knew who, but was discreet even with himself. He had taken a rough breakfast of bubbling warm milk fresh from the cow and a piece of yesterday’s bread with conserve of blackberries. Now he sniffed the good air and foresaw a damnable future for himself. She would be found out one of these days, and he would be indicted for disloyalty to the Emperor. It was his duty, always discreetly, to drop a word to one of the Greek functionaries on the Palatine. But Messalina’s private intelligence service would have him discreetly stabbed before he got so far. The misery on the face of the young man with a growth of black beard who now came from the direction of one of the barns, scratching as from an uneasy sleep in straw, was, he was sure, a mirror of his own. The young man looked at the uniformed and sworded Julius somewhat fearfully and strode in the direction of the Via Asinaria with a speed that could be termed furtive. Julius called cheerfully:
‘A moment. All right, you’re in no danger. Haven’t we met?’
The young man paused and frowned: had they?
‘A wrestling match. You were one of the wrestlers. The other one wore cat’s claws. He is no longer with us.’
The young man spoke. His Latin was not good and it contained gutturals that might be Greek. He said: ‘Yes. I remember the occasion. But I didn’t have time to look at the spectators. It seems as though I’ve been sleeping where I shouldn’t. I didn’t know they had military guards on farms.’
‘I’m part of an imperial escort, awaiting the morning’s orders.’
‘I want nothing to do with imperial escorts.’
‘You’re no longer wrestling?’
‘Wrestling to live but not doing very well at it. Some of us are barred from making a living. An imperial decree.’
‘Are you a Jew?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Jews shouldn’t be here at all. Don’t worry, I shan’t report you to the police. I’m married to one of the daughters of Israel.’
‘Her name her name?’ the young man panted with great urgency, opening and closing his fists.
‘Sara.’
‘No. No. It’s not possible. Does she ever speak of a man named Caleb?’
‘Frequently.’
Caleb nearly collapsed with the relief of his discovery. Julius took him to the farm quarters and gave him a cup of milk, cooler now than it had been.
There was a couple in a bedroom of the manor house of Laturnus, now away in Sardinia, not yet ready for breakfast. It was not a luxuriously appointed bedroom; it had something rustic about its furnishings. But the bed was huge and deep. The naked Messalina lay with her lovely arms entwined about the nakedness of Gaius Silius, a patrician young man of rather empty handsomeness. He said:
‘Why do those soldiers have to tramp around outside? I feel – well, watched.’
‘The Empress requires protection. From her numerous enemies. Don’t worry, dear Gaius. They say nothing. They daren’t. For that matter, they see nothing. The Empress Messalina pays her social visits. Business visits too. They’re quite in order. There’s nothing to feel frightened or guilty about.’
‘You, my love,’ Gaius Silius said, more at ease, ‘are one of the eternally innocent. You don’t know what guilt feels like. Your skin’s untouched by the lines of – oh, you know, remorse, compassion—’
‘Cruelty? Am I cruel?’
‘Cruelty,’ she said, having read this somewhere and at once recognised the truth of it, ‘is one of the sharp sauces of love. All the rest is just – well, policy, self-protection, being the Empress.’
‘The Emperor too,’ Gaius Silius said somewhat primly, ‘he has his right to self-protection. How would the Emperor feel if he knew he was being cuckolded?’
‘At least,’ she said, catching something of his primness, ‘I don’t flaunt it, do I? Claudius makes sheep’s eyes at his own niece, puts his gouty fingers in her bosom when he thinks no one’s looking. Ugh, an old man’s lust. The Emperor is above taboos like incest. I think Agrippina will have to drink something that disagrees with her. And perhaps her dribbling uncle could share the cup.’
‘Sometimes, meum mel, you – what can I say—?’
‘Revolt you? Frighten you? Never be frightened of clear thinking, Gaius. And never enter on anything you’re unwilling to pursue to the end. I sometimes think that you thought you could get into the Empress’s bed without having to pay for it. Messalina is a whore, but she’s different from all the other whores. She costs nothing. The stupidest slut of a village and the first lady of the Empire have that in common. But the Empress Messalina, my dearest heart, costs everything. As you’re to find out. How is the beauteous Lollia Paulina these days?’
‘I don’t know. She’s at Herculaneum. She lives her own life. I say nothing. She says nothing.’
‘If she ever were to say anything,’ Messalina said tenderly into his right cheek, ‘her jewels would be stuffed down her throat. She’d be crammed like a goose with them. I’d have her before me covered with them, like starlight as that stupid poet said, and then she’d be stripped to her buff, link by link of pearls and amethysts, and they’d be rammed down her throat.’ Gaius Silius could sense the excitement in her hot breath. She then said: ‘Certain things have to be done, dearest Gaius. You and I are to be together for ever and ever, or as near that as makes no difference. This is one bed you don’t steal away from with a couple of coins on the coverlet and your fingers to your lips. I want you for myself, and by Castor and Pollux’ – (she grasped with sharp nails that part of his body which they had so jocularly named) – ‘I don’t let you go.’
Gaius Silius held back a sigh and said: ‘I’m flattered but, forgive me, corcordium, somewhat sceptical. Tell me, how many men have you had in your short life?’
‘How many? I can’t count. Their names would make a book, I suppose, even just those I remember. A woman,’ she said fiercely, ‘is entitled to her pleasures. Few men can do more than touch the fringes of a woman’s satisfaction. You, honeycomb, are quite exceptional. You are tireless. I think that’s your only talent. You’re far from bright in many ways, but you have that. As well as fantasy and ingenuity. You know how important the life of the body is. That’s rare. I’m not going to let you get away. You and I are going to be married.’
He nearly leapt out of the bed at that. ‘Married? You mean – divorce from Claudius, divorce from Paulina? That’s impossible.’
‘Two long dark divorces. With no actuaries or notaries or whatever those legal gentlemen are called. Don’t ask me any more about it now. There’s much to be done, dear Gaius, but there’s no great hurry. As you see, the sun’s a slow climber.’
She seized him with inordinate appetite. The next hour was consumed in a remarkable variety of embraces and penetrations. She was succuba and incuba, mare and rider. They left the bed for the floor, the wall, even for the edge of the open casement, and even then she was not satisfied, though Gaius Silius thought she must grow hoarse with her screams of attainment. Back on the bed, she achieved at last the consummation of her need and her lovely face glowed with a rapture only to be described as saintly. This is, all of it, quite disgusting.
Peter, on his prison pallet, had, though proleptically a saint, no such glow. He slept well, though this night had been announced to him as the last before his execution. He had been brought out of jail daily during the last week for a slow trial whose conclusion had never been in doubt. He had been interested to note that the heretical aspects of his master’s messiahship had been dwelt on rather less than the opening up of the new faith (which some of the deposing priests had been prepared to regard, for argument’s sake, as an almost legitimate expansion of orthodoxy) to the uncircumcised Gentile. The conversion of the centurion Cornelius had been presented as an unauthorised act of pollution; the willingness to relax the basic hygienic and dietary regulations of the Jewish faith in deference to Gentile prejudice was presented as a brutal act of deracination, not, as with the imputation of messiahship, a tearing off of bark or a lopping of branches. The arboreal similitude persisted: the Judaic tree must be pruned by its own designated tenders, which meant getting rid of Peter and depriving the upstart sect of its head. It was in vain for Peter to protest that his innovations had come directly from God: that only made matters worse. In the closing speeches the vigorous piety of Israel’s monarch, absent during the trial, confined to his bed with atrocious stomach pains, had been commended; his high place in the history of Israel’s struggle to sustain the ancient purity of the faith was assured. Peter was then solemnly condemned to death. In his innocence he requested crucifixion in a form not identical with that of his master, for which he professed himself unworthy: let him be nailed to a Greek chi or on a regular Roman T inverted. Roman, he was told, Roman, he was demanding a Roman punishment when Rome no longer ruled the land. Properly he should be stoned to death, like the Greek heresiarch Stephen, but the precedent of the sword for the execution of James was acceptable as a clean, easy and somewhat apposite mode of dispatch: there had been much talk of symbolic lopping; let there be a literal and, it was hoped, final lopping. With the cutting off of Peter’s head the limbs of the detestable new faith would lose all power of locomotion. Amen and alleluia.
Peter slept well because he had been given a cup of drugged wine. He snored heartily, but an angelic visitant might have noted a pallor as of sickness: in spite of his acquiescence in the death sentence and even a demand that the mode of death be excruciating, he was still something of a coward, and his sleeping colour showed this. A light passed the window and a cock, thinking the dawn had come, sang loudly. This woke Peter: even his deeply sleeping mind was sensitive to the crowing of cocks. He smacked a dry mouth. The crowing had ceased. Now a dog somewhere bayed at the moon. Peter was surprised to see that the two guards appointed to his person lay on the stone floor asleep. He felt a certain indignation at this: men should do what they are paid for. And then he saw that the cell door was open. This was more than warders’ carelessness. There was a trap here somewhere. The sleeping guards snored loudly and not in unison. Had they drunk too of the drugged wine, thinking it to be undrugged? When a door was open it represented an invitation to go through it. He took the old cloak he had used as a coverlet and wrapped himself warmly. Then he cautiously peered out into the corridor, which was illuminated with two wall torches, and found it empty. There was something terribly irregular here, unless, of course, he was still really asleep and dreaming of escape. But a glance back into the cell showed him that his pallet was empty. Someone was engineering his escape, but who and how?
He then saw, scrawled on the outside of the cell door, the name Ioannis Markos or John Mark in yellow chalk. That was the name of the cousin of Barnabas, who was supposed to be lying low, along with Saul or Paul as he now was, in Caesarea. A right instinct told him to wipe off this name from the door with his cloak. Then, with little confidence, he went on soft feet along the corridor and came to another open door. This opened on to another corridor, right-angled to the one he had left, and a few yards down it, on the left, he heard the noise of what he took to be boisterous drunkenness. There was an open door and light, the only light of that corridor, beamed out of it. Guards having a party. Something told him that furtiveness would not be in order now, so he trod with some confidence and even a loud chest-clearing cough towards the light. Someone inside, hearing him, called ‘Everything all right then?’ in bad Aramaic and he replied, taking care to use Judaean and not Galilean tonalities, that everything was. Then he passed the light and came to a gate of rather thin metal, open as he had expected and, in a part of his brain, not really wanted to expect, and found that this led to a narrow stairway going down. He then found himself in the open air in an ill-tended garden with stunted shrubs and a young Judas tree. At the end of a weedy path there was a very massive iron gate. He walked towards it under the moon, which more than one hound now howled at, fully expecting to be picked up at any moment by boisterous troops and perhaps even a thin intellectual officer saying ‘Thought we’d let you have a last taste of hope, old man. Fine thing, hope. I’ve had lots of it in my time. Never came to anything, though. All right, boys, bundle him back in.’ There was indeed a presence, but only of a rising wind. This rose so violently that it clanged open the left half of the gate. Peter hurried through and came to the seven steps he had often observed from below and only once before, looking back to lost freedom, from above. He now went down them and found himself in the deserted street. Herod Agrippa’s police would be waiting round that corner. The game was up, and a cruel one it was, so he walked staunchly towards their hidden arms. They were not there. There was nobody there. His liberty was the real thing. He ran into it, meaning in the direction of John Mark’s mother’s house.
He turned into a dark alley. He heard drunken singing begin to resound down it: two late revellers taking a shortcut home. He found a back door open and got into a yard in which cats intent on a courting ritual took little notice of him. The singers passed: their song was a banal popular one that had recently taken the fancy of the Jerusalem young, something about a girl being as straight as a dikla tree. He was out again just as the cantorial part of the feline courtship, perhaps encouraged by the human caterwauling, began to wake the sleeping household above it: a male groan, the threat of the throwing of an old boot. He left the alley and got on to a wider street, then he turned right to a tree-lined residential quarter where, he knew, the house of John Mark’s mother lay. There were lights on in that house: perhaps there was a prayer meeting concerned with the repose of his soul; more likely they, having contrived his escape in a manner still inexplicable, were waiting for him to come there.
But the outer gate which led to the forecourt of shrubs and flowers, well tended, was locked. A little bell on a chain was affixed to an iron staple on the wall. This he shook. Its tintinnabulation was tiny, but it seemed to him likely to wake the street. Light still blazed from an upper casement. He rang again, deafeningly it seemed. This time the front door of the house opened and a young fat girl appeared. He knew her; her name was Rhoda. ‘Rhoda,’ he called in a loud whisper, ‘it’s me, Peter. Let me in.’ Rhoda’s response was to shriek and slam the door shut. Stupid fool of a damned girl. He rang the bell again and this time did not care if he woke the whole damned street. Damned idiotic imbecile of a stupid girl. The front door opened again and he saw John Mark’s mother come down the path with a key. She let him in. She relocked the gate. They entered the house together.
John Mark lay in bed. He was supposed to be a genuine imbecile immune from the probings of the law which, at the time of Saul’s persecutions, had been interested in the Nazarene philanthropy of his father, now dead of starvation in one of the camps that Saul had set up. His imbecility was now so taken for granted in the city that he could drool around the market, steal apples unmolested, and giggle obscenities like ‘Jesus lives’. He was supposed to have picked up the slogan from his father without knowing its meaning. In fact he was a learned young man who said now, as Rhoda hugged the wall, fearful of the thing that said its name was Peter: ‘She still takes you for a fravashi.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a Zoroastrian term I find useful. Not quite an angel, not quite a ghost. A fravashi. Touch her, go on, hug her, kiss her, show her you’re real.’ Peter made for her grimly and she screamed and ran out, falling over things. ‘A good girl but silly. Her name means rose but she doesn’t smell like one. Welcome to liberty.’
Peter sat down heavily and was given, by John Mark’s mother, a cup of wine, not drugged. ‘What I want to know is,’ he said, ‘how did you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Get me out of that place.’
‘I had nothing to do with it.’
The cell door was open and your name was chalked on it.’
‘There’s more than one John Mark in the world.’
‘Perhaps,’ his mother said, ‘there’d been another prisoner there with the name John Mark.’
‘Well, then,’ Peter said through his winewet beard, ‘somebody must have bribed somebody or killed somebody. Not that I saw any corpses around.’
‘Friends of the faith have no money,’ John Mark said, ‘and they don’t kill. It’s divine intervention or some such thing.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it.’
‘How do you know you haven’t seen it?’
‘It’s a damned mystery, that’s all I can say.’
‘Not damned, surely?’
John Mark’s mother was a cunning woman reputed to be a devout daughter of the strict faith; she was known for her loud denunciations of the Nazarene heresy and her rich choice of epithets in the regard of its adherents. She would call them desert dogs, whelps of dugless bitches, walking chunks of maggoty cheese, corrosive pilgarlicks, costive beggars, ambulant diseases and the like. Some of her terms of opprobrium were, even by members of the Sanhedrin, considered to go too far, particularly those which attributed sexual perversion to the Nazarenes, such as stuffers of their lousy heads up their mothers’ cunts, defilers of the arses of the unblemished sons and daughters of Jerusalem and so on. Still, nobody could ever be sure of being wholly safe from the investigations of the religious police: her excesses of objurgation might one of these days be seen through. She said now: ‘I hope to God you wiped the name off the door.’
‘Do you take me altogether for a fool?’
‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘Even so, we have to be careful. You’ll have to stay in the cellar here for a while. It’s cold but it’s safe. We’ve plenty of blankets. James is down there.’
‘Little James?’
‘There’s no other, is there, since your old fishing friend was done in by his majesty. God knows how long it will have to be, but we’ll get you away in time. James is stubborn, though. He says his place is here and here he stays.’
‘James doesn’t know yet?’
‘About you getting out? How can he know? Unless, of course, that stupid Rhoda is down there now trying to shake him awake to tell him. A heavy sleeper is James the Little. That girl’s stupid and she blabs. She’ll have to go.’
‘If she blabs, mother, that’s all the more reason why she ought to stay. Anyway, she’s one of us.’
‘So she says. But she doesn’t know her backside from her little finger, forgive my language. You can never tell with young girls these days. Their heads are stuffed with a load of nonsense, love stories and young men and popular songs. She doesn’t know what she is.’
Peter, according to a falsified record later unfalsified, was duly beheaded the following morning. It was not, of course, the real Peter who laid his head on the block but a substitute Peter, a grey-bearded criminal long incarcerated on a purely secular charge (killing his son-in-law in a drunken quarrel about the ownership of a small silver cow made by one of the fine workmen of Ephesus, itself stolen by one or the other from someone or other) and now given a delayed quietus drunk and heavily blindfolded. The king was, it was already known, incapable of attending the execution, groaning in his bed as he was, and it was not thought necessary to have a speech delivered on the Nazarene horror and the justice of the dispatch of its leading exponent, since all this had been exhaustively and exhaustingly taken care of at Peter’s trial. Head and body were speedily buried and all concerned – guards, captain of guards, prison governor and his assistants – breathed huge relief. If news of Peter’s baffling release were ever to get outside the prison and, through the channels of the department of internal security, to the ears of Herod Agrippa, then the CodexCriminalis would be invoked, this being one of the king’s Romish importations, and the entire prison staff would suffer beheading. There were a few quiet lashings, with tongue and thong, within the prison precincts, and then everybody agreed to forget the matter, though attempts to explicate the inexplicable went on for some time in the guards’ wet canteen.
King Herod Agrippa, feeling a little better, forced himself out of bed to travel to Caesarea, there to preside in his new silver robes over the festival held every five years on the anniversary of the founding of that city, in honour of the living Caesar whose title shone from the city’s name. A few Roman officials came down from Syria and one or two senators on a travelling commission attended the games which bloodily attested the spread of Roman culture. There would not have been such games in Jerusalem, but Caesarea was a Roman city, meaning that it was full of Greeks, and considered to be the true capital of the province. As well as Romans there were Phoenicians present, a couple of fearful emissaries of princely rank from Tyre and Sidon, towns on the Phoenician seaboard which, though prosperous enough ports, were slow in paying for recent grain imports from Galilee. The amount of grain sent was much smaller than was usual, and there were Galilean grumbles about grain being sent at all, since this was a time of severe shortage and the feeding of Palestine came first. But: Tyre and Sidon had depended on these imports ever since the time of Hiram and Solomon, and the royal treasury in Judaea received a sizable commission from both the Galilean factors and the Phoenician agents. The emissaries from Tyre and Sidon desired an opportunity to explain to Herod Agrippa why payment had not yet been rendered and why it could not be rendered for some time (a long story which could not be expected to interest the king, something about peculations, the failure of a docking project, a mining investment that had gone wrong) and they had a word with the king’s chamberlain Blastus the evening before the ceremony in which Caesar and Caesar’s city were to be honoured and the king to declare the opening of the games.
‘He’s sick,’ Blastus said, ‘and in a perpetual foul temper. Soft words and promises aren’t going to do any good. He’s not been too happy about you people for a long time.’ He spoke slow Aramaic which, cognate with the tongue of Phoenicia, the emissaries understood well enough.
‘We’ve brought presents.’
‘Good presents?’
‘The best. Fine Phoenician workmanship. Gold and silver bangles and breastplates and the rest of the nonsense.’
‘The rest of the—?’
‘Well, he’ll still demand heavy interest on the unpaid bill, and we like to deal with businessmen not monarchs weighed down with jewels and the rest of the nonsense. Flattery’s not in our line.’
‘You’ll have to flatter him just the same. It’s meat and drink to him these days, practically his only meat and drink.’
‘How much interest do you think he’s going to charge?’
‘He’ll go to the limit. If I were you people I’d start thinking about getting grain from Egypt. They understand business there better than he does. He’s lived too long in Rome.’
It was while Herod Agrippa was writhing in bed with an intolerable resumption of his pains that his daughter Bernice light-heartedly gave him bad news. ‘That man’s still alive,’ she said.
‘Which man, child?’
‘The man that was supposed to have his rosch cut off.’ She had the habit of mixing her nurse’s Aramaic into her Greek. ‘The one who used to catch dagim and then preached, the one with the white sakan,’ stroking her pretty smooth chin.
‘Speak plainly, child.’ Her father was up on his elbow, looking at her fiercely.
‘Well, they were all talking about it in the schuk, so old Miriam said, they knew the old yeled whose rosch was really cut off, some of them saw it after it was done, the rosch I mean, and said that’s old whatsisname. And the other one, he got away, and he’s alive in somebody’s cellar, there was a naarah who saw him, she thought it was his ghost at first but it wasn’t. There’s been a bit of trickery, old Miriam said, and it’s a king’s job not to be tricked, she said. That’s what I heard in the kitchen,’ Bernice said.
The king furiously rang the bell by his bed and at length Blastus came in. Blastus looked at the king without deference: it was plain to him that Herod Agrippa I was not long for this world; Blastus was only thirty and he had a non-monarchical future to think about. The king let his daughter tell the story again. ‘Have you heard the like from anyone?’ Herod Agrippa asked, fierce and wincing. Blastus had to admit that he had. ‘Get back to Jerusalem,’ the king ordered; ‘get the police on to this. I want that man’s head on the block and everybody else’s head who covered up the truth from their king. I want blood, and by God I’m going to have it.’
‘After the ceremony? The opening of the games, that is?’
When Herod Agrippa appeared amid clamouring Caesareans and distinguished visitors and the clangour of sounding brass and thumped drums he looked not only in robust health but unutterably majestic, for he wore his glittering gown of silver that the early sun caught, he shone like a planet. His face had been farded and he had been fed an energising drug and, when he spoke, it was with the deliberate articulation of one who is slightly drunk. He met his Roman visitors in the gaudy anteroom to the royal box of the circus, saying: ‘We welcome the honourable senators Auspicius and Cinnus to our royal port of Caesarea. We trust that they will find their entertainment satisfactory. We have arranged – what have we arranged, Blastus?’ But Blastus was on his way to Jerusalem. The under chamberlain said:
‘Wild beasts, majesty. Gladiators.’ One of the two emissaries from Phoenicia got in quickly then with an open box of bright jewels and the cynical language of courtiership, saying:
‘Majesty – I say majesty inadvertently – deity, I would say. Your holy personage glows like a god. Your people need no god but Herod Agrippa. And here, holy one, are gifts unfit for a god but all that humble and erring humanity could contrive for the decking of one who already outshines the sun, the moon and a myriad constellations.’ Herod Agrippa greedily dipped his heavily ringed right hand into the casket and raised a particularly finely wrought wristband to the light. Then he saw something fluttering in from the open casement. A bird. It settled on one of the ropes on which fresh flowers of the season had been festooned in the king’s honour. A little white owl. It looked at him without deference. Then Herod Agrippa remembered something. Many years ago, when he had incurred the displeasure of the Emperor Tiberius, he had been put briefly into chains and made to share an open-air prison with criminals of the common sort. He had been leaning against the bole of a tree, and in the branches of that tree were twittering birds. But one did not twitter; it hooted. A white owl, more mature than this. He had been frightened at first, believing owls to be birds of ill omen. But a prisoner from the Rhineland had laughed and gutturally said that this bird meant Herod Agrippa would be released soon, which he was. But the German had also, without laughing, said that next time Herod Agrippa saw a white owl it would mean that he had only five days more to live. ‘Take that bird away,’ he now shouted, then collapsed.
He howled in agony and was borne swiftly away on a litter to the palace. Should not, muttered some of the bearded councillors, have accepted the Phoenician blasphemy as his due. He elevates himself to the divine, and the divine responds by striking him down. But Luke, had he been present and not awaiting the return of Paul to Antioch, there to baptise him into the faith, would have delivered a less fanciful diagnosis: the rupturing of a hydatid cyst, the writhing of tapeworms in the final royal stool confirming it.
The death of Herod Agrippa I was nowhere regretted. Even his funeral lacked the extravagant gestures of mourning which the eastern territories are so cynically adept at furnishing. He was shoved into the tomb of his royal ancestors with minimal ceremony. He had blasphemed, though passively, and he had, after five days of condign suffering, given up the ghost with a cry that had sounded like a curse. The party of the Zealots, after a dissatisfied intermission of their plans for liberation from a foreign yoke, were now able to resume their secret meetings and their amassing of arms in secret places: things had reverted to the only situation most of them had known before the three-year reign (in Judaea that is; he had had rule of the neighbouring territories for seven) of one who, despite the gestures of autonomy, had been no more than a Roman puppet. Now they awaited the appointment of a procurator and some years of renewed but impotent disaffection, the only state in which they were really happy.
The law promulgated at last by Claudius and the Senate by which no Jews, except those who had been able to purchase full Roman citizenship from the Empress Messalina, were permitted to remain in Rome brought shiploads of refugees to Caesarea, refuge being glossable as repatriation, but few of these Jews had ever seen Palestine or even wanted to see it. There were a great number of Nazarenes among them, and the Jerusalem church gloried in expansion. The high priests of the Jewish faith, sickened by Herod Agrippa’s vindictiveness, which had no roots in genuine piety, guilty also at the execution of James, in which they had acquiesced uneasily, left the Nazarenes alone. Some converted Pharisees, speedily apostatising under the brief monarchy, now dusted off the intermitted faith they brought out of the cupboard, and they were loud in their demands that its essential Jewishness be proclaimed and regularised.
Peter, no longer in hiding, presided over a great meeting of Nazarenes in the open air on the Mount of Olives. He had carefully prepared his inaugural speech with the help of John Mark, and he spoke as follows:
‘Members of the faith, friends of the faithful, we are assembled in a time when little would seem to hinder the growth of this church in Jerusalem and the daughter churches of Asia. The rule of Judaea is, as you know, reverting to Rome after the unregretted death of its king. We expect a procurator appointed by the Emperor Claudius, and we anticipate a measure of Roman justice and a measure of Roman indifference. My brother and colleague James – whose name none of us can utter without sad but triumphant memories of his martyred namesake – has been granted the authority of head of the Jerusalem church. We may call him the overseer or episcopos or bishop of Jerusalem. My work lies elsewhere, as does that of so many of my colleagues – such as Paul and Barnabas, who are busily bringing the word to the Gentiles. We are met here to consider a particular problem – that of the relationship between these same Gentiles and those followers of the Lord Jesus Christ who, brought up in the Jewish faith, consider themselves still, despite so many radical changes, to profess that faith. The word is with Matthias.’
Matthias got up from the grass, spitting out an olive pit first, and spoke thus:
‘Father Peter, as I must call him, and brothers in the faith – I put the matter plainly. We followers of the Lord Jesus, blessed be his name, came to his teaching not as a new thing but as the fulfilment of a very old thing. His coming was foretold by the prophets, his lineage is of the House of David, his messiahship came as a salvation to the Jewish people. If I may put it simply – the Jews first, the Gentiles after. This sums up the mission of our brother Paul, who first enters the synagogue of any town he visits, addressing Jews who may or may not accept the word, but also those Gentile Godfearers, as they are called, who, in his experience, have been quicker than the Jews to follow and absorb the new teaching. Now a Gentile who follows Christ follows also the law which preceded Christ. He is bound to the law of Moses. He is bound to the acceptance of circumcision, to the abhorrence of unclean food, to the avoidance of fornication and the forbidden degrees of marriage—’
Peter cut in here, saying: ‘You mean he must conform as a Jew before he can conform as a Nazarene. I sense in Matthias’s words a certain rebuke of myself as the one who baptised the Roman centurion Cornelius into the faith without demanding that he change his eating habits or have his foreskin cut. But we have no ordinance which compels the baptised Gentile to accept the laws of Jewry. That must be made clear: The faith is for all. Foreskin-cutting does not come into it.’
A priest of low rank stood up to say: ‘I am not yet a follower of Christ, though I – and many of my brothers here present – am inclined to his way. Indeed, we Pharisees, who accept the resurrection of the body, are halfway there. But you cannot expect us, who call ourselves Jews and, though ready for the act of baptism, must always call ourselves such, to accept the modes of the Gentiles. More, you cannot even expect us to mingle with Gentiles and call them our brothers, since, according to our prior beliefs, they are an unclean people.’
Peter cried out angrily at that, having that vision to support him: ‘Nothing that God has created can be called unclean. That too must be made clear. Jesus Christ enjoins brotherhood on all who follow him. Circumcision and food laws do not come into it. Brothers, listen.’ For there were some belligerent mutterings going on there on the Mount of Olives, an olive being, as you may know, an emblem of peace. ‘Listen, I tell you.’ They listened, most of them. ‘A good while away God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God, who knows the hearts of men, gave the Gentiles the Holy Spirit, even as he did to us. And he made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith. Now why do you make a trial of God, that you should try to put a yoke on the necks of Christ’s disciples which neither our fathers nor ourselves were able to bear? What we believe is this: that we shall all be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus – Jew and Gentile alike.’
There were more murmurings and one or two shouts from the back. Another man in priest’s robes got up, older than the other, and spoke reasonably. He said: ‘We get reports of the evangelising work of the man whom we remember as Saul, and of the others. We hear that the Gentile converts to your faith, not yet mine, regard themselves as a special and privileged people who follow their own laws, or the lack of them. They shout out about being saved by the Lord Jesus, who has cleansed them of all sin, past, present and to come. So they can behave as they wish, jumping into bed with their mothers and grandmothers and nieces and daughters, nephews and sons too for all we know. Outside any decent law, do you follow me? Love one another, and we all know what that can mean. Only the Jewish faith lays down what you may and may not do. Eat a bit of pork and you’ll end up eating dogshit and saying how good it is with a little mustard. Fornicate freely and you’ll start buggering sheep. What I’m saying is this: this story of universal love and everlasting life isn’t enough. People have to behave. People have to have clean genitals and not carry the muck of the towns and the sand of the desert inside their prepuces. Nazarenes have to be Jews first. I propose that that be laid down as a fundamental law.’ And he sat again on the grass, applauded by many. James the Little, who no longer needed the distinguishing sobriquet, James the only James, James stood and said:
‘Brothers, listen. We know that long centuries ago God went first to the Gentiles, looking among them for a people who would follow his law. He found the Jews instead, but he said that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, and, and now I quote sacred scripture, “all the Gentiles upon whom my name is called”. What I conclude from this is that we stop troubling the Gentiles about these matters, but that we write letters to our new churches in Asia, telling them not to worship idols, not to commit fornication, not to bugger and sodomise, not to eat food that’s been strangled and contains blood. Will not this serve our need? Compromise is always to be followed. And that compromise weds the word of Moses to the word of Christ.’
‘They have to be circumcised,’ somebody shouted, and others took up the cry. Peter, angry, yelled:
‘Is the spread of our faith wholly to be tied to—What’s the word, John Mark?’
‘Coition. The organs of generation.’
‘What I say is that a good deal of the work of our men in the Asian provinces is spent fighting goddesses who stand for—’
‘Coition.’
‘Coition. People fornicating around and getting blessed by a goddess for doing it. In those places of the Gentiles you could say that the big enemy is the female genitals. And here in Jerusalem some of you people are making the genitals of men into a kind of rod forbidding entry into the Lord’s congregation. What we’re supposed to be concerned with is the soul and love and salvation. You make all that of less importance than having a piece of skin snipped off your—’
‘Organ of generation.’
‘Organ of generation.’
But the demand for Nazarene Gentile circumcision went on. ‘We’ll mention it in a letter,’ James called. Somehow he had not thought that the spread of the faith and its organisation would entail the writing of letters. Christ had never written any. None of them were letter-writers. Paul was different, of course. He represented the new way. On his brief visit to Caesarea with the famine relief money he had been writing letters all day long. They had never had anything in writing before.
Marcus Julius Tranquillus received a letter, a note rather, telling him to watch his step and signed Quidam amicus. He had destroyed the note on receiving it, but he sat now in the dining-room of the little rented house on the Janiculum brooding about it. He was not watching his step. He was taking action. Tonight he had an appointment. Why night? Narcissus, the Greek freedman, had said night and he had his reasons. The trouble was that it was dangerous to have enemies at night. During the day you could avoid them. Night was different.
Sara was clearing the table after their evening meal, and Julius’s brother-in-law Caleb sat at the table trying to force a white grape into the mouth of little Ruth, who resented being weaned and spat out solidities. But she sucked the scant juice of the grape.
‘Time for her bed,’ Sara told her brother, taking the child.
‘I must get work,’ Caleb said. ‘Get married. Set up a family of my own.’
‘If by that,’ Sara said, ‘you mean you’ve outstayed your welcome here—’
‘No. Just restless. And whatever the work is, it won’t be my real work.’
‘Killing the Romans. Not very complimentary to your Roman brother-in-law.’
‘Oh,’ Caleb said, ‘Julius thinks as I do. The Roman Empire is a great sham. Foul with corruption and yet it thinks it has this mission to clean up the world. I don’t want to kill Romans. Not ordinary ones. They’re just human beings. The Roman state is something else.’
‘Julius gets paid by the Roman state,’ Sara said, rocking the baby in her arms. ‘But thank Jupiter or somebody he’s no longer serving the wife of the Roman state.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Caleb said. ‘When did that happen?’
‘Eh? What? When did what happen?’
‘He wasn’t listening,’ Sara said. ‘He was brooding about being removed from the beauteous company of the divine Messalina.’
‘I have to go out,’ Julius said.
‘Tonight? Why?’
‘I have to go to the Palatine.’
‘Walk? It’s a long way.’
‘Only a mile or so. Downhill. Something to do with being given a new commission perhaps.’
‘And yet you look gloomy. I do honestly believe,’ Sara said, ‘that you miss the divine Messalina.’
‘Don’t tease me,’ Julius said. ‘I never felt safe. And don’t use words like divine. There ought to be an opposite to that word, but I don’t know what it is.’
‘There’s an opposite in Hebrew,’ Caleb said.
‘She gave off a kind of—I don’t know how to describe it.’
‘She looked like ice,’ Sara said.
‘You’ve never seen ice.’
‘I’ve seen her. Admittedly only from a distance. Beautiful like ice.’
‘No ice there, I can tell you. Sizzling imperial smiles. When she—Never mind.’
‘When she what?’ Caleb asked.
‘When she asked for discretion. That was her big word. But now I have to be indiscreet. Caleb – I mean, Metellus – We have to be discreet there, don’t we? There’s something—Never mind.’
‘The Jews are coming back to Rome,’ Caleb said. ‘The Romans can’t do without us. The synagogues will be opening up soon. With Roman troops outside to stop riots.’
When Sara took little Ruth to her cradle in the main bedroom, Julius said: ‘What I wanted to say was – will you walk with me as far as the Palatine?’
‘Gladly. But is it—’
‘No, it’s not safe. Nothing’s ever safe these days. Especially at night.’
‘Shall I bring my—?’
‘Yes, bring that. I may be foolish, but a married man has to be – well, cautious. You’ll understand that one of these days.’
‘I’ve learnt to understand about caution.’
He put a shine on his dagger while Sara sang little Ruth to sleep:
‘When the wolf howls
Feel no fear.
Romulus and Remus
Dropped no tear
When they heard the wolf’s howl
Drawing near.
Mamma is coming.
Mamma is here.’
Julius went first down the hill, limping still, cloaked, sword gripped under his cloak. Caleb, dressed like a Roman citizen, followed after. The Via Aurelia was empty of traffic. When they had passed the Marine Theatre three men jumped on Julius from some arbutus shrubs. Caleb ran thirty paces and was athletic with his dagger. He struck down one of the assailants. This assailant tried to crawl back to the bushes in his blood. The other two ran off. ‘Not very efficient,’ Caleb said. ‘We’d better question this one. Looks as though it’s too late, though. See that gash. At last I’ve killed a Roman.’
‘No need for questioning. I expected something like this.’
Julius felt safe after passing the Palatine sentries. He was known, there was no password to utter. He stated his business and was taken a long way to a room with a desk and a lot of scrolls on it. He had to wait a while before Narcissus appeared. He told Narcissus what had happened on his way there.
‘There’s no need,’ Narcissus said, ‘to stand stiffly to attention. You’re not on parade.’ He was very Greek, and he wore his curled hair long and over his ears to obscure the piercings that had accommodated earrings, badges of slavery long done. Manumission. A freedman. The Greeks were best at the higher administration. There were a lot of pierced ears on the Palatine. He was much shorter than Julius. He invited him to be seated. They sat. Narcissus said: ‘You have reason to believe that you were set upon for a special reason? I mean, these were not just common footpads?’
‘I was expecting that some way would be sought of – keeping my mouth closed. If my brother-in-law had not been with me this mouth would have been closed for ever.’
‘Yes yes yes. Your brother-in-law, whoever he is, deserves well of you and, I suppose, of the state. A brave Roman of the kind we’re always hearing about but rarely see.’
‘He happens to be a Jew.’
‘A Jew? Oh yes, they’re coming back, aren’t they? I said to Caesar that you couldn’t really keep them out. A sop to senators who owed the Jews money. Well, now you must come and talk to the Emperor.’
‘I hadn’t expected—’ Julius was startled. ‘What I mean is—’
‘He’s only just back from Ostia. The new harbour, you know. One of his pet schemes. And tomorrow morning he’s off to Neapolis. Tonight seemed the best time. Come with me.’
Narcissus led him down many corridors and towards the imperial suite, which was guarded. The guard was being changed, though without the bark of orders. Julius knew the captain of the guard, one Flaccus. They nodded at each other. Narcissus said, as they trod carpeting, soft to Claudius’s ailing feet: ‘The Emperor knows you and thinks well of you. That you were wounded in the British campaign is enough to gain his affection. You have little need to be concerned about the future of your career if – well, all goes as we pray it will.’
‘Amen.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, it just slipped out. A word I learnt. From my wife. Hebrew.’
‘You know Hebrew?’
‘Not much.’
‘But some. I see, I see.’ Narcissus knocked on a door and at once entered. ‘I beg the Emperor’s pardon,’ he said, though with no tone of sincerity. The Emperor had been nursing in his lap a personable young woman whom Julius recognised as the imperial niece Agrippina. She ran out very rapidly by a side door. Claudius, somewhat embarrassed, said:
‘A display of avuncular afffffection, no more.’ He did not look well: the hair pure snow, the face lined, the stammer bad. ‘So this is the young man I hear well of? So now I bbbbbrace myself and you tell me tell me aaaaall.’ He spoke the last word on a rising intonation. Julius gulped and began.
‘You will understand, sir, that there has been a certain division in my mind, what may be termed a conflict of loyalties. I was given a post in which discretion was enjoined on me. I was to be loyal to the Empress, but this loyalty entailed being disloyal to the Emperor. You understand my difficulties.’
He and Narcissus had been standing; the Emperor, in a dressing gown which parted to show glimpses of a slug-white fat body, was sitting on a wide chair loaded with yellow cushions. The Emperor said: ‘I think you had better sit down. I think we had bbbbbetter have some wine. You’re a soldier and I’ve done my share of wine-bbbbbibbing with soldiers. You may relax as in your own mess. Will you, Narcissus—?’ Narcissus brought a plain winejug and cups from a table in a far corner of the room, not overlarge, its quality intimate and domestic. Julius was glad of the wine: his mouth was dry. ‘Ppppproceed,’ the Emperor said. Julius proceeded:
‘The Empress made many visits about the city and its environs, with myself in charge of her armed escort. Most of these visits were to the same individual – often in one or other of his houses, sometimes in a farm or villa not owned by him. Occasionally in an inn on the road to Ostia. The individual in question was Gaius Silius, though I heard the Empress address him by name only once. That was when I was on patrol round the house of a kinsman of his former wife, the Lady Lollia Paulina.’
‘Ffffformer—?’
‘Yesterday, before I was dismissed her imperial majesty’s service, I heard her address the consul Gaius Silius as husband, and the – gentleman in question responded with wife. I thought at first this was a kind of facetiousness. But one of my last assignments had been to provide a military guard for a—I do not know whether to call it a party or a religious celebration or an orgy—’
‘You mean,’ Claudius said, very pallid, ‘one of these Oriental – the slave Ccccchrestus or whoever it is—’
‘No, sir, not religious in that sense. On the estate of a certain Silanus there was what was termed a homage to the god of wine, appropriate for the time of the wine harvest. Grapes and vine leaves and much wine and a fat naked man impersonating Bacchus. There was a good deal of drunkenness—’ Julius heard the primness of his tone and felt, paradoxically, soiled by it. ‘The consul Silanus, perhaps inevitably, turned himself into Silenus. There was – lechery, nakedness. It was a warm afternoon,’ he added, as if to excuse the nakedness.
He did as he was bid and continued. ‘Then a man in priest’s robes appeared to conduct a marriage ceremony. Perhaps I saw more than I should. I was supposed to stay in a sort of grove. But I saw this ceremony between the Empress and Gaius Silius and I assumed it was all a game. There was a great deal of laughter and little solemnity. Then the marriage or mock marriage was—It is hard to continue—’
‘You must,’ Narcissus said.
‘It was – consummated at once and in public. And, in sympathy as it were, the other guests – A great mass of naked bodies. Men and women. Fornication for them. There were boys there too, Ganymedes. For the Empress and Gaius Silius it was termed a consummation.’
Claudius said, with calm and without stammering much: ‘You were right after all, Narcissus. I owe you many apologies. A bigamous marriage to show her ccccontempt not only for her husband but for the law of Rome – a signal to the world of ggggglory in depravity. And when does Gaius Silius think he can strike the blow that will seccccure him the imperial cccc—’
‘I do not think,’ Narcissus said, ‘that Gaius Silius has such an ambition. He is a weak man besotted by the erotic, no more.’ To Julius he said: ‘Where are they now?’
‘I was told there would be no further need of my services and that I must report back for reassignment. Also that I must be discreet in my reporting back. The word was uttered in a tone which I interpreted as one of menace. I heard brief talk of a journey to Neapolis.’
‘And perhaps,’ Narcissus asked, ‘of taking ship there for the island of Capri? The Villa Jovis? That,’ he said to the now shaking Claudius, ‘was by a deed of gift assigned to the Empress.’
‘Do not refer to her as the Empress. You may, if you wish, allude to the late Empress. Immediate arrest and almost immediate execution.’ His tones were clear and pedantic, as though he were referring to peccant personages in his own historical writings. ‘As for a trial – all Rome must know already of a depravity too foul for its very sewers to discharge. All except its Emperor. I’ve been weak, Narcissus.’
‘Tolerant, Caesar. Distracted by multifarious duties.’
‘Young man,’ the Emperor said to Julius, ‘the world is more evil than any man can know. Every day there is some new foul surprise, some new ppppputrid revelation. The times need to be washed, scoured, to become the ttttttablet for the writing of a new age. A great pppppurging and a fresh beginning. But none gives the word. None none none.’ And with an astonishing and totally unexpected howl of animal terror he dashed his wine to the floor and tottered out.
There was a pause. During it Julius stood. He had done his duty and was ready to be dismissed. Narcissus looked up at him from his chair.
‘How much more can you tell me?’
‘Only of the road to Neapolis. Wait – some talk of Gemini, the heavenly twins. I did not attend much to that. It seemed to be some private joke.’
‘There’s a ship of that name. It plies between Neapolis and Capri. Or used to. Tell me – do you fancy following your purgative mission to the end? Apprehending the – criminal couple?’
‘Do I have a choice in the matter, sir?’
‘Oh, I think so. I can understand your wishing to be done with the business. I’ll have some bully from the Praetorian Guard assigned. You’ve done well. You’ve also, to be candid with you, restored my own credibility with the Emperor. I warned him of this, but he was not prepared to listen. He even, at one point, made sounds indicative of great rising anger, as though I were speaking a kind of referred treason. And now – I think a wholesome week or so in the bosom of your family would be in order. And a little bonus from the treasury perhaps. So be it, or—What was that Hebrew word?’
‘Amen.’
‘Yes. You have some connection with the Jews, you said.’
‘Through marriage, sir.’
‘Do you fancy service in Palestine?’
‘I think of myself as a good servant of the Empire. But I’ve lost my taste for blood.’
‘One of our tasks is to stop people shedding it. Perhaps you’d better work on your Hebrew.’
‘Aramaic, sir.’
It would, I think, be wearisome to recount the details of the many voyages that the tireless Paul undertook in the service of the new word, for wherever he went he said much the same thing and met much the same mixed response. He went back, after the delivery of money for the famine relief in Judaea, to the city of Antioch, where he baptised Luke the physician, saw that the Christian community was in good hands, and then prepared to go to Cyprus. Of the church leaders in Antioch it is perhaps interesting to note that one of them must have been black (else why should he be called Symeon Niger?) and one of them, named Manaen, meaning the comforter, was the foster-brother of Herod the tetrarch. Apparently his grandfather, who had the same name, pleased the infanticidal Herod the Great by prophesying great things for him, and Herod had the whole family accommodated in the royal household, so that the young Manaen became a sort of adoptive prince. This gives us an image of two boys playing together with golden balls and so on, one of them destined to be a church leader and the other to have the head of John the Baptist shorn off as a gift for a dancing girl named Salome. This should mean something, but I do not know what.
Paul took ship with Barnabas at Seleucia, five miles north of the mouth of the Orontes, and later the learned John Mark joined them at Salamis, on the east coast of Cyprus, where some saw the light and others hurled bricks. In the provincial governmental town of Paphos, where the proconsul Sergius Paullus ruled on behalf of the Roman Senate, Paul prayed that the blasphemous sorcerer Elymas be blinded, and his prayer was heard and implemented promptly. Sergius Paullus was impressed and agreed to consider the possibility of his joining the new faith, but I think he was merely being polite to his near namesake. Paphos had its many-breasted goddess, closer to Aphrodite than to Artemis, and Paul thundered against fornication. Many listened with pleasure, but most continued to fornicate.
The party then sailed for Perga, or rather for Attalia, taking a riverboat down the Cestus to the inland city, and Paul in the synagogue gave a long seamless account of the search of the Jewish people for a Messiah and the fulfilment of that search. Little, bald, thundering, though shaking with malaria, he impressed the Gentiles more than the Jews. He also seemed to take it for granted that he was the leader of the mission, although Barnabas had the priority of longer service and hence greater authority in the mother church of Antioch. John Mark resented this relegation of his cousin to second place. He told Paul so and Paul said:
‘I do not see that this is any business of yours. Barnabas does not complain. He is too busy preaching the word to consider such a thing as being of any importance. Get on with some preaching yourself and cease this pettiness.’
‘I think you are growing puffed up. I think your eloquence is inflating more than your lungs. You speak to the congregations as though you were the inventor of the faith. A lot of what you are preaching does not seem to me to be all that orthodox.’
‘Who is to say, except presumably yourself, who have read too many books and meditated on the faith too little?’
‘Jesus made friends with prostitutes, and you howl at them as though they were the devil.’
‘And so they are.’
‘I think I shall go back to Jerusalem.’
‘How will you get there? Work your passage?’
‘A week’s lessons in Greek to the daughters of that man Nabal will earn me enough. And I was asked to give a lecture on Zoroastrianism. No trouble about money, O father of the faithful.’
‘What did you call me then?’
‘Never mind. Good luck with your preaching.’
‘I call you a traitor and a deserter.’
‘Call me what you like. I could call you some things.’
So John Mark went back to Jerusalem, and Paul and Barnabas caused trouble by filling up the synagogues with Gentiles, who were forewarned to get there before the regular time for the arrival of the Jews. Stones were hurled as they took the eastern road to Iconium. In that city they had trouble too, but an Iconian resident named Onesiphorus gave them notice of coming mob violence initiated by some of the civic leaders, so they were able to get away unscathed. Onesiphorus was much impressed by Paul, and he has left us a little poem in Greek which fixes his appearance for all time:
Strongly built, though small in size,
Large-nosed, with penetrating eyes,
Omega made by leg and leg,
His eyebrows meet, bald as an egg,
A man, yes, but angelic grace
Shines sometimes from that ugly face.
So on to Lystra and then to Derbe, then back to Antioch. Here Paul and Barnabas quarrelled. Paul said:
‘Things go well enough here. Now I suggest we take the same trip as we did before and see how things go there.’
‘Now?’
‘Soon.’
Barnabas gave an apologetic cough. He said: ‘There’s somebody here in Antioch who’s sorry for his sins. He keeps out of your way. I tell him to come and beg forgiveness, but he’s frightened.’
‘You mean your damned cousin?’
‘Yes, and I trust you use damned as a mere conventional expression of displeasure. John Mark is good and useful. True, he sulked in Jerusalem for a time, but he realised at last where his place is. So I think we ought to give him another chance.’
‘He’s a traitor and a defector and I’m not having him.’
Barnabas sighed. ‘But if I want him?’ he said.
‘Look, Barnabas, there’s family sentiment at work here. You want him because he’s your first cousin. I don’t want him because he’s disloyal and, to speak candidly, his conception of our faith is not orthodox. He’s more trouble than he’s worth.’
‘It seems to me, if I may say so, that you’re taking too much on yourself. Nobody denies your eloquence and intellectuality and your success as an evangelist. But you assume precedence over me, and that without cause. You were sitting on your arse making tents in Tarsus when I summoned you. It was I who set up a church here in Antioch and I called on you as a helper not as one free to usurp my primacy when he felt like doing it. That’s plain speaking but you asked for it. John Mark goes with us.’
‘Oh no he does not.’
‘Oh yes he does.’
‘You’re pigheaded, Barnabas, and you don’t have the cause at heart. We can’t afford to have mere passengers, especially carping ones like John Mark who, moreover, trembles on the edge of the heterodox in too many of his views. He doesn’t come, and that’s an end of it.’
‘Very well then, I don’t come either.’
‘Oh yes you do.’
‘Oh no I do not.’
‘So,’ Paul said, ‘this is very regrettable, but it looks like the parting of the ways. You go where you will, since you proclaim the authority of primacy as you call it, taking that damned cousin with you. I’ll have to look for another helper.’
‘You see? That’s all I was to you, a mere helper, not a colleague working on the level of equality. John Mark and I will go as brothers in the faith.’
‘Cousins, and distant ones too. Where do you propose to go?’
‘To Cyprus to begin with.’
‘To undo the good work already begun? To have John Mark converting temple prostitutes?’
‘The way of the Lord is open to all.’
‘Get on with it, then. Anyway,’ he now said brutally, ‘I need somebody who’s a Roman citizen like myself. It’s always been awkward going round with someone who can’t claim those rights that belong to the Roman citizen. I haven’t claimed them yet and why not? Out of loyalty to you, Barnabas. There’s that young Silas who’s on a visit here. He has the ancestral privileges, or so he says and he’s no reason for lying. Well, so it’s come to this, and we preach a doctrine of love.’
‘My love for you, Paul,’ Barnabas said primly, ‘is in no way impaired by our altercation.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Paul said.
So he and Silas, a young man proud of his Latin, which he spoke with Ciceronian rotundities, so that native speakers of the tongue had difficulty in understanding him, went back to Paul’s own Cilicia, then crossed the Taurus range through the pass known as the Cilician Gates, entered the kingdom of Antiochus, king of Commagene, who had had part of Cilicia and the whole of eastern Lycaonia added to his territories some years back, and performed church inspections in Galatia. The mission of Paul and Barnabas had borne reasonable fruit there, and many asked with affection after Paul’s former partner in the work. Paul said blandly: ‘The egg has divided, and there are two travelling teams where there was but one before, praise be to God.’ The church at Lystra highly commended a young man named Timothy as one well fitted to learn the evangelising craft from Paul, and Paul, having inspected the church, inspected him. He was young, like Silas, and shy-eyed but not secretive. Paul said: ‘Tell me about yourself. Everything.’
‘My mother,’ Timothy said with a slight Galatian lisp, ‘is named Eunice, and she is Jewish. My father was a Greek Gentile. I carry his name.’
‘Ah. That makes you a Jew.’
‘The Jews don’t think so. They call me the uncircumcised son of a Greek. They make it sound like an insult.’
‘No trouble about getting you circumcised.’
Timothy was appalled. ‘At my age? Besides, you wrote a letter, didn’t you, about there being no need. It was read out in the Galatian churches.’
‘Yes, but that was before we received this letter from Jerusalem. The one about Gentiles trying to conform to the Jewish law as much as they can. For the sake,’ smiling kindly, ‘of quietening dissension. Circumcision. You’re just the man for it. They’ll be pleased in Jerusalem.’
‘But,’ Timothy frowned, ‘it’s painful and it’s dangerous.’
‘Nonsense. You’ll feel like a new man after it. We’ll see about having it done this afternoon.’
So poor Timothy had his foreskin tweaked and pulled by the strong hard fingers of the mohel, whose primary trade was that of blacksmith, closed his eyes, felt the bite of the razor, opened his eyes to see a part of his body lying on a white cloth, bled, recovered, and sorely walked off with Paul and Silas to places Paul already knew in Galatic Phrygia, went north to Philomelium, and then north-west through Asian Phrygia, where Paul did no preaching. This area was not yet ready for the word of the Lord. At Dorylaeum or Cotiaeum (my informants are not sure which) they ventured west and smelt the sea at Troas. This was a Roman colony but it remembered that it was a Greek town. Paul breathed deeply of the ozone and said: ‘Thalassa.’ Then he heard a voice behind him say:
‘Or thalatta, according to the dialect you prefer.’ Paul turned and saw Luke the physician. They were at a small open-air wineshop on the main quay. Luke smiled at Paul, swinging his small leather bag of medicines. ‘I said I’d be here. It’s better than Antioch. More sickness. Well. Introduce me.’ He sat down and another cup was brought. ‘Sore is it still?’ he said eventually to Timothy. ‘It’s the swinging against the legs as you walk. Try this ointment.’
‘Macedonia,’ Paul suddenly said. ‘Plenty of ships going there, I see. Philip of Macedonia. Alexander the Great. The land of the conqueror conquered. You’re coming with us?’ he said to Luke.
‘As your medical consultant? I can’t preach. I’m in the faith but I’m not learned in it.’
‘How does your poem go?’
‘I abandoned it. I’m not cut out for verse.’
‘Try prose.’
In the lodgings of Luke, where Paul was granted the privilege of the bed and the rest lay on the floor, Paul slept heavily and had several dreams, some of them trivial but one of them, he thought on waking, significant, indicative, authoritative. He saw Alexander coming into his tent and taking his armour off. He sat at a table and conferred unintelligibly with his commanders. Then he looked out of the picture straight at the observing dreamer and said: ‘I’ve drunk everybody else’s blood. I may as well drink his.’
So the four of them took ship next day across the north Aegean, got to Samothrace at sundown, felt the waves of the immemorial cult of the Cabiri beat out at them from its mountain, and the next day arrived at Neapolis on the Macedonian shore. ‘Philippi,’ Paul said, having discovered from one of the sailors that it was ten miles away from the coast, give or take a furlong.
‘You realise,’ Silas said as they walked, ‘that we’re now in Europe? We’re on the Roman continent. Antony and Augustus, Octavian as he was then, beat Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. We’re into Roman history now.’ Interesting, Paul said, though distractedly. More interesting was their failure to discover a synagogue in Philippi. No Jews? ‘Augustus settled his veterans here,’ Silas said, ‘not only after his defeat of Brutus and Cassius but after the battle of Actium when he trounced Antony and Cleopatra.’ Interesting: all Gentiles, not a Jew to be seen. Ten men the minyan for a synagogue, so there must be at most nine. The four of them sat down by the river Gangites and ate the bread they had bought on the way. Some women were washing clothes, beating them against stones in a manner too vigorous to conduce to their longevity, as Silas put it. Timothy suggested that he go and look for Jews, though without much enthusiasm. Paul said:
‘No. Gentiles will do for the moment. Leave this to me.’ And he raised his voice at the women. ‘You’ve heard of the Christians? We’re here to speak for them. Carry on with your linen-thumping, ladies, and listen or not, as you please.’ Some listened. One woman, who was not washing clothes but enjoying the cool of the willows, listened very attentively. Her name was Lydia, she said, and she was from Thyatira, part of the old province of Lydia which had given her her name. She knew the Jews of Thyatira, where was a Jewish colony, and she was by way of being what was known as something of a Godfearer. In Lydia they fished up the murex, a spiky creature out of which they made purple dye. She was unmarried, and she made her living by importing the dye from Thyatira. Interesting. Did she wish to be baptised? Later, she said, let us not rush things. Have you gentlemen anywhere to stay? Just arrived, they said. I sometimes take in lodgers, she said. I have two spare rooms.
So they stayed with Lydia, who seemed to have done rather well out of the business of importing purple dye, and they sat at a table where a servant brought in broiled riverfish with a sharp sauce, after the manner of the Philippine kitchen, in a ceramic pourer. While they were eating (the sauce was of crushed garlic and mustard seeds in wine), they heard outside the casement which gave on to the main street a girl’s voice yelling what sounded like nonsense. Lydia sighed a sigh of habituation and said: ‘I consider this a sin and a shame. That poor girl is not right in the head, and a couple of men have got hold of her, her being an orphan, and they use her as a kind of fortune teller. She says such nonsense that it’s taken by some to be the voice of the god Apollo, and they ask questions and these men say what her mad answers mean. They take plenty of money and keep the girl locked up in a cellar like a prisoner, feeding her nothing but stale bread. I call it a crying shame. Have some more fish.’ While she was serving all except Paul, who said thank you he had had enough, the house shook and the earth rumbled. An interesting place, Philippi. ‘We often get tremors,’ Lydia said. ‘Those two men who have that poor girl say it’s the anger of the god Apollo not being paid enough for his prophecies. Some people will say anything for their own profit.’ Silas said that there had been an earthquake during the battle of Philippi and that it had discomfited Brutus and Cassius though not Octavian.
Paul and Silas went out alone the following morning, leaving Luke and Timothy, who had no Roman citizenship and had best be prudent in a Roman town, to recover from the sharp sauce in the house of Lydia. They saw the poor demented girl at her imposed trade in the market place, crying out nonsense like alaba alaba arkkekk and having this translated as ‘The god says you may make the journey but do not be away longer than three days.’ The earth trembled. ‘There is the voice of the god himself confirming that statement and ordering you to be generous to his servants.’ The two men were middle-aged and wore greasy robes, shifty-eyed; Paul guessed that they took more than pecuniary advantage of the girl. The girl herself had eyes too widely set apart and had filthy hair but a clean blue priestess’s garment. Paul and she looked at each other; if she was feeble-minded then so was he, Paul. He said to her very clearly:
‘What is your name, girl?’
‘Arg werb forkrartok.’
‘I’m not having this nonsense. You’re frightened of these two men who are your jailors and exploiters and they’ve turned you into a voice that speaks gibberish under the guise of prophetic truth. Even by the standards of pagan Rome this is an abomination. Come with us and we’ll look after you. We serve the true God, which is to say truth and kindness and decency. Leave these vile men and we’ll take you to a place of comfort and safety.’ The girl began to weep bitterly, and the two men hurled abuse at Paul, calling on the bystanders to witness the blasphemy of these two foreigners, though Silas had as yet said nothing. The weeping girl responded differently. She got up from the three-legged stool on which she had been sitting, a Pythonian tripod, and cried:
‘It’s right enough. I’m sick and tired of it all. They make me do it. This one’s right when he says it’s all nonsense.’ And she joined herself to Paul and Silas, who hurried her away towards the house of Lydia. They did this with some difficulty for the common sort do not like to lose contact with what they consider the numinous and some of them threw pebbles. Lydia was pleased to have the girl, who permitted herself to be embraced by the older woman and sobbed and howled as though her heart would break. Paul nodded and said:
‘Let her. She’s discharging the foul stuff within. Ah, we have visitors.’ These were the masters of the girl, who now hammered on the front door and yelled that they had brought the lictors with them. Paul opened and nodded pleasantly at the uniformed officials, who carried rods which were both a symbol of authority and a device of punition. One said:
‘Foreigners? You’ve got a charge to answer. Come with us.’
Paul and Silas shrugged and suffered themselves to be led off to the courthouse, where the duumvirs or praetors were called out to examine them. One of the plaintiffs said:
‘It’s like this, your worships. These two are foreigners and Jews by the look of them, and they’re here interfering with good Roman religious practices as well as good Roman trade.’
One of the praetors, a man with crumbs on his jowls from a meal interrupted, said to Paul: ‘Are you the men who were preaching some outlandish superstitious mumbojumbo contrary to the laws of Rome yesterday by the riverbank?’
‘If by that you mean the Christian faith, yes. That, however, does not seem to be the charge. These men have brought my colleague and myself here to answer a plaint which they have not yet preferred.’
‘Never mind about that for the moment. You’re Jews, are you?’
‘Jews, yes.’
‘And also—’ Silas began, but Paul kicked him to enjoin silence. ‘Why?’ Silas frowned, puzzled.
‘We don’t like foreigners coming here,’ the crumbed praetor said, ‘causing disturbances and interfering with the Roman way of life. You lictors,’ he said, ‘use those rods of yours to some purpose and then shove these two big-nosed gentry into jail.’
‘But,’ one of the mountebanks said, ‘they’ve been interfering with our business, which is the holy invocation of the oracle of the god Apollo. That girl we have, your worships, they’ve interfered with her so she can’t do the holy work any more.’
‘As I said,’ the praetor said, getting up from the bench, ‘lay the rods on hard and not only shove them into jail but fix them in the stocks so they can’t move for a bit. That will cool their foreign hot-blooded interferingness. Go on, get on with it.’ The other praetor, following the first, added:
‘You heard what we said.’
So the lictors, who were out of whipping practice, kicked and shoved Paul and Silas to the marketplace, where they added to the day’s entertainment by stripping them down to their clouts and thwacking them with the rods. ‘They can’t do this,’ Silas gasped, ‘not to – It’s against the law.’
‘Let them put themselves in the wrong,’ Paul winced. ‘That sort of thing can be – ow – useful sometimes.’ Lydia witnessed the flogging, leaving the girl, whose name appeared to be Eusebia, back home to have her hair washed and protected by Luke and Timothy against the reappearance of the men who alleged they owned her. Lydia was respected in the town and got some of the women to join her in her cry of ‘It’s a disgrace to Roman justice, as they call it.’
There was an earth tremor, variously to be interpreted as the god Apollo’s approval of the flogging or else the disapprobation of the god of those two who were being flogged. The flogging over, Paul and Silas refused to put back on their robes, saying sensibly that they did not wish to have these glued to their backs with blood and that the heat of the sun (or the blessed god Apollo) was good for their wounds. And so they were led off to a cell where incarceration was compounded with the immobilisation of their limbs in an ingenious Roman machine called the stocks. Lydia and another woman bullied the guards into letting the prisoners be fed by hand, which the two women took care of, shovelling in broiled fish and bread. ‘None of that sharp sauce, please,’ Silas stipulated. And pouring wine down. Then Paul and Silas were left. The earth tremors resumed and made a bourdon to the loud psalms that they sang, interspersed with the odd ode of Horace recited by Silas. They were not alone in the cell. There were a couple of thieves to whom Lydia and her companion had fed the remains of the fish and wine, plenty left over. They were appreciative of the psalms, both Paul and Silas having loud but melodious voices, and they liked the erotic Horace, a poet they had to confess to not having heard of before. ‘Here we are, proper Romans, and we have to learn about one of our own from a couple of Jews. You don’t have to be in those things,’ said the burlier of the two thieves, whose name seemed to be Parvulus, examining the mechanism of the stocks. ‘I mean, you’re not going to get out of here in a hurry, are you. Injury to insult, I call it. Here Calvinus, give us a hand.’ These two hard men, used to breaking into houses, wrenched slat from slat, though with difficulty, and not helped by the earth tremor, which made the stone floor as unsteady as a ship’s deck at times. ‘There,’ Parvulus said in triumph, and Paul and Silas rubbed wrists and ankles with relief. ‘Not well made that thing. Foreign workmanship.’ And then the tremor, like a strong man underground who had been trying to break a set of stocks and merely exhibiting the strains of his exertion, now achieved what it was after, which was to disrupt the smug stasis of Philippi’s architecture. ‘Castor and bleeding Pollux,’ went Parvulus with awe, as the cell seemed to descend into an ocean trough and the door was detached from its hinges. Then, the tellurian message having been delivered, the earth settled to the sleep denied to its immediate dwellers. ‘We’re getting out of here,’ Parvulus said, making for the welcoming doorway. But Paul said:
‘Wait. If you do that the guards will be in trouble. They’ll have to fall on their swords. You know the law.’
‘Let the guards be shagged to death by Pluto and his wife for all I care. I don’t give a rat’s turd for the law, it’s the law that put us here.’ But at that moment two guards came in in relief, seeing their charges present and intact. Paul said:
‘You see how it is. Our God looks after his own. He’s released us from our bonds and opened the door to our freedom. But we thought of what your plight might be and declined the proffer. Now you see the strength of our religion. Join the line of converts we’re going to have when we get out of here.’
As it happened, it was not long before Paul and Silas were released, though the two good thieves, whom Paul duly taught that men of their kind had special niches reserved to them in the Christian heaven, had to see out their term. Paul and Silas were brought up once more before the praetors who, in a pose of Roman magnanimity, said they trusted they had learnt their lesson and they were now to be booted out of town. But Paul said:
‘Wait. My colleague and I are Roman citizens. Cives Romani sumus. Yes, easy enough to make the claim without being able to substantiate it, but our status is on record in, respectively, Tarsus in Cilicia and Caesarea in Palestine. We demand that you seek confirmation of our claim. We are prepared to wait. We have much to do here in the way of teaching the new faith. You know the penalty for (a) whipping Roman citizens, (b) imprisoning them without trial and (c) making them leave Roman territory under constraint. You will be removed from your praetorships and punished according to the provisions of the Valerian and Porcian laws. Very well. We will say no more about it. But if you do not accord proper tolerance to the discreet practice of the faith we profess, you, gentlemen both, to say nothing of your lictors, will be in grave trouble. Good morning.’
Thus a church was established at Philippi with little opposition either from the Jews, of whom there were fewer than ten, or from the Romans, who saw the value of discretion. Luke elected to stay on at the house of Lydia, allegedly for the purpose of medicating the girl Eusebia, who was covered in sores and vilely undernourished. Also, he said, the town was not rich in physicians and he wished to set down in the cool comfort of the room he had been given some details – in prose – of Paul’s missionary journeys. Paul, Silas and Timothy set out west along the Egnatian Way which linked the Aegean to the Adriatic. They came at length to Thessalonica, the Macedonian capital, where there were plenty of Jews, mostly with Hellenised names, and a thriving synagogue. A hired mob tried to have Paul, Silas and Timothy brought up before the politarchs, or city magistrates, on a charge of setting up one Jesus Chrestos, a Palestinian criminal who became a Greek slave, as a rival to Claudius. But Paul, Silas and Timothy were sped out of the town at night, and the only adherent of the treasonous conspiracy they could get hold of was a Jewish merchant named Jason (his real name was Joshua), who was acquitted by the politarchs for lack of evidence. This infuriated those who had hired the mob, and the mob turned up in the town of Beroea, whither the evangelists had travelled. Silas and Timothy went into hiding, but some of the Beroean converts got Paul to Methone or Dium, or some other port, and so he took ship alone to Athens.
Athens. Here now Paul faced the most difficult task of his career, that of persuading intellectuals learned in the philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus, to give ear to a religion not well founded in reason. The Greeks were under the Romans, a proud people colonised, but the inventors of the science of government were, for the most part, allowed to go their own way. Thus Paul met no opposition to his preaching, either from the Jews, who were too rational to be bigoted, or from the governing body, which tolerated every kind of intellectual or religious novelty. To Paul, who lodged in an inn under the Acropolis, the whole city was a seductive affront to his faith, whether as Jew or Nazarene. For here were all the gods and goddesses which, under changed names, the Romans had appropriated, limned in fine marble with a skill and sophistication the Jews, whose only art was literature, could never hope, if they ever took their horny paws from plough or nannygoat’s udder to assume the chisel, to touch. The temples to these demons, as he considered them to be, were of a superb elegance. These people had everything but God. And, he almost added, good wine, for the resinous urine they sold ensoured his stomach. He was lonely: Silas and Timothy were supposed to follow him here but they had not yet arrived and he feared somewhat for their safety. They would be safe enough in Athens, where the new faith provoked not opposition but yawns.
He went daily to the Agora, a kind of marketplace west of the Acropolis, where he met Stoics and Epicureans. They did not deny that there might be a God or world soul, but this being was too lofty to concern himself with the affairs of men. The Stoics went in for morality and duty without eschatological sanctions, the Epicureans believed in pleasure and tranquillity and the conquest of the fear of death. ‘But,’ Paul said, ‘there is nothing to fear in death. Death is the gateway to the fuller life. Duty and the moral life have their reward, and terms like pleasure and tranquillity hardly suffice to describe the eternal elation of unity with God.’ How do you know this? Who told you? Where is the evidence? ‘In the appearance of God made flesh in the world, in the resurrection of his fleshly Son after death.’ Many misheard the name Jesus as iasis, meaning healing, and Ieso, the name of the goddess of healing in the Ionic dialect. They interpreted anastasis, which signifies resurrection, as a restoration of health, and soter, meaning saviour, as the physician who so restores. They were not impressed. Nothing new here. No rationality in it. They called Paul a spermologos or seed picker, a pecking gutter sparrow, a purveyor of scraps and trifles.
‘But look here,’ said a serious teacher of rhetoric named Cratippus, whose homonymous father the peripatetic philosopher had obtained a professorial post in Athens through the influence of Cicero and was less inclined than many to scoff at what was not Athenian, ‘this Cilician Jew has come a long way, he’s evidently intelligent and learned in his own theology, and his Greek isn’t bad. He’s wasting his time here in the Agora. He ought to go before the Areopagus.’
‘The Areopagus?’ Paul repeated. ‘But I haven’t committed any crime that I know of.’
‘Oh, they’re not justices in the Roman way. They’re supposed to look after our religion and morals. The best way of getting these ideas of yours over to Athens is to speak to the Areopagus. They’ll listen. They’re not like the Romans, who won’t listen to anybody, as my father always used to say. And they’ll pronounce on what you tell them. They’ll let you know whether there’s anything in it or not.’
‘But I don’t need this Areopagus to confirm what I know to be true in my very blood and bones and guts.’
‘There speaks the Jew. You’re a very physical people. We go in more for the soul. Prepare your brief carefully. I’ll arrange things for you. Shall we say this time tomorrow?’
The Areopagus had used formerly to meet on the hill of Ares, which is what Areopagus means, but now they met in the Royal Portico north-east of the Agora. Paul, brought thither by Cratippus, found a number of grave men, some very old, all of magisterial appearance. Cratippus said: ‘I bring before you one Paul, who has come all the way from Palestine to propound the principles of a new religion very active in that province and, indeed, well beyond it. Athens has still to hear of it. Here is the man who bids you hear.’
So, in a clean Greek free of the pollutions of Cilicia, Paul spoke. He said: ‘Citizens of Athens, in my brief stay in your noble city I have observed your concern with matters of religion, even though it may be termed a negative concern, for I have seen many altars inscribed toan unknown god. This implies a willingness to worship a negativity, which neither grammar nor theology will properly permit. Now I would ask you to consider a singular and unique God, not one of many but the only one, who created the world and all things in it, who, having made man as well as the earth and the heavens, is much concerned with the ways of man. He is especially concerned that men seek him. He is not remote from us, he is easily found. Why, even one of your own poets, Epimenides the Cretan, says that in him we live and move and have our being. We are the offspring of God, creatures made of his substance, and it is absurd to think of him as a mere thing, an object of silver or gold or stone, which occurs when his unity is split into mere personifications of human needs and motives. For a personified quality is no more than a lump of metal. Now, God has been tolerant towards human ignorance of him, but now he commands that men repent of this ignorance. That this ignorance be no longer excused by the sense of his remoteness, which encouraged his conversion on the part of men either to a thought or to a thing, he came to earth himself, and that recently, to a particular place, Palestine, and in a particular time, that of my own generation, in the form of a human being. We may use the metaphor of the father sending down to the son, so long as we regard this as a mere similitude. So the Son of God taught the way of righteousness, showing human goodness as an aspect of eternal goodness enshrined in the godhead, and taught also that righteousness would lead men to dwell eternally with the fountain of righteousness, or, to change the metaphor, that human water should at the last be shown to be part of the divine ocean. I teach anastasis, which signifies not the survival of the soul, which any of your Platonists could demonstrate at least as a logical possibility, but as the survival of the sensorium also, though in a transfigured form. For God the Son himself rose from the dead and, in that filial or human aspect, returned to the eternal home of the Father. This, learned men of Athens, is the gist of my message.’
There was a kind of rumbling and squeaking silence. Then a very old man squeaked: ‘You quote a minor poet, or rather you make a very doubtful attribution to a minor poet. I would quote a major poet, our own Aeschylus, who, in his Eumenides, says there is no anastasis. The man dies, he says, and the earth drinks his blood, and there is an end of things. Words attributed to the god Apollo himself, alleged to have been spoken when this very Areopagus was founded by our patroness Athene. The Epicureans, true, speak of the indestructibility of the atoms of which we are made, along with all things in the universe, but the notion of physical human survival is a mere undemonstrable supposition.’ Another, younger, man boomed out boredly:
‘We require that a proposition be reduced to its first principles. We Athenians do not take things on trust.’
‘The first premise of a logical statement,’ Paul said, ‘has always to be taken on trust. We all have to begin with the evidence of our senses.’
‘You actually saw this man rise from the dead?’ a man so emaciated as fancifully to seem pared down to pure thought said.
‘I have lived with those who did and are still living to recount the experience,’ Paul said.
‘Well, then, send them to us. Not that their testimony would necessarily be credible. The world is full of madmen and liars. I think we have heard enough.’
The president of the Areopagus, a discreet legal-looking man in late middle age named Demetrios, said: ‘We will hear you again, if you wish. Not tomorrow, nor the next day, but sometime. It interests us to know what new fantasies are being entertained in the great world outside Athens.’ He lightly hammered great with irony. ‘For the moment, thank you for your attendance and the evident sincerity of your discourse.’ Then the Areopagus rose, leaving Paul alone save for an old man who announced his name as Dionysius. Dionysius said:
‘Interesting. And it has the charm of the exotic. Are there books on the subject?’
‘Not yet, alas. It is too new to have settled itself into books.’
‘Yes, a novelty. Well, you must come to dinner and tell me more.’
The invitation was vague, but Paul, sensing that he was about to drown in a thalassa of unconcern, determined to hold on to this flotsam of possible persuasibility and persuaded Dionysius to fix a date and a time. Thus, three days later, Silas and Timothy not yet having arrived, Paul dined with him, very frugally, and met at the table a hetœra as he took her to be, named Damaris. She was a little too enthusiastic about the new doctrines, and Paul’s heart sank into his stomach, where it met a wave of acidity induced by the resinous urine. Athens, he knew, was a failure. He received a message the next day from Silas and Timothy, brought by a travelling Beroean, which said they were staying in Macedonia a little longer, pursuing the good work already initiated. He was very much alone.
On his journey to Corinth he pondered the problem of spreading the word to the rational and educated. The Jews, most of them, opposed it because they were satisfied with what they had, and the pagans drank deep of it because they had nothing else. First principles. Credibility. Seeing, on the outskirts of Corinth, a temple with a many-breasted goddess transfixed on its façade, he felt the resurgence of hope. Eros once more to be transformed into agape. He greeted Astarte or whoever she was almost as an old friend. He went, after a light meal bought with his remaining coins of the Empire (he must find work soon), to a corner of the marketplace where, like any cheerful mountebank, he offered the secret of eternal life. It cost nothing, he eventually said, except everything. One man at the front of the crowd, loaded with larder provisions, maintained a faint smile of appreciation for the clarity and rhetoric but said nothing. Paul said he would say more at the synagogue in two days’ time, where pagans would be welcome to usurp the seats of the regular attenders, and, as he had no money for a night’s lodging, he slept in a public park, under a bronze effigy of the goddess, who held a detached phallus over him in, he thought he might fancifully think, a gesture of protection. This goddess must have put erotic images into his sleeping mind, for he woke polluted with a nocturnal emission. Not his fault, though he prayed that God might protect even the untracked regions of his brain in this city so well known for its erotism that it had given the verb korinthiazo as a synonym for I fornicate to the Greek language. For breakfast he drank fountain water and, without shame, begged a bit of bread from one of the gardeners. Then he walked towards the marketplace again. On the main street, however, a voice hailed him with a welcome. It was the faintly smiling man he had seen yesterday, sitting before a shop in the morning sun and stitching at what seemed to be a tent. Paul stopped and, with a nostalgia for that work, sat down next to him. The man said:
‘I heard you yesterday. I look forward to hearing you on the Sabbath. Not that I’ll be easy to convince. This is my wife, Priscilla.’ A smiling woman with a superior air about her, rinsing a cloth on to the pavement. ‘This is Paul, who preaches the Nazarene gospel. Oh, my name’s Aquila. That means eagle. The nose, see. Some wine, or is it too early?’
‘Some water, if I may. This is thirsty weather.’
‘And you’re off to do that thirsty business again?’
‘Corinth seems promising.’
‘A very fleshly lot, if you catch my meaning.’
‘I catch it. Korinthiazo – I fornicate.’
Aquila looked shocked. ‘Surely not.’
‘No, no, the word. As though fornication had been invented in Corinth.’ He looked at some women passing, perhaps temple prostitutes off duty; they seemed specially bred in some erotic stable that their rotundities of seduction should painfully provoke. But there was no pain in it save for Paul: they provoked only that they might satisfy. And the walk: undulant, the buttocks awag, the breasts thrust upward by some ingenuity of corsetage. The mouths very red, the hair crackling black from recent washing. Paul sighed, recognising that the impulse in himself could not be evil, not unless one admitted the dualism of John Mark’s Zoroastrians. What did one do about it? One turned Christ into one’s bride, which produced its own complications; one married. He, the preaching tentmaker, married. It was not possible. His groin whimpered resentment. But Aquila was saying something about the stress of work, the city full and rich, partly because of the inflow of Jews exiled from Rome, though some were going back. A trading town this, big port, rival to Athens. Paul did not want to hear the name Athens. He said, looking at Aquila’s stitching fingers: ‘I don’t think I ever saw that double-over lock in Tarsus.’
‘It’s the Roman way. Though it’s more awnings and bed hangers in Italy. You seem to know about the trade, knowing the double-over.’
‘It’s mine. My only living, except for charity. A man has to make a living somehow.’
‘You plan to stay long in Corinth?’
‘There’s a lot to do.’
‘So you wouldn’t mind practising the trade here?’
‘Making tents? Are you offering me something?’
‘There’s enough work for two. And there’s a little room at the back of the shop. Very little.’
‘I’m grateful.’
‘Of course, we shan’t be staying here for ever. My wife’s of a better class than I am. A good Jewish girl but a true Roman. She wants to get back. So do I, for that matter. But we thought of training some grown men, not young apprentices, and putting a manager in charge. Both here and in Ephesus. There’s money in the east. But Rome’s the place for spending it. You don’t know Rome, do you?’
‘No, but I will.’
So, fortified by good meals from Priscilla, Paul smote vigorously at Corinthian fornication, grew visibly elated in his invocation of the new faith, angered the Jews, baptised the pagans, and opened a chapel which was a kind of rival synagogue. A certain Titus or Titius Justus, an Italian who had been in the trade of exporting dried raisins, called currants after Corinth, and now a retired widower, owned a large house quite near to the synagogue, too large for his own use, and offered it to Paul for his preaching and the ceremony of the supper of the Lord. The Church is the body of the faithful, but a church is where the faithful may meet. This was the first of the brick-and-mortar churches. To it one day came the Jew who was in charge of the synagogue, much troubled. His name was Crispus. He said to Paul:
‘I’m convinced. God help me. I say that because it puts me in dire peril. Physical, that is. My former fellows – what are they going to think, do? My own feet have started to take charge. I walk towards the synagogue and then they make me bear left and I finish here. For God’s sake, what am I going to do?’
‘Some of us Christians remain Jewish,’ Paul said. ‘It’s only the bigots who insist on the schisma. Take your baptism in secret – it can be done here in that kind of fountain in the back garden – continue your synagogue duties. I’m still a good enough Jew to wish to go to Jerusalem for Passover – this year, next. The new faith is only the fulfilment of the old.’
‘I wish to God I could make some of the others see that.’
‘I’ve tried. You know I’ve tried. One can’t try forever. Life is short and there’s the whole known world to cover. Will you be blessed now with the baptismal water?’
‘Yes, God help me.’
Paul sat in the evenings in the living room of Aquila and Priscilla. She sewed delicate fabrics; he drank wine, his due after a hard day, and chewed currants out of a silver dish. Paul recounted his adventures. Priscilla laughed at some of them, and he could not see why. He was saying one evening: ‘Silas and I were at Lystra – Silas should be here soon, by the way – and a man in our congregation was a cripple more in mind than in body. His limbs were unshrivelled, they looked sound enough to me. He was not difficult to cure. The people were ecstatic, they said it was divine magic, and then – ah, they insisted on identifying Silas and myself with two of the pagan demons – he was Jupiter and I was Mercury. They even brought in a couple of white oxen garlanded with flowers. Of course, Lystra is the centre of the Zeus and Hermes cult – why are you laughing? You find this blasphemy comic? I work in the Lord’s name and they hail me in the name of Mercury—’
‘The god of thieves,’ Priscilla said with wet eyes, ‘but also of fine speech. I find the story has humour in it. Like the other one you told – of being put in prison and then having an earthquake open the door for you. I always knew that God had a fine sense of the comic.’
‘I don’t see it,’ said Paul.
‘Perhaps you will when the stories are written down. They mustn’t be lost to the future, they’re too good.’
‘Precisely the words of Luke,’ Paul said grimly.
‘Who’s Luke?’
‘A Greek physician I converted in Antioch. He has a taste for writing. And also for what you would call the comic. I see. I become a character in a Greek tale.’
‘But who,’ Aquila said, ‘is more real than some of the Greek heroes? Why should the pagans have the best heroes for themselves?’
‘The Pauliad.’ Priscilla laughed again.
‘No, no, no, no.’ Then there was a thunder of knocking at the shop door.
‘They’re here again,’ Aquila sighed. ‘I wish they’d leave us alone.’
‘My apologies,’ Paul said. ‘It isn’t you they’re after. It never is, I’ll go.’ He went and unbolted. Three Jewish elders were there, frowning in the mild light of early evening. The chief of them, Amoz, said:
‘Saul or Paul or whatever your name is, the governor is ready to see you.’
‘But I,’ Paul answered, ‘am not ready to see the governor. Can the matter not wait, whatever it is? A man has a right to rest after a long day.’
‘A teacher of blasphemies has no right to rest. Gallio is just come from Achaia and is anxious to try your case.’
‘Meaning that you people are anxious for him to try it. Not that you have a case.’
‘Under Roman law ours is a lawful faith. Yours is not. From the mouth of a Roman consul—’
‘Proconsul,’ Priscilla corrected. She had come to listen. She was smiling broadly.
‘I don’t need to be put right by foreign women who give lodgings to heretics,’ Amoz growled. ‘All right. From a Roman proconsul you will hear the judgement. Come.’ Paul went. Priscilla laughed very merrily. All this fuss. And all because men were concerned about the cutting of their foreskins.
Gallio’s real name was Marcus Annaeus Novatus. Born in Cordova and educated in Rome, he was adopted by the great expert on rhetoric Mucius Junius Gallio and so took his name. He was a man of charm, wit and some tolerance, tolerance meaning that he considered religion to be an inconsiderable toy. Tired from his journey and his chronic lung weakness, which he had saved from turning to phthisis by winter sojourns in Egypt, he was yet good-humoured enough when his deputy reported the arrival of a gang of Jews who wanted judgement on something or someone. He sat in his library, looking over a scroll of new verse that had come from Rome. Furfur caelestis. Heavenly dandruff. Why couldn’t these moderns say snow and have done with it? ‘They won’t be heard in here? No, of course, the house of the infidel. Ah well, I must bow my head in my impurity. I see they have brought their own torches.’ Their light could be seen through the casement, marching under the oleanders. He went out to his garden which, being God’s and not a Gentile’s, was pure. The gang was there with a small bald man with calm eyes. The rest stamped and neighed around him. The old Jew named Amoz spoke loud words:
‘Gallio, proconsul, greetings and long life. This is the man Paul we have spoken and written of. He continues to persuade men to worship God contrary to the Jewish law. Now the Jewish law is decreed by the Emperor to be religio licita—’
‘Has he spoken some villainy? Theft – murder – treason – has he committed any of those? Has he spoken against the Emperor?’
‘No, but he blasphemes by saying the new heresy supersedes the law of Moses—’
‘I have,’ Gallio said, ‘no concern with the law of Moses. That is your own affair. Your religion, as you rightly say, is under Roman protection. And so are all variants of your religion, heretical and otherwise. We Romans therefore have no right to meddle with their inner workings or dissensions between them. That would be breaking the law. And so I will not be a judge of these matters.’
‘Think carefully, Gallio,’ Amoz said, insolently it seemed to the proconsul. ‘What decision you make here establishes legal precedent in the Roman provinces and must be upheld in Rome itself. If the man Paul is made free to preach his doctrine as he calls it, that doctrine or abominable perversion of a doctrine becomes allowable under Roman law.’
‘I have thought as carefully as the matter seems to warrant,’ Gallio said. ‘Which means I have thought for twenty seconds or so. And I say with the Roman weight you seem to demand: So be it.’
Naturally a number of Nazarenes had followed the torchbearing orthodox into Gallio’s garden. These now let out whoops of glee and began to beat the sour vanquished as they left. There was one decent elder named Sosthenes who was taking over the leadership of the synagogue in succession to Crispus (who had resigned discreetly on grounds of ill health), and he came in for most of the battering. Paul used his authority, calling: ‘Stop that. Brotherly love. Tolerance.’ But the batterers went on battering as the company, loud in its discomfiture, passed down the garden walk and out of the gates. Gallio said to Paul:
‘I’ve heard of your religion. Through my brother. He’s a philosopher. Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Do you know of him?’
‘I see. You’re a son of the elder Seneca. My father spoke once of meeting him. That would be in Spain.’
‘We’re a Spanish family. And what was a Jew doing in Spain?’
‘You’re Spanish and Roman. We’re Jewish and Roman. It was a matter of trade. The wings of the eagle are wide, as they say. What have you heard of Christianity?’
‘That it comes close to the philosophy my brother teaches. The philosophy of the stoic. Do right, even when the state counsels wrong. Be prepared to suffer for the right. Be proud in your knowledge that right prevails, even when the state crushes it.’
‘I don’t teach pride.’
‘It’s a proud man who dies for his faith – like this man of yours.’
‘He went like a lamb to the slaughter. We follow him. The Stoic has no God, so he himself has to be the guardian of virtue. The Christian’s virtue is all in God. He can afford to be humble.’
‘Which God? The God of those ravening elders out there?’
‘There’s only one. He loves mankind. He sent down his only son to suffer in the flesh. That’s the measure of his love.’
‘You don’t seem to me to be a madman.’
‘You’ll find no saner faith than the one I preach. Love, forbearance, forgiveness – sane virtues. The world won’t survive without them. Ask your brother what he thinks.’
We have been absent from Rome some little time, and now that the name of Lucius Annaeus Seneca has been sounded we may as well look on the owner of the name, seated firmly in the Palatine as the confidant and adviser of Agrippina and the tutor of her son. He has haunted eyes and a mouth as it were set in suffering, his lank hair falls carelessly over his forehead as if he scorned the combed order of the world, but he is shrewd enough in the ordering of his estates, and the look of the ascetic is delusory. He is acting one of the characters of his own closet tragedies, surviving voice of virtue in the face of wrongs done not only by men but by the gods. But what wrongs have been done him? The Emperor Claudius banished him, true, for an impudent mock in one of his moral essays, but Agrippina soon had him recalled. His wealth is enormous. His influence in the state will, if he is discreet and prudent, be considerable. We see him for the moment seated in one of the schoolrooms of the palace, a spare room with maps and scrolls and the scent of a pine tree outside the casement reminding the moral philosopher of the wild grace of the natural world. His pupil lounges next to him, interrupting a discourse on the philosophy of Zeno by saying that he has had enough of this skeletal unreality and it is time for his music lesson.
‘You will need philosophy more than you will need music.’
‘In what?’
‘In whatever position in the state you are to hold. You must prepare for responsibility.’
‘I want to be a great actor, dancer, singer. Isn’t there such a thing as responsibility to art?’
‘It is not a moral responsibility.’
The pupil’s name is Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, and Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus the brother of the Emperor Claudius, is his mother. His father, Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, died in suspicious circumstances into which the son, though aware that his mother may have had something to do with it, has never too closely enquired. Morality does not interest him. He says now:
‘You talk too much of morality. And by morality you mean – I forget the words—’
‘The repression of impulse.’
‘Yes, you repressed my natural impulse to see life. The execution of the Empress Messalina, for instance.’
‘That was hardly life.’
‘But she was very beautiful. To see her beautiful head severed and the golden blood flowing, no spurting, over her ivory skin. A living poem. Wouldn’t you say that it was immoral to avert a young man’s eyes from the sight of the beauty of the world?’
‘There is no beauty in death, even when it is encompassed in the name of justice. Death is a necessity – which we ought to spend our whole lives learning to embrace without fear. As for the deaths of others, there is something shocking, I could almost say seismic, in the sight of human dissolution. To speak of the beauty of golden blood on ivory skin might be considered immoral. You must not subvert an organism, whether living or dying, into a mere arrangement of shapes and colours.’
‘But I do that all the time. You wouldn’t understand, Seneca. You’re not an artist.’
‘I am considered,’ and the grim mouth relaxes into a complacency which the pupil is quick to notice, ‘to be an efficient poet of tragedy. Tomorrow we shall read together my Hercules Furens. There you will find an exquisite ordering of words and rhythms serving a stoic end.’
‘I know the play, and I find it too violent. Not in what it shows but in its language. You have no ear for words. And if, as you say, you serve a stoic end, you are committing a gross immorality against the ethics of art, whose end is not the inculcation of a moral lesson but beauty for its own sake. Beauty, beauty, beauty.’
‘Who has been telling you this nonsense?’
‘Never you mind who’s been telling me. Whoever he is, he’s right. Beauty and morality may be considered deadly enemies, he also says, and you would say that goes ridiculously far. There is also the question of beauty and sexuality, and that poses a very difficult problem.’
‘A problem,’ Seneca says, ‘which you seem to have solved quite satisfactorily. The headless corpse of a beautiful object of sexual desire is reduced to mere shape and colour. You see where a concentration on what you call beauty will lead you. It will lead you beyond the limits of compassion and, I may say, all moral feeling. But man is defined as a moral creature. Beauty is a matter only of the senses. Let us continue with our study of the moral system of Zeno.’
‘Oh, Seneca, Seneca,’ the precocious youth said, leaning on his arm, which was flat to the table, ‘you have no subtlety. It’s useless discussing these high aesthetic matters with you. Very well, if we’re to study morality, tell me why you and other moralists look with such horror on incest.’
‘Why do you raise this question?’
‘You know very well why. The Emperor Claudius proposes to marry his own niece, who is my revered mother. You are shocked and Pallas and Narcissus are shocked, or say they are. And the Senate refuses to pass an act permitting it. And yet the kingdom of Egypt insisted on the royal house being sustained by brothers marrying sisters. Incest there was not merely permitted, it was regarded as desirable and holy, and I believe it still is. So why is it so terrible for Romans?’
‘If you read my play on Oedipus or, your aversion to my style being so great, the play by Sophocles on which it is based, you will see that the two gravest crimes against morality have always been in our western culture the act of parricide and the act of incest. You kill the father, you impregnate mother or daughter or sister or niece, and the whole structure of society is menaced. There is an instinctive abhorrence of these acts which is based on an instinctive knowledge of what makes for the stability of society. The family collapses and along with it the authority of the priests and the governors. The products of incest are very frequently monsters.’
‘You have seen such?’
‘I have read about such.’
‘So my revered mother will bring forth a monster?’ Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus smiled contemptuously at his tutor. The family cognomen meant bronze beard, and, though Lucius Domitius was beardless, his curly hair had the sheen of bronze and glowed gold in the sunlight. His eyes were blue and his features well formed: he was a pretty boy more than a handsome one. He was somewhat pustular, a condition not uncommon in adolescents, but maturity would calm the eruptions in his skin. Seneca said:
‘The Emperor will not be permitted to commit incest. There are limits even to the imperial power. The Senate has the duty of imposing these limits. Your mother will not become Empress.’
‘Will you bet on that – say, a hundred sesterces?’
‘I am not a betting man. To bet is to place yourself in the hands of chance, unseemly in a Stoic.’
‘You’re an old fool, Seneca.’
‘That is more than unseemly. You will apologise in fifty lines of hendecasyllables and deliver them tomorrow.’
‘And if not?’
‘I shall report you to your mother.’
‘May I sing the hendecasyllables?’
Paul was now in Ephesus. Aquila and Priscilla had travelled thither with him, considered the prospect of setting up business there, thought better of it, then, Priscilla’s homesickness prevailing, took ship for Italy. Silas appeared but not Timothy, who was conducting his own ministry in Macedonia. Luke arrived with some pages of neat Greek documentation of Paul’s work, more or less accurate but, in Paul’s view, disfigured with Greek humour. ‘Cross that out. That too. Unseemly. And that, there, is more than unseemly.’ Very well, sighing. Then Paul went to the synagogue and spoke as follows:
‘Men of Ephesus, I came to you after many journeys – from Jerusalem to Tarsus and from Tarsus to Antioch. I have brought the good news to Cyprus, to the other Antioch in Pisidia, to Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, to Philippi, to Thessalonica, to Athens, to Corinth. I have seen and suffered many things and have been as sick from the waves of the sea as I have from men with hard hearts in the towns of my travels. It has been no easy work to bring the good news, yet the hardship is softened by God’s grace, for God’s love permits the working of the yeast of his word through signs and wonders. When you say the man Paul has cured the sick, given sight to the blind, driven out the frenzy of the devil in men’s souls, you say wrong: it is the power of God working through Paul, for the man Paul has no power. Take heed, for this city of Ephesus is too well known in the world for its jugglers and magicians. I am come not to compete with them but to bring the divine word. And when I say now the power of the name Jesus makes you whole, I indulge in no petty mountebank’s cantrips. For man is made whole only by faith in Jesus the Son of God.’
A man in the congregation stood and held up for all to see a piece of worn leather. He cried to Paul: ‘Do you know what this is?’
‘No,’ Paul said.
‘It’s a piece cut off one of the aprons you use when you sit to your morning tent work. I got it from my handyman. He admitted stealing it. He’s been going round trying to cure the halt and the blind with it. If that’s not magic, what is?’
‘I can’t be blamed,’ Paul said, ‘for the superstitions of others. Not only my semicinctia but my sudaria—’
‘We don’t speak Latin here.’
‘Sweatrags. There’s neither unholy magic nor holy power in these things. Neither in me nor in my shadow nor in the miserable things belonging to me. Mark this well. Only the name Jesus possesses the power.’
A man named Sceva took this too literally. He called himself a chief priest, but this was an imposture assumed because only chief priests were supposed to know the correct pronunciation of the Ineffable Name, a cantrip omnipotent in magic. He did not know it, though he had tried lao and lae and laoue and other approximations. He sat now with some of his magician colleagues in his stuffy study with its smell of assafoetida and other noxious gums reputed to be useful in exorcism. He rolled absently between his hands the sad dry skull of a little child, saying: ‘They won’t pay any more, they tell me, without seeing results.’
‘You can’t command perierga,’ a man who called himself Antipholus said.
‘Perhaps not, but it’s perierga they’re paying for. We’ve tried everything. We’ve even fallen back on Sabaoth and Abraham, a fat lot of good such names have always been. You’ve seen what the new one can do. Is it safe to try it?’
‘It worked with old baldhead and that one with the palsy.’
‘You miss the point. He believes in what lies behind the name. We don’t. It’s foreign to us and maybe dangerous. It could kick back.’
‘Now you’re being superstitious.’
‘The strength lies in the name,’ a man called Trophuz, very dark and small, of God knew what provenance, said. ‘And the name’s anybody’s property, the way I see it.’
‘I suppose the worst that can happen is that nothing will happen,’ Antipholus said.
‘All right,’ Sceva sighed. ‘We’ll go.’
They went, seven of them, to the house of the widow Sameach, a sad woman despite her name (meaning glad) and the wealth left by her husband, who had been in the Lebanese timber export business. She was sad because of her son Bohen (so called because the Lord had pressed his thumb into his neck before birth and left a deep depression), who lay on his bed all day in a kind of stupor enlivened with occasional fierce writhings of the limbs and unintelligible shouts, also with fits of upright violence in which he smashed vases. She had taken to locking his bedroom door, upon which he now and then hammered. He ate little, spewed much and nauseatingly, and was impervious to medicines and cantrips. When Sceva and his colleagues arrived, Sameach’s brother-in-law was there, a sceptic who was sick of the mumbo jumbo. ‘Good money thrown away,’ he said. ‘Not a penny more.’
‘This time,’ Sceva promised, ‘you’ll see results.’
The seven of them went into the little bedroom, a close fit, and heard the widow lock the door behind them. This they never liked, but there had been an occasion when the boy had responded vigorously to the intonation of a deformed version of the Ineffable Name and rushed out to smash things. The rest of the day he had been quiet. The seven looked at him, no pretty sight, for he dribbled some yellow viscosity from nose and mouth and his eyes rolled independently of each other. From his mouth there issued voices of contention in no known language, like the later stages of a drinking party, and in one passage a bass voice argued simultaneously with a treble, while the other voices maintained a kind of listening silence. Trophuz nudged Sceva and said: ‘Now.’ Sceva took a large breath and sang:
‘Evil spirits that dwell within our brother here, I conjure you in the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches – leave him.’
The response was immediate and terrifying. A single voice spoke from the dribbling mouth in clear Greek, saying: ‘Jesus I know. Paul I know. But who are you?’ Then the youth leapt from his bed and waded into the seven with horrible energy, yanking at beards, gouging eyes, twisting ears, stamping on feet, tearing robes. Sceva hammered on the door, yelling. Two of the bolder and brawnier of the seven hit back at their patient, who did not seem to feel the blows. When at length the door was opened, the seven rushed out with energetic Bohen in the midst of them, kicking back as well as forward. The widow Sameach screamed, and her brother-in-law shook his head sadly, saying: ‘More harm than good. Not a penny.’
I tell the story that I was told, leaving it to my readers to reject or accept. Bohen in the street was a wonder of ferocity that set the dogs barking and then scurrying off yelping, while children and women rent the air with their yells of fright. He roared, stripped a poor old woman near naked, overturned a market stall full of gourds, and finally he lay exhausted in a puddle, whimpering and faintly howling. Paul at this time had been forbidden the use of the synagogue and was arguing a knotty point about the physical resurrection with some of his new plants or neophytes in the schoolroom lent to him by the teacher popularly known as Tyrannus (no relative of the father of the protomartyr). He was called out, saw poor Bohen, had him carried back to his mother’s house, and there induced a deep natural sleep from which the boy emerged cured. Or so I am told.
Certainly some such thaumaturgy must be invoked to explain the amazing scene which ensued that evening in the marketplace, when books of magical cantrips, treatises on the perierga, crudely illustrated guides to the winning of love, amulets, ikons, beads, flasks of unwholesome decoctions (dogturds, wolfsbane, menses) were thrown on to a fire. There were attempts to throw on it also Sceva and his fellows, but this was, Paul said, going too far. Silas and Luke, both bookish men, were uneasy about the incineration of some very fine volumes bound in leather with gold locks, but Paul said: ‘Look at that obscenity. And that.’ Dog pedicating man. Man pedicating dog.
‘They could be sold.’
‘To other magical charlatans.’
‘But see the workmanship.’
‘On to the fire with it, Luke.’
An old woman brought a small silver figurine to Paul. ‘What do I do about this, sir?’ Paul examined it squinting. It was an effigy of the goddess sprouting breasts like warts. ‘Me and my family – we don’t worship her any more.’ Paul said:
‘The effigy is evil. The silver is out of the rock that God made. Melt it down and give the silver to the poor.’ Then he raised his voice: ‘It is well know that this city of Ephesus is the shrine of the false goddess Artemis, whom some call Diana. You who give homage to her – repent. You silversmiths whose wealth is in the making of her image – change your business to the making of candlesticks. Have done with false idols.’ A silversmith named Demetrius heard these words and was very unhappy.
Now this was the time in spring when night and day are about equal, the beginning of the month called Artemision, when the eunuch priests and their priestesses presided over rituals to Artemis or Diana in the Ephesian temple. This temple was, and still is, one of the wonders of the world, being some four hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide and beautifully embellished with images of copulation. There had been a previous temple destroyed through the incendiarism of a young man named Herostratus, who did the deed to make a reputation for himself, successfully, for he is still remembered. (He performed the act, we are told, on the night when Alexander the Great was born.) The image of the goddess in the temple was not destroyed and indeed was indestructible, being a thunderstone or chunk of a star fallen to earth. It was, by celestial chance, formed in the image of a many-breasted female, and even the educated and sceptical were easily persuaded that the gods had sent down a crude representation, perhaps hammered by Vulcan, of one of their own. Certainly, Ephesus gained a great reputation as a town highly favoured by the goddess and, indeed, became the centre of her cult. To hear this cult assailed by a bald-headed Jew with a taste for book-burning was too much for the silversmith Demetrius and others of his trade, who made much money out of making and selling figurines of Artemis or Diana. Especially at this season.
So Demetrius and some of his fellow craftsmen held a meeting in Demetrius’s workshop the following morning. This was a large shed full of fires, where some men poured molten metal into moulds and others cracked cold moulds open to reveal the smirking godlingess. Demetrius said:
‘Look, friends, this is our trade. This is how we make our money.’
‘In your instance, a lot of money.’
Demetrius ignored that. ‘We’re all involved in the worship of the goddess, blessed be her holy name and sacred influence. This man Paul is telling everybody that there’s no such thing as gods made by hand. Before we know where we are he’ll have the damned temple pulled down and the traffic stopped.’
‘Traffic?’
‘You know what I mean. The holy pilgrimages from all over Greece and Asia. This is our bread, friends.’
‘He’s blaspheming against precious metal. So we—?’
‘Stop him.’
Thus it was that Paul and some of his fellow Christians were dragged to the Ephesian temple by the militant guild of silversmiths, aided by a rabble that did not need to be hired, for the gratuitous manhandling of foreigners is always both a virtue and a pleasure in provincial towns where, anyway, there is little to do in the evenings. Silas, fearful in the ruddy flare of the torches, seeing the mound of the goddess’s huge belly threatening twenty feet above his eyes, panicked in the belief that they were to be sacrificed to her, Christian blood to be smeared laboriously over her polymastic or multimammial rotundity. He began to hit out, and Paul hit out with him. The mob, always suggestible, hit out too in the same directions, and one brawny lad shouted to Paul: ‘That’s right, give it to these impietous Cretans or whatever they do be called.’ A surprising and very Greek instinct for a kind of civic regularity then took over, and what seemed to be the entire male population of Ephesus pushed two recent Christian converts, both foreigners, Gaius of Derbe and Aristarchus of Thessalonica, who had followed Paul hither, towards the huge open-air theatre. Paul and Silas and Luke shoved against the current without opposition, for everybody was absorbed in a rhythmical yell of ‘Long live Artemis of Ephesus!’ So while Gaius and Aristarchus and other, nameless, converts were driven up the hill towards Pion, the converters got down to the inner harbour and hid behind some corded bales, panting.
It has to be noted that the chief citizens of Ephesus, known as Asiarchs, were not inimical to Paul’s activities. The decision of Gallio had established a precedent in the Roman provinces, and Paul had broken no law. When, a little later, he and his fellows sat, Silas still fearful, in the schoolroom of Tyrannus in the dark, a friendly Asiarch came to report on what was proceeding in the theatre. ‘Three quarters of them,’ he said, ‘have no idea why they’re there, but the notion has arisen that this is an anti-Jewish demonstration and there’s a Jew called Alexander telling them that the Jews love Artemis as much as anybody, a damned lie but you can’t blame him. Anything to quieten them down.’
‘As for quietening them down,’ Paul said, ‘I’d better go and address a few words myself. It’s not often we get the whole town assembled.’
‘Are you mad?’ Silas said. ‘Are you completely and irrevocably stark staring demented? They’ll tear you to pieces, man.’
Luke said: ‘I’ll go and see what’s happening. On the fringe, so to speak, with my little notebook. After all, it’s a kind of literary duty.’ So they let Luke go. Luke stood at the back of the mob which had been transformed into an audience, marvelling at the thousands making their own entertainment with the monotonous choral chant of ‘Diana of Ephesus for ever!’ while an old man with a long beard whom he took to be Alexander mouthed and gesticulated inaudibly from the theatron. Then a man strode on to the stage whom Luke knew: he was the grammateus or city secretary, a functionary responsible for the publication of civic decrees and a link between the municipal council and the provincial government. Thus he was responsible to the Roman authorities for good order in the city, and when he spoke he spoke with an urgency that quietened the assembly and made them listen.
‘Men of Ephesus,’ he cried, ‘there is no need of your protestations. We all know Artemis is great. We all know that Ephesus is the keeper of her temple. We know that her image fell out of the skies from the hands of the god Jupiter himself. Why waste your breath on a truth too well known? Why not assume the dignity of quiet and the avoidance of rash acts? These men you have brought here are neither robbers of the temple nor blasphemers against the goddess. If Demetrius there, and others of his craft, have anything against these men who are called Christians – well, the law courts are open, the proconsuls ready to sit. Let everything be settled in the regular assemblies. Riot and civic pride do not sit well together. Go home.’
If the grumbling assembly now broke up and went home, it was partly out of a Greek sense of dramatic form. They had been there two hours, long enough for a play, and the final speech had the capping quality of well-shaped dramaturgy. When Paul heard Luke’s report, he nodded in approval of the good sense of the grammateus, though naturally deploring his paganism, and he said: ‘No bigot. In him you see the great change coming. Men will not fight for the old gods unless there is profit in them. If there is good sense in holiness, there may well be holiness in good sense. You will live to see that silver melted down and the goddess become a memory. She is already no more than dead metal.’
Dead metal, indeed. He had said that before but he would not say it again. What I have now to recount is extremely painful, but Paul should have known that everything has to be paid for. Demetrius and his fellows were not by nature men of violence, except against defenceless silver, and they were half content to wait to put their case to the proconsul (there was only one at that time, despite the town secretary’s habituated pluralising: Marcus Junius Silanus, proconsul for Asia, had been murdered on Agrippina’s orders, but that is another story). Nevertheless, they felt it was only just that Paul should have a taste of the goddess and that that would much modify his rantings about purity. They arranged for a temple prostitute to be introduced into the bedchamber where Paul, the due of his status, slept alone while Luke and Silas had to share a cell: this was in the house of the convert Pyrrhus, where they lodged free. The girl was ready enough for the game, and she was helped up to the ground floor casement by smirking Demetrius and a dwarfish colleague named Achilles. Paul slept heavily after a morning of stitching canvas and an afternoon and evening of shouting the word. She stripped herself naked and slid into the narrow bed, encountering bare hairiness and a flaccid rod which she swiftly whipped into life. Paul thought he was dreaming. Then he awoke shocked to find himself held in the posture of succubus by a smooth female body which knew every trick. He yelled, and the laughing girl leapt off and to the window, without which the two confederates were waiting. Paul, to his shame, found himself pumping seed on to his blanket. Dead metal indeed.
The finger was much pointed at him the following day. He boiled, composing in his head eloquent letters to all the churches about the deadliness of the sin of fornication. For himself, he required ritual purification, and there was no provision for that in the new order. He needed Jerusalem, he needed the Temple of Solomon. As for the temple of Artemis, this stood solid and mocking, and the huge effigy of the goddess leered at him in a kind of triumph. She was going to be hard to melt away.
You have heard something of Agrippina but you have not yet met her. She was a woman, at this point in our story, in the prime of her beauty, presenting the same philosophical problem as her predecessor Messalina, namely the apparent reconcilability of a celestial virtue, for beauty is that and always that and must always be that, and a capacity for unutterable vice. But whereas the vices of Messalina were in themselves venial, being mostly a passion for sensual gratification and only dangerous, as you have seen, in the lack of moral scruple which subordinated all things to its encompassing, Agrippina lived solely for power, frightening enough in a man but terrifying in a woman. She had countered the Senate’s opposition to her marriage to Claudius by personal threats to the more vociferous senators, and some of these threats were, with the aid of Pallas, the Emperor’s financial minister, whom she had efficiently seduced, very ruthlessly fulfilled. It was eventually decided that Claudius might be permitted to break the law which forbade incest, since (a) marriage with a niece was not much different from marriage to a cousin, which was lawful, and the degrees of marital prohibition properly applied only to immediate blood – maternal, sororal, filial, and (b) Claudius seemed beyond not merely the begetting of a child (who would, of course, be a monster) but too old and feeble for the marital act itself. As for Agrippina, she would sleep with anyone, though not for physical pleasure, only for political advantage. She was cursed or blessed with a certain sexual coldness, knowing as much as a temple prostitute about the arousing of male passion and the procurement of its ecstatic release but keeping herself aloof, despite an occasional simulation of desire and the odd false orgiastic shudder and scream of fulfilment, from a process she found distressingly bestial when it was not frankly comic. She had initiated her own son, L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, into the transports of physical love at a quite early age. It was a device for keeping him under. Even when married to Claudius she soft-footed in the night to the boy’s bedroom and lashed his pustular body to loud transports a waking servant would interpret as a nightmare. This son, by the way, had been adopted by Claudius and now bore the new name Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus.
Let us now soft-foot into the imperial bedchamber, which is shaded against the intrusive sun of the late afternoon, for Claudius has a headache and wears a wet bandage over his eyes. Agrippina, gorgeous in her thin lawn, her bare arms a miracle of shapeliness, her hair the hue of an Egyptian midnight spread over her delicate shoulders, strokes his brow and says: ‘Better?’
‘Bbbbbetter. But only in the sense of not as bbbbbad as yesterday. And not as bbbbad as ttttomorrow.’
‘Nobody knows about tomorrow.’
‘An ageing man knows that ttttomorrow he will not be any younger.’
‘Oh, these shining platitudes. Gems of imperial wisdom. Golden rays of the obvious. I hope the book you’re dictating isn’t full of aphorisms like that.’
‘I write history. Moral ppppplatitudes I leave to Seneca.’
‘Get rid of that man.’
‘Eh?’ Claudius raised himself from the pillow an instant in surprise, then fell back. ‘It was I, as I seem to remember, who got rid of him some time bbbback. It was at your request that I released him from exile.’
‘I’ve changed my mind about him. He teaches my son treason in the guise of philosophy.’
‘Ttttreason to the Emperor?’
‘The Empress.’
‘Meaning bbboth of us. I’ve heard of this. Morality is morality. There are no moral exceptions for Seneca. We are living in a state of incestuous ppppollution, whatever the Emperor and the Senate say. He has probably been telling your son that. Not to upset him or to ddddenigrate our imperial selves, but to remind him that there are no moral exceptions.’
‘I was taught as a girl that the whole point of power was to be able to break the rules.’
‘I’ve certainly bbbbroken one rule.’
He spoke wistfully and she answered sharply: ‘You regret it?’
‘You taught me new raptures of the body. Raptures which not even Messalina—Ah no, I don’t regret it. But sometimes I feel – well, ccccculpable. Chiefly when I look at your son. There’s something wrong about having a grandnephew who calls me ffffffather. He calls me it rather more than Britannicus does. He seems to be trying to imppppplant an idea in my mind.’
‘The idea,’ Agrippina said frankly, ‘that he’s fitter for the purple than Britannicus. Britannicus is a fool.’
‘I don’t think I’d have ttttttolerated that from you when you were merely my niece. Britannicus may be the son of Messalina but he’s inherited surprisingly fffffew vices. He’s even something of a thinker. And he did well as a soldier in Britain. It was he who ccccaptured Ccccccaracttttacus.’
‘Which we’re not allowed to forget. But which I personally don’t believe. When you say Britannicus I feel we’re always expected to stop what we’re doing and drink his health.’
‘I shut from my mind, dear niece-wife,’ he said wearily, ‘a pppparticular thought – that you love your son more than you love me, that your love for him is great enough to have surmounted various barriers, the least of which is incest. Now let me sleep. My head throbs.’
‘Marriage is a gateway to legitimate progeny, dear Claudius. That gateway is always open. You’re always too tired or too sick to—I say no more, fffffather of all the Romans.’ He sat up and looked at her without affection. He said:
‘That mockery is unseemly. It is also unseemly to pretend a situation that does not exist in the ppppresence of one who knows it does not exist. The physicians pronounced you barren shortly after the death of your revered second husband. Do not ppppretend to be more of a ffffool than you already are.’ He thought better of that. ‘No, no ffffool. But a liar, as she was. And, I begin to suspect, much more vicious.’
‘You have something particular in mind?’ she said in a voice that oozed Hybla honey.
‘Yes. What has happened to Sttttattttilius Ttttaurus?’
‘The old bull? You sometimes forget who you have and have not had put to silence, to use that delightful state euphemism. The old bull has been slaughtered.’
Claudius nearly got out of bed. ‘Not on my orders.’
‘On the orders of Pallas. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?’
‘What was the charge against him? Pallas said nothing to me about this, gave me no pppppapers to to—’
‘He said,’ she said in a voice modulating to the innocently childish, ‘that he’d hand his gardens over to me. He knew I wanted them. Then he changed his mind.’
‘What?’
‘Wealthy Roman citizens should sometimes show their gratitude for being allowed to remain wealthy. And they certainly should not insult their Empress by reneging on their promises. The gardens are very beautiful. You must walk them with me sometime. The pine-scented air will be good for your weak chest.’
He breathed very deeply the closer air of his sickroom. ‘Pallas,’ he said and then, more characteristically, ‘Pppppallas. I see. The efficient minister of finance is more your servant than mine. Are you exerting your witchcraft on him?’
‘What do you mean – witchcraft?’ she said, not without a faint note of anxiety that Claudius would be too deaf to catch.
‘Your charms. That ppppungent odour of sensuality which ccccaptivated your old uncle and tttturned him into the ffffool he is.’
‘Pallas is devoted to you. He takes as much off your hands as he can to leave you free for your higher concerns. He consults me, as is right. I am the Emperor’s helpmeet.’
‘It was Pallas who urged my ttttransferring the impppperial inheritance from my son to yours.’
‘He had only the welfare of the state at heart. Britannicus is a good solid soldier, which means a bit of a fool. My son is ready even now for high office. He studies hard, and with the best teachers. He is intelligent, sensitive—’
‘Insuffffficiently so to the sound of his own sccccrannelpipe voice. Your son may sing and dance his way round the Emppppire for all I ccccare, bbbbuying apppplause, but he is not going to wear the ppppurple if I have anything to do with it.’ He tried getting out of bed, but his migraine issued contrary orders. He collapsed on his pillows again. Agrippina nodded kindly.
‘Sleep,’ she almost sang. He had mentioned witchcraft, too much the enlightened intellectual to apply the term other than metaphorically. But real witches existed, and they practised a real craft. There was one who lived in the Suburra, her name Locusta. Agrippina had used her services before. Sudden, you say? It must not be too sudden. The art of the sleepbringer lies in the imitation of nature. You know how to – administer? Sleep, silence: admirable euphemisms. She made a derisive gesture at Claudius’s groaning bulk and then left.
Paul came to Caesarea not only with Luke but with a convert of Ephesus named Trophimus. This Trophimus was a fair-haired youth, son of a goldsmith slower to be converted: his final words to Paul as he saw his son off were that he would think about it. He believed young men should see the world, preferably in the company of older men who would keep them out of taverns and brothels, and of Paul’s continence and sobriety he was in little doubt. In Caesarea they went to call on Philip, the Greek who had converted a black eunuch and still felt uneasy about it. He had four chattering daughters who were always prophesying the end of the world and seemed to have little time for the work of the household. Still, Philip’s fat wife cooked well and they would all have eaten a pleasant meal together – the daughters, when not prophesying, were good silent trencherwomen – if another regular prophesier had not called, well remembered from Antioch, his name Agabus. He began prophesying about Paul while they were still eating. He said:
‘I was right about the famine in Palestine, was I not, yes I was. So watch me carefully now and listen with both your ears. Give me that girdle you have round your middle.’ Paul, mystified, unknotted it and handed it over. Agabus said, taking it: ‘I follow Holy Writ in miming what I prophesy. Did not Ahijah the Shilonite foretell the disruption of Solomon’s kingdom by rending his new cloak? Yes, he did. Did not Isaiah walk naked to prophesy the Assyrian captivity of the Egyptians? Most certainly. So now Agabus ties his feet and hands together – with some little difficulty, I confess – to signify that the Jews of Jerusalem will take the owner of this girdle, bind him hand and foot, and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. The only Gentiles in Judaea are the Romans, am I not right, so stay away from Jerusalem. Enough.’ He handed the girdle back. Regirding himself, Paul said:
‘I have to go.’ The four daughters of Philip started to wail in unison. ‘Quiet, girls,’ Paul said sharply. ‘I beg your pardon, Philip, I should have left that to you, but I am growing a little sick of people consulting my safety. I had a similar prophecy delivered to me in Tyre, less cogent perhaps than Agabus’s, for it was purely verbal. Much more to the point is the question of a safe lodging in Jerusalem for these two Gentiles who have come so far with me. I know hardly anybody there now, except my sister, and she has no love for me any more. Any Jewish lodging house will be dubious about letting the uncircumcised in. Where can we go?’
‘There’s this man Mnason,’ Philip said. ‘A Cypriot Greek, one of the first Jerusalem converts. He’s here in Caesarea now, but he’ll want to be back in Jerusalem for Passover. A matter of trade only. He sells unfermented grape juice, very popular with the children.’
Mnason was agreeable to taking in three temporary lodgers. He was a sharp soldierly old man who rode a white horse. ‘I’ll be there well before you,’ he said. ‘Anybody will tell you where the house is. It’s a pity you all have to walk. Sixty-odd miles and in this heat. As for you, sir,’ he said to Luke, ‘I’ll be happy to sit down with you any evening and tell you all I know about the early days of the faith here. I always said someone should make a book out of it. Bloody reading it will be, though, a lot of it. Well, Jerusalem then, gentlemen. Look after your feet.’
With sore feet Paul went alone to see James, once called the Little, now named, with some justice, the Just. He was the only one of the original disciples left in Jerusalem, the others dispersed about the world, some of them dead. He presided over a number of new Jewish converts who, somewhat timid and stay-at-home, looked on the great missionary traveller with awe. James, as on the other brief occasions of meeting him, felt his intellectual inferiority to Paul weigh on him like his own fat, for the muscle of his younger days, when he had emerged from country wrestling to follow the faith, had decayed to an unbecoming adiposity. It was absurd, he often felt, that such a one as he should have become the bishop of Jerusalem, but he had the right qualifications, which might be glossed as the wrong ones for an active mission: he preferred to stay where he was and, not wanting too much trouble either, compromised all he could with the orthodox Jews, seeming to present a new and revolutionary faith as a mere harmless annexe to the old. He paid his Temple dues, fulfilled the requirements of seasonal ritual, and gave Nazarene money to even such of the Jerusalem poor as said that rightly was that one hanged between two thieves. He was glad to see Paul hand over a small bag of coins of the Empire for the disbursement of the Mother Church. ‘Go on remembering the poor’ was a slogan that Paul seemed to have remembered. James said to him:
‘We’re glad to see you well and safe. We shall be more glad to hear of your adventures and successes, though perhaps in the form of a formal discourse to all our elders. This house of poor Matthias is hardly big enough to accommodate them and you. Perhaps in the open air, on the Mount of Olives.’ Paul looked round him: the house had grown shabby and seemed to have shrunk, and spiders, like little black Romans, were at the work of structural engineering in dark corners. Paul said:
‘You say poor Matthias.’
‘He’s at work on the Italian mainland and has had, from what we hear, little luck and many buffets. Italy, I would say, needs a man like yourself.’
‘I have every intention of going to Rome. The dagger to the heart, so to speak.’
‘Yes. Good. Now there is something disturbing which these gentlemen here will confirm. There are some wicked stories going around, none of them, naturally, based on truth, which you will have to do something about confuting. I think you know what the stories are.’
Paul shrugged. ‘I take it that the Jewish converts are at it again. Alleging that I’ve said that circumcision is a lot of unnecessary nonsense. Well, so it is, in comparison with what we may term the circumcision of the spirit. There are some grumblings too about the new Sabbath – Dies Solis instead of Yom Rischon. That had to be. Now they’re saying, according to Philip up there in Caesarea, that I’m turning Jesus into the sun god. Let them say what they wish.’
James was unhappy about that. He shifted his bulk and made his chair creak. ‘I’ve always been against rapid innovation.’
‘Rapid? I think we’ve been damnably slow. Life may be eternal, but it’s not very long.’
James had heard that before, perhaps too often. He said: ‘There are thousands of Jews here in Judaea who’ve been converted to the faith, but they don’t want to give up their zeal for the old law. Too many of them have been told that you’ve been persuading the Jewish Nazarenes who live among the Gentiles to give up Moses, which means chiefly to stop circumcising their sons. And then there’s the matter of the food laws. A little song’s been going the rounds. What is it, Remaliah?’
A scarcebearded convert in a too clean white robe cleared his throat and warbled:
‘Paul’s Sunday services are not all talk.
They start with lobster and end with pork.’
‘A mere stupid song,’ Paul grinned. He doused the grin and said: ‘One of the big complaints of the Christians in Ephesus is that meat doesn’t taste good any more. No blood in it. I’ve done my best to enforce dietary laws, but few of the Gentiles see what they mean. That dream that Peter had in Joppa seemed to me to be a very sound one, but I hear now that Peter’s been denying that he ever had it. A great one for denying,’ he added somewhat viciously.
‘The point is,’ James said uncomfortably, ‘that you’ve some explaining to do.’
‘Doing is better than explaining. I’ll shave my hair off, not that there’s much left, and go to the Temple with the mandatory menagerie. You’ll have to give me some of that money back.’
‘A ram, two lambs, a quart of wine, white flour – I forget how much, I’ll find out. You mean the purification rite.’
‘I need it, believe me.’
‘That will work with our own people.’ And then: ‘Need it? Why?’
‘Defilement. I say no more.’
‘I ask no more. The real trouble is the Jews who’ve come from the provinces – Antioch and so on. They didn’t feel free in the lands of the Gentile. Now they’ll feel all too free. Shadow of the Temple. Consecration of hate. You see what I mean? It won’t do any of us any good if they start on you.’
‘You’re sorry I came, James? Upsetting your cosy stability, am I? Shall I wait for night and take the road back?’
‘No no no no no. All I’m saying is that you have to watch out.’
Before totally bald Paul went to the Temple for his purificatory rites, he took young Trophimus into its outer courts. Trophimus was awed by the magnificence but found it hard to reconcile with the noises of a meat market. There was a notice whose key words were Thanatos and Mors and Mavet. ‘Thus far, no further,’ Paul said. ‘You see – death by execution to all nonbelievers who enter the inner Temple. An old law – not even the Romans can touch it. Indeed, a Roman was once misguided enough to disregard the warning. He was stoned to death on the orders of the priests. The Roman law couldn’t save him. We’ll turn back now.’
Paul and his friend were closely watched. A couple from Antioch, Job and Amos, squinted through the sunlight with especial care. ‘See him?’ Amos said to a knot of strollers from the same town. ‘Remember him? He’s there, see, large as life, taking one of those fair-haired bastards with a hat on his prick into the Holy of Holies.’
‘No, he’s not. He knows the rules. There, they’re away now.’
‘Filthy defiler of the Most High, the bastard.’
‘You’re going too far.’
‘Wait.’
Paul’s enemies got him when he was completing his ritual obligations in the Court of Israel. This was that part of the inner precincts reserved for lay sons of the faith: priests and Levites could go in to the limit, or nearly. To those under the law I became as one under the law though not being myself under the law that I might win those under the law. He tasted the phrase: it would go well in a letter to Corinth. He was surprised, looking up, to see what seemed to be a great portion of the Jewish population of Corinth glowering at him. Then somebody pointed a finger at somebody and said: ‘There he is.’ This latter stood in a shaft of light and was momentarily all gold. Then, seeing himself pointed at and probably having some reason to feel guilt, he moved into darkness and then out. ‘Bringing Gentiles into the Temple of the Most High.’ Paul made himself limp as he was grasped: he had expected this, though not yet and not here. Someone harmlessly slapped his bald head with a shoe. He was dragged down the steps into the outer court. He heard the gates of the sanctuary clanging to. There were some trying to get up there to grasp the absent Trophimus: the police of the Temple wanted no riot and did their own beating. A ready crowd poured into the outer court. A man recognised by Paul as a known troublemaker in Ephesus yelled: ‘Come on, help smash him to pulp, men of Israel. He’s defiled this place. He brought Greeks in,’ pluralising easily. ‘He preaches against the law and the people and the Temple. Law and order. Justice. Knock his teeth in.’ Paul was being kicked and thumped. One gross sweating man in old robes fisted him on the crown before saying: ‘What’s he done, then?’ Then Roman troops arrived and stopped the riot.
There was a cohort of armed Romans up there to the north-west in the fortress of Antonia. The military tribune had been quick. Two hundred men with their centurions poured in, happily beating the Jews with the flats of their daggers. They handcuffed Paul and were ready to drag him up the steps to the castle, criminal, thief, pickpocket, something, but he was ready to mount with dignity. The rearguard fought off the mob with kicks. This was a great day.
Panting, Paul stood before the tribune in the guardroom. This officer, close to retirement, weary, too much fat on his jowls, said:
‘Causing a riot, eh? Stirring up trouble. I know you. You’re that Egyptian we had trouble with three years ago. Found you out, have they? Saying the wall would come down if you told it to and then you’d march in and take over. Well, they got what was coming to them, but you got away, Egyptian swine, didn’t you? Well, now you’re for it.’
‘Do I look like an Egyptian? Do I sound like one? I’m a Jew, of Tarsus in Cilicia, citizen of no mean—’
‘Only got your word for it.’
‘If you want that crowd quietened down let me speak to them. In the language of the Jews.’
‘That’s right, get them to attack this tower. All right, centurion, take him away.’
‘Did it look as if I was ready to lead a mob? It was my blood they were after, not yours. Let me say a few words in Aramaic.’
‘Let him, sir,’ the centurion said. ‘Seeing what they were doing to him he’s got a right to. Let’s get that crowd cleared.’
They led Paul back to the stairs leading up to the tower. He had troops above him and troops below him. The crowd yelled and then grew tired of yelling. They would be glad of inflammatory words; they wanted to be further incensed, being a mob. Paul did not shout. He pitched his voice high and forward and said: ‘Men of Jerusalem, listen to me. I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia but brought up in this city instructed according to the strict manner of the faith and the law of our fathers, being zealous for God – just as you are, all of you. I sat at the feet of none other than Gamaliel, the glory of the law. I am a Jew then, but one who heard the voice of the Lord telling me to cease persecuting his saints, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth who is the Christ. For it was said to me: “The God of our fathers has appointed you to know his will, and to see the Righteous One, and to hear a voice from his mouth. Arise, be baptised, wash away your sins, calling on his name.” Again, it was said to me: “Depart, for I will send you to bring the word to the Gentiles.” I have obeyed the voice of the Lord of our fathers. In what way have I done wrong?’
It was the word gentiles that threw oil on to flames become briefly quiescent. It was a filthy word. The mob responded not merely by yelling. They followed some of the more devout of their number and began tearing their clothes, throwing their cloaks in the air, kicking up dust. Paul saw that he had not been discreet; this would not have happened to James. The howl that the Roman troops heard was one they knew well but had not heard lately: it was the growl of colonial disaffection screwed to a rage insentient of blows and the sword. The centurion himself, who stood on the tread beneath Paul, started punching him in the ribs and then kicking him upstairs.
‘This makes no sense,’ the tribune said. Paul had no breath. He looked at the blood dripping on to his right hand from a cut from a ringed fist on his right cheek. ‘What you said, what I could follow of it, and what they’re yelling makes no sense. You’ll have to be examined according to Roman law. You know what that means?’ Paul shook his head. ‘All right. Take him down to the courtyard.’
In the courtyard they began fixing his wrists with thongs to a chain hanging from a kind of gallows. He saw a couple of soldiers appear lashing the air with flagella, lengths of leather studded with spikes and bits of bone affixed to a wooden handle. To the centurion he said: ‘May I speak?’
‘No. Not till after this lot. That’s the only way to get at the truth of this business.’
‘I will speak. Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is uncondemned and is, moreover, a Roman?’
‘You,’ the centurion gawped, ‘a Roman?’
‘A Roman.’
The centurion saw his tribune in the far corner of the courtyard, looking at an amendment of standing orders that a clerk had brought. ‘Wait here.’ Paul humorously indicated his bonds. The two flagellators practised flagellating Paul’s still-clothed back, standing well away and letting the boned tip peck at the garment, enjoying the whistle of the leather in the air. The centurion came back with the tribune. The tribune said:
‘The centurion here says that you say you’re a Roman.’
‘I am a Roman. The records are in the procuratorial headquarters at Caesarea. You can check. Meanwhile you’re breaking the law by binding my hands in this manner. This you will know.’
‘Look, friend,’ the tribune said. ‘It cost me a pretty penny to buy my Roman citizenship. All right, I know, you can tell I’m a Greek, have I ever denied it? You don’t look to me all that rich.’
‘I didn’t have to be one of Messalina’s customers. I’m Roman born. As I say, check up on it. Meanwhile don’t do anything you may regret.’
The tribune stroked his two blue chins. Then he said to the centurion: ‘Untie him. Lock him up for the night. We’ll have their priests on to this business in the morning. You know the penalty for beating up a Roman citizen?’
‘I do, sir, I do.’ So Paul was untied and led into the castle. The flagellators, thwarted, tried to flagellate a pair of alighting sparrows. Unharmed, they flew off. Paul, from his cell, watched other birds homing to eaves as night fell quickly. They brought him a soldier’s meal: dark bread and a piece of rank goatmeat with blood in it. Also wine. He drank the wine, composing letters in his head. It was by virtue of the Roman courier system that they got to their readers, heads of congregations who read them aloud at the love feast or eucharistic service. Put to death therefore whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, greed, idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming … Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them … Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. He saw a whole sunlit world of white stone, the odour of camel dung and of decaying figs on the air, and the words were perhaps no more than shaped air. He was growing into middle age, the night air was chill on his total baldness, and he felt that his words were heard but not well understood, that Christ had grown into a legend, that he had been wasting his time. His tents would outlive his preaching. Then he smiled, recognising certain familiar devils of discouragement which negatively proved that there had been no waste: the devils knew if men did not.
He thought of his own death, which might not be much longer delayed. If he believed, if he truly believed, then he would carry into a world beyond time the gifts of time, which he sleepily envisaged as an earthenware dish of the dried raisins of Corinth. Not an angel, any more than Christ was. Human but immortal with a kind of purged sensorium. So the pleasures of the next world would be, in a manner, of the senses. Meaning a barrier to the experience of pure spirit, which meant denial of the ultimate vision. Meaning that Christ, also a creature of sense, was barred from merging with the Father. That explained why Father and Son, though consubstantial, were distinct persons. Theology. Life was too short for it, but he foresaw before sleeping men writing long books about the personality of Christ and neglecting the multiple message. The point was that the thing had rooted, message or metaphysics. It could not be willed away, not even by God the Father himself. And God the Father was closer to that damnable unknown god of the Athenians than to the Jehovah to whom he had dedicated his ram and his lambs. He slept.
He was awakened at dawn to be taken to an emergency session of the Sanhedrin. There was already an energetic crowd around, spitting through the steel cage of his Roman military escort. He was handed over to Temple guards who gratuitously thumped him into the council chamber. The Roman escort waited without, grumbling. Paul looked at the yawning priests and holy laymen as they assembled. He recognised few of them, but he could tell the Sadducees from the Pharisees. The latter had red farmers’ faces and gnarled hands; the former had a Roman look. All stood when the chief priest came in. He was new, the successor of Caiaphas, thin and with a look of inner torment, perhaps intestinal. He was given a paper by a clerk. He glanced at it and said:
‘You, Saul of Tarsus, are charged with a serious breach of the Jewish law.’ Before he could say more, Paul said:
‘My name is Paul. I admit no breach. Brothers, I have lived before God in all good conscience until this day.’ He prepared to say more but the chief priest, to the surprise not only of Paul, struck him with a ringed right hand on the mouth. Paul bled. He was sick of having to bleed all the time. He heard with anger the priest’s words:
‘You blasphemer, you have the gall to claim purity of conscience before this holy assembly here met?’ Paul snarled:
‘God shall strike you, you whitewashed wall. You stand in judgement on me according to the law and you smite me contrary to the law.’
A Sadducee arose and said: ‘Fellow, you address Ananias the high priest of God. Watch your mouth.’ So. A forked name. To the Christians an Ananias was no more than a liar. Paul said:
‘I know what is written: you shall not speak evil of a ruler of the people. But nobody told me he was the high priest. Nor did he behave in a manner befitting a high priest.’ Somebody at the back of the assembly guffawed briefly and Ananias looked daggers. Paul gathered that there was little reverence for him except among the wealthier Sadducees. He said boldly: ‘I see the disposition of your council. I see Sadducees. I see Zealots. I see Pharisees. What do the Sadducees believe? That there is no resurrection, that death ends all. But the Pharisees accept the hope of the resurrection of the dead. Brothers, I am a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee. The dead rise as Jesus of Nazareth rose—’
There was some commotion among the Sadducees. The Zealots spat, and one cried: ‘Resurrection of the free Jewish state under God.’ A Pharisee somewhat younger than Paul banged on the marble floor with his staff and raised dust. He shouted: ‘I smell conspiracy.’ Paul did not understand. ‘What fault do you find in this man? Go carefully. You cannot always know who you are dealing with.’ Then the dissension grew very loud. Another Pharisee arose and yelled over all:
‘We are met to deal with a mere frivolity. I am sick of the hypocrite and the timeserver. He was right when he spoke of a whitewashed wall. Profaner of the sacred office. Greed and rapacity. While we are met let us condemn who should be condemned. Ananias, son of Nedebaeus, admit you take the tithes that should go to the low priests. Friend of the Romans, licker of the Emperor’s arse.’ There was now some very unseemly punching. Ananias trembled, white as a whitewashed wall. Then the outer doors were battered open and the centurion who had accompanied Paul hither came in with troops behind him. He was surprised to see Paul standing aloof from the noise and unhandy fisting. Ananias glowered at the centurion and cried:
‘This is a holy place.’
‘It sounded like it. Come on, you, sir, back to headquarters.’ This was to Paul, who nodded and submitted to being caged in by barelegged troops with drawn steel for the march back to the tower. He was howled at by many who did not know why they were howling. He saw Luke and Trophimus, much disturbed and shouting what sounded like Courage. James he did not see. Paul was marched back to his cell.
In a tavern later that day a group of Zealots listened to Amos and Job, the ill-favoured visitors from Antioch. The leader of the Zealots was named Jotham, and his hard young face was much scarred with a pox picked up in Samaria. ‘So,’ Jotham said, ‘that’s his story, is it? To hell with the kingdom of this world and forget you’re a Jew. Get rid of him and that’s one enemy out of the way. We have to make a start somewhere. If he’s a Roman, as he says he is, then it’s a beautiful situation. They won’t react, they daren’t. Sons of the kingdom kill a Roman citizen. And that’s the end of the Nazarenes.’
‘How?’ asked a Zealot named Jehoash, a lad of few words.
‘Get the Sanhedrin to have him brought in for another examination. Not the full council, no Pharisees, that can be worked. Stick the knife in then.’
‘Difficult.’
‘Look,’ Jotham said fiercely as the serving boy put fresh wine on the table. ‘I’m ready to propose an oath on this business. No eating or drinking till it’s done. Tell the priests. We curse ourselves till we do it.’
‘Tell Ananias?’
‘Not that lump of goal’s dung. Yochanan the disciple of Pinqai.’ The Zealots guffawed, but the visitors from Antioch did not understand. If they had thought about the writing of the name they would have seen that Hananiah spelt backwards gave Yochanan. The twenty-fourth psalm of David had the line: ‘The temple court cried out “Lift up your heads, O ye gates and let Yochanan the son of Narbai and the disciple of Pinqai enter and fill his belly with the divine sacrifices.’” Ananias was noted for his greed. Pinqai suggested pinka, a dish of stewed meat with onions to which the high priest was partial. In some ways the Jews were a subtle people. The boy setting the wine down on the table heard that business about not eating and drinking and was prepared to take it away again, but Jehoash clamped his heavy hand on the crock handle. Presumably the oath was to go into effect tomorrow or the next day. The boy went off.
The boy left the tavern and ran all the way to the Tower of Antonia. He started to run up the outer stairs but was stopped by a soldier. The soldier was ready at first to push him away, but the lad was very earnest. You had to be careful since that Jew being a Roman citizen business. Best leave decisions to the higher command. The soldier let the boy climb up to the centurion, who had just finished guard inspection on the middle terrace. The boy spoke to the centurion. The centurion took the boy kindly by the hand and led him in to see the military tribune.
Later that day the military tribune dictated a letter. It took a long time, he had difficulty with the Ciceronian kind of Latin. His amanuensis put his grammar right silently. ‘Claudius Lysias, tribune in Jerusalem, to the most excellent governor Felix in Caesarea, greetings and long life. This man was seized by the Jews and was about to be killed by them. I rescued him, having learnt that he is a Roman citizen. Anxious – no, desirous to know the grounds of their accusations, I had their council examine him. He was accused about certain questions of their law, but nothing was laid to his charge worthy of death or even imprisonment. Now it has come to my notice that there is a murderous plot against this man, therefore I send him to you forthwith. I am charging his accusers also to speak against him in your presence. Got that? Usual flowery stuff to end it.’
This Greek Lysias, who had taken on the name of the Emperor when buying citizenship from the Empress, had his own good reasons for getting Paul off his hands. If the Jews killed him there would be a lengthy inquiry, and it would certainly come out that he had in his time taken bribes from Jews. Everybody did it. A perquisite of colonial service. Best to throw the whole business into the lap of the procurator up there in Caesarea with his Jewish princess of a wife. He ordered a horse for Paul, a mounted squadron and a platoon of infantry. That should be enough. Set off at nine in the evening, when these noisy Jewish bastards would be in bed with their daggers under the pillow, and march steady, five minutes’ break in the hour, be at Antipatris before dawn, not Jewish territory so safe, send the bulk of the escort back to Jerusalem, a handful of cavalry enough to take him to Caesarea, there let Felix, miserable sort of a swine, strange how a man’s name is always a kind of joke, take over. There it was, then.
Paul, his rear sore, was lodged in a neutral kind of chamber, locked but not a prison cell, until the Sanhedrin had its case against him prepared and a counsel for the prosecution appointed. He was fed regularly on bread, beans and watered wine, and he was allowed writing materials. There were always letters to write. After five days he was permitted warm water for washing and a new robe. Somebody in the palace, clearly, had not unfriendly feelings towards him. Probably the wife of the procurator, daughter of the unlamented Herod Agrippa I. Washed and enrobed, he was led by a couple of Syrian private soldiers to the hall set aside for the hearing. Ananias was there, glowering, with three assistant priests, and there was a portly man puffing over his papers, introduced as Tertullus, a Greek Jew from the look of him. The procurator came in with his personal escort and sat resignedly on a kind of throne. He irritably waved a fly whisk. Paul took him to be of lowly origin, a civil servant who had worked his way up by threats and bribery. He was to learn later that he was a freedman who had served Claudius’s mother Antonia and added the forename Antonius to the servile Felix. Also that his brother was Pallas, financial minister to Claudius. Felix’s wife Drusilla was to tell him this. The procurator frowned at Paul and asked where he was from. From Tarsus in Cilicia, no mean—Let this business begin. Tertullus bowed portlily and started:
‘Seeing, O illustrious Felix, that under your governance we enjoy much peace, and that by your providence many evils have been corrected in this territory, we accept the judgement you shall be pleased to make, most excellent Felix, with all due gratitude in the matter now laid before you. I will be brief and put off all tediousness and say merely that here we have a most pestilential fellow, a mover of insurrections among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect called by some Nazarenes and by others Christians. Another matter, and the one immediately at issue: he tried to profane the Temple in Jerusalem by leading thither a man of Gentile persuasion contrary to the sacred law of the Jews. By your own examination, O illustrious one, you will see these things to be so. I will not presume to put into your honourable mouth the judgement meet to be meted out, but would merely at this time emphasise the gravity of his crime.’
While he drew breath to continue, the procurator shook his flywhisk and then pointed it at Paul, saying: ‘Let the accused speak.’ Paul smiled and spoke suavely, saying:
‘I know, sir, you have been a judge of this nation for many years, and therefore I make my disposition to you cheerfully and with confidence. Briefly, then. I have spent no more than twelve days in Jerusalem. In that time I have stirred up no crowds, neither in the synagogues nor in the city. I have not even been involved in any religious disputation. Nothing I am accused of can be upheld. The Jews of Asia who initiated my accusation are, I see, not present. Those of Jerusalem can find me guilty of one thing only, and that a thing confidently accepted by the sect called the Pharisees, who are of right and tradition represented in the religious councils of Israel—’
‘That after death there is resurrection. Believing this, I do not offend against the ancestral creeds of the Jews. Wherein then am I guilty?’
‘And the other matter?’
‘Taking a Gentile into the Temple? This is expressly forbidden. Would I knowingly lead a friend who has come far with me to his condign death? I note that there are none here present who can bear witness to this allegation.’
Claudius Felix grunted. There then entered a very young lady of exquisite dark beauty who smiled at Paul and kissed Felix on the crown of his head. This would be the lady Drusilla, his wife. She stood behind the chair, smiling now more generally. Felix said: ‘I know the ways of the Jews. I will consider the matter at greater length with the accused himself. Clear the court.’
The priests were not happy about this, but Tertullus bowed and bowed his way out backwards. Felix summoned with his flywhisk Paul at the decent distance of a prisoner at the bar to approach the procuratorial chair. Paul did so, catching a whiff of the procuratorial consort’s perfume. Felix said: ‘I have ratified from the records that you’re a Roman citizen. This means you have money.’
‘A Roman born. I have no money.’
‘A pity. Money can often resolve things that legal wranglings make more and more – well, knotty. You are acquainted with the lady Drusilla?’
‘Honoured. Daughter of a king of Israel.’
‘She prefers to be known as the consort of a Roman procurator. Listen. I hate nonsense. I hate hypocrisy. I hate petty kings. I hate law. I love expediency.’
Drusilla began to speak to Paul in Aramaic but then changed to charming Greek with a strong rasp on the chi. ‘My father, I regret to say, did things not easily forgivable. Neither to you Christians nor to Roman justice. Will it surprise you that his daughter is anxious to hear something of the new belief?’
‘And,’ Paul smiled, ‘her husband – who hates law but loves expediency?’
‘Paul, I’ll be candid with you,’ Felix said. ‘I don’t want to judge your case. I’m not sure that I even understand it. Moreover, I’ve been recalled to Rome. Some nonsense about undue harshness in putting down an insurrection in Samaria. You know the sort of thing. While I wait for a ship to arrive you’re welcome to expound your doctrine. But you’re in custody. The custody may be long. Your case will be heard by my successor, and Castor and Pollux alone know when he’ll be here.’
‘With respect, as there seems to be no case to answer, might it not be expedient to let me go?’
‘Ah, you’re a Jew but you don’t seem to know the Jews. That’s the Roman in you, I suppose. They won’t be satisfied with an acquittal. If I dismissed the whole business and let you take ship from Caesarea to Tarsus or wherever you want to go, those gentry in Jerusalem would find out quickly enough and tear the place to shreds. I don’t want to leave here in the middle of a fresh insurrection. These damned sicarii – you’ve heard of them?’
‘I’ve heard of them.’
‘No, I’ve enough on my plate as it is. This Nero is something of a new broom. Only a boy, but he knows all about cleaning the provinces up, or so he thinks.’
‘What was that name?’ Paul frowned.
‘Of course, you won’t have heard, will you? We have a new Emperor. Claudius has been turned into a god.’
‘Custody, then,’ Paul sighed. ‘I submit.’
‘You have to, don’t you? All right, Drusilla, ask him your questions.’
Time. Time. We have been living, with Paul, in Claudian time. Now we shift to Neronian time. Time is not, as some say, a universal waterclock but a submissive consort of place. But the chronicler, servant of Chronos, has to forget that place is the reality and time a phantom hovering over it like the smoke from a stewpan. Whipped by his master, he goes back in time, which is absurd. What is now to happen has already happened.
Claudius lay in uneasy sleep. Agrippina shook him gently awake.
‘I’m ttttired. I have this ppppp—’
‘I know. Dear Claudius.’ She embraced his ageing bulk with a show of love, even of desire. Sick as he was, he began creakingly to respond. ‘No, dearest, not now,’ she crooned, then deliciously laughed. ‘Time to eat. Supper’s ready. You’ve been starving yourself. Silly Seneca and his stoical self-denial. You must eat to be healthy. I’ve ordered your favourite dish – wild mushrooms.’
‘Wild mmmmmm—’
They were already on the table when Claudius came in. His daughter was absent with a migraine, a physical endowment from her father. She had none of his mental endowments. Britannicus, his sturdy son, stood at attention. Agrippina, all smiles, helped her husband on to his couch. The three were reclined when Claudius took in the empty place. ‘Late again. Not on the hour but five minutes bbbbefore the hour. Isn’t that military ppppunctuality, my son?’
‘A family dinner isn’t a parade, father.’
‘No. Well, at least ccccommon ppppoliteness. An empire ought to be run like the ffffusion of a ffffamily and an army. If that’s ppppossible.’
The mushrooms in their thick brown sauce steamed less urgently. ‘Eat, Claudius dear. We won’t wait for Domitius.’
‘I’ve little appppetite, my dear. Still, the odour is – seductive.’ Agrippina’s son now rushed in, unclasping his cloak, crying:
‘My profoundest apologies. An appointment in Suburra. One of the litter-carrying slaves broke his ankle. I do most sincerely regret my unpunctuality, dear father. I beat the fool, of course, and borrowed a slave from somebody, I forget whom – Ah, mushrooms, delicious—’
He was ready to put his fingers unceremoniously in the dish, but Claudius proffered his own full plate. ‘Take these. I can’t eat.’
Agrippina coughed violently. She then, preoccupied with the feigned paroxysm, overturned her goblet blindly and let wine cascade on to her dress. Her son took Britannicus’s napkin and wiped her down. Claudius said:
‘Well, since you ordered them, my dear—’
He fingered in three of the fungi whole. Agrippina exhaled in relief and cried: ‘Oh, I’m so pleased. Let’s drink to the Emperor’s restored health and appetite. May the Emperor Claudius live for ever.’
‘Not even you, my dear, can prevent me from turning into a gggg—’ He turned pale. He sweated. ‘Greed. Always one of my failings. The virtues of ttttemperance. Seneca is very good on that subj—Oh, no.’ His round face under the snow thatch passed from colour to colour like a chameleon. He gaped and tried to drink in all the air of the world. He clutched his big belly with both hands. Quick to act. That witch in the Suburba knew her craft. Nor, it was hoped, had suspected who her veiled client might be. But, to be on the safe side, have her put, operative word, to silence. Agrippina clapped her hands, her eating son thought, for a moment, in applause, but it was that servants might come. Claudius, moaning, was helped out. One servant performed a more important act – the removal of the mushrooms and their consignment to silence. Domitius tore white meat from a bone. Britannicus stood to attention, waiting for orders that did not arrive.
Pallas and Agrippina stood in the imperial bedchamber and watched Claudius turn painfully into a god. He had vomited, but she had been ready with what she alleged to be a healing aperient well watered. She openly embraced Pallas when Claudius opened his eyes wide for a last gulp of the world. Gaping to the limit to take it all in to take below to the bloodless land of the shades. She made a rutting motion in Pallas’s arms as the rattle began. ‘Goodbye, uncle Ccccclaudius,’ she jeered. Then, affronted by the audible collapse of nether muscles, she strode to the one lamp and blew it out.
When the Roman dawn was gorgeous over the pines beyond the terrace, Narcissus paced, waiting for the commander of the Praetorian Guard to appear. He at length strode in, Afranius Burrus, a decent moral man, though chosen for the office by Agrippina. ‘The news?’ he asked.
‘All over. It was a failure of the heart. To be expected at his age after unwonted gorging.’
‘What had he eaten?’
‘Mushrooms.’
‘Mushrooms can always be dangerous. He proclaimed the succession?’
‘Pallas and the Empress report that he proclaimed it.’
‘Be so good,’ Burrus said weightily, ‘as to assure the Emperor designate that the Praetorian Guard is ready to serve him with all the devotion it accorded his father.’
‘Adoptive father I take it you mean. The Emperor designate is not Britannicus.’
‘Not Britannicus?’ Burrus seemed to take all of ninety seconds to perform an act of simple subtraction. Then he heard the voice of a mere boy, though a precocious one, up early to practise his music, moaning a song to the accompaniment of a cithern:
‘Troy is destroyed,
But a greater Troy
Will rise in the void
None shall destroy.’
If I have neglected for many pages the minor personages of this chronicle, it is because they have done little worthy of your attention. Who can compare a mother’s wiping of her child’s nose with the spreading of the word? If you reply that the word will not last but noses will always drip you are doubtless speaking a profound truth, but chronicles are not compiled that the obvious may be eternised. When the great men are gone it will be time to give ear and eye to the little ones. However, let us go briefly to a gymnasium in Rome where Caleb alias Metellus no longer trains himself to perform skilled acts of aggression and defence in the circus but instead trains others. He has lost his youth but is in robust maturity, health glowing from him like oil, or it may be oil. ‘Break now,’ he says to two Greek wrestlers. ‘Rub down. Then to the baths. Ah, Julius.’
For Marcus Julius Tranquillus the senior centurion has trodden sand and made a circuitous way past sweating gougers and punchers to say a word of farewell to his brother-in-law. During the past years he has done nothing notable. His leg was long in healing, he put on some weight and lost some hair and is clearly no longer a young officer of whom much may be expected. His sole triumph was the confirmation of Messalina’s villainy, but he took no pleasure in witnessing her execution, seeing that glorious body rendered into proleptically putrescent morphology or worm’s food. The Emperor Claudius was not as grateful as he might have been: he probably associated Julius with a phase of pain and humiliation, and Narcissus, in his concentration on amassing wealth before his retirement, forgot the humble soldier who had lent the weight of a witness to a most dangerous accusation. He served briefly in Syria but was stricken with fever and sent home. He grew weary with duties in barracks. But now, with a new Emperor, and with a new procurator in Palestine, he is to be given a chance to serve Rome with his Aramaic, not that he has much of it. Caleb says:
‘How does Sara feel about it?’
‘She won’t come. She never wants to see Palestine again. She’s happy in Rome, she says.’
‘You’re going with the new procurator?’
‘Yes. Poncius Festus. But I retire in a year. I’m given this short tour as they call it, and then – a pension, a garden, boring reminiscences to make Sara yawn. Sara thinks she can bear a year’s separation.’
‘She has Ruth. Do you think of going back?’
Caleb rubbed his chin as if to remind himself that there was no beard there, he was no longer a real Jew. ‘To start insurrections? Kill Poncius Festus and you in the name of a free Israel? I’m a married man now, with a child on the way. First things first. I’m seduced. I’ve succumbed.’
‘Grown up.’
‘Oh, I still believe. But I think Israel will get her independence through negotiation. Break the link through a new client monarch. I have a feeling that Rome will want to be rid of Palestine. Costs too much in taxes. Too poor to pay taxes. I don’t know. But Hannah comes first now. And the child on his way.’
‘You’re sure it’s going to be a son?’
‘I take what God sends. When do you sail?’
‘The day after tomorrow if the wind’s good. From Puteoli. And if the Emperor’s performance at Neapolis ends on time.’
‘What performance is that?’
‘Shameful, really. He sings and dances before an invited audience. Conscripted, I mean. I’m one of the conscribed. Bad luck. We lodge the night with the garrison at Puteoli and the entire garrison has to attend.’
‘God help you.’
This was the well-remembered occasion on which the gods or the chthonian demons responded with displeasure to a Roman emperor’s making a fool of himself in public. It was in an indoor theatre outside Neapolis. The entire Puteoli garrison, a number of patricians, knights, consuls and their wives sat dismally on stone benches while a certain Gaius Petronius, a simpering aesthete in a violet robe carrying a bunch of hyacinths, danced on to the stage and announced: ‘Honoured guests. Imperial entertainment. His Grace the Emperor Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar.’ He tucked his hyacinths under his arms and led the applause. There were dutiful shouts of ‘ave!’ The Emperor, looking like the silly though precocious boy he was, came on smirking. He was in frilled purple and florally crowned. With him were a number of shamefaced lute and flute players who had nothing to do but hold him to the simple tune he had composed to bear words he had composed. The tune was this:
The players preluded with it while the Emperor announced: ‘The Siege of Troy.’ Under the loyal or sycophantic applause there were deeper rumblings from below ground. Some of the ladies showed reasonable fear, but the lynx eyes of the Emperor were on everybody, and the husbands quietened their spouses. The Emperor began:
‘Richly enrobed with the flames of her funeral, Ilium yielded her limbs to the fingers of fire,
Lovingly, lustingly, cooing like columbines,
Roaring like lions and howling like wolves of the wood.
See how the citizens, screaming and scurrying,
Scamper like woodlice from logs freshly thrown on the fire …
One of the audience inadvertently yawned, a young soldier unused to high art and happier with the dirty songs of the taverns. The Emperor cried: ‘I demand not only attention. I demand appreciation. Take that man away.’ The wretched fellow was dragged off by two of his comrades, a little too eagerly thought Marcus Julius Tranquillus, who sat next to Poncius Festus. The Emperor resumed:
‘Ancient Anchises, caught sleeping, awakening
Now to the flames that devour his ancestral abode,
Calls to his son, young Aeneas, to rescue him,
Pious Aeneas, our father, the builder of Rome …’
The underground rumblings grew and the pillars of the theatron visibly shook. Women now screamed. The Emperor cried:
‘Stay! Stay! Nobody is to leave! The Emperor’s orders!’ The nervous musicians resumed fluting and thrumming, though not all at the same time. The Emperor sang loudly but not loudly enough to drown the treasonous noise of something crashing outside:
‘Pious Aeneas, our father, the builder of Rome,
Bore on his shoulders, so handsome and muscular,
Anchises, the father of all of the fathers of Rome …’
He gave up. There was no applause. The shaking earth seemed to be applauding enough. Brave or stupid, the Emperor watched part of the roof giving way. Gaius Petronius came on and led him gawping off. Julius to Poncius Festus said:
‘Well, that’s one way to stop him singing.’
There was no smile in response. The procurator designate was pushing his way through the frantic pushing audience. The earthquake continued its performance.