The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene (17 page)

On higher ground between the Museum and the Lochias Promontory stood the famous Alexandrian Theater. From its upper seats patrons were afforded a view of the broad panorama of the harbor, a forest of masts from ships, scores of small boats, and the great white lighthouse on the island at the seaward boundary. Beside the theater towered the Temple of Pan, and west of this, the great gymnasium whose porticoes were more than a stadium in length. Just beyond the gymnasium were the Courts of Justice.

Joseph spent his days in the Museum, watching the physician-teachers treat the sick poor who thronged here from every part of the city. While the professors diagnosed and treated each case, they lectured to a semicircle of students standing around the patient. Less often, surgical operations were performed, but in this field none of the teachers could equal the skill and daring of Bana Jivaka or the teachings of the great physician Susruta whose precepts he scrupulously followed.

Afternoons were given over to lectures on science and astronomy, in which the school at Alexandria led the world. It was here that Euclid had proved his famous theorems in geometry. Here, too, Eratosthenes had accomplished the astounding feat of measuring the earth. And beneath the same cool arcades, Aristarchus of Samos had studied the stars at night and evolved his startling theory that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun.

As the days passed, Joseph found that he was learning more from Bana Jivaka than he was from the teachers at the university. Under his friend’s tutelage, he became adept at inducing the strange trancelike condition by which the Indian surgeon was able to perform serious operations without pain. The subject merely gazed at a bright object, such as the jewel used by Jivaka, while the physician’s will gradually overcame his through the repeated suggestion that he was falling asleep. From an Egyptian student he learned that this accomplishment was not limited to India, but had been known by the priests of the Nile for thousands of years.

Working together, Joseph and Bana Jivaka performed many feats of surgery, so much so that their reputation soon spread throughout the city and people came seeking them from all quarters. In this way, Joseph came to make friends and earn the gratitude of high persons among the officials who ruled the great metropolis, merchants who operated the bazaars, traders in foreign exchange whose offices were in the great warehouses, people of his own race from the Jewish Quarter, and, following his success with Achillas, even the thieves and petty criminals who were everywhere.

Achillas’s recovery was steady and uncomplicated. Joseph visited him every few days for the first week, and by the second he was so much recovered that he no longer needed anything but an occasional examination of the operative wound.

True to his promise, Matthat came a few weeks later to take Joseph to the theater, where the performances began in mid-afternoon and ran until darkness had fallen. The drama and dance were favorite diversions of the pleasure-loving Alexandrians, and a great crowd thronged the streets, moving toward the massive stone walls of the great theater near the waterfront.

“It is always like this when Flamen dances,” Matthat explained as they were pushed about by the crowd. “The theatergoers worship her. There has never been another like her in Alexandria.”

“Is she a courtesan?” Joseph had come to know that actresses in Alexandria, as in the rest of the world, belonged generally to this group.

Matthat shrugged. “Some claim she is not. Men who have sought her favors and been repulsed will wager she is a virgin. Whatever she is, her power over men is greater than that of any other woman in Alexandria. She is rich already from gifts by wealthy men who seek her favors.”

“Why do they seek her if she refuses them?”

Matthat smiled. “You are a physician. You should know human nature well enough to realize that a man will beggar himself for a beautiful woman who denies him when he would soon become tired of her if she yielded. Courtesan or not, this Flamen is smart and cold-blooded. Just last year the tax collector, Flavius, lost his position because he stole tax moneys to buy gifts for her. The day he was found out, she turned to another, and richer, man.”

Matthat had purchased tickets entitling them to a seat in the great
cavea,
or auditorium. They entered by the aisles called
paradoi,
separating the performers from the audience, and found their way along other passages radiating out from these to a row of seats only a short distance from the stage. The first several rows were reserved for the nobility and the very rich. Just over the openings where the crowd entered, two elaborate boxes called
tribunalia
were set apart for even more important dignitaries.

“One of the
tribunalia
is always taken by Flamen’s current suitor,” Matthat explained. “You can see that she caters only to very rich men. Nobody else could afford such a seat night after night.”

Joseph looked about him curiously, for it was the first time he had ever been in a theater. Before the
scaena,
or stage, was a broad semicircular platform, the orchestra, on which the chorus sang and danced and before which the musicians sat. They were already tuning their instruments when Joseph and Matthat came in.

A great partition separated the audience from the stage proper, but soon after they found seats, it was lowered into a grooved slot in the floor at the edge of the
scaena,
revealing the stage with its painted backdrop, or
skene.
Of stage machinery there was little except the
eccyclema,
a wheeled platform that was run out on the stage when necessary, bearing special scenes.

The auditorium was filling rapidly, and a steady roar of conversation filled the air. It was a brilliant scene indeed, for the vast semicircular theater was a riot of color from the tunics of the men and the vivid draperies of the women who sat with them. Hawkers moved up and down the aisles selling sweetmeats and small skins of wine with which a thirsty viewer might refresh himself. People shouted gaily to each other across the rows, relaying the latest bawdy story or the newest juicy bit of scandal.

The musicians soon began to play the opening chorus, but there was little letup in the hum of conversation. Fortunately Joseph and Matthat were close to the orchestra, so they could hear the music and also had a fine view of the stage itself. Shortly a group of jugglers appeared, tossing swords deftly to each other and catching them by the handles with amazing dexterity. After them a beautiful girl in jeweled breastplates and a golden girdle set a number of swords upright upon the floor and danced among them nimbly, missing the points, it seemed, by only a finger’s breadth.

Now came the first play. It was a mime, one of those short scandalous dramas full of double meanings and frank asides spoken to the audience. The stock characters in these earthy dramas were the unfaithful wife, the handsome effeminate lover, the cuckolded husband, and the gay coquette. This last was played by a young lady who made a great hit with the audience by flirting up her skirts at every opportunity. The audience loved it all, shouting their approval and keeping up a steady conversation all the while.

Next a troupe of girls in filmy tunics ran out upon the orchestra with garlands of flowers in their hair and carrying golden lyres in their hands. They sang a tender love song, then, putting the lyres on the edge of the raised stage above them, began to dance. All were very graceful and made a lovely picture.

After the dancing came another mime, this time the
Atelan Farce,
with its broad comic characters, the clown called Bucco, the pantaloon Pappus, a booby called Maccus, and the wise man, Dossenus. Next, the musicians began a strange haunting melody which Joseph had never heard but which Matthat said was a song of ancient Egypt, and a dark-skinned girl ran to the center of the stage and bowed, her extended fingertips touching the floor. When she raised her writhing arms slowly and stood erect, Joseph saw with a start that it was Achillas’s daughter, Albina.

“Next to Flamen, Albina is the best dancer they have,” Matthat observed. “And a lovely girl as well.”

The dark-skinned girl’s dance was strange to him, a thing of stylized postures with fingers together and hands extended in many odd positions, but the audience, especially the Egyptians, loved it, and Joseph judged that it was a favorite of her people. When she finished, applause filled the theater and she came back once to bow to the audience.

On the performance went, for a regular program in the Alexandrian Theater lasted four hours. Finally, a band of black women from Africa danced the strange, sensuous tribal dances of their people, their skin glistening with sweat in the light of an actual fire built in a great copper pot on the stage.

“Flamen will be coming on soon,” Matthat said. “Her current suitor is in his box.”

Joseph looked across at the seat in the
tribunalia
which had until now been empty and saw that a tall man with a cold hard face had taken his place. The Roman was graying at the temple but very handsome, a patrician in every haughty line of his face.

“That is the
gymnasiarch
Plotinus,” Matthat explained. “I hear that he has already spent thousands of denarii on Flamen.” Joseph had been in Alexandria long enough to know that the
gymnasiarch,
as head of the great gymnasium that was the center of the city’s social activities as well as much of its political life, was one of the most important men in Alexandria.

“What does this Flamen do that makes her so popular in the theater?” Joseph asked curiously. “She can hardly wear less clothing than the dancers who have gone before her.”

“She wears more. They say when she first came to Alexandria the director wanted her to dance naked like the others, but she refused. Wait until you see her, and you will understand the magic she uses upon a crowd, even when more fully clothed than many women in the audience tonight.”

The last of the black dancers scurried from the stage and the massive curtain rose, creaking, from the depths beneath it. It was already dusk, and attendants began to light torches on either side of the stage itself while a hush fell over the crowd in anticipation of the main attraction. Then, as slowly and as ponderously as it had risen, the curtain descended again and a scene of fairy-like beauty was revealed.

A flower garden erected upon the
eccyclema
had been wheeled upon the stage while the curtain was down. A bench stood in the garden beside the little fountain playing there as naturally as if it were real, and flowers were cunningly arranged so that they seemed to be growing around it. The sheer beauty of the scene brought a burst of spontaneous applause from the audience.

When the applause had died away, a woman appeared from the flower-decked arbor beside the bench, carrying a lyre in her hands. She was dressed in a clinging gown of dazzling white, girt about her waist and beneath her breasts with silvery ribbon, and on her flaming red hair a circlet of jewels sparkled in the light of the torches beside the stage. Applause thundered through the building again, and she waited patiently for it to subside before plucking the strings of the lyre and beginning to sing. The song, when it reached Joseph’s ears, was familiar, as familiar as when he had first heard it one day on the streets of Tiberias:

I’ll twine white violets and the myrtle green;

Narcissus will I twine, and the lilies’ sheen;

I’ll twine sweet crocus, and the hyacinth blue;

And last I’ll twine the rose, love’s token true:

That all may forma wreath of beauty, meet

To deck my Heliodora’s tresses sweet.

Listening as she sang, drinking in her beauty with his eyes and his ears, Joseph could see that Mary had changed in the years since she had left Magdala. Not only had her body grown more womanly and less girlish, but her voice had matured as well. Where before it had been beautiful, the notes as clear as a bell of the finest silver ever struck by the superb artisans of Ephesus, whose peer did not exist anywhere in the world, the tones were now richer and deeper.

It was easy to see why she had captured the admiration of the jaded crowds of Alexandria, for looking around him in the theater, Joseph saw not a woman who could even approach her in beauty and sheer personal allure, although the most famous courtesans of all Egypt were here tonight. The
gymnasiarch
Plotinus was leaning forward in his box, and as she finished her song Joseph saw Mary glance up to the
tribunalia
where he sat and smile, before bowing to the thunderous applause of the audience.

“Is she not lovely?” Matthat asked.

“Even more than she was five years ago,” Joseph said without taking his eyes from the white figure on the stage below.

“Five years?” Matthat’s eyes widened. “Do you mean—?”

“The woman called Flamen in Alexandria is Mary of Magdala, the girl I have been seeking.”

The merchant’s eyes popped. “Then why could you not find her?”

“She no longer uses her name. And she seems not to have let it be known here that she is a Jew.”

Matthat nodded sagely. “She was wise. We Jews are not loved, even in Alexandria where we outnumber almost everyone else. And no Roman would marry her if he knew she was a Jewess.”

“She is only half Jew,” Joseph explained. “And she was brought up as a Greek.” But he could not repress entirely his disappointment that Mary had chosen to deny the Hebrew ancestry of which he was so proud.

“Flamen,” Matthat mused. “The torch. She could hardly have chosen a more appropriate name under which to dance. Sometimes she does indeed resemble a burning brand.”

“A Nabatean musician named Hadja gave her the name,” Joseph explained. “He always called her the Living Flame. She would naturally take the name Flamen as an actress. I was stupid not to think of it before.”

The applause had died away, and as the stringed instruments of the orchestra took up a soft lilting melody, Mary began to dance. It was the same dance she had performed before Pontius Pilate and his guests, but Joseph had never seen it. As she moved about the stage, he could visualize the scene she was painting with the consummate artistry of her body as clearly as if he were once again on the shores of the beautiful Lake of Gennesaret watching the lightning play across the dark thunderheads and hearing the drumming of the rain of Marheshvan sweep across the water and caress the shores with its promise of a bountiful harvest. The boy and girl might even have been himself and Mary back in Magdala an eon, it seemed now, ago.