The Kingdom of the Wicked (17 page)

       Philip smiled, though thinly. 'And your way is what, now that you're rid of Pilate?'

       'Not to be caught by the next procurator, whoever he is. That, for a start.'

       'There's talk of your dream being fulfilled without knives or fuss. A client king, Herod Agrippa. No more procurators.'

       'A client king is only a procurator in fancy dress.' Caleb gazed at the lively street scene without seeing it: a camel haughtily dropping its sandcoloured dung; the basketcarrying women, veiled to the eyes but the eyes lively; a girls' quarrel about the precedence of waterdrawing from the well, eyes and teeth a flash of toy knives; an old man drunk asleep under a clump of dusty palms. 'I have,' he said, 'to strike at the centre.'

       Philip, with Nazarene tenderness, rescued a wasp that was trying to swim, against a current of waspish drunkenness, round and round in his halffull winecup. 'You mean,' he said, 'go to Rome?'

       'First things first, you're right, go to Rome. I take it my poor sisters will have been sent to Rome, capital of a slave empire. The first strike at the centre is the stroke that frees my sisters. If they're still alive.'

       'Slaves for the Emperor will, I think, be immune from rough treatment,' Philip said in his cool Greek manner. 'I refer to the voyage under hatches and the clanking of the chained gang from Puteoli or wherever they land. I mean that there will have been no whipping or rape. The slaveowner expects whole skins and a look of health. What happens afterwards depends on the temperament of the slaveowner. And the slaveowner is the Emperor. No longer the wretched mad Tiberius. The sane and well-loved Gaius of the little boots.'

       'You seem to get good fresh news in Jerusalem these days.' The wasp staggered with feeble wet wings about the tabletop. Caleb saw himself in Rome, a city he knew only from fantastic visions: marble palaces with flights of laborious marble steps, gardens of planes and pines and oleanders closed to the rabble, ladies with predatory unveiled faces, wooden tenements quick to burn down, gigantic effigies of false gods. Caleb wandered the streets of Rome, a stranger speaking moderate Greek but bad Latin, living off bruised fruit and wormy cabbages discarded by the stallholders of monstrously huge markets, drinking at ornate fountains. The Jews gathered on the Sabbath at the many synagogues, and Caleb was ready to harangue about a free Israel: strike, spare the Emperor for the moment, but kill the Greek civil servants, metaphysical enemies of the Jews. It all seemed hopeless. Men in chestmoulded armour stood around, speaking all the tongues of the bad Empire, alert for dissidence. Hopeless, yes. But he was glad to have a small focus of action: to free his sisters, bangled and ankleted in slavish copper, was an act of piety that even the Romans might approve though forced brutally to punish. First things first. Philip said:

       'Strike at the heart. Stephen's way was better.'

       'Any fool can die,' Caleb said, seeing his own death, five or six Roman spears lunging. 'You Nazarenes will achieve nothing.'

       'Has it ever struck you,' Philip said, 'that the Empire is already decaying? Decaying because force breeds nothing but force. There's a terrible emptiness that has to be filled.'

       'We're the only ones who can fill it,' Caleb said. 'It took a long time to arrive at the fulfilled vision of a single God. The whole world will have to worship Jehovah. Jerusalem is the capital of the real empire to come. And in the heart of the capital the empire's heart, which is the Temple. This has to happen.'

       'Battering rams,' Philip said. 'Pilfered gold and silver. Human hands can destroy what human hands have made. I think we're right. I'm sure.' But he delayed finishing his wine and trudging through the dust to the Samaritan capital.

I met an old man named Livius Silanus who, cautiously at the centre of Roman affairs as an efficient but not brilliant court advocate, had seen the whole of Gaius's brief reign and noted the point at which madness supervened on moderation. 'I remember,' he told me, 'the day when Gaius escorted the corpse of Tiberius to Rome from Misenum. He was dressed in full mourning and maintained a countenance of great sadness, but he was so greeted by the plebs that one would have taken the funeral procession for a military triumph, as if the young weeping Gaius had subdued some kingdom of darkness. They yelled mad endearments at him — our little pet, our own imperial baby, our son who is yet our father, star of the east and the west, our chicken who shall yet be an eagle, and so on, all quite nauseating to look back upon. I was one of those unauthorized citizens who pushed their way into the senate house to witness the setting aside of Tiberius's will and the conferment of absolute power on Gaius, rendering totally invalid the claim of the joint heir Tiberius Gemellus. The celebrations were of a dangerous extravagance, what with the public sacrifice of nearly two hundred thousand beasts and, it was said, human beings as well, slaves naturally, in his honour, in the space of no more than three months. Extravagance of one kind condones extravagance of another. The wonder is that Gaius did not yield more readily to the intoxication of absolute power. The adoration of the people was demented. When Gaius fell briefly ill of a surfeit of turtle's eggs, there were people ready to give their own lives — they went round the streets bearing cards lettered to that effect — if only the gods would grant his recovery. With Gaius recovered they forgot their pledges quickly enough.'

       The September heat has somewhat abated. Last night there was much rain and, as I write, my two slaves Felicia and Chrestus are busy mopping up its inflow. Livius Silanus continued:

       'Gaius endeared himself to the Romans by showing filial piety to what I thought an excessive degree. He sailed to Pandataria and the Pontians in very rough weather to transport back to Rome the remains of his mother and brother Nero (a name not at that time redolent of evil: all names are neutral, to be smeared with faeces or honey according to the temperament and acts of their possessors). He honoured their ashes with prayers and tears and placed them in their urns with his own hands. He organized days of funeral sacrifices and of circus games to the glory of his mother. As for his father, he renamed the month September Germanicus, a change about which many of us have ambiguous feelings, for we approve the honour while loathing him who bestowed it. Need I go on in this recital of acts altogether worthy? His uncle Claudius, the limping stutterer, the Balbus who built no wall but erected an ill-written pile of dubious Roman annals, was at the time of Gaius's accession a mere knight, but he was swiftly elevated to the rank of consul, fellow to the Emperor himself, while poor Tiberius Gemellus, who had as good a claim to the imperiate, he adopted and gave the title of Prince of the Young. His sisters, with whom he was soon to commit incest, he associated with his own glory, bidding consuls and senators end their official proceedings with the prayer "Good fortune go with the Emperor Gaius and his sisters".

       'He cleansed the city of its perverts, called spintriae, wishing to drown them in the Tiber but restrained from an act of such excessive virtue. He abolished censorship, resumed Augustus's practice of publishing an annual budget, revivified the electoral system, pleased the plebs with new games — panther-baiting, boxing and wrestling with the best of the African and Campanian professionals, nightshows with the city illuminated, with lavish throwing of gift vouchers for the people from his own hands. The greatest of his shows was presented in no arena but on the stretch of sea from Baiae to Puteoli. He anchored all the merchant vessels of the west coast in two lines, and then he had mounds of earth laid on their planks. Wearing an oakleaf crown and a cloak of cloth of gold, sworded and bucklered, the Praetorian Guard behind him and some of his friends in chariots brought from Gaul, he rode on a richly caparisoned stallion from one to the other end of this fantastic bridge. This, I gather, was to give the lie to a prophecy of Thrasyllus the soothsayer: "Gaius has no more chance of becoming Emperor than of riding a horse dryshod across the Gulf of Baiae." Here, perhaps, you see the first public manifestation of his madness.

       'He seems first to have proclaimed his divinity in a discussion with certain foreign potentates, including Artabanus, the king of the Parthians (who hated Tiberius but did everything to ingratiate himself with Gaius). At this time he had already insisted on being named by such titles as Father of the Army and Best and Greatest Caesar, but, in the kingly argument, conducted in the friendliest terms, as to which of the monarchs there present was the most nobly descended, he cried that he outranked them all. He was greater than any king, he insisted, and the greater than a king must of necessity be a god. From that moment on he began to forge proof of his divinity. He extended his palace as far as the Forum, so that the shrine of Castor and Pollux there became a mere annexe or vestibule. Standing beside the statued brethren, he put himself in the situation of one who had to be worshipped along with them. Some worshippers went too far and called him Jupiter Latiaris, but he was soon to regard himself as greater than the whole pantheon lumped together. He had a shrine built, with a lifesize golden image of himself, the clothes of which had to be changed every day to be identical with those which the divinity wore in the flesh, and there were sacrificial victims of great cost and rarity — peacocks, flamingos, pheasants, guineahens. He would converse with the statue of Jupiter of the Capitol, threatening to cast the heavenly father down to hell if he did not raise himself, the divine Emperor, heavenwards. It goes without saying that his ritual copulations with the moon goddess continued, though no longer in secret. All the statues of the gods he had decapitated, and an effigy of his own grinning head placed above the muscular stone or metal. A conversation with a Greek craftsman is reported from this first phase of his mania:

       ' "All these gods — you know what the Jews believe?"

       ' "No, Caesar."

       ' "That there is only one God. Clever people, the Jews. You understand my instructions about placing the head of the one God on this multiplicity of divine bodies?"

       ' "Yes, Caesar, but what do we do about the goddesses?"

       ' "Easy, you fool. Put my head there, but also hair, hair, hair in abundance." And he made the gesture of conjuring a sprouting of lavish locks from his own bald scalp, at the same time giggling manically. Gaius Caligula — the name still makes me shudder. It even induces a physical nausea. Ask me no more about him.'

       It was to a Rome ruled by a still reasonable and indeed benevolent Gaius that the two sisters of Caleb were marched, though not lashed, in light chains. They had both been violently sick on the voyage from Caesarea, huddled under the hatches with too many other slaves, some of them Samaritan captives, but the Cytherea, a sailing ship wholly dependent on the winds and not on banks of wretched slave rowers (who were indeed only employed on the biremes, triremes and quadriremes of home waters at that time), was often becalmed and put in at many ports of the Roman Levant, thus granting periods when the tossed stomach might recover. Both Ruth and Sara had become thin, unable to eat salt pork and drink foul water though they later devoured broiled fresh fish with the hunger of animals, fighting for it. Ruth wept much but Sara set her beauty to a fierce grimness which, even when, as you shall hear later, she was manumitted, she never entirely lost. She was determined to live and dreamed much of revenge. She had also a sense, perhaps perverse, that it was better to learn about the great world even through slavery than to sit muffled at home in the metaphysical servitude imposed by the Jewish law. There was nothing metaphysical about Roman whips; there was indeed a kind of brutish honesty in Roman doctrines of buying and selling: no hypocrisy about the Romans: you knew where you stood or lay or tottered. It was a three days' march along the Via Aurelia, with an exhausted flopping-down in the fields under guard when nightfall had brought its tubs of water and its hurled bread ration.

       And here at last was Rome: the Janiculum, the Marine Theatre of Augustus, the bridge over the Tiber that led to the Palatine. In the streets low people jeered at the slaves and some spat; Sara, unveiled now for ever, spat back, but the wind blew from the east. There north were the Forum and the Temple of Jupiter and the Circus Flaminius and Pompey's Theatre, but the slaves were to see none of these things: they were split into groups and impelled according to their imposed functions to this or that part of the slave quarters that lay beyond planted groves to the north of the imperial palace. Sara and Ruth were to be put to kitchen duties. They were greeted by a slave mistress from the Rhineland who barked at them. Sara barked back and was cuffed. They were herded with other women, many of whom wailed, to a windowless barracks filled, like a monstrous stable, with straw. Ruth lay down and wept for Jerusalem. Sara saw there was no way of escape.

'Our master said that we should be his witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and also Samaria,' Philip told the Samaritans in one of the synagogues of Sebaste. 'So I am here.' The sun from the high window enflamed his hair and made it seem a sign of something. 'You have a word which you use much, and that word is ta'eb, meaning him who shall restore. What shall he restore? He shall restore health and wholeness after sickness and wounds. He shall restore the lost vision of the faith as a faith of love. The ta'eb appeared in Judaea and I bring his message. A message of tolerance, forbearance, charity. A glib and useless message, so some of you will say, smarting as you are from the fury of the Romans, the predations of an unjust procurator. Some of you dream of vengeance and a new rising of the people. We Nazarenes do not dream. We offer instead a practical answer to tribulation and pain. We must love our enemies, and such love, which it would be foolish to believe capable of gushing spontaneously from the heart, has to be learned as any other skill is learned. You burn your finger in the fire, and the throbbing finger causes you pain. Do you then hate your finger? No, for it is part of yourself. So when men cause you pain, blame the fire that is in them, but remember that such men are your brethren, are part of the body of God as much as yourselves. Love is a hard thing to learn, but if we do not learn it we are lost.'