The Kingdom of the Wicked (41 page)

       '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 apologize 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 baldheaded Jew with a taste for bookburning 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.