The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction (5 page)

As soon as the ship left the open sea and entered the mouth of the Cayster River, Antipater had used his sharp elbows to force his way to the head of the little group of passengers, with me following in his wake; despite his wrinkles and white hair, the old poet was neither shy nor weak. Our first glimpse of Ephesus came as we rounded a little bend and saw an indistinct mass of buildings clustered against a low mountain. Moment by moment we drew nearer, until the city loomed before us.

The harbour was pierced by a long mole that projected far into the water. So many ships had moored alongside, that it seemed impossible we should find a spot, especially because other ships were arriving ahead of us, with their sails aloft and colorful pennants fluttering in the breeze. By the Roman calendar this was Aprilis, but in Ephesus this was the holy month of Artemision, marked by one festival after another in honour of the city’s patron goddess, Artemis. Antipater had told me that the celebrations drew tens of thousands of visitors from all over the Greek-speaking world, and it appeared he had not been exaggerating.

A harbour-master in a small boat sailed out to inform the captain that there was no room for our ship to dock at the mole. We would have to pitch anchor and await a ferryboat to take the passengers ashore. The ferrymen would have to be paid, of course, and Antipater grumbled at the extra expense, but I was glad for the chance to remain for a while in the harbour and take in the view.

Beyond the crowded wharves rose the famous five-mile walls of Ephesus. Where the mole met the shore these walls were pierced by an ornamental gate flanked by towers. The tall doors of the gate stood wide open, welcoming all the world into the city of Artemis – for a price, Antipater explained, for he anticipated that we would have to pay a special fee to enter the city during the festival. Beyond the walls I saw the rooftops of temples and tall apartment buildings. Further away, clustered on the slope of Mount Pion, were a great many houses. Some were like palaces, with ornate terraces and hillside gardens.

The most prominent building to be seen was the enormous theatre built into the hillside. The semicircular tiers of seats that faced the harbour were filled with tens of thousands of spectators; apparently they were watching a comedy, for every now and then I heard a burst of distant laughter. Scores of towering, brightly painted statues lined the uppermost rim of the theatre; these images of gods and heroes appeared to be gazing not at the stage below them but across the rooftops of the city, straight at me.

“I see the famous theatre,” I said, shading my eyes against the late-morning sun above Mount Pion, “but where is the great Temple of Artemis?”

Antipater snorted. “Gordianus! Have you forgotten the geography I taught you? Your head is like a sieve, boy.”

I bridled at being called a boy – I was eighteen, after all – then smiled as the lesson came back to me. “I remember now. The Temple of Artemis was built outside the city, about a mile inland, on low, marshy ground. It must be … somewhere over there.” I pointed to a spot beyond the steep northern slope of Mount Pion.

Antipater raised a bushy eyebrow. “Very good. And why did the builders chose that site for the temple?”

“Because they decided that building on marshy soil would soften the effect of earthquakes on such a massive structure.”

“Correct. To further stabilize the ground, before the cornerstone was laid, they spread a deep layer of crushed charcoal. And then what?”

“Atop the charcoal they put down many layers of fleece, taken from sheep sacrificed in honour of the goddess.”

“You are an apt pupil after all, my boy,” said Antipater, gratifying and irritating me in the same breath.

The sun was directly above our heads by the time a ferryboat arrived. Antipater again elbowed his way to the front, with me following, so that we were among the first to be ferried ashore. As soon as we alighted on the mole, a group of boys swarmed around us. Antipater chose the two who looked most honest to him and tossed them each a coin. They gathered our travelling bags and followed after us.

We strolled up the mole, which seemed like a small city itself; the crowded ships were like dwellings along a broad thoroughfare. I saw people everywhere, heard babies crying, and noticed that many of the masts were strung with laundry. A great many of the visitors to Ephesus, unable to find accommodations in the city, were apparently residing aboard ship.

“Where will we stay in Ephesus?” I asked.

“Years ago, when I lived here for a while, I had a pupil named Eutropius,” said Antipater. “I haven’t seen him since, but we’ve corresponded over the years. Eutropius is grown now, a widower with a child of his own. He inherited his father’s house, about halfway up the hill, not far from the theatre. Eutropius has done rather well for himself, so I’m sure our accommodations will be quite comfortable.”

We reached the end of the mole and arrived at the open gate, where people stood in long queues to be admitted to the city. I was unsure which queue we should get into, until one of the gatekeepers shouted, in Latin, “Roman citizens and their parties in this line! Roman citizens, queue here!”

As we stepped into the line, I noticed that some in the crowd gave us dirty looks. The line was shorter than the others, and moved more quickly. Soon we stood before a man in a ridiculously tall hat a bit like a quail’s plume – only a bureaucrat would wear such a thing – who glanced at my iron citizen’s ring as I handed him the travelling papers my father had secured for me before I left Rome.

Speaking Latin, the official read aloud: “‘Gordianus, citizen of Rome, born in the consulship of Gaius Marius and Lucius Valerius Flaccus’ – that makes you what, eighteen years old? – ‘of average height with dark hair and regular features, no distinguishing marks, speaks Latin and some Greek’ – and with an atrocious accent, I’ll wager.” The man eyed me with barely concealed contempt.

“His Greek accent is actually rather good,” said Antipater. “Certainly better than your Latin accent.”

“And who are you?”

“I am the young man’s travelling companion, formerly his tutor. Zoticus of Zeugma.” Antipater gave the name under which he was travelling incognito. “And you would not be speaking to us this way if my friend were older and wearing his toga and followed by a retinue of slaves. But Gordianus is no less a citizen than any other Roman, and you will treat him with respect – or else I shall report you to the provincial governor.”

The official took a long look at Antipater, made a sour face, then handed my documents back to me and waved us on.

“You certainly put that fellow in his place!” I said with a laugh.

“Yes, well … I fear you may encounter more than a little of that sort of thing here in Ephesus, Gordianus.”

“What do you mean?”

“Anti-Roman sentiment runs deep throughout the province of Asia – through all the Greek-speaking provinces for that matter – but especially here in Ephesus.”

“But why?”

“The Roman governor based at Pergamon taxes the people mercilessly. And there are a great many Romans in the city – thousands of them, all claiming special privileges, taking the best seats at the theatre, rewarding each other with places of honour at the festivals, sucking up the profits from the import and export trade, even sticking their fingers into the treasury at the Temple of Artemis – which is the great bank for all of Asia, and the lifeblood of Ephesus. I’m afraid, in the forty years since the Romans established their authority here, a great deal of resentment has been stirred up. If even a petty document-checker at the gate feels he can speak to you that way, I fear to imagine how others will behave. I think it might be best if we speak no more Latin while we’re here in Ephesus, Gordianus, even among ourselves. Others may overhear and make assumptions.”

Somewhere in the middle of this discourse, he had switched from Latin to Greek, and it took my mind a moment to catch up.

“That may be … a challenge,” I finally said, pausing to think of the Greek word.

Antipater sighed. “Your words may be Greek, but your accent is decidedly Roman.”

“You told the document-checker I had a good accent!”

“Yes, well … perhaps you should simply speak as little as possible.”

We followed the crowd and found ourselves in a market-place thronged with pilgrims and tourists, where vendors sold all sorts of foodstuffs as well as a great variety of talismans. There were miniature replicas of Artemis’s temple as well as images of the goddess herself. These images came in various sizes and were fashioned from various materials: from crudely made terra cotta and wooden trinkets, to statuettes that displayed the highest standards of craftsmanship, some advertised as being cast of solid gold.

I paused to admire a statuette of the goddess in her Ephesian guise, which seems so exotic to Roman eyes. Our Artemis – we call her Diana – is a virgin huntress; she carries a bow and wears a short, simple tunic suitable for the chase. But the manifestation of the goddess here – presumably more ancient – stood stiffly upright with her bent elbows against her body, her forearms extended and her hands open. She wore a mural crown, and outlining her head was a nimbus decorated with winged bulls. More bulls, along with other animals, adorned the stiff garment that covered her lower body, almost like a mummy casing. From her neck hung a necklace of acorns, and below this I saw the most striking feature of Artemis of Ephesus: a mass of pendulous, gourd-shaped protrusions that hung in a cluster from her upper body. I might have taken these for multiple breasts, had Antipater not explained to me that these protrusions were bulls’ testicles. Many bulls would be sacrificed to the virgin goddess during the festival.

I picked up the image to look at it more closely. The gold was quite heavy.

“Don’t touch unless you intend to buy!” snapped the vendor, a gaunt man with a long beard. He snatched the little statue from my hand.

“Sorry,” I said, lapsing into Latin. The vendor gave me a nasty look.

We moved on. “Do you think that image was really made of solid gold?” I asked Antipater.

“Yes, and therefore far beyond your means.”

“Do people really buy such expensive items for keepsakes?”

“Not for keepsakes, but to make offerings. Pilgrims purchase whichever of the images they can afford, then donate them to the Temple of Artemis as an act of propitiation to the goddess.”

“But the priests must collect thousands of talismans.”

“Megabyzoi – the priests are called Megabyzoi,” he explained. “And yes, they collect many talismans during the festivals.”

“What do the Megabyzoi do with all those images?”

“The offerings are added to the wealth of the temple treasury, of course.”

I looked at the vast number of people around us. The open-air market seemed to stretch on forever. “So the vendors make a nice profit selling the images, and the temple receives a hefty income from all those offerings.”

Antipater smiled. “Don’t forget what the pilgrims receive – participation in one of the most beloved religious festivals in the world, an open air feast, and the favour of the goddess, including her protection on their journey home. But the donation of these trinkets is only a tiny part of the temple’s income. Rich men from many cities and even foreign kings store their fortunes in the temple’s vaults and pay a handsome fee for the service; that vast reservoir of wealth allows the Megabyzoi to make loans, charging handsome interest. Artemis of Ephesus owns vineyards and quarries, pastures and salt-beds, fisheries and sacred herds of deer. The Temple of Artemis is one of the world’s great storehouses of wealth – and every Roman governor spends his tenure trying to figure out some way to get his hands on it.”

We bought some goat’s cheese on a skewer from a vendor and slowly made our way through the crowd. The crush lessened as we ascended a winding street that took us halfway up Mount Pion, where we at last arrived at the house of Eutropius.

“It’s larger than I remember it,” said Antipater, gazing at the immaculately maintained façade. “I do believe he’s added a storey since I was here.”

The slave who answered the door dismissed our baggage carriers and instructed some underlings to take our things to the guest quarters. We were shown to a garden at the centre of the house where our host reclined on a couch, apparently just waking from a nap. Eutropius was perhaps forty – with a robust physique and the first touch of frost in his golden hair – and wore a beautifully tailored robe spun from coarse silk dyed a rich saffron hue. He sprang up and approached Antipater with open arms.

“Teacher!” he exclaimed. “You haven’t aged a bit.”

“Nonsense!” Antipater gestured to his white hair, but smiled, pleased by the compliment. He introduced me to our host, and we all exchanged pleasantries.

The air above our heads resounded with the sound of a great many people laughing.

“From the theatre,” explained Eutropius.

“But why are you not there?” asked Antipater.

“Bah! Plays bore me – all those actors making terrible puns and behaving like idiots. You taught me to love poetry, Teacher, but I’m afraid you were never able to imbue me with a love of comedy.”

“Artemis herself enjoys the performances,” said Antipater.

“So they say – even when they’re as wooden as she is,” said Eutropius. Antipater cackled, but I missed the joke.

Antipater drew a sharp breath. “But who is this?”

“Anthea!” Eutropius strode to embrace the girl who had just entered the garden. She was a few years younger than I, and golden-haired like her father. She wore a knee-length purple tunic cinched with a silver chain tied below breasts just beginning to bud. The garment hung loosely over her shoulders, baring her arms, which were surprisingly tawny. (A Roman girl of the same social standing would have creamy-white limbs, and would never display them to a stranger.) She wore a necklace of gilded acorns and a fawnskin cape. Strapped across her shoulder was a quiver filled with brightly painted, miniature arrows. In one hand she carried a dainty little bow – clearly a ceremonial weapon – and in the other an equally dainty javelin.