by Ken Parejko
Vespasian later told me how on his very first day in Antioch he'd encountered one of these busts and found himself in tears as a flood of memories and feelings spilled from his heart and mind. As he reached out to touch the fine white marble, he remembered his mother reading to his brother and him the many letters his father had sent while posted here. His father was a strong, exuberant man and in his letters you could feel the joy he felt here in Antioch, which he described as a beautiful and exotic city. And Vespasian had told me how, when his father would come home to their little estate in the Sabine country they would be so excited to see one another, how his father would take him on his knee and weave wonderful stories of the people and customs of the exotic east. But then after only a few days or weeks he would go away again and leave a palpable emptiness in his wake. Sometimes his mother would go away too, leaving the boys with their grandmother Tertulla at her estate near Cosa. Over the years they were with their grandmother for many months. She filled the emptiness of their hearts with fresh fruit and sweet cakes and by holding them on her lap, and never stinting on hugs and kisses. He would remember her fondly all his life, and I don't think I could count how many times he'd shown off a silver drinking cup he'd inherited from her. Later when as emperor he found the steering of the unwieldy ship of state a greater burden than he could bear he would run off to her place up at Cosa, where he kept her house just as it had been while she was alive.
Tax collectors walked a fine and difficult line between filling imperial coffers and facing angry mobs. Each time his father came home he seemed to the young Vespasian to have aged a decade. Through his tears, here a thousand miles from Rome and Reate, he remembered the last time he’d seen his father. His mother and brother Sabinus and he stood outside the house at Reate and watched as his father mounted his horse and rode off to the north to collect taxes in Helvetica. When they could no longer see him they turned back to the house and their own lives. A few months later his father, already a bitter worn-out shell of himself, was dead of overwork and depression. Vespasian described to me how, standing in the atrium holding his mother’s hand, the urn holding his father’s ashes came up the drive, and how much he grew up that day, faster than he wanted to.
He'd brought with him the letters his father had sent from Antioch and as he wandered the forum, streets and imperial offices of the city, now and then he'd recognize a building his father wrote about. Walking those stones connected him to the man he loved but hardly knew and he somehow managed to find time to steal away from his job of shaping his future, now entangled with that of Judea's, to visit now and again the white marble bust outside the imperial offices.
I knew how busy he was, those first few days in Antioch, so I left him alone. But one day he found me at my office, working over columns of official expenses. He came straight to the point.
“I'll have three legions,” he said. “The Xth Fretensis, which your friend Mucianus is giving up. And the Vth Macedonian, following me down from Greece.”
“And Titus is on his way here from Alexandria with the XVth. We're meeting in Ptolemais. All told, I should have sixty thousand men, infantry and cavalry together, and more than a hundred pieces of artillery. If you’d like, I could put you at the head of a cohort. Auxiliaries, whatever. You decide. We’ve got lots of Gauls, you’ve worked with them before. Parthians, too, wonderful horsemen, who can out-ride us any day. Or, if it's more to your liking, Titus says he needs a staff officer. More tactics than sword-swinging there.”
It was years since I was in the army. In the meantime I’d become an overweight asthmatic administrator and scholar. The prospect of heading off on a campaign with its long hours on horseback, and facing actual combat, had long since lost its appeal to me. But an adjutant to Titus, now that was tempting. Titus was someone I could work with.
In contrast, that is, to my supervisor Mucianus. My responsibility as his financial adviser was to see to it that provincial expenses were kept in line with income. But Mucianus was mercurial, self-centered, and a paradigm of disorganization. He'd change his mind right in the middle of a project and send me off on a completely different tack, and all my work up to then would be wasted. How many times had I asked him for funds to repair a road or an aqueduct only to be told there was no money, and the project would sit undone. Then later when at one of the lavish dinners he threw someone of some standing complained about the sorry state of the city’s infrastructure he'd berate me for not keeping him updated. As Stoic as I am, Mucianus is a luxury-addicted Epicurean. Frankly I was tired of it. As much as I liked Antioch, I’d already started thinking about changing jobs.
“Can I have a few days to think about it?” .
“A few, yes, but we're leaving soon. Just so you know: Titus told me not to accept no as an answer.” Vespasian hurried out the door and down the street.
So I mulled it over that afternoon and evening, when, as though Fortune meant to help me decide, the Jewish problem flared up on my very doorstep. That night was opening night of a festival of Euripede's plays at the theater. I’d thought I might go but stayed home instead to write. As it turned out I was glad I hadn’t gone. Mucianus told me all about it the next morning, how in the first act of the first play a man named Antiochus, son of the city’s chief Jewish magistrate who as much as he hated us Romans fawned over us so we'd invite him to our banquets, rushed onto the stage to announce that he’d infiltrated a Jewish plot to set fire to the city. He had a half-dozen sorry-looking Jews he’d been holding captive dragged onstage behind him. Here they are, he shouted, these are the terrorists who plotted to kill us all. The audience, of course, dragged the men out of the theater and burned them on the spot. Most likely, we knew, the victims of this instant justice were innocent, and were no more than random Jews who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As the charred remains of the innocent men lay untouched on the stones Antiochus rode a wave of anti-Jewish sentiment into every corner of the city. I was there when he tried to convince Mucianus that a large-scale rebellion could only be headed off by insisting that all Jews sacrifice to the Roman gods. This, he said, would separate out the traitors from the innocent. Those who refused should be exiled or executed.
Though I tried to convince him otherwise, Mucianus agreed with Antiochus. The blood-bath which followed cleared the peasant-rebels out of the city, leaving only the Pharisees and upper castes, Antiochus included. Antiochus’ little fiction had succeeded. Mucianus granted him extraordinary police powers over his fellow Jews and Antiochus went so far as to outlaw observation of the Sabbath, and my once-pleasant city along the Orontes was disrupted by gangs of his ruffians hauling men, women and children off to prison or execution. Crowds gathered, houses were burned, young children watched as their parents were dragged away to horrible torture and death. For me, the pax had been taken out of the pax romana. In a matter of days Antioch had become barely inhabitable. I had no strong views on the Jewish question, but these events made up my mind. I sent Vespasian a note accepting the position as aide-de-camp on Titus’ staff.
I was a bit surprised how little Mucianus objected to my leaving. He was a man who cared little who worked with him, so long as they were appropriately subservient. In our six months together we’d hardly got to know one another and I had the feeling he was totally ignorant of how much I’d done for him.
Having made the decision I was also surprised at how much better I felt, as though a heavy burden had been lifted off my back. Even my breathing was easier. Lucius noticed it. “You’re unusually happy this morning,” he remarked the day after I resigned.
“Am I? Well, come to think of it, yes, maybe I am.”
“Happy to be off to war?” Lucius was fifteen years older than me and had grown to enjoy the comforts of Rome and now Antioch. He’d not been well lately and didn’t find the thought of days in long marches and nights in rough field tents all that attractive.
“At least it’s not the swamps of Germania.” I tried to p
ut the best face on it.
“No. It’ll be the deserts of Judea,” he grunted.
“Well, you know, you could stay,” I offered. “I’m sure Mucianus could find you someone else to work for.”
I was surprised, and not a little hurt that he seemed to be giving the suggestion serious consideration. But after a moment he reassured me he wouldn’t consider working for anyone else.
Two mornings later we walked together, Lucius and I, out of Antioch’s west gate towards Vespasian’s army. Vespasian, I was told, was at the moment in conference with Marcus Julius Agrippa, come up from Caesarea. We all knew about the Agrippa family, of course. Marcus Julius was the son of Julius Agrippa, making him the great-grandson of Herod. It was Augustus’ appointing Herod to oversee Judea that initiated the Jewish collusion with Roman power, an act which cast its troublesome shadow right up to the present. While little more than a puppet Herod starting seeing himself as a demigod, and in time the Herodian family had made more enemies than friends. It was said radical terrorists like the Sicarii hated the Herodians as much as they hated us.
Playing the role of client-king wasn’t easy for Marcus Agrippa. A decade ago, not long before I’d seen her on the reviewing stand in Ara Agripinnesis, his sister Drusilla had been abducted by our procurator Marcus Antonius Felix. Well, not exactly abducted. At the time his sister was in an unhappy marriage to Azizus, king of Emeza. Azizus was a non-Jew who had had himself circumcised just so he could marry Agrippa’s beautiful, charming and well-connected sister. To me adult circumcision is no more than a kind of torture. Some said Azisus was a petulant bore, not at all up to Drusilla’s intellectual abilities; others that she offered to marry him if he’d have himself circumcised only as a test of her manipulative powers, and that she’d meant from the beginning to move on to bigger fish.
She and Felix first met at a banquet hosted by her brother. She was a brilliant conversationalist who could charm the apples off a tree. Felix fell for her, and as his kind of man does, swore he had to have her. He was good friends with Simon Magus, a charismatic Jew who practiced the occult, who he turned to for help in winning Drusilla over. Now the manipulatrix Drusilla became the target of manipulation. Simon Magus, who at the time was in direct competition with the Nazarene Christus for followers, and like Christus had declared himself an incarnation of God on earth, spent many hours endearing himself to Drusilla, and finally convinced her to leave Azizus. As procurator in Caesarea the young, good-looking Felix held a position of significant power and potential wealth. But since like Azizus he was neither Jewish nor circumcised, this was not a match the Jewish community approved of. But Agrippa was unable to talk his sister out of the match.
Though he blamed Felix for seducing his sister he'd had to put that behind him. As the peasant-revolt grew he realized how much he needed us. All the Herodians – Marcus Julius and his sisters Drusilla, Mariamme and Berenice – could not leave their houses unless surrounded by bodyguards. It was not a welcome choice, to go on living in fear or join us in hopes of crushing the rebellion. In the end Marcus raised a Samarian legion and came to join us in Antioch.
I’d already decided to walk back into the city and return to see Vespasian later when their meeting ended and they poured out of his tent.
“Ho, Pliny!” Vespasian called. I turned around. “You can’t go home yet, the war’s not over! You two haven’t met have you?”
“No,” I said. “Salve!”
“Ah, Pliny, I’ve heard so much about you. You’ve made our Vespasian here very happy, you know, by joining us,” Marcus Agrippa said.
“Yes, yes,” Vespasian agreed. “I’m expecting you to finish them off yourself, old friend. The rest of us are just along for the ride.”
Marcus Agrippa’s eyes smiled. One look at me and it was clear I'd be no help in a fight.
“Titus was elated to hear you’ll be with him. You’re a big man,” Vespasian said, holding his belly, as though it were mine, “full of good advice. You'll be a trusted messenger between Titus and myself. Glad to have you!”
“How are things going?” I wasn’t in any kind of hurry, but now without a job I’d cleared out a space between parts of my life, and it felt kind of empty.
“Most of us are here, except of course Titus and his legion who we’ll be joining in Ptolemais. But the artillery hasn’t arrived, and there are more provisions still coming. Another week, if we're lucky.”
So we waited. Lucius and I stayed in our apartment, living among the crates we’d packed to take along, minus the belongings we’d already shipped back to Comum. I spent some time back at the office helping Mucianus with this project and that, and he did seem, or maybe I was just imagining it, a little wistful that I was leaving.
A few days before we were ready to go we had our belongings hauled out to the encampment and moved into our tent, near Vespasian’s. Lucius grumbled and I could empathize, but we’d cast our lot and that was that.
From the minute we moved in I could see that Vespasian would live up to his reputation. He seemed to be everywhere, his hand in every detail. The legions were busy training and gathering together the mountain of weapons and supplies needed for an army of sixty thousand men. At last the day arrived to set out, and as in days long past Lucius and I found ourselves on the march. We headed south from Antioch, a huge mass of men and equipment streaming out toward Judea. Though there was a certain heady excitement to starting a campaign it’d been years since I’d spent this many hours on a horse. My back and bottom complained. Army food was nothing like what we’d been getting in Antioch. And my aching body kept me from getting even the little sleep I was used to. I awoke the third morning of the march tired, hungry and sore. Lucius suffered quietly alongside me, but suffered nonetheless.
We faced a two-week march to Ptolemais where we were to meet Titus coming up with his legion from Alexandria. Like a gigantic snake we moved down along the coast, between the clear waters of the Mediterranean on one side and the mountains on the other. This was a dry, harsh land where only scattered nomadic tribes could make a living off small herds of mangy goats and sheep. Yet the land had its own rugged beauty, especially in the evening as the setting sun lit a fire on the headlands and cliffs rising to the east. It was springtime, the clear afternoon air often freshened by a brief shower. Many kinds of flowers were in bloom. I came across one new plant after another, which I described in detail to Lucius, once again busily taking dictation on horseback. There were new animals, too -- lizards, snakes, small animals I'd never seen before. The hardest thing was not being able to stop and collect, or at least slow to have a good look at them.
A few days march into southern Syria and our route became more arduous, as we rose to cross the rugged Eleutherian mountains falling here directly into the sea. Used to cavalry maneuvers, I was astonished how slowly the infantry and all its gear moved up and down the narrow, ancient trails crisscrossing the mountains towards Phoenicia. Here our way was literally hewn out of the rocks which spilled down to the seashore. We moved one painfully slow step at a time, the heavy artillery and equipment-filled carts which followed creaking painstakingly up the steeper slopes.
At last we reached the summit and spilled down out of the mountains onto a seaside plain where the soil was rich and alluvial, the landscape a green quilt-work of crops and native vegetation. This was the fertile soil that a thousand years before had given birth to the Phoenician culture, who excelled at commerce, sea-faring, navigation and astronomy, even providing us with our alphabet. We were in fact following a caravan route dating back into prehistory, and every step we took was taken on the ruins of once-powerful civilizations. The lesson was not lost to Vespasian or myself as we chatted over the evening campfire. Our mission was to prevent a similar fate from befalling Rome.
But though the great cities and temples of ancient Phoenicia had fallen and crumbled, here the rich land continued to support a thriving people. It was remarkable to me how with their irrigated terrace-gardens these p
eople who to most of our men were no more than barbarians, had actually maintained an ancient landscape in a state of vibrant production and beauty which rivaled that of our own Italy.
Once out of the harsh Syrian desert and moving gradually southward the native and cultivated plants had changed. Here we found large groves of the date-palms whose fruit I’d bought in the markets of Antioch, and new varieties of cedars, for which this coast was famous: it was cedar-wood from these same forests our artisans used for the images of gods in Rome’s many temples.
I knew that just off the coast in the shallow waters of the Mediterranean we could find the purple-shell clam, harvested for its blood, a beautiful and nearly priceless purple dye. Each clam yielded only a drop or two. In Augustus’ time, double-dyed purple cloth was a great luxury, and cost a thousand denarii a pound. Purple cloth was then only used in small swatches or on borders of togas and purple, the most expensive color, was the insignia of imperial power. Nowadays everyone used it to show off their wealth. Women wore purple stoles, double-dyed purple borders were common on the streets, and in the dining rooms of the rich great purple sheets covered the triclinia on which they reclined to eat. To me a gift of nature had once again been turned into an emblem of greed.
Like a gigantic worm our army inched ahead. The ancient city of Tyre welcomed us, once an island but since Alexander the Great’s time connected to the mainland by a causeway. In the following days we marched easily along the coast, a narrow flat tableland between the sea and the mountains.
