by Ken Parejko
“It’s a lovely swim, I’ll tell you that,” he said, nodding towards Herod’s pool. “Try it yourself, please, after our meeting.”
“I haven’t slept so well in weeks,” he said. Alongside him Agrippa smiled. “The sea against the seawall lulled me right to sleep. It reminded me of grandma’s place. And this morning when I woke there was the freshest offshore breeze spilling in through the window. I tell you,” he said to Agrippa, “your great-grandfather must have had me in mind when he built this place. Follow me, for just a moment.” We walked around the pool on marble floors inlaid with multi-colored mosaics. The long sides of the pool were surrounded by a two-story colonnade broken, on the ground floor, with plantings of shrubs and flowers. Vespasian led us up a wide flight of stairs to the second floor where a landing opened onto a semicircular colonnaded balcony with a breath-taking view of the sea. Looking down from the balcony I could see the waves I'd heard crashing against the seawall. The building seemed a kind of stone ship, facing Rome, to the west and heading out towards it.
“What a view!” Vespasian beamed. We could see ships near and far, some mere specks about to disappear over the horizon, ships coming and going, and in the harbor itself even more ships, sails furled, being towed in by rowboats, whose oars rhythmically rose and set in the swelling sea. The rowers were Jewish slaves, Agrippa said, survivors of the pogrom which had swept through the city a year before, when conflict between the city’s Greeks and Jews resulted in the massacre of twenty-thousand Jews and the imprisonment of many of the rest.
We let the exhilarating offshore breeze sweep through us for a few moments and drank in the wide panorama of sea and sky. But lovely as it was there was work to be done. We pulled ourselves away, descended the stairs, and filed into the reception room to decide the fate of the ancient land in which we found ourselves.
Vespasian set the agenda. Highest priority was to set the exact order of command for the coming campaigns, and the most effective strategy for victory. We were to a man in agreement that Titus be co-commander of the forces. But, Vespasian added, should the two of them disagree, by virtue of his experience and age his own decision would prevail. Agrippa and Titus Julius Alexander would serve directly under them. We decided that Josephus would come with us, but not yet to be trusted he would not be given details of our strategy. According to Vespasian the optimal outcome would be the immediate surrender of all cities and towns we encountered. Warfare and sieges cost money, time and men. Josephus could help by convincing his countrymen of this. Vespasian said that if he could put down this revolt without shedding another drop of blood, he would. Of course none of us believed that was possible. But Vespasian re-affirmed the marching orders that blood be shed only when necessary.
There was no doubt about the ultimate outcome of the war. Our well-equipped, well-trained legions, backed by the cavalry, archers and the finest artillery in the modern world, would inevitably overcome the ragtag discordant bands of rebels who vacillated between first one leader, then another. Ultimately our goal was to retake Antonia, our garrison in Jerusalem. The question before us, as Vespasian put it, was how to do that as quickly as possible.
The discussion that followed was sometimes heated, but under Vespasian’s hand, always on focus, and it did not take long to reach unanimous consent. From Caesarea the armies would move out into Judea, Galilee and upper Idumea, capturing cities along the way. We would follow a practice Julius Caesar established a century ago. Before beginning an attack the city’s leaders would be offered the chance to come over to our side. Any who did would be allowed to keep their ancestral lands and would be appointed local administrators of Roman law, and the city left unharmed.
We would make clear to the city's leaders that refusal to accept our offer of amnesty branded them as enemies of the Roman state, and following the inevitable fall of their city they would be executed. There was a discussion about the treatment of noncombatants. Some suggested a scorched-earth policy, showing mercy neither to civilians nor their property, as most likely to speed the war’s end. But I pointed out the inconsistency in that with Vespasian’s wish to minimize bloodshed. We did not come to agreement on this issue. We would respond, we decided, on a city-by-city basis, proportional to the level of hostilities we encountered.
Vespasian emphasized the importance of keeping good relations with Caesarea’s city fathers and inhabitants. While gold and silver coins could only be minted in imperial mints, Nero had given us the right to mint bronze coins as long as the troops were in Caesarea. Vespasian would supply his men with these bronze asses, semis and quadrans to buy food, drinks and everyday supplies. Coins after all were propaganda, so we agreed that the coins should feature a bust of Nero on the obverse and a figure of the Caesarean Tyche, our Fortuna, on the reverse.
We'd brought an economic boom to Caesarea which the city fathers made much of. They threw the city open to us, put together a schedule of games at the amphitheater and comedies in the theater. My job was to work with the city’s harbor-master to organize the influx of naval traffic which would be streaming in and out of the harbor. A small army of slaves was drafted to keep the flow of goods flowing off the docks into the city and into the hands of the army.
That evening I set out for a sumptuous banquet Agrippa was providing us while the sun was still a hand’s width above the harbor. As we walked to the palace I chatted with several of Titus’ aides about the city’s history. Four camels, captured from the Jewish army at Jotapata and finely festooned with elegant brocaded cloths and leather trappings inlaid with gold were tethered just outside the palace. I stopped to pet one. It was calm and friendly and allowed me to run my hand across the dry, leathery skin of its neck. I put my hand out to it. It touched my fingers with its lips. This was the first time I’d seen one of these strange creatures up close. These were the one-humped African kind. I’d heard of a darker, two-humped camel out of Asia. Once again the question of kind arose. They were different, yet they were both camels. I stood letting it chew lightly on my fingers, while I wondered if it was possible to find general rules for classifying living things. But I had to leave that for later. My companions were already heading inside.
We encountered two security check-points on our way into the palace. The Herodians were increasingly targeted by the Sicarii, who'd become adept at infiltrating gatherings and striking without warning. Surrounded by well-armed bodyguards, Agrippa welcomed us into the atrium.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like,” he apologized for the security. “At any moment, no matter where we are, we expect some fanatic peasant to jump out and attack us then disappear back into the crowd. It’s already happened to friends. Our days, from the moment we wake to the moment we fall asleep, then often in our dreams too, are filled with fear,” he said, waving his hand for the musicians to begin. “It’s no way to live, I’ll tell you that.”
The banquet sprawled through both floors of the palace. The poolside had been converted into a dining room where Vespasian, Titus, myself and a dozen or so others would recline along with Agrippa. Vespasian and Titus had the places of honor beside their host. Before reclining Agrippa introduced us to his three sisters, Mariamme, Berenice and Drusilla, and their husbands. His sisters, I knew, had done well. Mariamme was married to Demetrius, alabarch and richest man in Alexandria. Berenice, the oldest, had caused something of a scandal when she married her uncle Herod of Chalcis. She'd left him and after a short tumultuous marriage to the king of Cilicia married her present husband, beside whom she sat, Tiberius Julius Alexander’s brother Marcus. I knew of the family through Tiberius’ and Marcus’ uncle, the Jewish philosopher Philo, who professed that God and the world were in absolute separation. This I could not understand. I preferred to see God, if there was one, as immanent in the world. Nature and humanity at its best -- but certainly not at its worst -- were part of the divine body. I mentioned to Marcus that I’d read his uncle’s works.
Drusilla was the youngest of the sisters. Of course I
’d seen her nearly twenty years before at Ara Agrippinesis, along with her husband Felix. As a great-granddaughter of Herod, she’d grown up in this very palace. Years later after she'd married Felix, who was newly-appointed procurator of Judea, she moved back in. She seemed a bright and energetic woman who relished being in the middle of it all. Felix had recently died. Drusilla was a widow now, a young, lovely and wealthy widow. She nodded and welcomed me.
The banquet was impressive, as banquets were meant to be. On the menu were exotic regional sea-foods and fruits, meats, and melons. I ate a little of almost everything, and found it all delicious. Afterward we were entertained by a performance of dances from the hills of Idumea. The music, played on a plucked string instrument I’d not seen before, and accompanied by drums and flutes, was alternately quietly pensive, then intense and primitive.
I wished I had Lucius beside me. But Lucius was banished, with the few other servants who’d come along to the evening’s festivities, to the servants’ rooms. Without Lucius to dictate to I was afraid of losing the steady stream of ideas boiling up in my mind. More and more I realized I was an observer of life, bored by the fatuous small-talk endemic to these banquets. As I finished eating I relaxed and listened to the music’s long melodic phrases, letting my mind follow the music back to the wild Idumean hills from which it came.
Around the room the politics of war and the tactics of flirtation were being practiced. I felt out of place and decided I might as well leave. I reached into my purse for a bit of laser. As I slowly chewed it, the best of the pseudo-laser I could find, I remembered Theophrastus’ comment that Aristotle knew of a secret mountain in Cyrenaica where silphium grew undisturbed. Even if that were true, I thought, it was unlikely that silphium was still there these four centuries later. Still, it deserved looking into. I hoped I could find time to go down to Alexandria’s library for a day or two of research. If there was a place in the world where silphium still existed, it might be possible to start a whole new population, and once again bring the wonders of authentic laser back to the world. I remembered the little stand of silphium in Castor’s garden, and fondly recalled the conversations he and I’d had in the botanical oasis behind his house. I missed the old man, who, after more than a hundred years of life, had not long ago died. I wondered if Castor had grown enough silphium to produce laser.
I wandered quietly around the pool, watching the surface of the water catch the reflection of the surrounding red and pink flowers. Now and then one of Agrippa's parrots would fly over the pool. As they swooped low over the water their reflection would suddenly appear, and as the beating of their wings disturbed the pool’s surface, dissolve into a playfully dappled icon of themselves, only to disappear as the bird swooped upward towards another perch. I walked on and found myself beside Drusilla’s table. She was quietly reclining, like me casually observing the other guests. With a silver knife she carefully sliced a ripe, black fig and carried tiny portions of it to her mouth. She smiled, offered a slice. I accepted it, sweet and delicious.
“It’s Alexandrian,” she said. “Do you like it?” Her Latin was precise, elegant, tinged with an exotic eastern accent. As I would later learn, she was fluent in six languages: Aramaic, which was the language of the Idumean kings from whom she was descended, and its Palestinian dialect. Latin, of course, learned because it was the power-language of her time. She had picked up Nilotic Egyptian from trips to Alexandria and her growing interest in the cult of Isis. She knew Hebrew, the official written language of her religion of birth, though it had been years since she’d practiced that religion. Most remarkably, she was fluent in Greek. For a woman to speak Greek was still somewhat scandalous. Greek was considered a man’s language, among women used only by prostitutes and those of an artistic or bohemian temperament.
Drusilla’s great-grandfather Herod, who referred to himself as King of the Jews, had Arab blood in his veins, and Drusilla shared the darker skin, fine mouth and sculpted eyes of her ancestors.
The fig she’d given me really was exceptional, sweet and complex. “Yes,” I said. “It’s very good.”
“Are you finding your way?” she said, setting down the knife and straightening the long string of pearls which hung around her neck. She exuded the self-confidence of nobility.
“What do you mean?”
“You Romans seem so lost when you’re away from home, so out of your element.”
“Lost? Do you think so?”
“It’s not that you can’t brag and throw your weight around. You’re really quite good at that. I have yet to meet one of your countrymen who wasn’t an expert at that. It’s that you don’t seem to fit in, and what’s more, don’t seem to want to.” She slipped off the triclinium and stood, smoothing her light blue tunic down over her legs. She said nothing further, as though challenging me to respond.
“What makes you think that?”
“Well of course my husband was like that,” she said. ‘Felix, I mean. Rome this, Rome that. Everything compared to Rome. You don’t have figs like that in your silly little Rome, do you? Or women like me?”
“Well, these are exceptional figs,” I admitted.
She took me by the hand and I followed her through the scattered crowd.
“Perhaps,” I offered, “perhaps it’s not that we’re uncomfortable in the provinces, but only that we’re loyal.”
Like the image of parrot wings on dappled water, contempt momentarily distorted her face. “Loyal? To what? It seems a kind of overwrought mother-worship, to me.”
I had no idea what she meant. “Are you a mother?” I asked.
“Yes, I am,” she answered, lightly touching her brother Agrippa’s arm as we walked past. “I have a ten-year-old son, Antonius Alexander.”
“And does he respect you?”
“Yes, of course. I’m his only parent now, since his father died. But worship, no. That’s different. I wouldn’t allow it.”
We stopped beside a monkey in a big cage. The monkey came toward us, with its eyes begging for food. Drusilla turned, picked a fig off a nearby table and handed it to the animal. With tiny hands it received it gently. One might have read gratitude in the animal’s eyes.
“I shouldn’t tell you this, but we call him Nero.” I think she expected me to be shocked. “Because he is at the mercy of his appetites. Really, it’s not fair to the monkey, is it?” She turned and faced me as I watched the fig disappear into the monkey’s busy mouth. She touched my hand with hers, to get my attention. “Why do you think Nero went mad?” she asked.
“Well it can’t have been mother worship, can it?” I rejoined.
Drusilla smiled, leaned back against a column. “You respond to a question with a question. Very good. I think your Nero, like Narcissus, fell in love with his own image, and could not bear that anyone disturb it, not even his mother.” She peered down into the pool, at her own image looking back up at her, picked a small white flower from a nearby plant and dropped it into the pool. Her image disappeared, replaced by the flower. “I think he could not stand her as a separate person, with her own ambitions. I’ve seen that often in your men. I’m something of an expert on Roman men, you know.” She laughed, for some reason I could not determine. “Do I shock you, speaking this way?”
“Speak of us as you like. Only convince me you don’t need us.”
She smiled again. “No. I can’t. We need you, it’s true. With all your faults, still we need you. And that, I suppose, is our greatest fault, the needing of you.” She turned and looked me in the eyes. “Well then, I’m glad you’re here, whether you’ve found your way or not.”
At that she turned and hurried off into the crowd, leaving me somewhat dizzy and disoriented. As she passed by, Nero leapt towards her and with a low chattering sound begged for more figs. She paid no attention but disappeared through the door into the reception room. As she left she almost ran into Lucius, just coming in. I raised my hand and Lucius found me. It was time to go.
“Alexandria,
” I said to Lucius on our way back to our rooms. “That’s where I want to go. Maybe we can find the time.”
“But don’t forget,” Lucius reminded me, “there’s a war to be fought.”
In the coming months from our headquarters in Caesarea Vespasian directed one by one the bloody but successful capture of Gadara, Joppa, Gishala, Jamni and Azotus. Things were going well. Though it was Vespasian’s hope to keep bloodshed to a minimum he didn’t have absolute control of his troops and victory often brought brutal, indiscriminate slaughter. It was said that the bodies of innocents floated in wide rafts down the Jordan River and across the Dead Sea. I knew it would turn out this way, our brutality ending up playing into the rebels’ hands. No one, the Judeans would now argue, is safe from the Romans. As a Jew your only chance of survival is to exterminate them from our land. The final battle, everyone knew, would be fought in Jerusalem. We received reports of thousands of men streaming towards the city from the surrounding countryside.
The more victorious we were, the harder the terrorists struck out at us and the Herodians. Vespasian ran out of patience. He reinstated the principle of amnesty to Jews who came over to our side but announced that everyone else was to be killed, priest or peasant, even family of priest or peasant. Chaos gripped the countryside. The smell of death was everywhere. It must have seemed to Simon bar Giora and the thousands in Jerusalem that the Armageddon promised in their scripture had finally arrived.
Meanwhile reports came from Rome of a different kind of madness. After sending Vespasian off to Judea Nero had grown more and more paranoid and irrational. He had good reason to be paranoid. The Senate, the nobility, and even the armies had given up on him. Nero was not insensitive to this and construed every whispered comment and every meeting at which he was not present as evidence of a coup. His paranoia came to rest on Germany. While still in Athens he summoned to him the governors of Upper and Lower Germany and Domitius Corbulo, the highly-respected commander of the Roman legions on the Rhine. It was Corbulo who I’d followed to Vetera, and then to Agua Mattiacae. I knew him well, and what a brilliant general he was. When these great patriots arrived Nero casually informed them that if they didn’t commit suicide he’d have them and their families disgraced and executed. Vespasian’s view was that it was as much Nero’s jealousy as it was paranoia that drove him to this madness. Successful generals or administrators threatened the emperor's auctoritas. The forced suicides of these three caused tidal waves of shock to wash across the empire. It was clear now that no one was safe from Nero’s whims, and rather than protecting himself from an imaginary mutiny, he’d further sealed his fate.
