by Randy Singer
Pilate would scan the reports and data, dictate summaries to his secretary, and then change the wording and start over. He wrote with little confidence and no flair. He was never really satisfied with the report destined for Tiberius, but he would eventually have it copied, seal both copies with his signet ring, and dispatch them with two duplicate couriers to Capri.
That entire process changed when Pilate discovered that I had a way with words. At first, I joined him as he dictated. I watched him pace the room with his hands behind his back, struggling to find the right phrase. I would suggest a certain wording. “Yes! Yes!” Pilate would exclaim. “That’s it precisely. Say that again, Theophilus.” He’d walk over to his secretary, peering over the man’s shoulder, making sure he got the words exactly right.
Before long, Pilate was merely suggesting the substance and I was dictating the entire letter. He would read it afterward and sometimes make changes, though I cringed when I read some of them.
From time to time, Tiberius would reply to one of the commentarii, probably just to demonstrate that he actually read them. When he did, he only seemed to have questions about the parts that Pilate drafted. The result was that Pilate began entrusting more and more of his writing responsibilities to me.
After about a year, Pilate insisted that I join him for his morning shave. It was a long and tedious process, and Pilate, being a morning person, didn’t want the time to go to waste. Every military man had heard the stories of how Julius Caesar read reports each morning as he shaved, taking advantage of every minute. Hence, it became expected of all magistrates to do the same.
Pilate and I would sit side by side while the barbers clipped my hair and shaved his head, then splashed cold water on our cheeks and the backs of our necks, dragging their razors across our skin. After each stroke, the barber would wipe the blade along a leather strop, and Pilate and I would talk about the challenges of the day, interrupted by an occasional curse when the barber slipped and drew blood.
Unfortunately, it was easier to write about the province than to govern it. And no matter how much I gilded the words and made the sentences dance, the fact of the matter was that things were bumpy in Palestine. Pilate seemed determined to rule Judea from Caesarea, the gleaming city by the sea. The city had been largely rebuilt by Herod the Great, a client king who had reigned in Judea for thirty years, prior to Pilate. Caesarea was magnificent in its architecture and diverse in its inhabitants. For Pilate, it was both comfortable and fitting for a man of his stature. He left only when absolutely necessary.
But staying hunkered down in Caesarea wasn’t Pilate’s only weakness. He made no effort to understand the Jewish people. For Pilate, they were eccentric and uncompromising, impossible to figure out. Judea was the one province where Rome had been unable to impose its religion and culture. Thus, instead of being forced to adopt the state-sanctioned religion of Rome, which combined the sacrifices to the traditional gods of the Roman pantheon with emperor worship, the inhabitants of Judea were allowed to continue in their Judaism. Accommodation was the order of the day. And Pilate could never understand why the Jewish leaders weren’t more grateful.
I knew this was one of Pilate’s blind spots, so I made it my mission to study the Jewish religion and to dialogue with their leaders. On more than one occasion, I listened to the great Jewish rabbi Gamaliel teach in the Temple courtyard. I befriended members of the Jewish Sanhedrin and became particularly close to the leaders with substantial wealth—men like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Still, the Jewish customs seemed bizarre, antiquated, and inflexible. In Rome, we used our religion for personal gain and favor, bending the rules as necessary to advance our individual agendas. But the Jews took the opposite view. These men would rather die than transgress the thousands of nuanced laws and customs required by their God.
During my first two years in the province, tensions simmered just beneath the surface. Pilate’s soldiers were itching for an excuse to attack. The Jews awaited a Messiah who would shatter the yoke of Roman domination. Pilate seethed and sulked, making his reports to Caesar, biding his time, keeping his body in shape, and planning the next set of games for the arena in Caesarea. For my part, I felt trapped in the middle, doing my best to apply Roman law without triggering Jewish sensibilities.
Though we managed to hold it together for two long years, I awoke each morning with a feeling in the pit of my stomach that before long, it would all unravel.
The first thread was pulled in the Roman Senate.
CHAPTER 16
I was with Pilate when the letter came from a friend in Rome. Pilate read the first few sentences, and his face went ashen. A frown furrowed deep into his forehead as he read the rest of the letter and handed it to me without speaking.
According to Pilate’s friend, Tiberius Caesar had sent an official letter to the Senate, to be read in the presence of Sejanus. The letter started by praising Sejanus, making it seem like the seventy-one-year-old Tiberius was getting ready to appoint Sejanus as his successor.
But then Tiberius’s rambling letter took a strange turn. Without explanation, Tiberius made several accusations against Sejanus, including charges that Sejanus had plotted against the emperor himself. Tiberius’s letter, which took nearly an hour to read, dismissed Sejanus as commander of the Praetorian Guard and appointed a man named Macro to take his place. Even as the letter was being read in the Senate, Macro and his guards were gathering outside the doors.
Tiberius had concluded the letter by requesting that the Senate lodge charges against Sejanus and conduct a trial to determine whether he was guilty of treason.
The news sucked the breath out of me, especially when I read what happened next. The Senate ordered the arrest of Sejanus and sent him to the Tullianum, a notorious cesspool where Roman generals had traditionally placed conquered kings or high-profile dignitaries just before their executions. That same night he was convicted in a mockery of a trial on the portico of the temple of Concord. The Forum was packed with citizens, shoulder to shoulder, cheering every charge against Sejanus and drowning out any attempt by Sejanus to defend himself.
Immediately after the senators declared him guilty, Sejanus was executed by strangulation. Two soldiers pulled on ropes looped around his neck until he died, no doubt in agony. His body was thrown down the Gemonian Stairs that led to the temple. And instead of leaving the body there to rot, as was the custom with traitors, the crowd had surged forward and ripped the body to pieces.
Riots ensued as statues of Sejanus were torn down and ground to dust. His wife and children were arrested and held for trial. His friends fled Rome for the countryside.
Visions of the dead ruler flashed through my mind as I finished reading the letter from Pilate’s friend. I could recall so vividly Sejanus’s regality and stone-faced temperament at the games. The way he had carried himself around Rome—a seasoned commander of Roman legions and the Praetorian Guard. The way people had groveled to earn his patronage, freedmen and senators alike. Like so many others, I had received my first post from Sejanus.
“Did you see this coming?” I asked Pilate.
He shook his head, his thoughts clearly a thousand miles away.
Pilate had served under Sejanus. On more than one occasion, Pilate had regaled me with stories about those years, about the love/hate relationship between Sejanus and his troops. The stories were interesting in their own right, but for Pilate, I could tell they also had a reassuring undertone. Sejanus was a buffer between Pilate and Tiberius. As long as Sejanus lived, Pilate would never feel the full fury of the emperor’s wrath.
Now that buffer was gone.
“Rome lost a friend, as did I,” Pilate said.
Maybe. But I never saw him shed a tear.
In the ensuing weeks, Pilate came up with a plan that I knew immediately would not end well. I tried to talk him out of it, and I had a strong ally in his wife, Procula, a most remarkable woman. She was ten years younger than her husband, as close to my age as to
his, but was absolutely devoted to him. She had a charming face, a full figure, the slight hint of a double chin, and the smooth skin of a noble, though she too hailed from an equestrian family. Her eyes were her most expressive feature—narrow and elongated, inquisitive and bright. She took great care to accentuate them with makeup and always had her eyebrows done exactly so. The eyes drew you in and held you, and she was smart enough to know it.
Pilate made no secret of his affections for her, a rare exception to his usual gruff demeanor. She was easy to love and a favorite of all the staff—upbeat and energetic, the intellectual equal to any man in Caesarea.
Yet even Procula couldn’t talk Pilate out of this idea.
“It’s my private residence!” he thundered. “No Jew is going to tell me how to adorn my private residence!”
He was talking, or rather shouting, about the shields. After mourning the death of Sejanus, Pilate had gathered fifty shields, coated them with gold, and consecrated them to Tiberius. He ordered them hung in his private palace in Jerusalem, an extravagant and gaudy building with enormous rooms, high ceilings, and terraces that overlooked the city. I reminded him that Jerusalem was a holy city. “Hang them in Caesarea,” I urged him. “It’s the capital anyway.”
Pilate wouldn’t hear of it. Shields like these were hung everywhere in the empire—public buildings, temples, even in lavish private homes. The inscription on the shields was not inflammatory. How could the Jews find it offensive? Pilate to Tiberius. It was the least he could do to honor the emperor in a province where, because of the emperor’s kindness, the people could worship their own God and were exempted from military service.
“Who could object to it?” Pilate asked.
It was a rhetorical question, and I chose not to answer. Instead, I looked to Procula, who shrugged and shook her head.
There was no reasoning with Pilate when he got like this.
CHAPTER 17
As assessore, I stood behind Pilate’s seat when Herod Antipas, who ruled the neighboring region of Galilee, presented his petition along with his brother and two other Jewish leaders. Their long beards were carefully trimmed, their flowing robes dutifully pressed. They brought more servants than necessary in a regal display designed to remind Pilate that their ancestor, Herod the Great, was the one who had built the very palace where Pilate was now holding court. Herod the Great had been a true friend of Caesar, they reminded Pilate. And he would never have attempted to desecrate the Holy City.
“Do not arouse sedition; do not destroy the peace,” they pleaded. “You do not honor the emperor by dishonoring the ancient laws. Tiberius does not want our customs to be overthrown. If you say he does, produce a letter so that we can stop pestering you and start petitioning him.”
Pilate didn’t respond, but I could tell he was boiling. He stared at the ground in front of him, denying Herod even the courtesy of eye contact. The back of Pilate’s neck was red, and I prepared myself for an eruption of his infamous temper.
Instead, when Herod finished, Pilate showed no emotion whatsoever. “Finished?” he asked, looking at Herod for the first time.
“If there is no such letter, we will appeal to Caesar ourselves,” Herod threatened.
“Do as you must,” Pilate responded. He rose abruptly, pivoted, and turned his back to them. He marched into the palace, and I followed, leaving the Jewish leaders staring into space.
Despite Pilate’s bluster, the threat was not lost on him. We labored that night to draft a preemptive report, alternating between presenting the incident as a small annoyance on the one hand and making it seem like an affront to Tiberius himself on the other. Perhaps, Pilate said, if we played our cards right, Tiberius would award Pilate the neighboring territory of Herod Antipas in addition to Judea.
We ultimately decided to downplay the incident. Tiberius didn’t like prefects who couldn’t handle their own provinces. And this time Sejanus wasn’t around to provide cover.
The shields weren’t coming down. Pilate just wanted Tiberius to know that the delicate sensitivities of his Jewish subjects had been offended once again. But Tiberius was the son of the divine Augustus, and nothing was going to stop Pilate from worshiping him in his own quarters.
Pilate sealed the letter, stared at it for a very long time, and sent it off.
Even a military man like Pilate—no, especially a military man like Pilate—could not easily shrug off the sting of a sharp rebuke. And this rebuke, having been sealed by the signet ring of Tiberius Caesar, cut particularly deep, creating a sense of despondency that made Pilate nearly suicidal.
The letter from Caesar contained none of the usual formalities and perfunctory words of flattery. Instead, Tiberius cut straight to the point. He had read the report from Pilate and had received correspondence from the Jewish delegation. He was not pleased. Pilate’s job, Tiberius reminded him, was to govern Judea, not start a provincial war.
Each of your predecessors was wise enough to respect the peculiar customs and practices of the Jewish people while at the same time firmly enforcing Roman law. I was told you had the wisdom and courage to do the same. Perhaps I was misinformed.
Tiberias ended the letter with an order that left no room for interpretation.
Take down the shields. Send them to the temple of Augustus in Caesarea.
Pilate hardly spoke a word all day. Even Procula couldn’t console him.
That night he showed up at the baths at the normal time. We lifted our weights in silence while other staff members spoke in hushed tones.
“Put on the gloves,” Pilate demanded partway through our regimen.
It wasn’t an unusual request. Greco-style boxing, using gloves of padded leather that we wrapped around our hands, was part of our routine. Pilate was strong as a bull but not well trained. I could parlay his thrusts with quickness, stamina, and a three-inch reach advantage.
We normally started slow, circling, measuring each other, before Pilate would invariably plunge straight ahead. Tonight he didn’t wait. He attacked me with a viciousness I had never before seen. I backpedaled and jabbed, but he just kept coming, grunting as he landed blows, sweat spraying from his body. His right fist caught the bridge of my nose, and blood spurted. A left felt like it cracked my ribs. I held up my hands and gave him a quizzical look, but the bull just attacked again.
I blocked a few of his punches, and he stopped to catch his breath. Blood was dripping down my face.
“I’m twenty years older, Theophilus,” Pilate said, huffing. “I thought you knew how to fight.”
When we reengaged, I no longer treated him as the prefect. I caught him with a fist just above his left eye and opened a gash. People gathered around, halting their own exercises to watch. For the next twenty minutes, we put on a show nearly worthy of the arena, attacking each other with anger, grimaces, and cursing until we were both covered in blood and sweat.
Finally, with Pilate too tired to raise his hands for another blow, he took a couple steps back. Blood dripped down his face and dropped from his chin to the marble. He bent over, his chest heaving. I was holding my nose, trying to stanch the bleeding.
Those who had gathered around started clapping, politely at first and then louder. I unwrapped my hands and began to clap myself.
Pilate caught his breath, stood, and unwrapped his gloves. He nodded brusquely at those clapping and brushed past me. “Come on,” he said. “You bleed like a pig.”
After the slaves dabbed the wounds and stopped the bleeding, we took our turn in the cold bath, the warm chamber, and ultimately the hot marble tub. Afterward, the servants rubbed our bodies, closing the pores of our skin against the cold before they scraped us with a bronze blade.
“Feel better?” I asked.
Pilate thought about the question for a long moment. “Every time I look at those damnable shields in the temple, every time I offer incense or sacrifices to Tiberius, I will hear his words of condemnation.”
I didn’t press the point or dare re
mind him that I had recommended against the shields. If he hadn’t learned this time, I reasoned, he would never learn.
CHAPTER 18
Aesculapius was the god of medicine and healing. He was conceived when Apollo impregnated Coronis. While she was pregnant, Coronis fell in love with another man and for her unfaithfulness was sentenced to burning. Just before Coronis died, Apollo rescued his son, cutting him from his mother’s womb. Apollo named him Aesculapius, which literally meant “to cut open.”
To compensate for the loss of a mother, Apollo gave his son the ability to heal people, and Aesculapius grew into a renowned physician. In fact, his healing powers became so great, he started raising people from the dead. The healings stopped when Jupiter, jealous about someone else having the privilege of immortality, killed Aesculapius with a thunderbolt.
Even in death, the god’s power was not extinguished. Aesculapius had healed hundreds, perhaps thousands, by his touch. He had brought men and women back from the dead. He became a favorite god among the Greeks and Romans. Rulers constructed temples in his name, and the masses called on him for healing.
So it was that Procula, the beloved wife of Pilate and the mother of his three children, turned to Aesculapius in desperate need of healing. She told me about the experience during a long walk by the Mediterranean Sea a few weeks after she had recovered from her near-fatal illness. I knew she had spent the night in the temple. I knew she had miraculously recovered. But she had not told anyone but Pilate about the vision until that day, when she shared her story with me.
