The Advocate

by Randy Singer

  That’s when it started. First a small rumbling, followed by a low growl as the ground shook beneath us, as though the entire hill on which we were standing might be swallowed into the bowels of the earth. I struggled to maintain my balance and kept an eye on the crosses as they shook, the blood spraying from the prisoners and sprinkling those of us below. People around me gasped and shouted for mercy. Quintus fell to his knees while the other soldiers crouched in readiness as if preparing to do battle with the gods themselves.

  The earthquake ended as abruptly as it started. The ground became firm again, and people struggled to catch their breath.

  “Surely, this man was the Son of God!” Quintus exclaimed.

  I kept my eyes fixed on Jesus, half-expecting him to shoot to the heavens like a comet in reverse, the way Augustus had done. But he just hung there, motionless, his struggle finally over. The earth did the same, as if it had struggled along with him and, with him, found its peace.

  Gradually, inexorably, the light returned. The soldiers regained their composure, and Quintus looked at me with a wary eye as though I might tell Pilate that he had given the title of Augustus to this beleaguered Jewish rabbi.

  I noticed in the sunlight that my own toga had been stained with a few drops of the rabbi’s blood. It brought to mind the image of Flavia at the Festival of Fordicidia, soaked with the blood of a pregnant cow. Or the way physicians would have a patient suffering from parliamentary disease drink the blood of a slain gladiator. Romans knew one thing: there was power in blood, especially the blood of a sacrifice.

  I walked alone back to the Praetorium. I hardly noticed the damage from the earthquake along the way.

  It wasn’t until the following day that I first heard the news. The earthquake had damaged the four-inch-thick curtain that separated the Holy Place of the Jewish Temple from the Holy of Holies, the place that only the high priest could enter once a year. The curtain had been torn in two. The earthquake must have shifted the structures holding the curtain in place.

  They said it had been torn from top to bottom.

  CHAPTER 30

  Things quieted down after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. The Jews celebrated the Passover without further incident on the fifteenth day of their month Nisan. We used the day to prepare for the long trip back to Caesarea.

  On Sunday, we left at dawn. We went out the same way we came in—an impressive entourage with a few thousand soldiers marching in formation, reflecting the sun from their shields and armor. Anyone who watched would have thought Pilate was still in charge. Those of us who had been there for the trial of Jesus knew better.

  It took Pilate and me two days to refine the letter we sent to Tiberius Caesar reporting the incident. As usual, Pilate had asked me to prepare the first draft. But when he read it, he accused me of including too much detail and making the prisoner seem innocent. “He claimed to be a king. That’s the main point,” Pilate said.

  He redrafted the letter himself. The trial of Jesus merited only two paragraphs. The Nazarene had called himself a king. He had a huge following. Mindful of the prior admonition from the great Tiberius to keep peace in Judea, Pilate had given Jesus every opportunity to recant.

  When he found out that Jesus was a Galilean, Pilate had sent him to Herod. But Herod merely made fun of the man and sent him back to Pilate. Eventually, Pilate ordered that the man be crucified, demonstrating to the Jews that the great Tiberius had no rivals.

  There was no mention of Barabbas. There was no mention of the multiple times Pilate had found the man innocent. There was no mention of the prisoner’s stoic insistence that although he was a king, his Kingdom was not of this world.

  And not surprisingly, there was no mention of the eclipse or earthquake.

  I had carried my guilt back to Caesarea. My unease over my role in the trial had intensified by watching the brave rabbi die. Even the gods had been displeased with the injustice of it all.

  Cicero wrote that guilty men are tormented and pursued by the Furies not with blazing torches as in the tragedies but with the anguish of remorse and the torture of a guilty conscience.

  Cicero could not have been more right. It took me weeks just to regain my appetite. I thrashed in bed at night. When I did sleep, I was visited by images from the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. I relived and rehashed my lack of courage under pressure. What if I had stood strong with Pilate when he first decided to find the man innocent? What if I hadn’t insisted on that ploy of offering up Barabbas? What if I had stood up to Pilate when he waffled at the end and put his own self-interests first?

  What if I had been the one on trial and my life had depended on somebody being courageous enough to apply the law impartially?

  Pilate made it clear that such questions were off-limits during our time together. I brought the subject up once, indirectly, by commenting on how upset the verdict had made Procula.

  “What I have done, I have done,” Pilate said. “The gods will decide whether I played my part well.”

  “Do you ever wonder yourself?” I asked.

  He gave me a look of annoyance that told me I had already pushed the matter too far. “What I have done, I have done.”

  It was the last time I mentioned the incident to him.

  But he couldn’t stop people outside the Imperial Palace from talking about it.

  A month after we returned to Caesarea, the rumors still floated like leaves on the wind, stirring up the Jews in our city. The followers of Jesus claimed he wasn’t really dead. He had been seen alive after the crucifixion in the city of Jerusalem and at one time had taught a group of five hundred on the hills outside the city.

  I put no stock in the rumors. I had watched the man die, seen him give up the ghost with my own eyes. He might have been, as Quintus himself had exclaimed, the very Son of God. And his soul might have been immortal, vying right now with the other gods for his place in the pantheon. But dead men didn’t come back to life. Certainly not in the way that the Jews were describing Jesus. He supposedly looked the same, except for the nail wounds in his wrists and feet and a hole in his side where the soldiers had pierced him with a spear to make sure he was dead.

  I was a little concerned, from a political perspective, that the movement had not died with its alleged Messiah. But this was not the first time such things had happened. Perhaps his disciples had stolen the body from the grave as some of the religious leaders were claiming. Pilate had placed guards at the tomb, but I knew Roman soldiers were not infallible and not above being bribed. In any event, we still had a province to govern.

  I never had a chance to return to Jerusalem. Three months after the trial of Jesus, and six months ahead of schedule, I was replaced with another assessore and sent back to Rome to begin my career as an advocate. I knew the hand of Seneca was behind the maneuver. With Sejanus now dead, alliances had shifted, and Seneca’s star was again on the rise. Agrippina’s family was no longer the threat it had been previously. The time was ripe for Seneca’s allies and friends to make their influence felt in the capital city.

  I knew I was only a minor player in the drama unfolding in Rome. Nevertheless, I was excited to return at a time of such great turmoil because turmoil spawned opportunity. Tiberius would soon be gone, and the jockeying to succeed him as emperor was already taking place. I could read about it from afar, or I could be on the fringes of the swirling intrigue unfolding at the center of the civilized world.

  I was tired of writing formulaic letters to Tiberius and helping Pilate judge the same types of cases over and over. The law was made in Rome. There, I would be free to carve a name for myself as an advocate, not just serve as an adviser to a hotheaded and unpredictable prefect.

  I left Pilate on good terms, though our relationship was never the same after that trial in Jerusalem. He wished me the best and told me I had served him well. He drafted a letter touting my virtues, and I packed it carefully among the other books that I kept in the boxes impregnated with cedar oil. My scr
olls were well-worn and cracked because I constantly unrolled and read them before tying them up again and stuffing them away.

  But my favorite letter I had left unopened for the last three months. I opened it once, with great reluctance, during the voyage home. The words that had inspired me on my trip to Caesarea now filled me with sadness and regret.

  What we have to seek for, then, is . . . the soul that is upright, good, and great. What else could you call such a soul but a god dwelling as a guest in the human body? A soul like this may descend into a Roman equestrian as well as into a freedman’s son or a slave. For what is a Roman equestrian or a freedman’s son or a slave? They are mere titles, born of ambition or of wrong. One may leap to heaven from the very slums. Only rise and mold thyself into kinship with thy God.

  As the winds battered our ship and prolonged the journey home, I thought long and hard about my time in Caesarea. I had demonstrated a great capacity for writing, and I had mastered the intricacies of Roman provincial law. But on the point that mattered most, I had failed most profoundly. I had not risen to the occasion as Seneca had encouraged me to do. And because of my cowardice and failure, my soul felt a long way from kinship with God.

  CHAPTER 31

  IN THE TWENTIETH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF TIBERIUS JULIUS CAESAR AUGUSTUS

  I returned to Rome to find a different kind of city than the one I had left behind. Not much had changed by way of architecture or economy, but there was a certain tension in the air that you could almost taste. After the fall of Sejanus, the leading senators had turned on each other with a spate of treason trials, invoking the crime of maiestas, which included any behavior offensive or hostile toward the majesty of the state or the person of the emperor.

  From his remote post on Capri, Tiberius fostered a climate of distrust that led to a proliferation of these trials. They were conducted in the Senate chamber, and it was said that the commander of the Praetorian Guard, Naevius Sutorius Macro, would attend the trials and watch the faces of the senators as the evidence was presented. Even a look that seemed to suggest sympathy with those accused of maiestas could be grounds for suspicion and subsequent charges.

  The trials gave rise to a new class of parasite that fed off Tiberius’s fears and the wealth of others. The maiestas laws provided that the persons who successfully prosecuted the cases would inherit the estate and political offices of the accused. Such men were called delatores, and they wormed their way into power by prosecuting others for crimes of alleged malice toward the Roman people or the emperor. All of Rome despised them, and the most hated delator of all was a man named Caepio Crispinus. As a result of several successful cases, he now served in the Senate, where he could keep a close eye on the men who would be his next victims.

  I found safety in keeping a low profile. I set up a law practice and, with Seneca’s help, developed a fairly robust client base. I spent my time pleading cases in the Roman Forum at the Basilica of Julius, where seven civil courts conducted proceedings simultaneously. When the basilica opened for the day, there was such a crush of litigants and advocates you could barely move. All day long, spectators flocked from one proceeding to the next, depending on the status of the litigants and the types of issues being tried. My cases seldom attracted a crowd. I specialized in representing borrowers when their lenders exacted more than the 5 percent interest allowed or when the lenders tried to compound interest illegally.

  There were two problems with my nascent practice. First, I seldom got paid. Clients who have to borrow money at usurious rates do not have the funds to pay lawyers. Instead, they tried to barter with me. As a result, I was promised more goats, pigs, and bushels of barley than I could possibly devour in the next decade.

  Second, I tended to make powerless friends and powerful enemies. Alienating the Roman citizens who had the most money was not helping my long-term ambition to make a lasting impact in Rome.

  That all changed on a cold February morning when Seneca summoned me to his house for the salutatio, a formal morning reception. As he had done several years earlier, Seneca’s servant called my name first, and I skipped over nearly sixty others who had come for a favor that morning. We retired into Seneca’s office, where he had a fire going in the hearth.

  He poured some wine, rubbed his hands together over the fire, and filled me in on the latest gossip from the Judean front. Pilate was on his last legs. He had brutally suppressed another religious uprising, this time in Samaria, and the Samaritans had complained to Rome’s prefect in Syria.

  “Pilate has been ordered back to Rome to answer the accusations of the Jews and Samaritans,” Seneca said.

  The news rocked me. I had been making good progress in my quiet new endeavors in the civil courts, but this added a level of dangerous uncertainty to my future. Would Pilate return and be sanctioned for his numerous shortcomings? Would a hearing in front of the Senate reflect poorly on my own role? It seemed like every act of misconduct was now somehow turned into an affront against Tiberius Caesar. Would they do the same with Pilate? And if they did, could I possibly escape guilt by association?

  “He’s lost control,” Seneca said as if the matter were not open for debate. He threw a few logs on the fire and took a seat. “A new religion is spreading like wildfire through his province. The captain of the Italian Regiment, a man who reports directly to Pilate, is now a follower of the Way. He’s been trying to convert the provincial troops.”

  “Cornelius?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what his name is. But it doesn’t look good for Pilate.”

  I knew the man Seneca was talking about. Cornelius was a respected soldier with a lot of influence in the province.

  I had been hearing some things about the spreading influence of the Jews who were committed to the teachings of the Nazarene, but I had no idea that the movement—if that’s what it was—had infected Pilate’s own troops. For some reason I felt a flicker of joy at the thought of it. The Nazarene and his followers deserved better than what happened that day before the Jewish Passover.

  Seneca took a sip of wine and changed the subject. He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. He had dark and swollen pouches under his eyes. His skin sagged and already showed some age spots. He was feeling the pressure of the times.

  “The people are sick of these treason trials,” Seneca said. “The Senate is like a pit of vipers, turning on each other, sentencing each other to death, stealing each other’s families and possessions.” Seneca shook his head and frowned. His jowls added ten years to his appearance. “Tiberius is seventy-five and in poor health. The tide will turn soon. The only question is whether any of us will live long enough to see it.”

  He lifted the cup to his lips again. After drinking, he set it down very deliberately, as if this was one of the few enjoyments he had left in life. “The conventional wisdom is to keep a low profile and be careful what you say even to your friends,” Seneca continued. “Have you heard about Plautius?”

  I nodded. “Everybody’s heard about Plautius.”

  The poor man was a bizarre example of how ludicrous the maiestas laws had become. Plautius had made the mistake of carrying coins bearing the image of Tiberius into the bathroom. It turned out to be a crucial error, deemed by the courts to be an affront to the emperor. Plautius was condemned to death, though his sentence was later commuted to one of exile.

  “Lucius Apronius is the latest victim,” Seneca said. “I believe he’s a friend of your father’s.”

  He was indeed. Apronius had an estate outside Rome, not far from the land farmed by my family. He was known to be a kind and generous man but unyielding when it came to matters of principle.

  “He’s being prosecuted by Crispinus.” Seneca spat the words out as if the very name were a curse. “For obvious reasons, Apronius is having a hard time finding a capable advocate to defend him.”

  I immediately knew where this was going, and Seneca must have read the look of concern in my eyes. “I know what you’re thinking,” h
e said with a dry smile. “But you must trust me on this. You can spend the rest of your life representing tenants in the civil courts, or you can rise to the occasion and plead a case in the Senate. And, Theophilus, before you give me your answer, you need to understand two things.

  “First, there is no doubt that Apronius is guilty as charged. He thinks Tiberius is usurping the role of the Senate, and he thinks the old man needs to step down. So nobody is asking you to win this case. But if you put up a good fight, people will notice. Senators will notice. They’ll learn what I already know—that you are one of the best advocates at your age in all of Rome.”

  His flattery was taking its intended toll. I should have said no before he could draw the next breath. Instead, I asked a question. “What’s the second thing?”

  “You have a chance to be on the right side of history,” Seneca said. “We have a chance.”

  He hesitated for a moment, and I could tell he had been wrestling with this issue for a long time. “If I’m right, when Tiberius dies, there will be a tremendous backlash against his legacy and against delatores like Crispinus. Those who stand up now to his reign of terror will be heroes when that day comes, their names on the tip of every man’s tongue. That could be you, Theophilus. That could be me.”

  “And what if you’re wrong? What if Tiberius hangs on for another five years and they come after me because I had the audacity to represent someone who criticized him?”

  Seneca smiled. He lifted his cup in a toast, apparently a toast of me. “Then I’ll deny we ever had this conversation.”

  When I didn’t return the smile, Seneca turned serious again. “My only request is that you meet with Lucius Apronius one time. I think you’ll find him to be an honorable man. If you can tell him no to his face in good conscience, I’ll honor that decision.”

  I agreed to the meeting because Seneca was a good friend and benefactor. I also agreed because I was intrigued. My tenants were underdogs in the cases I handled. But their lives were not at risk.