by Nick Tosches
“The finest bread and olives in all the empire.”
A wistful look passed over him, and when he broke his quiet, it was with a voice that was wistful.
“Yes,” he said.
Then he spoke matter-of-factly. “So, the court of Tiberius, eh?”
I was thinking of the waiting donkey-cart of riches. I was thinking that the man with whom I spoke had been raised to his position by Sejanus, the killer of the son of Tiberius, the scheming usurper whose cunning machinations, and my knowledge of them, had caused a raving Tiberius to evict me in his refusal to heed my warning. I was thinking of the financial agent and the arrangements that needed to be made. I was thinking of the flight of the day. I was thinking of Jesus peering out from Narbata, anxious to glimpse my returning figure in the distance. I was thinking that this was no time for the tall, gaunt, bald Pilate and me to be discussing the swaying grain-fields of the Abruzzi, and most certainly no time for us to be teetering so precariously on the brink of talk of Tiberius and Sejanus.
“Some time ago, as I was telling your adjutor. In the years before…”
But, unlike his auxiliator, the procurator did not complete with his own words the sentence I had intentionally left unfinished. What was worse, he pressed me to finish it myself:
“As you were saying?” he said. “ ‘Before’? Before what?” He did not appear so affable now. “Before madness befell?” There was a pause. “Before Sejanus?”
“Before many things,” I said, with composure.
Once again he seemed affable, then once again wistful, then once again forthright.
“Tiberius was driven from the throne,” he said. “Sejanus, our fellow equestrian, will die in it before his time. Madness and death were the fates allotted them by the divider of destinies and days. So be it. To hell with them, I say. To hell with both of them.”
These words unburdened me of my worries. But I could not resist:
“I had been led to believe—mistakenly, it seems—that you were a favorite of Sejanus’s.”
“No, your belief is not mistaken. It is Sejanus who was from the outset mistaken. He mistook my manner for my substance. Men such as he favor only those whom they feel they can mold into disposable tools of their designs, which serve them and them alone. This is as evident to me as the vein that brings blood to my wrist.”
“Your words are safe in me,” I said sincerely.
“If I cared a whit for their safety, I would not have spoken them,” he said. Then he spoke as if musing to himself:
“Yes. Rome grows impatient with Sejanus: with his persecutions, his plottings, his tyrannies. Diminished as he is, Tiberius is still princeps. Sejanus will never see the overripe fruit of age. It is not as in that strange tale of the Jews, that tale of the first murderer. Not all killers live for a thousand years. Sejanus will die soon. The world will be better for it.
“Sometimes I feel that the world is better for every death. Then I remember that for each who dies, two are born.…”
Then he smiled again and spoke directly to me:
“But whither has my courtesy escaped? Will you let me call for some good Roman wine and good Roman food?”
I declined, and with circumspect ease, I bade him farewell.
“Will I see you again?” he asked.
“I will come again to the palace of your hospitality, and the pleasure of your company, and a cup of that good wine, before I depart for Rome.”
He smiled with a subtle distant kindness, then walked with me until there was within hearing a guard whom he summoned to escort me.
Though his talk of Sejanus was assuring as to there being no enmity between Pilate and me, I believed there to be no truth in what he foresaw. Already the most influential and feared citizen of Rome, the usurper was to be raised to the consulship a few years thence.
But then, in October of the seventeenth year of the reign of Tiberius, Livilla would meet her end either by her own hand or the hand of another, and on that evening, the Senate would convene at the Temple of Concordia, at the western reach of the Forum. Amid accusations of conspiracy against the princeps, Sejanus was summarily condemned, apprehended, and executed by strangling at the Gemonian Stairs, where the body was left to be torn apart by crowds.
Mobs hunted down and killed anyone they could link to the regime of Sejanus. The Praetorians resorted to looting when they were accused of having conspired with the former prefect. His statues were torn down and his name obliterated from all public records. A few days later, Sejanus’s eldest son, Strabo, was also arrested and executed. On hearing of his death, Strabo’s mother, Apicata, the first wife of Sejanus, killed herself after addressing a letter to Tiberius saying that Drusus had been murdered by Sejanus with the complicity of Livilla: a charge corroborated by the testimony of Livilla’s slaves, who admitted to having administered the poison to Drusus.
How had Pilate foreseen this? Perhaps he merely knew Sejanus better than most. Perhaps he knew and understood many things better than most men. Or maybe he was given to outlandish predictions, a few of which were bound to fall true.
On that day in Caesarea, I had a donkey-cart filled with wealth, a man to see, and arrangements to make. The future extended no further.
Having said this, I return immediately, like a fool, to what then was the future; but only to tell you a very small tale in which lies a very big lesson. When Tiberius at last did depart this life, he left his heir and successor, Caligula, with an almost inconceivable inheritance of more than two billion and seven hundred million sesterces. Caligula squandered this vast fortune in less than five years’ time. This shows that there is no true value in inert wealth itself.
True wealth lies in the squandering of it. A good loaf of bread and a jug of good wine could be had for a single sestertius. Before deductions, a legionary’s wage was barely three sesterces a day, about the same that a laborer was paid for a day of hard toil. The finest Greek slave could be purchased for a few thousand sesterces. A luxurious villa, for a few hundred thousand.
Now think of throwing such sums and more to the winds of every morning and every night. Think of idly hurling two billion and seven hundred million sesterces to the winds and raging seas of five years’ living. That is wealth: the lavishing of it beyond reckoning; not the hoarding, the mere having, the prudent spending of it.
Our fortune was nothing by comparison, but we needed to insure that we could squander ours as well. I led Faith and the cart to the agent, whose place of business was close to the palace, and I presented him with the papyrus sheet given me by the adjutant. I loosed the ropes from the cart, threw back the blanket, and together we hauled the sacks and packsaddles into a curtained area of his stall. He betrayed no sign that he was impressed by either the bulk or the weight of what we moved from the cart to the curtained room.
Two assistants were called into the room, and the hoard was sorted into four piles: Greek coins, Hebrew coins, Roman coins, and coins of a more exotic nature.
The few jewels and pieces of gold virtu collected by us were kept apart from the coins and not included here.
The piles were subjected, under the charge of a third and especially expert assistant, to the simultaneous processes of permutation and computation, by which the current values of coins of different kinds, sources, and denominations were reckoned into Roman equivalents of commensurate value, with the ongoing calculations being stated aloud by the third assistant and entered on wax tablets by the other two.
The small pile of strange and exotic coins was treated last, and several of these coins required closer examination and deliberation. In the end, only one coin remained unaccounted: a very ancient electrum stater of Lydian origin, as the third assistant explained it, saying that he had encountered only one other example, and while he felt its value to be considerable, he could not responsibly appraise it. He excluded this small pale-yellow coin from the reckoning and handed it to me. Also excluded were several crude counterfeits bestowed on us with a show of
piety in the course of our mission.
The two men with wax tablets then added the figures on their respective tablets, and, when they finished, gave the tablets to the agent, who compared them to establish that their individual arithmetical results were identical.
He wrote on a piece of papyrus, and presented it to me. I saw the symbol IIS with a line drawn through it, followed by the numeral DCCC with a line over it, followed by the numerals XMMM and DCCLIII.
“Eight hundred and thirteen thousand and seven hundred and fifty-three brass sesterces,” announced the agent.
Though the sestertius was the standard unit of account, and thus always used formally, this sum was equivalent to eight thousand and one hundred and thirty-eight gold aurei, plus or minus a few handfuls of silver denarii.
Dividing this amount by two, it was plain that both the Lord and I were amply rich men. The requisite wealth of the two hundred or so Romans of senatorial rank was eight hundred thousand sesterces. It might be said that the Prince of Peace and I were now each worth half a senator. And more riches lay ahead. Jesus had been right. We should ride our mare farther and farther on, rather than quit, vanish, and make for Rome. These fleeting days were for the seizing. Rome awaited always.
The agent and I discussed the matter of how the deposit was to be held by him: as vacua pecunia, bearing neither interest nor risk, or as creditum, to be lent out by the argentarius at the conservative fixed legal rate of twelve per centum per annum.
Here he was quick to bring to my attention that while this fixed legal rate was enforced in Rome, with due penalties provided for violations, the rates commanded by usurers in the provinces were not so easily overseen or controlled. Lending through Jew intermediaries here in Caesarea could bring rates in excess of twenty per centum, and through certain usurers at the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, rates as high as forty per centum or more.
After much deliberation, I instructed him to invest half the fortune through usurious lending, and let the other half lie unturned. I did this because I could not speak for the Lord’s share. If he felt comfortable with the increase afforded by usury, I would grant him half participation in the half of the deposit that I had designated as creditum.
The agent and I settled on his fees and his percentage of the creditum profits. There was paper-work: details of arrangements whereby the deposit could be claimed in full or in parts either here, in Caesarea, from him, or at his argentaria in Rome, in person or through prescriptive draught authorized by me.
“Where is your place of safe-keeping?” I asked him at last, not because I had doubts over his methods of security, but because I was quite curious.
“It is safe because I do not speak of it. It is unknown to my assistants and my associates, even to my brother, and to the provincial government for which he works.” There came to his face a smile. “To have my fun, I make as to confide in the Jew usurers that it travels by my own manned war galley, moving from one feared and uncharted sea, one unknown port to another. They believe a large shark is painted on its hull, and that its mainsail is black, and some of them claim to have seen it, or to have heard reports of its sighting, on this distant horizon or that.”
So my curiosity was not to be satisfied. But he did leave me with these words:
“You see, wealth is not a material thing. All these heaps of various coins you have brought me are but the tangible token-pieces, the roundel-chips of that which is impalpable. The values represented by them are affected by many things: changes in composition, changes in denominations and denominational tables, artificial manipulations of politics and marketplace, decreed or fortuitous debasements, decreed or fortuitous appreciations.
“Ships are loaded heavy with these tokens whose transient values exist only in the minds of men. But wealth has no weight. It is so light as to be transported invisibly by the breath of Fortune. As it is good to increase the number of these tokens and chips, it is better to transmute them into nothing. Only when they become that which does not exist is their safe-guarding absolute and complete.”
Hours had passed in that curtained room. I knew that I would not be returning to Narbata that night.
I found the inn of long ago, where Jesus and I had spent our first night together. The dark winding streets were still filled, even more so than I remembered them, with furtive shadows, lurking presences, the phantoms of old gods, the mad howlings of new messiahs. The increasing strangeness in the air was thick.
I saw to it that Faith had his feed and water. I ate pig jowls, rich with tender fatty meat beneath charred skin, and ocean fish, and good bread with vinegar, and good dry-salted cheese and summer figs, and I drank my share of good Roman wine.
I remembered his delight in the oysters. I remembered his telling me of the bread of affliction. I remembered our laughter. I saw my right hand slowly raise my knife and just as slowly lower it vertically to cleave in twain the air between us, to answer his question as to how any hypothetical gains were to be divided between us; and I heard my voice, as if from very far away: “Straight down the middle.” So long ago, all of it. And, yes, considering the distances we had traveled, so very far away.
Faith and I entered Narbata well before the day’s meridian. I found Jesus in the shade of a tree, telling a group of children about why it was important for them to honor their fathers and their mothers.
“For they gave you,” said he, “the one gift without which there can be no other gift, and without which nothing can be possessed or enjoyed.”
The children were young, and some of them turned their heads sideways as they looked to him and listened. Some of their mothers stood behind them, looking warmly to the Lord.
“They gave you the gift of this breath,” he went on. “The gift of life itself, without which you would sing no song or hear the song of no bird in the sky. The gift without which there could be for you nothing.”
“The old rabbi told us that it was God who gave us life,” one of the taller children said.
“Then that rabbi respects not his father and mother. That rabbi disobeys the God of whom he speaks.”
The mothers seemed to give this more thought than the children gave it.
“You are better than the old rabbi,” said one of the little children.
“If that is true, it is because I am grateful for the gift of this breath, and for the happiness it allows to come.”
“And how must we honor our parents?”
The mothers awaited his answer expectantly.
“By heeding them, for they know more than you and want only for you what is good. But more by caring for them as they become old. For as they gave you the gift of life, so you must return it to them. Life will become wearisome for them, and you must replenish it. If you grow to have good fortune, you must share it with them. If you grow to have children of your own, you must let them hold and cherish them. If you have nothing, you must give to them the love and care within you. As they gave you the gift without which there would be nothing, so you must honor them with all that befits this priceless gift.”
I saw that, off a way, near the livery-stable, unburdened of his packsaddle, Hope had mounted and was fucking Charity.
We should have shoved a skipping-stone up that jenny’s cunt. The last thing we needed was a pregnant or foaling donkey. As the livery-hand and I unharnessed Faith, the old dun jack looked to Hope and Charity as if his turn were next. I gave a good push to Hope, but he went on with his humping, and Charity stood firm and impassive.
Jesus was alone now. I told him that all had gone well in Caesarea, and I told him of the sum of our wealth, at which he rejoiced.
I asked him if he wanted to share in the half that was to accrue interest through usury.
“No,” he said, and he asked me the duration of the period to which I had committed my half of the deposit to be put into creditum in this way.
“Semi-annuum. Payment after six months. The Roman month of Januarius.”
Jesus thought and muttere
d the name of the corresponding Jewish month, Shevat.
“That is good,” he said. “Whatever you do, be sure that the term expires as arranged, and is not renewed.”
“Why are you so concerned about this?”
“Because there may very likely be an upheaval among the usurers come next spring.”
I looked at him and told him that I had heard nothing of the kind.
“You have heard it now. Just do as I say, and your money and your profits will be safe. But you must do as I say.”
I told him that I would. His mood lightened considerably, and we celebrated our wealth.
“Good is the greed that is fulfilled,” he said, as if from on high. At this he laughed as if reborn.
We walked in aimless good spirits.
“You missed a good funeral,” he said. “One of the Temple publicans. The weepers could barely hide their gladness.”
So, I thought, the whispering man with the withered arm had acted. It felt good to know that he and his daughter were no longer among the meek of the earth who would go to their deaths in the futile expectation of their inheritance. But again I regretted the fool and dodgy words I had written.
The priest and the rabbi, Aaron and Ephraim, welcomed me back. Jesus spoke to them, surprising me with his words almost as much as he surprised them.
“We have been together a long time. Throughout that time, I have looked upon your sectarian tenets with respect, understanding, and at last tolerance. But I tell you now that the time for every sect is done.
“The God who is my Father will have no more of Pharisee, or of Sadducee, or of Essene. All of these are as Philistines before him, and their division of the house of David will no longer be suffered. The Way is not to be argued. The Way is not to be contended. The Way is not to be cleft. Rock that is smitten and sundered has no strength, and only of solid rock will the new temple be built.
“To God the Father, the noise of your worship is more like the squabbling of hens than the voices of the righteous joined as one, and it is abhorrent to him.
