“I was just looking at it,” I told him. “If you want to check a reference, sir, go ahead.”
He smiled. I had been in the city long enough now to recognize that the beard and the fringed shawl and the little cap were signs that the man was Jewish; he had brown hair, and was lighter than the usual honey color. He was tall, and wide across the shoulders in a way that reminded me of Thorion. “Thank you, sir,” he said, and looked up a reference to a prescription for some gynecological disorder, then shook his head. “Won’t work,” he said. “Still, we can but try.”
“A patient?” I asked, and he smiled again.
“What else? And there’s little enough I can do for the poor woman. Opium, that’s all. Relieve the pain. A cure — that’s in the hands of God.”
“ ‘Life is short and the art long,’ ” I quoted. “ ‘Opportunity, elusive; experience, deceptive; judgment, difficult.’ ”
“ ‘But not only must the doctor do his duty, but patient and attendants do their part as well, if there is to be a cure,’ ” he finished for me. “Ah, Hippocrates! You are a student here, sir?”
“No,” I said shortly. Then, because he reminded me a little of Thorion: “I’d like to be. But no one seems to want me. I’m a eunuch, and I haven’t proper recommendations.”
He gave a little grunt — still more like Thorion! — and surveyed me. “Where are you from? If I may ask. Your accent is Asian.”
“Ephesus,” I said. “That is, Ephesus and Amida.” And I outlined my little story about the Persians, and “my cousin Ischyras” redeeming me, and Thorion sending me off to learn medicine.
“You have been unlucky,” he said, in reference to the supposed massacre of my family and my castration. “And your patron should have taken more care, and arranged where you should study before you arrived. But why medicine? I would have thought —”
“That a eunuch would do better at court, taking bribes? I want to study medicine. I don’t care about money, but I care about healing. It is the noblest of the arts, and I have wanted to study it all my life.” I spoke with some intensity: the past week had made me defensive.
“Ah,” he said. “May I perhaps see your letters of recommendation?”
I had them, of course, and I showed them to him. He read them through (“This Theodoros — he’s not the one who was executed? No, no, of course not . . .”), then asked me some medical questions, mostly drawn from standard texts like the Hippocratic works and Galen.
“You are very well read for such a young man,” he said at last. “And you speak with an educated accent — you know the classics as well as medical writers? Yes? I am surprised no one has taken you as a pupil. I myself . . .” He stopped, looking uncertain; then he seemed to nerve himself and took the plunge. “I myself greatly need an assistant. My nephew was to have studied with me, but he died of a fever last year. Of course you would have to arrange to attend lectures as well, but I am affiliated with the school here . . .” He coughed, cleared his throat. “Of course, I am not such an educated man; I was brought up on the Law, not on Homer and the classics — but I know Hippocrates. I know him better than the Torah, God forgive me! If you do not mind studying with a Jew who can quote no more than ‘Sing Goddess of the Wrath,’ you are most welcome to study with me . . .” He trailed off a bit uncertainly.
“If you know Hippocrates,” I said, “you can throw Homer in the Great Harbor. But I am a Christian — you don’t mind?”
“Oh, no, no!” he said, smiling again. “It would in fact be very useful.”
So, both of us perhaps wondering what we were letting ourselves in for, we went to Adamantios. He greeted Philon warmly, and when he heard what he’d come for looked surprised, then amused; he shook hands with me and congratulated me in a condescending fashion. Philon would take me on as his assistant, and agreed to teach me the art; I was free to attend lectures by other doctors, on payment of a fee; and when I felt ready I would be examined by the professors of medicine at the Museum. I agreed to pay Philon ten solidi as soon as I was able to sell my jewels, and we shook hands on the bargain.
Then I went back to my lodgings and worried. I knew nothing at all about Philon. I had been in the city just long enough to know that the Egyptians hated the Jews, and that the intellectuals of the Museum, who were mostly pagan, distrusted them, and ignored them as much as they could. That might go far toward explaining my ignorance — but what if the man was dishonest, or just incompetent? And Adamantios was Jewish too, and everybody had heard of him — though it was true that he was upper-class, and better read in Homer than in the Law. Anyone can quote Hippocrates. Well, I told myself, I can go to lectures now, and I can get other opinions. I should be able to learn something even if Philon can’t teach me.
But that just started me worrying about the lecturers and, worse, about the other students. I had seen them around, checking books in the library, arguing by the fountain in front of the Temple, examining herbs in the Temple gardens. They were all young men, about my own age or older, and they all acted as though they knew every secret of nature already. They would certainly know more than I did. And I suspected that they despised me already. It shouldn’t matter, I told myself, trying to still the fear. Here I am in Alexandria, and tomorrow I’m going to start my study of the art of healing. Even if I am ignorant, even if I’m not good at it, it’s still what I’ve wanted all my life. A dream come true.
It did make me feel better. I got out my copy of Galen and went through it again, wondering at everything there was to learn.
I met Philon the next morning at the Temple, as we’d arranged. He looked a bit unsure of me as well, but he greeted me politely and we started off on his rounds.
Philon's patients were mostly Jewish, but there were a scattering of lower-class Greeks and Egyptians. We worked our way around a series of narrow houses and tenements, some of them tacked onto the back of small shops, in the southeast quarter of the city. There was a carpenter recovering from a fever; a scribe’s little daughter with earache; a bathhouse attendant’s wife with a broken collarbone. “No one of any distinction, I’m afraid,” Philon told me, smiling. “I am not a fashionable doctor. But I’m not an expensive one either!” He introduced me to the patients carefully, and asked me to make notes in his casebook, which allowed me to see what each patient had suffered and what Philon had done for him. He was gentle and careful, used a great variety of drugs with discretion, and avoided bleedings and purgatives. He took time with each patient, answering questions and explaining what he was doing.
The fourth or fifth patient we visited that morning was a coppersmith’s wife who was recovering from childbirth. The lintel of the house was covered with laurel branches and cinquefoil as a charm against the evil eye, and a magic charm was pinned to the door beside the Jewish scroll of the Law. Philon looked at the charm and frowned unhappily. “I know that one,” he muttered, and shook his head. He knocked on the door.
The house slave, a shriveled old woman, let us in, and even before Philon had put his foot across the threshold she was telling him that “the mistress is worse, much worse, and the baby’s ill too, poor thing; it’s gone yellow.”
“That often happens a day or two after the birth,” said Philon resolutely, and went to examine the patient.
The house smelled of incense, and under the incense was a peculiar acrid smell — burnt hair and some plant, I decided. The mistress was lying in bed, unhealthily flushed. She had a magic charm around her neck, and a knife under her pillow, to ward off devils.
Philon smiled, introduced me, and examined the patient. He cleaned her up with a solution of vinegar and myrrh, and gave her a drink of opium and dittany in wine. He looked at the baby, who was a bit yellow, and sound asleep with a magic charm around her neck. He pulled it off, then picked up the one the woman wore as well. “This one’s no good,” he told her with a cheerful air. “It’s a pagan thing, no good for a Jew. You shouldn’t trust in a thing like this, but in the Law. Jewish devils won�
��t pay any attention to it. Do you think the demon Lilith minds what Isis says, eh? What you want, my good woman, is a scroll of the Law. Tie it to your stomach with strips of new linen, and get your husband to sing the psalms while you burn incense. The eighteenth psalm is good. I know the fellow who made this for you: he thinks you can appease every devil by giving it blood. But that only makes them greedy, and they keep coming back for more. You listen to him, and you and the baby will both die. You do as I say and don’t let him in here again, and just see how quickly you get better. Don’t worry about your daughter, either: a mild jaundice like that is common. Nurse her often, and perhaps give her some boiled water to drink as well, and the yellowness will leave her quickly if you say the right prayers and burn the incense.”
The woman looked happier for the visit, and nodded. Philon went out, taking the magic charms with him. He tore the other charm off the door and threw them all into the public sewer, “where they belong,” he said angrily. “And I wish their maker was with them.” Then he looked rueful at my surprise. “One of our Alexandrian sorcerers,” he explained. “We have a lot of them. This one specializes in childbed fevers. Did you smell anything?”
“Burnt hair and . . . something else.”
“The hair was the woman’s, and the something else was papyrus written on with the woman’s blood. It’s the first part of the charm. If it doesn’t work, he cuts fingers off the baby, to appease the devil that threatens the child’s life. He has no idea of hygiene, though; those cuts of his usually go septic, and the child ends up a cripple, if it lives. He likes burning things, too. The people he’s killed!” Philon sighed. “Well, the Egyptians are addicted to magic, and have passed the taste to some Jews. But I hope our patient will leave it alone now.”
“What was it that you told her to do?”
He smiled still more ruefully. “A thing that disgraces me as a Hippocratic. But she wants magic; Hippocratic medicine can promise so little. Leave it to the wisdom of the body, we say: your body will recover if it can. But meanwhile she is in pain and frightened. A sorcerer comes up and says, “I can cure you,” and it’s more than the doctor promised, so she listens. Well, I gave her a charm to keep her happy, and if it calms her mind, that in itself will be helpful.”
He started off to the next house, and I followed him slowly, thinking hard. It was all very different from the Hippocratic texts I had read. Philon glanced back, then stopped to let me catch up.
“Practice is different from theory,” I observed, apologizing for my slowness.
He grinned. “Why, esteemed Chariton, you have already learned something that half the doctors at the Temple don’t seem to know.”
I smiled back, and asked, “Do you have a theory you work by, at all?”
He stopped smiling and shrugged. “Not really. I’m not a Galenist or a systematic or an allopath — they have more theories up at the Temple than a dog has fleas, and I can’t remember them all, and certainly can’t teach them to you. But I can practice. Some of them will tell you that to come up to a patient without a theory of disease, with a knife in one hand and a drug in the other, is like stabbing in the dark. But in my view, none of the theories is quite right, and a man has to practice in the dark as best he can. Only he has to be aware that he is in the dark, and be careful. I try to treat the symptoms, make the patient comfortable, and help the body in what it seems to be trying to do. I can teach you some things that work, but no great mysteries.”
“That sounds like Hippocrates.”
“Hippocrates knew less than Galen, but he understood more. Or so I think.” The grin was back. “We must hurry: I have another patient waiting.”
After working with Philon for a week, I was glad that the more prestigious physicians had turned me down, for I could not have found a better master. He was my ideal of a true Hippocratic: scientific, detached, methodically observant — and selfless, generous, and kind. The poorer patients he treated out of charity, not taking a penny from anyone who couldn’t afford it. He did it, he said, “for the love of God,” and since most of the patients he accepted on this basis were Egyptian Christians or pagans who traditionally despised the Jews, his generosity was astonishing. He was also a good teacher: he liked explaining things and took time with me, and he was pleased when I asked a searching question. He seemed happier with me too, and dropped his earlier, rather diffident manner; he called me Chariton instead of “esteemed sir,” and occasionally let slip sarcastic comments or jokes about his patients (“That one wants to be praised for spitting well”; “Never mind her symptoms — she only said that because of your bright eyes, my lad!”). He suggested that I lodge somewhere closer to his own house, so that I wouldn’t have the long walk from the harbor to meet him every morning.
I asked if he knew of anywhere without fleas. “Somewhere where I could take a bath,” I told him. “I can’t use the public ones here, and I feel like a monk from the outer desert.”
Philon laughed, and then looked shy. “We have a room in my house,” he said. “It’s small, on the third floor, and rather plain, but if you like . . .”
“You wouldn’t mind? That is, your wife wouldn’t mind taking in a foreigner, a Christian and a eunuch?”
“Oh no, no! She’s a good woman — as the psalmist says, ‘worth more than rubies.’ I’ve told her about you; she wants to meet you anyway.”
So that afternoon Philon took me to his home and introduced me to his family: his wife, who had the exotic Jewish name of Deborah; his fourteen-year-old daughter, who had the more ordinary Greek one of Theophila; and his two slaves, Harpokration and Apollonia. The slaves were both pagans; I discovered that this is fairly common among the Jews, whose Law requires them to free any Jewish slave after seven years. Philon had a son as well, but this young man was off studying the Jewish Law in Tiberias. Philon announced to them all that I was to lodge with them. They looked somewhat taken aback but did not protest, and Harpokration, a stout middle-aged man who was an Isis-worshiper, was sent to help me fetch my things.
Philon's house was near the new city wall, to the south of the Canopic Way. It was a narrow house, no more than two rooms wide, though it was three stories tall. My room was on the third floor, under the roof, and the window looked out on the house next door. So I stared through it at a wall of yellow-gray brick; if I twisted my head I could see into the neighbor’s window. When I first moved in she closed the shutters against me, but after a few weeks, and after I offered her a prescription for varicose veins, she just left the window open and her swollen veins on view, and occasionally swapped gossip, laughing at my modesty because I persisted in closing my shutters to her.
Lake Mareotis has an inlet that runs up toward the Gate of the Sun, and the Canopic Canal, which joins the lake to the Nile, runs into this. On hot, still days the stink of mud and harbor sewage was overpowering. Hippocrates says that stagnant water is very bad for health, and that those who drink it develop dropsy and diseases of the stomach. People in this quarter didn’t actually drink the water from the canal, and the lake water is brackish and undrinkable, but they still seemed to come down with fevers and infections more often than people living in other parts of the city. All in all, the house was quite different from Father’s house in Ephesus.
Still, it was in what was otherwise quite a pleasant corner of Alexandria. The old park dedicated to the god Pan was only a few blocks away, and there was a public fountain just on the corner with the Canopic Way. And I liked the house, and the family, very much. I paid Philon four solidi for rent for the year; this covered the water Apollonia fetched for me from the public fountain, and a brazier to heat the room in the winter, and even having my clothes washed with the rest of the household linen. I paid another two solidi toward buying food, and took most of my meals with the family.
By this time I had plenty of money, as Philon had also found someone to buy some of my jewelry — an old Jewish merchant who lived in what was left of the Delta quarter. He made no pretense of th
inking that the stones were glass, but asked me instead why, if they had been my mother’s, I wanted to sell them. “I can have no wife and no daughter to wear them,” I told him. “I thought my mother wouldn’t mind if I used them to pay for my education.” The old man nodded and muttered, and offered a price so good that I was almost ashamed to take it. And in fact I only sold a pair of earrings. They were of pearls and sapphires, and the old man paid me sixty-eight solidi for them — enough for me to live on for years, the way I was living in Alexandria.
It seemed to me that I’d done nothing all my life until I came to Alexandria, almost that I hadn’t existed before. I missed the comforts of home only at first, then soon forgot them in my happiness. I hadn’t believed it possible to be so happy. Every morning I woke up and thought, I’m in Alexandria! And it was as though my whole body began to sing.
I would get up before dawn — everyone does that in Egypt in the summer, because it’s so hot. I would wash by the early gray light that slid through the shutters, standing over a basin and splashing tepid water over myself while from the street below came the sound of carts and camel trains taking goods to the market, and of women shouting to each other as they fetched the day’s water from the public fountains. The slave Apollonia did that for our house; I’d usually meet her in the kitchen when I came downstairs. We’d wish each other a good day, and I’d take a roll of cumin bread from the kitchen and eat it on my way to the Temple. It would still be gray pre-dawn when I went out the door of Philon’s house, but the streets would be crowded. Respectable men and women hurried to work; schoolboys pelted down the street shouting to one another, or walked quietly beside one of their family’s slaves, escorted like little gentlemen to the day’s dose of Homer. On the Canopic Way the shops were opening: bakers piled fragrant loaves of fresh bread, baked during the cool of the night, on long tables before their shops; butchers set out young goats, legs tied, and wicker cages full of chickens onto the pavements; barbers whetted their razors and looked for customers; peasants from the countryside settled themselves by the side of the road, spreading the fresh fruit or green herbs that they’d brought to sell and calling to the passers-by in nasal, singsong voices. The covered litters and sedan chairs of the wealthy sailed above the heads of the common throng like ships on a rough sea. It was hard to remember that I had been accustomed to ride in one of those. I’d jostle my way down Soma Square, where birds sang in the ruins, and then pause to look back: if I timed it right, I’d see the red dawn flooding down the wide Canopic Way from the Gate of the Sun, sculpting the masses of the public buildings in heavy light, outlining figures of people and animals sharp and clear like figures in a painting. When I reached the Temple, the sun would have climbed up over the flat green delta, and from the gateway I could look down at the whole great city, a jewel-bright mass of color around the glittering sea.
The Beacon at Alexandria Page 9
