The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Then for the first time in his life Jehubabel became prophetic: “I believe that other Jews in other towns must realize that with the Greeks there can be no hope. I believe other Jews are holding discussions like this … tonight … now.” He stood silent, and his listeners could visualize the perplexity with which their fellow Jews were facing the great persecution. And after midnight they agreed that at the first sign of the next general search, those in that room, and their families, would flee Makor to make their lives in any way they might among the swamps and the hills; and as each man left, Jehubabel inspected him and asked, “Is it a pledge?” And it was so pledged.

  At the end of the week, when tension was high and no one knew where the next blow would fall, a welcome diversion came with the return from Ptolemais of Menelaus, accompanied by a team of wrestlers who had come by ship from Cyprus. Tarphon announced happily that he would sponsor a public exhibition between the Cypriots and the men of Makor, at which he would wrestle the second man of the Cyprus team. “Their champion will be met by our champion, Menelaus!” Proudly he placed his arm about the shoulder of his returning protégé, and the young athletes filed off to the gymnasium.

  That afternoon the gymnasium was thrown open, and the stone seats of the exhibition hall quickly filled with townspeople. Jews were forced to attend, it having been found that otherwise they would refuse to participate in what they held to be pagan rites, so in the front row, across from Melissa’s box, sat Jehubabel, his arms folded stubbornly across his fat stomach, his eyes fixed on the sanded floor of the arena. To have to watch one’s own son parade his nakedness was humiliating, but to attend on this particular day, when the fate of the Jewish community was in jeopardy, was abhorrent, and he would not try to hide his sense of insult.

  Trumpets sounded, and from a door leading to the dressing rooms the six young men of Cyprus marched out, naked, tanned from their life aboard boats, and confident. They had come from a major island of the Ptolemaic empire to show a small provincial village on the outskirts of the Seleucid empire how men from a cosmopolitan center conducted themselves, and they paraded a certain appealing arrogance. Melissa, looking at their superb bodies, thought what a handsome lot they were, and how surprised at least the first two were going to be when they struck young Menelaus and her husband.

  Another flurry of trumpets caused a different door to open, and from it marched the six local athletes, led by the red-haired gymnasiarch, manly and stalwart as he had been during his championship days in Athens. He was still a superb human being and the local audience applauded, but as the men lined up in the center of the arena a murmur began in the front rows, then climbed through the stone seats and at last erupted into cheering applause as the population saw the transformation that Menelaus had undergone. All evidence of his circumcision was gone, and since many knew how painful this operation was, cries of approval began to greet the young champion.

  “Menelaus! You are one of us!”

  An old man who had once been champion in Tyre shouted, “He is a Greek! He is a Greek!” And young women who saw with interest the transformation began to applaud and call the name, “Menelaus!”

  At first Jehubabel had refused to look at the entrance of the athletes, but when he heard his son’s name being shouted with approval he had to look up, and he saw his son standing not far from him, relaxed and marvelously handsome, his skin lightly rubbed with oil. At first Jehubabel could not understand why the people of Makor were applauding him, and then the baker Zattu, who might at any moment be flayed for having consecrated his son to YHWH, nudged Jehubabel and pointed to the result of the operation. The Jew’s eyes rested with astonishment upon the visible proof of the boy’s disgrace, and he was so appalled at what Menelaus had done that he pressed his hands over his face, and as the crowd called the boy’s name Jehubabel heard the words of YHWH himself saying as of old: “And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant …” and it seemed to him a commandment, and he leaped from his seat, grabbing the walking stick of a crippled Jew, and with this knotted club he struck his son with such force that the boy fell to the ground. With four crushing blows he beat his son about the head, shattering his skull. Then with a loud cry, “The pledge! The pledge!” he ran from the gymnasium and without halting dashed through the main gate, shouting, “The pledge! The pledge!”

  As planned, he headed for the swamp, and by nightfall a few Jews had joined him. Some of the leaders had managed to flee the gymnasium. Lesser ones, hearing the battlecry, had lowered themselves over the town walls with ropes, and there were undoubtedly others who had escaped but who had not yet joined up with the fugitives. Jehubabel’s wife had not received word in time, and she would be lashed to death, but Zattu, his wife Anat and their son had escaped.

  They were a sorry lot, a handful of unarmed Jews hiding in a swamp without food and led by a man who had just murdered his son. They could hear the heavy splattering through mud of Greek soldiers trying to seek them out, and they could catch words of the Koine as the Greeks passed by, but at dusk the sounds halted and they were left alone. When they were satisfied that their persecutors had gone, Jehubabel assembled them in prayer, and without recourse to the tedious proverbs of his commonplace life, said, “Adonai, this day we place our lives in your hands. We are nothing. We are a miserable, lost group of Jews with no food and no weapons. But we are convinced we shall prevail against the madman who dares to call himself God-Made-Manifest. Adonai, show us what we must do.”

  And this prayer brought to the huddled Jews such an honest realization of their plight that no man spoke, but they clung each to the other, and in the silence of the swamp they heard anew the splashing and whispered, “The soldiers have come back,” and Jehubabel prayed, “Adonai, if the Greeks capture us tonight, let us die in your arms.”

  The searchers came closer and might have passed on, except that the child of Zattu began to whimper, and this betrayed them, and the retreating sounds returned, bringing terror to the swamp, and in Hebrew a voice whispered, “Jehubabel! We know you are here. Present yourself, for we have been in the swamp for six days. All over Israel, Jews have risen against the oppressor. In Jerusalem. In Modi’im. In Beth-Horon.”

  No one spoke. It could be a trap planned by the clever Greeks, but with a desperation he had never known before Jehubabel wanted to believe. He wanted to believe that his pitiful remnant was not alone in that swamp. And then the voice came again: “Jehubabel, we know you are here. If you are zealous for the law, if you stand by the covenant, come out with us, for we are not a rabble. We are an army, obedient to Judah the Maccabee.”

  LEVEL

  IX

  King of the Jews

  Glass phial, hand-blown at Caesarea, 20 B.C.E., by a Roman artisan. Erroneously known as “a tear glass” and supposedly used for collecting tears at the death of a loved one, it was actually a phial for the storing of expensive perfumes, since the narrow opening delayed evaporation. Of clear glass when blown, now beautifully tinted by amber, green and aquamarine discolorations. Deposited at Makor in the spring of 4 B.C.E.

  I have always held the town of Makor to be one of the most charming Roman colonies in our Jewish kingdom, and I do not speak from any narrow provincialism, for I have worked in all the great cities of the east. It was my good fortune to supervise the adornment of Jericho and I spent three years at Antioch rebuilding that well-regarded street first laid down by Antiochus Epiphanes. I paved it with marble and roofed it with an arcade resting on colonnades so extensive that the eye could not follow them to their end. My happiest period came, of course, when I constructed Caesarea, that admirable city, and I also assumed responsibility for rebuilding the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, but frankly I never derived much pleasure from that assignment, for I am no more a Jew than the king himself and I cite the temple merely to prove that I was involved in some fairly important projects.

  If, therefo
re, I say that in my opinion our frontier town of Makor combines the best of Roman architecture with an exquisite physical setting commanding both the mountains and the sea, I am comparing my little town with the finest of Jericho and Antioch. I am even bold enough to discuss it in terms of Caesarea itself, and that’s saying much. When I rose, a few moments ago, in the cool dark hours before dawn on what will probably be my last day on earth, I looked out upon the beauty I had helped create here in Makor, and although I am not a sentimental man I cried involuntarily, “If we could only preserve this as it now stands! We’d have a memorial of the best that Rome accomplished.”

  From my prison in the Venus temple I can see in the darkness the white façades that have brought a kind of perfection to this forum. To my right stands the small Greek temple erected, I am told, to honor Antiochus, the benefactor of this area. It stands low against the earth, with six flawless Doric columns, reminding us of how much we owe the Greeks. In the Roman plan for Makor, I retained this gemlike structure as the focal point, but converted it to our Jupiter temple. Local citizens claim it stands upon a spot that was sacred for the past three thousand years, and this I am ready to believe, for the little building has an inherent poetry that could not have sprung entirely from the hands of an architect.

  Facing this Greek edifice, which I altered in no detail, stood the sprawling palace of the governors, which I rebuilt completely, adding a new façade with sixteen niches in which the king placed statues of the great men of Rome. When the impressive marble heads were put into position the Jews of Makor rioted, for statuary was an offense to their belief, and my wife Shelomith, who is a member of their religion, wept. But the king came, and against my judgment and my wife’s tearful pleading, assembled in the old gymnasium all Jewish dignitaries, and when he had them trapped, coldly sent his mercenaries among them with naked swords, and the Jews were hacked to death until the floor of the gymnasium was red and slippery.

  I remonstrated with the king, telling him, “This slaughter is not required,” but he replied, “I have learned how to control Jews, and you have not.” And he was right, for after that first killing our Jews of Makor behaved, even if those in the rest of the kingdom did not.

  When I was through with the old Greek palace no one could tell it had once been a Hellenistic construction, and from it the governors assigned by the king gave our region good government. In one sense it was foolish to speak of us as a Jewish town, for the kingdom of the Jews lay to the east and south; we were perched off to one side where the border of Phoenicia intruded, and we took our basic coloring from that region of the Roman empire. Like it we spoke Greek; we worshiped the Roman gods; we went to the Roman theater or to the arena in Ptolemais, where I had built a masterwork for gladiatorial combats. But structurally we were a part of the Jewish kingdom, and families like that of my wife’s played a respectable role in the town, even though the better jobs were held by Romans like me.

  The dimensions of the forum were thus determined by the temple of Jupiter to the south and the governor’s palace to the north. Along the western side I built a series of three small temples, excellent work the king said, the central one of which we dedicated to Venus. It was always my favorite, a small marble thing with six Ionic columns that seemed to float in the air. It is ironic that I should now be imprisoned in this temple, but if it is true that each man in this life builds his own prison, and inhabits it the way crawling fish inhabit shells along the beach at Caesarea, then I have built for myself an exquisite jail, exactly suited to the kind of man I have always wanted to be. In the dark hours of this dawn I am content to be immured within the Venus temple, for it is a work with no error. Its stones fit without mortar. Its columns are precisely related to the façade. The view from any point within the prison is exactly as I had wanted it to be, and if I must die this day I would rather die here than anywhere else in the kingdom. Nor do I know of another spot within the empire where any of the potential prisons I built would suit me better. The palaces at Antioch are too large. The graceful forum at Jericho is too impersonal. And the loveliness of Caesarea belonged always to the king and never to me. But this quiet spot, at the edge of empire, seems to have been planned from the beginning as a proper place for me to die.

  I look out from the Venus temple, past the half-sleeping guards, and see across the forum the building of which I am most proud. It runs almost the entire distance from the old Greek temple to the governor’s palace, a grave, heavy building containing neither preliminary columns nor niches for statuary. It is simply a mass of rock, perfectly proportioned, with straight and simple lines, ponderous perhaps but with that dignity I once saw when the legions of Julius Caesar were marching from Damascus to Egypt. They came forward not as ordinary soldiers but as a massive group having its own intention outside the men who comprised it; and from that day when I was in my early twenties, I tried to build into my structures the same sense of weight and dignity. In Jericho I did not succeed; the king interfered with all my plans and I made compromises whose ill effects could not be hidden. But when I decided to erect the great, solid building in Makor, the king was not at my elbow. He told me simply, “Build something to remind us of those first days when we fought together at Makor.” I am certain in my heart that the king wanted this excellent building to be named after him, but when it was finished he was apprehensive about his relationship with Rome—since he was not a Jew his kingship over the Jews depended solely upon the pleasure of Rome—so he imported a boatload of dignitaries from that imperial city and held a three-day feast during which he announced the name of my latest building. I see it now, as the sun lightens, a low, formidable work marching toward me like the leather-shielded legions of Julius Caesar, but it does not bear his name. It is called by the sycophantic name our king gave it that day—the Augusteana—and in it we have long worshiped Caesar Augustus as our god. This my wife Shelomith has refused to do, as have the other Jews, but no trouble grows out of their rejection: in our town Roman and Jew live as they do in our kingdom: in a kind of armed truce, each holding to his own gods and to his own beliefs, as do my wife and I. She loves Jerusalem and the Jewish god, and is never so happy as when I am commissioned to do additional work at the temple; I, as a Roman citizen, keep mostly to Caesarea and the worship of Caesar Augustus, and it seems to me that we Romans have the better of the bargain, for there is no city in the empire, not even Rome itself, more enticing than Caesarea, that remarkable city which we have built of white marble and the sweat of slaves.

  Between my jail and the Augusteana stands the Makor construction for which I alone am responsible: a double row of marble columns, tall, with heavy Corinthian bases and beautiful capitals on which nothing rests, for I placed these columns here only to add grace to the forum and to link the various buildings one to the other. Looking at them now, I think that my life has been a series of columns, marching along like days, and I have never had enough either of columns or of days. How many marble columns did we use at Caesarea? Five thousand? Ten thousand? They were the unifying beauty of that city, and they came to us in ship after ship sailing from Italy. One night the king and I walked through Caesarea, and he said to me in Greek, “Timon, you’ve made this a forest of marble. I shall send for a thousand more columns and we’ll build an esplanade to the theater.” In Antioch, in Ptolemais, in Jericho, how many columns have I erected—those silent marching men of marble who bring grace to the roads they walk?

  Our forum has only eight, extending in two lines from the Greek temple to the palace, but they summarize the thousands we used elsewhere, for without the king’s knowing it I inspected a hundred ships coming from Italy, seeking out the perfect pillars: this one near the Venus temple is fluted, and that pair by the Augusteana are purple. A purist, say, the Greek who built the first temple, would shy from the medley I have composed and would seek a single pure note repeated seven times. I wanted this summary of my life … how beautiful they are in their variety, how perfect in their proportions. From thre
e thousand columns I chose these eight, and had I three thousand more to choose from I could not improve upon this group. Stand there, my shimmering columns bearing nothing on your heads. If it is today that I must die …

  What difference does it really make whether the messengers come from Jericho today or six days from now? I am sixty-four years old, still lean as when I fought with the king, white-haired but with all my teeth. I have seen the legions of Julius Caesar. I accompanied Cleopatra for nine days. I knew the glory of Antioch intimately and I have worked hard. More fortunate than most, and infinitely more smiled upon than the king, I found early the one woman I was destined to love, and although there were periods when I discovered joy in the slaves of Jericho or with the graceful young eunuchs of Caesarea, I always returned to Shelomith. How fortunate I was, really. She lies now on her cot, sharing my prison, and even with her whitened hair she is as attractive to me as when I first saw her on the arm of the king. He, poor soul, has known ten wives and has grown to hate them all, while I have drifted along with Shelomith as a man drifts down a river in a small boat, heading always toward the sea of obliteration but finding always new pleasure in the scenery that comes upon the river banks and perpetual new delight in the companion who shares his boat. Shelomith is like a marble column who lives, and if we die this day my eight perfect columns in the forum of this little town will be her monument, for her spirit inhabits them already.

  If I go to the southwest corner of my prison I can see down the avenue one of my happiest creations. In my youth I used to play near the old Greek gymnasium, then a building fallen into sad disrepair, and I used to run along the cracked and crumbling walls imagining myself an athlete at the Olympiad and shivering in the mournful memories of the place: at the broken gateway stood two statues which I loved even before I had learned to appreciate the excellence of Greek carving. To the left stood Hercules as a wrestler and to the right was nimble-footed Hermes as a runner, while inside the faded halls stood the statue which impressed me with both its gigantic size and its ugliness. It was Zeus, now called Jupiter, as a discus thrower, but we were told by loyal Jews that it was really Antiochus Epiphanes, the benefactor whom the Jews had driven from the land a century before, but no part of that story did we then believe.