The Roman sotk-2

by Mika Waltari

  Sighing with relief, Hierex became voluble.

  “Blessed be all the gods,” he said, “both known and unknown, but most of all your own Goddess of Fortune. I had been very worried about you and was afraid your reason was going. It’s neither natural nor right that a youngster of your age and rank should see the world through sad eyes and eat nothing but cabbage and drink nothing but water. So it was as if a burden had fallen from my back when you came back stinking of wine and vomit and I realized that you had thrown in your lot with ordinary men.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve brought disgrace on myself all over Corinth,” I said bitterly. “I dimly remember that I danced a Greek goat dance with the legionaries. When Proconsul Gallio gets to hear of this, I’m certain he’ll send me straight back to Rome to be a writer or a lawyer.”

  Hierex forced me to go out and walk with him in the wide streets of the city, telling me the exercise would do me good. We saw the sights of Corinth together, the ancient sternpost of the Argonauts’ ship in the temple of Neptune, the Pegasus spring and the hoof mark in the rock beside it. Hierex tried to lure me up to the Venus temple on the mountain, but I still had enough sense left to refuse.

  Instead we looked at the wonder of Corinth, a waxed wooden track on which quite large ships could be hauled by slaves from Cenchreae to Lycaea and back. One would have thought this would have needed hordes of slaves and endless whiplashes, but the Greek shipbuilders, with the help of windlasses and cogs, had arranged it all so skillfully that the ships slid along the track as if by themselves. A seaman who noticed our interest swore on the Nereids that with a good wind behind them, it was sufficient just to hoist the sails. I felt better afterwards, my troubles fading, as Hierex told me about his life and several times made me laugh.

  But I still felt embarrassed when I went back to the barracks the next day. Fortunately everything had been cleared up after the orgy, the men on guard were smartly in their places and the usual daily routine in force. Rubrius summoned me and reproached me tactfully.

  “You are still young and inexperienced,” he said. “There was no valid reason for inciting these old warriors to fight each other and brawl drunkenly all night. I hope it will be the last time. Try not to give free rein to the Roman crudeness in your nature, and adapt yourself as best you can to Corinth’s more refined customs.”

  The senior centurion took me, as he had promised, to inspect the men on the cohort rolls who were tradesmen in the city. They were smiths, tanners, weavers and potters, but many had simply used their Roman citizenship, earned by long service, and married into wealthy tradesmen’s families, and acquiring from them privileges which assured themselves an easy life of abundance. Their equipment had rat-gnawed straps, the points of their lances were rusty and their shields had not been polished within living memory. Some of them could not even find their equipment.

  At every place they offered us wine and food, even silver pieces. One legionary, who had become a perfume dealer and could not find his shield, tried to push me into a room with a girl. When I remonstrated with him, he said bitterly, “All right, you can turn on the screws then. But we already pay so much to Rubrius for the right to practice a free trade that I at least haven’t many drachmas to put into your purse.”

  When I realized what he was saying, I hurriedly assured him that I had certainly not come to exact bribes but just to see, as was my duty, that all the men on the rolls were equipped and took care of their weapons. The perfume dealer calmed down and promised to buy a new shield at the flea market as soon as he had time. He also promised to join in the exercises if I wanted him to, and said that a little physical exercise would do him good, because in his line of business he was always sitting still and he was getting much too fat.

  I saw that it would be wisest if I did not look too deeply into Commantler Rubrius’ affairs, especially as his sister was the most important priestess in Rome. The senior centurion and I made out a program which at least appeared to give the men something to do. After inspecting the traditional guard posts, we agreed the guards should be relieved by the sun and the water clock. The guard would no longer be allowed to lie or sit and must be fully equipped. I could not really see what a double guard at the city gates was really guarding, but the centurion said that these places had been guarded for a hundred years and so could not be left without. It would have offended the Corinthians, for it was they who through taxation maintained the Roman garrison in their city.

  After a while, I considered I had carried out my tribune’s duties in Corinth as best I could. The legionaries had overcome their initial dislike for me and now greeted me cheerfully. On the Proconsul’s court day, I reported to him in my toga. A Greek clerk went through the cases beforehand and Gallio yawningly ordered his judge’s throne to be carried out to the front of the building.

  Gallio proved himself to be a mild and fair judge. He asked us our views, joked occasionally, questioned the witnesses carefully himself and postponed every case he thought had not been sufficiently explained by the lawyers’ speeches and the witnesses. He refused to pronounce judgment on what he thought were too trivial cases, but demantled that both parties should settle the matter between them or he would line each of them for lack of respect for the court. After the session, he invited me to a good meal and gave me some advice onCorinthian bronzes, which at that time it was fashionable to collect in Home.

  When I returned to the inn, despite everything depressed by Gallio’s sober wisdom and the ordinariness of the court, Hierex had a suggestion to make.

  “You can undoubtedly afford to live as you like,” he said. “But to live for a whole year in an inn is downright waste..Corinth is a prosperous city. It would be wisest to put your money into a house of your own and let me help to make you comfortable there. If you’ve not enough money here, as a Roman official you would certainly get as much credit as you have the nerve to ask for.”

  “Houses always need repairing,” I replied, “and servants are always quarreling. As a house owner I’d have to pay taxes to the city. Why should I give myself all those worries? It’s simpler to move to a cheaper inn if I think they’re fleecing me here.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” said Hierex; “to look after your worries as best I can. Just give me the authority and I’ll arrange things for the best. The only thing you need do is put your name to a document from the temple of Mercury. Later on you’ll have to return hospitality with hospitality. Think what you’d have to pay at an inn, for instance, when you invite six people to a festive meal with wine. In your own house, I’d do the marketing myself, get wines at wholesale prices and advise your cook. And you wouldn’t have to live like this, when any stranger knows it every time you make water or blow your nose.”

  There was a great deal of good sense in his suggestion, and several days later I found myself the owner of quite a large two-story house with a garden. The reception room had a lovely mosaic floor and there were more inner rooms than I needed. I noticed that I also had a cook and a Greek doorkeeper. The house was furnished with comfortable old furniture, so nothing looked new and brash. Even a pair of Greek household gods stood in their niches each side of the altar, greasy and sooty with age, Hierex had also bought some ancestral wax masks at an auction, but I said I did not want someone else’s ancestors.

  Rubrius, the senior centurion, and Gallio’s Greek lawyer were my first guests. Hierex appointed a Greek sage to talk to the guests and a skillful dancing-girl with a flute player for lighter entertainment. The food was excellent. My guests left me at midnight in a state of civilized inebriation. Later I found out that they had had themselves taken straight to the nearest brothel, for from there they had a bill sent to me to teach me Corinthian customs. I was unmarried, so I should have acquired a woman guest from the Temple mountain for each of my guests. But I did not want to be part of such customs.

  Anyhow, I do not know what would have happened, because Hierex did his best, quietly and gradually, to train me to be th
e kind of master he wished to have. But it was court day again. Gallio, still with a hangover from the previous night, had hardly sat down and adjusted his toga properly when a crowd of Jews rushed up to him, dragging with diem two men who were also Jews. In the Jewish way, they all shouted at once until Gallio, after smiling for a while, said sharply that one of them should speak for the rest. After they had consulted together to decide on the charge, their leader stepped forward.

  “This man,” he said, “is misleading people into worshiping God in an unlawful manner.”

  I was depressed and frightened to find that even here, and as a member of the court too, I was to be involved in the quarrels of the Jews. I looked carefully at the accused man. He was nearly bald, his eyes burning and his ears large. He stood proudly upright in his worn goatskin cloak.

  As if in a dream I remembered I had seen him many years ago in my father’s house in Antioch. I was even more frightened then, for in Antioch he had caused so much trouble that the Jews who recognized Christ had preferred to send him away to sow dissension among Jews elsewhere.

  The man had already opened his mouth to begin his defense, but Gallio, guessing what was coming, signaled to him to be quiet and turned to the Jews.

  “If this were a matter of a crime or an evil deed, then I might have listened to you with patience,” he said. “But if you are disagreeing on your teaching and its name and your own laws, then those are your own troubles. I do not wish to sit in judgment on them.”

  He ordered the Jews to move away and turned to us.

  “If I gave the Jews my little finger,” he explained, “I should never hear the end of it.”

  But he did not rid himself of them quite so lightly as that. After the court session he again invited us to a meal, but he was distrait and sunk in thought. Afterwards he took me to one side.

  “I know that man the Jews wished to accuse,” he said confidentially. “He has lived in Corinth for a year and earns his living honesdy as a tentmaker. His name is Paul. They say he has changed his name to hide his past and taken a new name from a former governor of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus. His teaching made a deep impression on Sergius in his day and Sergius is by no means simple, although he did try predicting by the stars and letting a magician live with him. So Paul is not an insignificant man. I thought his piercing eyes looked right through me into another world as he stood before me so fearlessly.”

  “He’s the worst troublemaker among the Jews,” I said without thinking. “In Antioch in my childhood, he tried to drag my good father into the intrigues of the Jews.”

  “You must have been much too young at the time to understand his teachings,” Gallio remarked considerately. “Before he came to Corinth, he is said to have preached in the market in Athens. The Athenians took the trouble to listen to him and even said he might do so again. You can hardly be wiser than they.

  “In fact,” he went on, “I’d very much like to ask him here in secret sometime to find out properly about his teaching. But that might give rise to gossip and offend the rich Jews of Corinth. I have to keep myself strictly impartial. As far as I can make out, he has founded some kind of synagogue of his own alongside the Jewish synagogue, and he is pleasingly different from them in that he instructs anyone who cares to come, and also prefers Greeks to Jews.”

  Gallio had obviously thought a great deal on these matters for he continued to speak of them.

  “In Rome I did not believe that foolish story about the runaway slave called Christus,” he said. “We live in a time when all the ground beneath our thoughts is giving way. I cannot talk about the gods. In their traditional forms, they are only images which can amuse simple souls. But the teachers of wisdom cannot make man good or give him peace of mind either. We’ve seen this in the Stoics and the Epicureans. Perhaps this wretched Jew has really found some divine secret. Why else should his teaching provoke so much quarreling, hatred and envy among the Jews?”

  I need hardly repeat any more of Gallio’s broodings. But finally he gave me an order.

  “Go and find out about that man’s teaching, Minutus,” he said. “You’ve the best qualifications to do so, as you’ve known him since your childhood in Antioch. And also you are in general acquainted with the Jehovah of the Jews and their laws and customs. Your father is said to have been very successful in Antioch as a mediator between the Jews and the city council.”

  I seemed to have fallen into a trap and it was useless to object, for Gallio turned a deaf ear to all my protests.

  “You must overcome your prejudices,” he said. “You must be honest if you are to seek the truth, insofar as your duty permits you. You’ve plenty of time. There are worse ways of passing it than studying the wisdom of this Jewish savior of the world.”

  “But what if he gets me into his power with his magic?” I asked bitterly.

  But Gallio did not even consider my question worth answering.

  An order is an order. I had to carry it out to the best of my ability. It might be quite important to Gallio to be absolutely clear on what such a dangerous and influential rabble rouser preached. On the day of Saturn, I dressed in simple Greek clothes, found the Jews’ synagogue and went into the building next door. It was not a real synagogue but an inoffensive cloth dealer’s house which he had given up to the assembly Paul had founded.

  The reception room on the upper floor was full of simple people waiting with joyful expectation in their eyes. They greeted each other in a friendly way and I too was welcomed and no one asked my name. Most of them were craftsmen, small traders or trusted slaves, but there were also some old women wearing silver ornaments. Judging by their clothes, only a few of them were Jews.

  Paul arrived with several disciples. He was greeted with cries of homage as a messenger of the true God, and some women wept with joy when they saw him. He spoke in a loud, piercing voice and was so carried away with the conviction of his own words that it was like a hot wind blowing through the sweating crowd of listeners.

  His voice alone pierced me to the marrow. I tried to listen attentively and make some notes on a wax tablet, for at the beginning he referred to the Jewish holy scripts, showing by quoting from them that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified in Jerusalem, in fact was the Messiah or Christus the prophets had predicted.

  It was interesting that he quite openly referred to his own past. He was undoubtedly a gifted man, for he said he had studied in the renowned philosophy school in his home town, Tarsus, and later in Jerusalem with famous teachers. In his youth he had soon been elected to the highest Jewish council. He said that he had been a passionate adherent to the laws, and a persecutor of the disciples of Jesus. He had even guarded the clothes of the stoners and in that way taken part in the first illegal execution of a member of the assembly of the poor. He had hunted, bound and dragged to court several followers of the new way and finally at his own request had been given authority to arrest the adherents of Nazareth who had fled from persecution to Damascus.

  But on the way to Damascus he had seen such an unearthly light that he had been blinded. Jesus himself had appeared to him, and since then he had changed. In Damascus, a man who had acknowledged Jesus, a certain Ananias, had laid his hands on him and given him back his sight, for Jesus of Nazareth wished to show him how much he must suffer to proclaim the name of Christ.

  And suffered he had. Many a time he had been flogged. Once he had been nearly stoned to death. He bore scars of Christ on his body, he said. All this the listeners had heard many times before, but they listened just as attentively and occasionally cried out with joy.

  Paul told them to look around and with their own eyes confirm that there were not many wise, powerful or important people among them. This he considered showed that God had chosen what on earth is simple and despised, to shame the wise men. God chose the foolish and the weak instead of the wise men, for he transformed the wisdom of the world into foolishness.

  He also spoke on the searching of the spirit and they who run races
. And he talked of love, more impressively, I thought, than I have ever heard anyone else speak. Man should love his neighbor as himself, yes, to the extent that whatever he did for the good of another without love was of no benefit to him. He maintained explicitly that even if a person distributed all his possessions for the good of the poor and gave his own body for burning without feeling real love, then he was still nothing.

  This pronouncement pierced my mind to the depths. Gallio too had said that wisdom alone did not make man good. I began to brood on this and no longer listened carefully to his words which went over my head like the rustling of a stormy wind. He was undoubtedly talking in a state of ecstasy and went from one subject to another as the spirit put the words into his mouth. But he seemed to know what he was saying. In this he was different from the Christians I had met in Rome where one said one thing and another another. Everything I had heard before was as child’s prattle compared to Paul’s powerful eloquence.

  I tried to separate the main points in his teaching and I noted down several matters to dispute with him later in the Greek way. But it was difficult, for he whirled from one thing to another as if home by a wind. Even if within me I disagreed with him, I had to admit he was not an insignificant man.

  Finally everyone who was not baptized was dismissed, thus leaving his inner circle. Some people begged Paul to baptize them and lay his hands on their heads, but he refused firmly and told them to be baptized by their own teachers who had been given the gift of grace to do so. When he had first come to Corinth, he had made the mistake of baptizing some people, but had then heard them boasting that they had been baptized in the name of Paul and at the same time had shared in his spirit. Such twisted teaching he had no wish to spread, for he knew himself to be nothing.

  Sunk in my thoughts, I walked home and shut myself in my room. Naturally I did not believe what Paul had said. In fact I thought out how I could argue against him. But as a person and a human being, he aroused my interest. I was forced to admit that he must have experienced something inexplicable, as this experience had so completely changed his life.