Alexandria

by Lindsey Davis

  Furious, Helena was about to speak, but our unborn baby gave a fearsome lurch. I knew it from her expression so put an arm around her kindly. (It had to be a boy; he was on my side.)

  'Bear up, dear girl... Do not fret, Philetus. She will be invisible and silent.' She would slam me with plenty of vocals once we were home, but Helena took the hint temporarily.

  Philetus enthroned himself like a particularly uninspiring magistrate. The others slunk into a circle of armchairs that were like the marble seats assigned to senators in amphitheatres. I managed to get one for Helena. A folding stool was fetched for me. Needless to say, it had unequal legs and kept trying to refold itself. As an informer I was used to this trick. It was better than being made to stay standing like a slave.

  'Didius Falco will observe proceedings.' Philetus pecked at the announcement spitefully. Any good nature he had ever possessed had wizened like a diseased plant. 'We must keep the Emperor's man happy!'

  While I was busy stabilising my stool, Helena Justina took notes. I still have her documents, headed by who was present. Nobody had introduced us - manners were not on the curriculum at this institution - but she concocted her own cast list:

  Philetus: Director of the Museion

  Philadelphion: Zoo Keeper

  Zenon: Astronomer

  Apollophanes: Head of Philosophy

  Nicanor: Law

  Timosthenes: Curator of Serapeion Library

  Normally there would have been two more: the Head of the Great Library and the Head of Medicine. Theon was detained at the undertaker's. Heras had said the medical post lay vacant for some reason. Helena scribbled queries as to why literature and mathematics were unrepresented; subsequently she arrowed all branches of literature, along with history and rhetoric, to the Head of Philosophy while the Astronomer had a remit for mathematics; I saw her scowl. For a start, she loathed the demotion of literature.

  One thing struck me immediately. None of the names were Roman, or even Egyptian. They were all Greek.

  As the morning wound on, Helena added opinions and pen-portraits. An 'L' meant Helena considered that man a candidate for the job at the Great Library. Those were the ones I watched most carefully. I had every faith in Helena's judgement on them. If Theon had been murdered, the shortlist would be my suspects.

  Philetus: MDF's bugbear. And mine! Priest and poltroon.

  Philadelphion: cheekboned charmer; ladies' man? No, just thinks he is. L

  Zenon: Never speaks. Dumb or deep?

  Apollophanes: Lofty. Director's toady. ?L

  Nicanor: Pompous. Thinks himself a cert for L - no chance.

  Timosthenes: Too reasonable to survive here. Should be L

  The agenda for the most part followed the pattern it must have had most days, which at least allowed those who hated meetings to nod:

  Director's report: potential VIP visits

  Faculty matters

  Budget

  Acquisitions: Librarians' reports (deferred from yesterday)

  Discipline: Nibytas (deferred)

  Progress on new Head of Medicine

  New item: appointment of Chief Librarian

  AOB: drama performance

  It was typical of the Director's unfitness for office that he thought it more important to panic about the possible appearance in two months' time of a deputation of town councillors, on a spree from some Greek island, than to tackle Theon's demise yesterday. His only expressed interest in that incident was wittering about a replacement. The Library could have been full of bloodthirsty assassins and all Philetus wanted to do was put the next victim in a position to be attacked. He was a psychopath's dream. I did consider the possibility he might himself be a psychopath. (Was he uninterested in Theon's fate because he already knew what had happened?) Philetus certainly failed to understand or relate to other people. But I decided he lacked precision, compressed energy and the cold desire to kill.

  Faculty matters were as boring as you think and went on twice as long as you imagine is possible. The Museion had no set teaching programme, which at least saved us endless wrangling between hidebound devotees of an Old Syllabus and thrusting exponents of some New; nor did they nitpick about removing the works of one old minor philosopher nobody had ever heard of in favour of another nonentity whose name would make the scholars groan. Philadelphion indulged in a ramble about how they ought to try to deter scholars' parents from approaching them full of unwise hopes. 'Better if they just send gifts!' commented Nicanor, the lawyer, cynically. The Director bemoaned the low standard of students' handwriting; he beefed that too many were so wealthy they were submitting theses that had been copied out for them by scribes - which increasingly meant that the scribes had really done the work. Philetus cared less that the students were cheating than that the scribes - mere slaves - were being permitted to acquire knowledge. Apollophanes boasted snidely that his scholars could not cheat because they had to declaim philosophy in front of him. 'If what they have to say is interesting enough to keep you awake!' scoffed Nicanor, implying with legal subtlety that it was not just the students in the philosophy faculty who were tedious.

  Timosthenes wanted to talk about hosting public lectures, but they all pooh-poohed that.

  The budget was dispatched briskly. The astronomer, Zenon, with his watching brief over mathematics, presented the accounts to the meeting, without any explanations. He just handed them round, then gathered them straight back in. Nobody else understood the figures. I tried to snaffle a set, but Zenon whipped all the copies away fast. I wondered if there was a reason. Helena wrote Money??? on her notes. After a moment she drew a circle around it for added emphasis.

  Acquisitions had to be deferred because Theon was dead. However, Timosthenes reported on book matters at the Serapeion, which we deduced was an overspill library; it sounded well run. He offered to cover Theon's responsibilities at the Great Library on an ad hoc basis, but Philetus was too suspicious to let him. It was clear from Timosthenes' understated way of speaking, and his grasp of his own report, that he would have been a good stand-in. Philetus therefore feared him as a threat to his own position; nor would he appoint anybody else. He preferred to leave everything in limbo. Apollophanes made some flattering comment that it was 'wise not to over-react, wise not to be precipitous' (these carefully balanced lumps of sycophancy helped Helena and me to identify Apollophanes as the Director's toady). Everyone else at the meeting slumped despondently. It looked habitual.

  They skipped discipline, so we never found out who Nibytas was or what he had done. Well, not that day.

  There was absolutely no need to have the Head of Medicine appointment on the agenda every day, other than to allow Philetus to fidget pointlessly over a matter that had already been resolved. Philadelphion stifled a yawn and Timosthenes let himself close his eyes briefly in despair. A candidate had been chosen and appointed. He was on his way by sea. I asked where he was coming from: Rome. That seemed a radical move, until I heard he had trained in Alexandria: Aedemon, who worked for the well-to-do in Rome. Amazingly, Helena and I knew him, though we kept quiet. Association with us could damn the man before he stepped ashore.

  When they reached the appointment of a new Librarian, everyone sat up. Waste of effort: Philetus only mumbled half-hearted regret over Theon. He made much of his own important role in composing a new shortlist for the post. He had no timescale. He had no finesse either. He enjoyed himself by saying, 'Some of you will be considered!' with a mischievous twinkle that made me feel ill. 'Others may be surprised to find themselves omitted.' He managed to suggest that those who slighted him need entertain no hopes.

  Philetus sent out a clear invitation to engage in gruesome flattery and to give him expensive dinners. It stank. Still, Helena reminded me that in most of public life, in Rome too, that is how things work.

  The discussion of the Librarian's post took less time than an endless wrangle under Any Other Business about some students wanting to produce a version of Aristophanes' play Lysist
rata. The Board's objections were not to its saucy language or its dangerous theme of ending war, nor even to its portrayal of women organising themselves and debating their own role in society. There was serious doubt about the wisdom of allowing the actors, all male, to dress in women's clothes. No one mentioned that the play turned on withholding sex as a way for the female characters to influence their husbands. I overcame some of my boredom by looking around the board and wondering which of them even knew what sex was.

  I might also have wondered whether any of these cultured beings was familiar with the play. But implying they might discuss a text they had not even read would of course be sacrilege.

  The meeting broke up. It achieved nothing tangible. I had the impression that this daily torture never did.

  Philetus sailed off to his room to be served mint tea. Apollophanes found an excuse to beg fawningly for a few words with his master. I was disappointed with this philosopher, who had seemed reasonable yesterday at the necropsy. That's how it goes. Decent men demean themselves in the hunt for career advancement. Apollophanes must have known that Philetus had an inferior mind and reprehensible ethics. Yet he sucked up to the man openly, in the desperate hope of the Librarian's job.

  All of the attendees seemed demoralised. Some looked shifty too. For a great and historic institution to be so badly run and so low in spirits was doleful.

  There was only one way for Helena and me to recover. We went to the zoo.

  XVI

  By arrangement we met Albia, who was being towed through the gardens by ]ulia and Favonia.

  'Aulus has gone to play as a student.'

  'Good for him!' enthused his sister, heaving Favonia on to one hip in the hope that close proximity would help with controlling her.

  'He's a tough boy,' I reassured Albia. I put Julia into a sophisticated wrestling hold. She made a good effort at the extrication move, but as she was still not quite five, I managed to win by sheer strength. 'Aulus won't let a little spot of education ruin him.'

  Helena flapped at me with her free wrist, bangles jingling. 'He's ferreting around on your behalf, I take it?'

  'Under cover with the scroll beetles. We can't all take our ease, staring at elephants.'

  The zoo did have elephants, a couple of them cute babies. There were aviaries and insect houses. They had Barbary lions, leopards, a hippopotamus, antelopes, giraffes, chimpanzees - 'He's got a horrible bottom!' - and, most marvellous of all, an absolutely enormous, highly pampered crocodile. Albia was honestly entranced by everything. My infants pretended to be offhand throughout, though the marked improvement in their behaviour as they stared at the animals told its own story. Julia's favourite was the smallest baby elephant, who tossed grass with a bad aim and trumpeted. Favonia lost her heart to the crocodile. 'I hope it doesn't indicate her future choice in men,' murmured Helena. 'He must be thirty feet long! Favonia, if he munched you, it would just be like eating a sweetie for him.'

  We were still stuck looking down into the crocodile pit, unable to tear our lovelorn Favonia away, when the Zoo Keeper came by. 'His name is Sobek,' he told my daughter gravely. 'A god's name.'

  'Will he eat me?' Favonia demanded, then shouted the answer to her own question, 'No!'

  Setting down the child, Helena murmured, 'Only two, and already distrusting everything her mother tells her!'

  Philadelphion went into an educational lecture. 'We try to make him eat only fish and meat. People bring him cake, but that is bad for him. He is fifty years old and we want him to live healthily to a hundred.'

  Noting his patience, Helena asked, 'Do you have a family?'

  'Back home in my village. Two sons.' So he had a Greek name, but was not Greek. Had he changed it for professional reasons? Uncle Fulvius had told me that the different nationalities lived peaceably together, most of the time, but at the Museion it was clear which culture ruled.

  'Your wife looks after them?' It sounded like chit-chat, but Helena was probing. Philadelphion duly nodded.

  Favonia and Julia both tried to climb the fence on the edge of the crocodile's deep pit while we urgently instructed them to get down. 'Will Sobek escape?' squealed Julia. She must have noticed that inside the fence the zoo staff had a long access ramp to the deep pit, protected by metal gates.

  'No, no,' Philadelphion assured us. As my two excitable girlies bounced about on the fence, he helped me lift them down. 'There are two gates between Sobek and the outside. Only I and members of my staff have keys.'

  Helena told him how we had once met a traveller who told us about the crocodile at Heliopolis, a tame beast in a temple, which was covered with jewels and regularly fed sweetmeats by pilgrims until he had become so fat he could hardly waddle.

  'Also called Sobek,' Philadelphion replied. 'But we keep ours in more natural conditions for the purposes of science.' He wooed the girls' attention with facts about how fast the gigantic crocodile could run, what good mothers the females were, how rapidly the babies grew once they broke out of their eggs and how Sobek knew his wild companions lived on the shores of Lake Mareotis.' He yearns for them. Crocodiles are sociable. They live and hunt together in large groups. They will co-operate to herd fishes against the shore so they can catch them -'

  'Will he run back to the lake if anybody lets him out?'

  'No one will be so silly as to let him out,' Helena told Julia.

  In his pit, Sobek lay down on his belly with his powerful legs crouching, as he basked with his snout up at right angles against a wall. His body was in shades of grey, his underbelly yellower; his great powerful tail had darker bands around it. All were covered with scaly hide, patterned in rectangles, with crenulations running along his spine and tail. He looked as if he knew what we were thinking.

  Philadelphion took us into his office, where they had babies, a couple of months old, which had been snatched as eggs while their scaly mother left their nest to cool off. The children were thrilled by the little squeaking monsters. The smiling staff, Chaereas and Chaeteas from the necropsy yesterday, supervised very closely. 'Even this young they could bite you badly. Their jaws are tremendously powerful,' warned Philadelphion. Julia snatched her arm, with its colourful bead bracelets, back close to her body; Favonia waved a hand at the little snappers, daring them to grab her. 'Yet crocodiles have weak jaw muscles in some ways. They cannot chew; only rip off pieces of meat then swallow lumps whole. A man can sit astride even a large one like Sobek, and hold his mouth closed from behind. But a Nile crocodile is extremely strong; he would writhe and twist his body, rolling over and over again, to throw the man off or drag him under water and drown him.'

  'Then would he eat the man?'

  'He might try to, Julia.'

  Two little human jaws dropped, showing a variety of white baby teeth.

  Philadelphion suggested that Chaereas and Chaeteas who were, as he drily remarked, good with young animals, should look after the girls so he and I could talk. Whether he intended to include Helena was uncertain, though not to her. She came to play with the boys.

  Albia stayed behind to practise her Greek on the staff. She probably thought they were gentle, helpful, harmless fellows. Unlike me, she had not seen Chaereas and Chaeteas hauling on the dead Librarian's dead flesh to expose his ribcage yesterday.

  Mint tea was served. I jumped straight in and asked Philadelphion if he had had any success with identifying the leaves Theon ate.

  'I consulted a botanist, Falco. His tentative identification is oleander.'

  'Poisonous?'

  'Very'

  Helena Justina sat up. 'Marcus, the garlands!' She explained to Philadelphion: 'Our host, Cassius, had special garlands made for the dinner party; they had oleander wound in them.' She must have noticed the varieties; I can't say I did at the time.

  Philadelphion raised his eyebrows in an elegant gesture. 'My colleague told me it would certainly be possible to murder someone with this plant, though you would somehow have to persuade them to ingest it. He thought the taste
would be very bitter.'

  'Try it?'

  'Not brave enough! Taken in sufficient quantities - not unmanageable amounts - it acts within an hour. It works well. I am told it is a favourite choice of suicides.'

  'Was Theon's dinner garland found with his body?' I asked.

  Philadelphion shook his head. 'Perhaps - but not sent to the necropsy.'

  'Someone cleaned up Theon's room and may have thrown it out. Know anything about that?' Again he signalled a negative.

  I could see one flaw. Neither Theon, if he felt despairing, nor a potential murderer could have known in advance what foliage would be in our garlands. Cassius had made his selection only the afternoon before the dinner. 'Would Theon know anything about plants? Would he recognise these leaves or be aware of their toxicity?'

  'He could have looked them up,' Helena pointed out. 'After all, Marcus, the man did work in the world's most comprehensive library!'