The Road to Bithynia: A Novel of Luke, the Beloved Physician

by Frank G. Slaughter

  “Your way lies to the west, Luke,” Saul corrected gently. “Mine goes eastward, into the desert.”

  “But you will starve—or die of thirst.”

  “Jesus taught His disciples to carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes. Should I carry more?” Saul got to his feet. “We should be on the road again; I want to reach the fork by sunrise.”

  Together they removed the basket from the mule and hid it in the bushes that grew along the bank of the creek. Luke took off the rough cloak he had been wearing over his toga and washed as much of the walnut stain from his face as he could in the water of the brook. While Saul filled the waterskin Luke bathed his feet, but when he tried to replace his sandals, the blisters had swollen so that he could not tie the thongs, and the thought of walking on that hard road again made him shudder.

  Saul saw the blisters and came over from where he was fixing the waterskin to the mule’s harness. “You cannot walk with those blisters, Luke,” he said concernedly. “I will lead the animal and you can ride.”

  Luke got on the mule without protest, for he could not have hobbled much farther on his wounded feet. Thus they left in quite the reverse order from that in which they had arrived, with Saul, formerly the hunted one, now unquestionably the leader of the small caravan.

  The sun was already several hours high when the road divided before them at the top of a hill. Looking back, Luke could just make out the white pattern of the city of Damascus like a strange geometric cloud on the horizon. A pillar of dust much nearer to them marked the progress of Silvanus and the rest of the party.

  Over Luke’s protests that he was not hungry and that Saul should keep the food for himself, the older man divided it into two parts, and they ate and drank. Luke insisted that Saul take the mule, however, for there would be plenty of them with the approaching party, and Saul could use the animal during his journey into the desert to carry water for the two of them. Besides, it was in Luke’s mind that Saul could always sell the mule and thus be assured of food and drink. Finally the food was finished and Saul took up the lead rope of the mule.

  “Come with us to Antioch, and Theophilus will see that you are protected,” Luke urged once more. “Then you can go with me to Tarsus when I travel to Pergamum.”

  “In times of crisis a man must be alone to think, Luke. It is better this way.”

  “But this is not a crisis. You have already joined the Company of the Fish.”

  Saul shook his head. “I am not yet worthy to join that noble company, Luke. Most of them walked and talked with Jesus, but I have heard His voice only once from the heavens.”

  Luke was beginning to understand now what was troubling Saul. Intelligent and well educated, he would know that others, too, had heard what they thought were voices speaking to them alone. Even Socrates admitted such in his experience. A man of Saul’s intelligence would not be content with what had happened to him on the road to Damascus; he must ponder upon it and the things which had preceded that dramatic moment. Perhaps he also had some warning through his experience in Damascus—his being set upon in the synagogues and the plot to take him back to Jerusalem in chains—of what the future might hold for him if he kept on in the way he had chosen so recently. A man would be a fool to undertake such a course of action with the obvious hardships and risks it promised without considering in advance where such a path would take him. And as Saul had said, alone in the desert with his thoughts, there would be a time of crisis indeed, a time when he must decide once and for all to continue traveling what was obviously going to be a rocky road indeed.

  Moved by an impulse he could not explain, Luke took the scroll from his toga. “Here are the words of Jesus Himself,” he said. “Perhaps they can help you.”

  Saul took the scroll in his hands. “Was it for this that Stephen lay down his life?” he asked wonderingly.

  “Yes. He gave it to me as he lay dying.”

  Tenderly Saul touched the dark bloodstains upon the parchment and the jagged tears made by the stones. Then with trembling fingers he put the scroll carefully inside his robe and turned to Luke, his eyes shining, his face transfigured.

  “Now I know I am obeying God’s will,” he said confidently. “And I think I understand why you and I and the words of Jesus have come together here on this hill.” He put his hands upon Luke’s shoulders. “It must be part of God’s plan, Luke. There is no other answer.” Then, dropping his hands, he picked up the lead rope and, followed by the patient animal, moved down the road to the east. Some fifty paces away Saul turned, still smiling, and called joyously, “Farewell, Luke, my brother. Be sure it is God’s will that our paths shall cross again.”

  Luke watched Saul and the mule descend the hill and move out across the dusty plain to the east toward the desert. And as he stood there, something deep inside him urged that he forsake the comfort and luxury of Theophilus’s home in Antioch, his chosen profession, even his promise to Mariamne to return, and give up everything that lay before him to follow the man whose figure was steadily growing smaller as the distance between them widened. So strong was the impulse that Luke actually struggled to his feet and took a few steps along the road Saul had taken. But the pain from blisters made him cry out in agony and stumble, so that he tripped and fell. Finally, weeping with frustration and impotence, he pushed himself up on hands and knees and crawled back to the rock beside the road to Antioch upon which he had been sitting.

  It was thus that Silvanus found him several hours later, staring at two black dots that were barely visible now among the sands to the east, all that could be seen of Saul of Tarsus.

  Book Two: The Miracle

  He sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.

  (Luke 9:2)

  I

  Night had fallen over the Temple of Asklepios in Pergamum. Before the door of the abaton, the doubly sacred inner temple, torches lighted the statue of the divine Asklepios with the sacred serpents twined about the staff in his hand. In the outer court the bubbling of water from the sacred springs sounded a muted obbligato to the voices of the night, and the soft tone of lute, lyre, and cymbal floated from the quarters of the priestly physicians, where a banquet was in progress.

  The multitude of the sick who thronged the outer court had already received their evening meal of gruel, fruit from the temple orchards, and goblets of the bitter mineral waters from the sacred springs whose purgative action, scoffers maintained, was more beneficial than the ministrations of the God of Medicine. Some had finished the prescribed three days of preparatory dieting and purging and tomorrow would be admitted to the abaton at sunset, for the sacred sleep called incubatio. Others, newly arrived at the temple, discussed their sicknesses with the more experienced as they bathed in the pools into which the mineral springs emptied, before placing their offerings upon the altar of the god. Strategically placed in the outer court, flaming torches illumined votive tablets erected in honor of the divine Asklepios by grateful worshipers who had been cured at the shrine:

  Julian [one of them stated], being in a hopeless state on account of a spilling of blood, was directed by the god to take pine seeds from the altar, mix them with honey, and eat them during three days. He recovered and returned thanks openly before the people.

  Still another tablet gave pointed notice that the god, however divine, worked for profit to himself, as well as for the good of those who did him homage:

  A certain Hermo of Pasos was cured by the god from blindness. He, however, made the mistake of refusing to pay the honorarium to the sanctuary. The god promptly smote him again with blindness as a punitive measure for the oversight. When he returned again and paid, he slept once more in the temples and the financially satisfied god once again healed him.

  The great hostel just outside the gates of the temple grounds was filled with patients who could not yet be admitted to the healing shrine. Not many of the poor were to be found
in the luxurious hostel; they were forced to fare as best they could while waiting for admission, sleeping under the temple walls at one of the meaner inns which catered to the poor, or even in stables. In the hostel gouty silversmiths from Ephesus, rich from trade in the statues of Artemis for which their guild was famous, argued with fat merchants from Tarsus and beyond the Cilician Gates, through which came the rich caravans from the Far East, bringing spices for the sophisticated palates of the rich in Antioch, Ephesus, Rome, and Alexandria, exotic cloth for the gowns of their wives and mistresses, and shining steel swords and cutlery from the blacksmiths of Damascus. A priest of Diana, fat and jaded from too much venery, belched reflectively after a meal of rich viands which tomorrow would be denied him once he entered the temple and placed himself in the hands of the priestly physicians. And to one side a Roman judge, hoping the water and the god could cure his gouty toe, dined in splendid isolation and haughty silence, his striped toga of nobility drawn tightly against his body lest the merchants passing his bench soil the fabric with greasy fingers.

  There was much going and coming, for tonight a performance was being given in the theater which formed a part of the temple grounds. Also under the direction of the priests of Asklepios, and contributing no little to the coffers of the god, were a stadium for the games, a gymnasium, vast kitchens from which special foods were sold, and shallow stone lakes where the waters from the springs were allowed to evaporate, after which the bitter salts which gave them their mineral action were scraped up and sold in packages to those who would continue to take the waters in their homes.

  Tonight Mnesilochus, the favorite actor of the Ephesian theater, had brought his troupe of players to present the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes, drollest and most facile of all the plays by that inimitable writer of comic drama. No tragedies were presented in the theaters of Asklepios, for the thoughts of those who sought healing of the god must never be disturbed by the contemplation of death. The priests boasted that none ever died in the Temples of Asklepios, but they said nothing of those who, admitted by some mischance to the shrine while nearing death, were summarily ejected by order of the chief priest, to die unattended by any medical aid outside the walls.

  Not even Mnesilochus would have dared to present here the Plutus of Aristophanes, that whimsical allegory satirizing the activities of the Asklepian deity and his priests, in which Plutus, god of riches, regained his sight under the healing tongues of the divine serpents. After four hundred years Greeks and sophisticates the world over still laughed as the barbed shafts pricked the bloated priests of Asklepios and ridiculed their pretensions to divine power. Nor did the followers of Asklepios swear the Oath of Hippocrates, for that prince of physicians had eschewed priestly rites to allege that nature, aided by the physician, healed disease, rather than through any mystic intervention by the God of Healing, who some irreverent Greeks vowed did not even exist.

  II

  In the darkened abaton, the sick chosen for communion tonight with the god were lying on low couches. Most of them dozed quietly in the healing stupor of the incubatio, or “temple sleep,” a state of semiconsciousness induced by the mystic laying on of hands by the temple priests, plus the warning that only in such a state would the god reveal to them the measures necessary for their cure. Aiding in the production of the divine stupor was a drink administered to each of the sick as he entered the abaton, a shrewdly prepared decoction of poppy leaves, mandragora, and the East Indian drug, hashish, much prized by libertines in those lands and by the more decadent Roman nobility for its power to produce fantastic dreams. Wax tapers burned before the small altars along the walls, where the patients had placed their offerings in the hope of luring the god to visit them personally in their dreams.

  At the back of the room a door opened gently and an odd wailing note filled the inner temple, a monotonous trilling repeated in endless melody until the very droning became a palpable force, oppressing the breathing. In the gloom that filled the abaton the forms of the two men moving through it were barely distinguishable. Tall, with shaven heads, they wore flowing white robes, and their faces were whitened with clay. Small snakes extended their heads from the full sleeves of the white-robed acolytes, giving them the strange appearance of having serpents for arms.

  Through the room the acolytes moved on their nightly mission, stopping to lift an eyelid or prod an irregular snorer, until they were satisfied that all who lay there were already in the divine stupor. Then they returned to the door through which they had come and knelt beside it, their heads bent, their arms and the writhing snakes extended in a gesture of supplication.

  Now a startling figure emerged from the door, surely the divine Asklepios himself! He was unnaturally tall, the effect produced by a high mask that covered his head and hid the face which, according to tradition, no man might see upon pain of death. The features of the mask were noble, a handsome man with curling hair and a short beard arranged in ringlets after the manner of the Olympian gods, but the eyes of the god behind the mask were brown and quite human.

  A strange procession began to move among the beds, with the god in the lead. Beside him was a tall man with a sheaf of wax-covered tablets under his arm and a slave bearing many boxes and jars of medicines in a basket. The slave carried also a burning taper, and on top of the basket containing the medicines lay a large emerald. The tall man was the apothecary-scribe, an important member of the god’s retinue, for not only did he keep the records of the hundreds of patients who passed through the abaton every month, but he also compounded the medicines prescribed by the god and dispensed them to the sick.

  Behind the apothecary-scribe walked the acolytes, and after them another slave bearing a large empty sack suspended from his belt. The procession stopped beside the first sleeper, and the apothecary selected one of his tablets and held it up to the light of the taper on the wall. The flame showed a lean, intelligent face with an ironic quirk to the lips, as if the man found humor even in this stately procession of healing, and his eyes twinkled in a very unpriestly manner as he read from the tablet:

  “‘Janos, a merchant of Philadelphia, suffers from a bloating after his meals which is made worse by wine and rich food. He has already been considerably benefited by the fasting and the waters, but seeks to keep this improvement, if it be the will of the divine Asklepios.’”

  The scribe put down the tablet and, bending over the sleeper, lifted his left eyelid with a skillful movement of the right thumb and forefinger. The slave now handed him the emerald, which the tall man manipulated until a beam of light from the taper was directed into the wide-open pupils of the sick man. “Janos,” he said sharply. “The divine Asklepios favors thee in person.”

  The sleeper’s pupils contracted from the light, and he stirred as if in a dream. “I hear, O Divine Healer,” he said in a voice slurred from the stupor.

  “Abstain from spices and wine,” the god recited in a bored voice. “Be not a glutton, and avoid foods cooked in lard and butter. Drink daily of the waters from the springs or the salt mixed in your drinking water.” He lifted his staff, and the small snakes twined about it reared their heads and hissed. “Asklepios has spoken to thee in thy dream, Janos. The prayers have been heard and answered.”

  The apothecary took a package of the evaporated salt from the basket carried by his assistant and left it beside the couch. Then the procession moved on to the next patient, while the slave at the rear of the group scooped the offering from the altar into his bag, sniffing audibly at the stinginess of the merchant from Philadelphia. The ritual was repeated with every sleeper, and where one was found who did not respond to shaking and the concentrated light of the emerald, the divine instructions were written on a wax tablet by the apothecary-scribe and left by the couch.

  A sufferer from the stone was told that he would be cured by the temple lithotomist, one of those whom Hippocrates had spoken of in his oath as “cutting for the stone.” And a man with
bleeding from the stomach was warned that a diet of ass’s milk would soothe the angry passions that gripped his belly. In each case the procedure was the same, and as they went from row to row, the scribe noted in exquisite Greek script upon the tablets the treatment prescribed by the god.

  It was almost midnight before the visit of the divine Asklepios was finished. Each of the small altars had been swept clean of its offering, and when the procession filed out of the abaton, the sack of the slave at the rear was so heavy that he carried it slung over his shoulder and staggered with its weight, while the basket of the apothecary’s assistant was empty save for the emerald used to focus the light.

  Now the abaton was silent while those who had experienced the divine visit during the rite of incubatio slept. Tomorrow new cures would be recited to the glory of the godly Asklepios and new tablets would be chiseled attesting his power. Meanwhile in the outer courts a new throng would soon greet the dawn eagerly, looking to the night when they, too, would enter the abaton to receive the favors of the god.

  III

  In the luxurious anteroom outside the abaton where the priests put on and off their ceremonial robes, two men were busily occupied. One was the apothecary, who was helping the tall figure wearing the mask of Asklepios to remove it. Bereft of the mask, the god revealed himself to be mortal, a slender man in his early twenties, fairly tall, with warm brown eyes, a mobile face, and the facile fingers of a surgeon. Dumped unceremoniously in the corner, the divine Asklepios was a far from arresting visage.