The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  Saul nodded. The arm twisting was renewed. Timon gasped and then cried aloud.

  ‘The Messiah has not yet come. Has he, Timon?’

  ‘Yes yes yes.’ The arm broke and he fainted.

  ‘He’s a hard one,’ the torturer said.

  There is no name in any language for the open-air centres of detention which Saul devised for his dissident Greek Nazarenes. Rough palissades were erected on Temple land outside the city gates, and within them were herded whole families of Christ-following Hellenes. There was no shelter from the sun, save for that afforded by arms and cloaks, brief tents sheltering the sick and old. There was not enough water and the only food was stale bread. Families with wailing children were quick to defect from the new faith and could hardly, even by the most rigorous Nazarene patriarch, a kind of Saul of the new, be blamed for their denial of the Messiah. When they were freed again, their faith could be tested by willingness to suffer exile or by the ingenuity of subterfuge. But some children died and very many of the old. The Temple shone in the distance and none expected a voice of protest to come from beyond the veil.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I began this chronicle in an unusually rainy late spring and have laboured at it, with what little result you have already been able to judge, through an unusually hot summer. I have suffered bitterly from the bite of the insect we call in Greek kounoupi and in Aramaic yitusch, so that my right hand, scratching its Greek and Aramaic letters under the lamp, has swollen to a red ball and my bare ankles have bled with the scratching of my left. I have had difficulty in breathing, waking gasping in the dark and begging for some god or demon to fell me with a heavy club, quelling not so much life as the agony of trying to sustain life with lungfuls of invisibility. My stomach has been out of order too, so that wine, the stomach’s cheerer, has turned sour on me, sending me off groaning to a particular bubbling fountain in Savosa that, as I should have expected, has dried up this dry summer. I have eaten little except broiled lake fish and honey and black bread bought in the market at Lucanum, and not much of that simple diet has stayed down. Today the ninth month, termed the seventh, starts in a ferocity of heat with no promise of autumnal mellowness, but doubtless soon I shall be complaining of morning and evening chill. Neither heat nor cold pleases us; afflicted with the one, we long for the other. I dream of opening death’s gate on to a quiet green field under a mild April sun, there to lie undisturbed for ever with a donkey grazing companionably by.

  It is without doubt unseemly for an author to impose on his readers reports of his bodily condition, since the writer’s hand is to be considered a mere abstract engine, along with the complexities of nerve, muscle, blood and digestion that have some part in the driving of that hand. The writer’s words alone count, though even they may be begrudged as a barrier (though, in grumbling concession, a necessary one) between the reader and what he is reading about. The writer as a living and suffering being is set, as it were, in parallel to what he writes. We do not enquire into the condition of Virgil’s bowels when he wrote this or that line of The Aeneid, nor do we seek to relate the love poems of Catullus to the love pangs of Catullus. Still, the engine can break down, as the hydraulis broke down last year in Rome at the games, to the fury of Domitian. Any author who has undertaken a lengthy enterprise must wonder if he will see the end of it. If he has sense, he will put himself out of the way of danger for the work’s sake, refusing to swim lest he be caught by cramps and drown, avoiding tavern brawls and shellfish. But death, somewhat like God, is a great joker and can lurk in a speck of dirt on the table’s edge. The unwary author, shut safe in his writing cell, chokes on the stone of the plum he sucks for refreshment or finds that life, suddenly grown bored with the monitoring of the drum of his heart, leaves him as he stands to stretch. He falls forever, seeing bitterly as his head sinks below the level of the desk an unfinished sentence that will not now be finished.

  This is gloomy stuff, and I apologise for it. I would do better if, instead of expending an hour’s writing on the prospect of leaving this chronicle incomplete, I pushed on with the chronicle itself, seeing all time as precious. But, as I observe now, I am reluctant to write of the Emperor Gaius Caligula (whose birthday yesterday was, I should surmise and hope, universally forgotten or, if remembered, remembered with a shudder). I have summoned my own dyspepsia, philosophical gloom, disenchantment with an oppressive summer as a pretext for deferring a necessary account of a wretched reign. Let me then postpone until tomorrow our first visit together to the bloody city on the Tiber, rendered bloodier still by its new master, and swelter with you briefly in a village not far from Jericho, where two decent young men, fired by opposed ideals, by chance or not chance encounter each other.

  Philip the flame-haired Greek Jew Nazarene was ready to start his evangelical mission in Samaria. He arrived weary at the village of Mamir, a league or two from Jericho, shortly before noon, the day a scorching one, glad to find shelter under a wide-crowned raintree near a small tavern. He sat, dropped his scrip to the dust and, from the large-breasted serving girl who came from the open kitchen, ordered a small loaf and a mug of wine. She wondered at his golden handsomeness and at his accent, which combined Judaea and the ancestral Greek islands. While he broke his bread and sipped his wine, conducting his own service of unity with his divine master, Caleb the Zealot came from the interior of the tavern, saw Philip, thought he knew him at least by sight, walked boldly up to the sunwarped table and bench and, after a shalom, sat. The two looked at each other with some wariness. Philip at length remembered the name. Caleb’s reported work of subversion in Samaria had been driven out by more recent and privier events. Caleb had seen Philip around in Jerusalem but did not know who he was or what he did. Jerusalem was a great city crammed with citizens. ‘What news in Jerusalem?’

  ‘Persecution,’ Philip said, ‘of the Greek-speaking Nazarenes. I was lucky to get away. I’m taking the gospel to Samaria. By that twisting of your lips I guess you disapprove.’

  ‘Who are persecuting – the Romans? No, of course not. The Nazarenes bow down to the Romans. The other cheek. Love your enemies.’

  ‘One particular Roman. Who is also a Jew.’

  ‘Saul of Tarsus. My old fellow student. He was hot against the Nazarenes. And now he’s persecuting them. Well. Do you know a man named Stephen?’

  ‘I knew a man named Stephen.’

  ‘A good man. I suppose I owe my life to him. Knew, you say knew.’

  ‘Stephen is dead. He was stoned to death. For being a Greek-speaking Nazarene.’

  ‘Saul did this?’

  ‘Yes. You could say that.’

  ‘And what happened to Stephen’s family?’

  ‘The mother and father are good children of the Temple.’ Philip spat out the word with some bitterness. And then: ‘Ah yes, ah yes. You ask very obliquely and discreetly and with fear perhaps. You mean your sisters. The soldiers took them to the procurator Pilate. Pilate sent them as a gift to the Emperor. Along with camels and horses and dried dates and figs.’

  ‘And,’ Caleb said, his colour not yet changed, ‘my mother?’

  ‘I heard something from Stephen about the mother of Caleb being dead. And very quietly buried. Your eyes and changed colour tell me you blame yourself for all this.’

  ‘I should have thought.’

  ‘If thought always had to precede action there’d be little done in the world. Though most of the things done are hardly worth doing. We heard of your inciting the Samaritans to rise. And of the crushing of the rebellion. The outcome of which you will know, perhaps. Pilate’s no longer procurator of Judaea. Vitellius summoned him—’

  ‘Who’s Vitellius?’

  ‘The legate of Syria. Pilate’s been forced into premature retirement. It was a mistake, apparently, to try to sack that temple on Mount Gerizim.’

  ‘You’ve been learning something about Samaria.’

  ‘It’s as well to know something about the people one proposes to convert.’


  ‘Your friends or overseers have made a good choice from one point of view,’ Caleb said. ‘You don’t look like a Hebrew.’

  ‘Whatever a Hebrew looks like.’

  ‘They detest the Hebrews. They accepted me because of the stripes on my back. They spit at mention of the Temple in Jerusalem. Go carefully.’

  ‘It’s a strange thing,’ Philip said. ‘And I wonder if our master foresaw it. The Nazarene faith is already splitting into two. Stephen was condemned because he diminished the worth of the Temple and the whole hieratic order of the Temple. But Peter and the rest still look like good sons of Abraham and Moses.’

  ‘You split already,’ Caleb nodded. ‘You will split more yet. There’s no health in you, no unity. There’s no grip at the centre. You react to Rome in the wrong way. You’re as bad as the Sadducees.’

  Philip smiled, though thinly. ‘And your way is what, now that you’re rid of Pilate?’

  ‘Not to be caught by the next procurator, whoever he is. That, for a start.’

  ‘There’s talk of your dream being fulfilled without knives or fuss. A client king, Herod Agrippa. No more procurators.’

  ‘A client king is only a procurator in fancy dress.’ Caleb gazed at the lively street scene without seeing it: a camel haughtily dropping its sand-coloured dung; the basket-carrying women, veiled to the eyes but the eyes lively; a girls’ quarrel about the precedence of water-drawing from the well, eyes and teeth a flash of toy knives; an old man drunk asleep under a clump of dusty palms. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘to strike at the centre.’

  Philip, with Nazarene tenderness, rescued a wasp that was trying to swim, against a current of waspish drunkenness, round and round in his half-full winecup. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘go to Rome?’

  ‘First things first, you’re right, go to Rome. I take it my poor sisters will have been sent to Rome, capital of a slave empire. The first strike at the centre is the stroke that frees my sisters. If they’re still alive.’

  ‘Slaves for the Emperor will, I think, be immune from rough treatment,’ Philip said in his cool Greek manner. ‘I refer to the voyage under hatches and the clanking of the chained gang from Puteoli or wherever they land. I mean that there will have been no whipping or rape. The slaveowner expects whole skins and a look of health. What happens afterwards depends on the temperament of the slaveowner. And the slaveowner is the Emperor. No longer the wretched mad Tiberius. The sane and well-loved Gaius of the little boots.’

  ‘You seem to get good fresh news in Jerusalem these days.’ The wasp staggered with feeble wet wings about the tabletop. Caleb saw himself in Rome, a city he knew only from fantastic visions: marble palaces with flights of laborious marble steps, gardens of planes and pines and oleanders closed to the rabble, ladies with predatory unveiled faces, wooden tenements quick to burn down, gigantic effigies of false gods. Caleb wandered the streets of Rome, a stranger speaking moderate Greek but bad Latin, living off bruised fruit and wormy cabbages discarded by the stallholders of monstrously huge markets, drinking at ornate fountains. The Jews gathered on the Sabbath at the many synagogues, and Caleb was ready to harangue about a free Israel: strike, spare the Emperor for the moment, but kill the Greek civil servants, metaphysical enemies of the Jews. It all seemed hopeless. Men in chestmoulded armour stood around, speaking all the tongues of the bad Empire, alert for dissidence. Hopeless, yes. But he was glad to have a small focus of action: to free his sisters, bangled and ankleted in slavish copper, was an act of piety that even the Romans might approve though forced brutally to punish. First things first. Philip said:

  ‘Strike at the heart. Stephen’s way was better.’

  ‘Any fool can die,’ Caleb said, seeing his own death, five or six Roman spears lunging. ‘You Nazarenes will achieve nothing.’

  ‘Has it ever struck you,’ Philip said, ‘that the Empire is already decaying? Decaying because force breeds nothing but force. There’s a terrible emptiness that has to be filled.’

  ‘We’re the only ones who can fill it,’ Caleb said. ‘It took a long time to arrive at the fulfilled vision of a single God. The whole world will have to worship Jehovah. Jerusalem is the capital of the real empire to come. And in the heart of the capital the empire’s heart, which is the Temple. This has to happen.’

  ‘Battering rams,’ Philip said. ‘Pilfered gold and silver. Human hands can destroy what human hands have made. I think we’re right. I’m sure.’ But he delayed finishing his wine and trudging through the dust to the Samaritan capital.

  I met an old man named Livius Silanus who, cautiously at the centre of Roman affairs as an efficient but not brilliant court advocate, had seen the whole of Gaius’s brief reign and noted the point at which madness supervened on moderation. ‘I remember,’ he told me, ‘the day when Gaius escorted the corpse of Tiberius to Rome from Misenum. He was dressed in full mourning and maintained a countenance of great sadness, but he was so greeted by the plebs that one would have taken the funeral procession for a military triumph, as if the young weeping Gaius had subdued some kingdom of darkness. They yelled mad endearments at him – our little pet, our own imperial baby, our son who is yet our father, star of the east and the west, our chicken who shall yet be an eagle, and so on, all quite nauseating to look back upon. I was one of those unauthorised citizens who pushed their way into the senate house to witness the setting aside of Tiberius’s will and the conferment of absolute power on Gaius, rendering totally invalid the claim of the joint heir Tiberius Gemellus. The celebrations were of a dangerous extravagance, what with the public sacrifice of nearly two hundred thousand beasts and, it was said, human beings as well, slaves naturally, in his honour, in the space of no more than three months. Extravagance of one kind condones extravagance of another. The wonder is that Gaius did not yield more readily to the intoxication of absolute power. The adoration of the people was demented. When Gaius fell briefly ill of a surfeit of turtle’s eggs, there were people ready to give their own lives – they went round the streets bearing cards lettered to that effect – if only the gods would grant his recovery. With Gaius recovered they forgot their pledges quickly enough.’

  The September heat has somewhat abated. Last night there was much rain and, as I write, my two slaves Felicia and Chrestus are busy mopping up its inflow. Livius Silanus continued:

  ‘Gaius endeared himself to the Romans by showing filial piety to what I thought an excessive degree. He sailed to Pandataria and the Pontians in very rough weather to transport back to Rome the remains of his mother and brother Nero (a name not at that time redolent of evil: all names are neutral, to be smeared with faeces or honey according to the temperament and acts of their possessors). He honoured their ashes with prayers and tears and placed them in their urns with his own hands. He organised days of funeral sacrifices and of circus games to the glory of his mother. As for his father, he renamed the month September Germanicus, a change about which many of us have ambiguous feelings, for we approve the honour while loathing him who bestowed it. Need I go on in this recital of acts altogether worthy? His uncle Claudius, the limping stutterer, the Balbus who built no wall but erected an ill-written pile of dubious Roman annals, was at the time of Gaius’s accession a mere knight, but he was swiftly elevated to the rank of consul, fellow to the Emperor himself, while poor Tiberius Gemellus, who had as good a claim to the imperiate, he adopted and gave the title of Prince of the Young. His sisters, with whom he was soon to commit incest, he associated with his own glory, bidding consuls and senators end their official proceedings with the prayer ‘Good fortune go with the Emperor Gaius and his sisters’.

  ‘He cleansed the city of its perverts, called spintriae, wishing to drown them in the Tiber but restrained from an act of such excessive virtue. He abolished censorship, resumed Augustus’s practice of publishing an annual budget, revivified the electoral system, pleased the plebs with new games – panther-baiting, boxing and wrestling with the best of the African and Campanian professionals, night-shows with the cit
y illuminated, with lavish throwing of gift vouchers for the people from his own hands. The greatest of his shows was presented in no arena but on the stretch of sea from Baiae to Puteoli. He anchored all the merchant vessels of the west coast in two lines, and then he had mounds of earth laid on their planks. Wearing an oak-leaf crown and a cloak of cloth of gold, sworded and bucklered, the Praetorian Guard behind him and some of his friends in chariots brought from Gaul, he rode on a richly caparisoned stallion from one to the other end of this fantastic bridge. This, I gather, was to give the lie to a prophecy of Thrasyllus the soothsayer: ‘Gaius has no more chance of becoming Emperor than of riding a horse dry-shod across the Gulf of Baiae.’ Here, perhaps, you see the first public manifestation of his madness.

  ‘He seems first to have proclaimed his divinity in a discussion with certain foreign potentates, including Artabanus, the king of the Parthians (who hated Tiberius but did everything to ingratiate himself with Gaius). At this time he had already insisted on being named by such titles as Father of the Army and Best and Greatest Caesar, but, in the kingly argument, conducted in the friendliest terms, as to which of the monarchs there present was the most nobly descended, he cried that he outranked them all. He was greater than any king, he insisted, and the greater than a king must of necessity be a god. From that moment on he began to forge proof of his divinity. He extended his palace as far as the Forum, so that the shrine of Castor and Pollux there became a mere annexe or vestibule. Standing beside the statued brethren, he put himself in the situation of one who had to be worshipped along with them. Some worshippers went too far and called him Jupiter Latiaris, but he was soon to regard himself as greater than the whole pantheon lumped together. He had a shrine built, with a lifesize golden image of himself, the clothes of which had to be changed every day to be identical with those which the divinity wore in the flesh, and there were sacrificial victims of great cost and rarity – peacocks, flamingos, pheasants, guineahens. He would converse with the statue of Jupiter of the Capitol, threatening to cast the heavenly father down to hell if he did not raise himself, the divine Emperor, heavenwards. It goes without saying that his ritual copulations with the moon goddess continued, though no longer in secret. All the statues of the gods he had decapitated, and an effigy of his own grinning head placed above the muscular stone or metal. A conversation with a Greek craftsman is reported from this first phase of his mania: