“So, which of my works have you read?” Philo asked teasingly.
Uri began to list them. Philo was flabbergasted. When Uri got to a work entitled “On the Life of Moses,” he interrupted.
“What do you make of that?”
Uri pondered.
The servants at this point brought wine, water and fruit, and they pulled the table between the two couches so that both men might reach.
“I found it a hugely entertaining read,” said Uri cautiously. “I have to admit I was startled by the notion behind it — the idea of portraying Moses as an original philosopher, that is to say, and that he is the source of all Greek wisdom and art, even including Homer…”
“You really have read it!”
“Of course I did!” burst from Uri.
“Keep your hair on!” Philo said appeasingly. “Any number of people brag about how cultivated they are, when they aren’t.”
“I’ve encountered something of the same,” said Uri. “But to get back to Moses, as I said, that stunned me to begin with. But after a while I got used to the notion, and I believe grasped its purpose, which is to show that one sphere of thought can be just as valuable as another, that the one can be derived from the other and vice versa.”
“Amazing!”
Philo gazed in astonishment at the young man sitting tensely, uneasily on his most expensive couch. There was nothing special in his outward appearance: myopic gaze, sharply steepled brow, greasy, mousy-brown hair, sunken cheeks yet despite that an incipient double chin under a receding jaw line. His nose was crooked, bending to the right, as did his jaw.
“Did you also speak to Agrippa about philosophy?”
“No,” said Uri, and left it at that.
Philo roared with laughter:
“I doubt Agrippa read even three books in his entire life, and half of those will have been lost on him!”
Philo picked up the plate of fruit and offered it to Uri, who took a fig.
“So,” Philo resumed, “and do you agree with that line of thinking?”
“I’m not mature enough intellectually to be able to agree with it,” said Uri carefully, yet frankly. “My mind has not become as unruffled as yours, a venerable philosopher’s.”
Philo gave an unforced chuckle.
Uri also laughed out loud.
“Well, there’s plenty of time to debate that,” said Philo cheerfully. “But I ought to draw your attention to one of my predecessors whose notion I merely developed further in my “Moses,” the idea was not mine originally… Have you heard of Artapanus?”
Uri blushed and confessed that he hadn’t.
“One of the most significant Jewish thinkers,” exclaimed Philo. “Never mind, you’ll get around to reading him… but tell me, what happened to you in Judaea? We lost track of you after you set off from Caesarea for Jerusalem.”
Uri was astounded but kept that hidden.
“Well,” he said, “after that I got pulled into some quite extreme scrapes.”
“What happened in Samaria?” Philo asked.
Uri was again astounded: some people had been continually feeding reports about him — and to Alexandria at that. It was staggering.
Uri gave a brief account of the massacre at Mount Gerizim, saying that it had been Vitellius’s soldiers who were responsible for the slaying, but Ananias, the former high priest, had gotten the delegation to sign off on a report that blamed Pilate’s cohorts for the killing.
“And did you sign?” Philo ask pensively.
“I had no choice,” said Uri. “Otherwise it’s hard to believe I would be here now.”
Philo nodded.
“That we didn’t know,” he said. “You did well.”
“I did well by signing what I knew to be a lie?”
Philo raised his head and stared vacantly into the space above the hills and dales that were painted on the atrium walls.
“You did well,” Philo repeated, returning his gaze to Uri. “That was how Vitellius was able to disgrace Pilate. About time too. Were you there when they led him away in chains?”
Uri confirmed that he had been there and seen that. Just as he was present in the exultant throng when Vitellius announced that he was restoring the safeguarding of the high priest’s vestments to the Jews.
“That’s about as far as their intellectual horizon extends,” said Philo ruefully. “As if it matters who looks after the high priest’s vestments.”
“It was a pity that many hundreds of innocent, jubilant people were slain for the sake of machinations like that,” Uri opined.
Philo took a melancholy sip of the wine, not mixing it with water.
“You’re right, of course, it was a pity,” he said. “A dirty, low-down provocation to use that hired false prophet — what was his alias? Simon, wasn’t it? That the Ark of the Covenant has been found! Only in Samaria could the masses be made to swallow that sort of guff… To the best of our knowledge it was the high priest who spun the line to Vitellius, who took the bait… Pilate was cautious, being singularly moderate in his reactions to any provocation, constantly backing down… That, however, was one thing he cannot have counted on… To be saddled with responsibility for a bloody act that he didn’t even commit. It’s not something for delicate stomachs: it sickens me!”
Uri felt uncomfortable: this was high politics and had nothing to do with him. The Jews of Rome by tradition wisely steered clear of this sort of thing.
“Look, my boy,” said Philo. “The high priest and Vitellius came to an agreement that they would have Pilate removed. Antipas in Galilee allowed the Syrian cohort into Samaria; he had no choice because he did not want to upset Rome — after all, the Syrian legate is the embodiment of Rome. In his shoes Agrippa would have done exactly the same.”
Uri nodded, but there was still something he wished to get out.
“Master,” he said. “While I was going about among the mutilated corpses on that hillside in Samaria, the dead bodies of women, children, and old people — not all of them had been cleared away and the relatives were still grieving over them — there were some fairly weird sensations at play. The wretched fanatics had gone there simply because they were looking for the Ark of the Covenant… It wasn’t they who hit upon the idea, they had been duped there by others… The ruins, the remains of their destroyed temple, are there on the hillside… That was where those who share the same faith as us once used to pray, and it was their co-religionists, the Jews, who destroyed their shrines… All I saw was a cloud over the mountaintop, that must have been the ruins, but I understood why only the worship of idols built at the top of hills is forbidden… a mountaintop is a very big deal indeed… Excuse me if I am still indignant when I speak about this…”
Uri fell silent.
Philo muttered:
“It’s not possible to feel sorry for everybody… They were Samaritans…”
“People!”
“You’re not a Samaritan.”
Uri nodded glumly.
“That’s true, I’m a Roman Jew…”
“I understand you, I really do understand,” Philo quickly added.
There was a silence.
“Young man that you are,” said Philo, smiling with an omniscient air, “you most likely came to like even the peasants of Judaea…”
“Yes, I grew fond of them. They were hosts for me, and they treated me well…”
“I too will be your host: you’ll spend the night here.”
As a result, Uri spent the night at Philo’s, though he did not get a wink of sleep, the guestroom being crammed with scrolls of parchment and tablets, and he was able to burn as many lamps as he wished, so it was with bleary, red eyes that he looked up in the morning, when Philo dropped by to say good morning.
“Didn’t you sleep at all?” Philo asked.