“Not really,” murmured Uri, drunk from reading.
Philo ran his eyes over the books that were piled up on the table; there must have been a good ten of them, some quite voluminous scrolls.
“And you read all of those?”
“All of them,” muttered Uri.
“Can I test you?”
“What’s that?”
Philo picked up one of the scrolls, a play, the “Exagoge.” He picked out a passage at random and read out aloud: “Aaron: It’s not worth going that way, there’s nothing there!”
Uri closed his swollen eyelids and half-asleep mumbled: “Moses: How would it not be worth going that way! Over there is the Promised Land…”
Philo put down the scroll.
“You know it off by heart?”
“Certainly,” said Uri with a big yawn.
“And you know where it comes from?”
“A Jewish play of some sort. What’s the title? Maybe ‘Exodus’… Not a particularly good work as the outcome is given from the start, moreover one can have a fair guess what the ending is and that they will reach their goal… It’s not possible to turn that subject into a tragedy; the author ought to know…”
“Ezekiel the Poet wrote it, two centuries ago! Is it something you read earlier?”
“Why would I have done that? I’m not going to spend time rereading things that I’ve already read in Rome… The works here on the table are not available in Rome.”
Philo picked his way through the scrolls lying on the table and nodded. Indeed, it was unlikely that a copy would be found in Rome.
“Have you been to libraries there?”
“Of course I have,” said Uri. “From the time they open to when they close, from the first to the fifth hour, one can read anything there, on the premises, for free, and it’s surprising how much one can read in four hours if one tries…”
Philo looked at the sleepy, red-eyed young man swaying around, almost out cold, on the seat in front of him, and he was genuinely touched.
“Get some sleep now,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “I’ll give orders that you’re not to be disturbed. And that when you wake up, you are to be fed. There’s no need to hurry the reading: you’ll have plenty of time for that, plenty of time for reading, dear boy.”
The old man was almost on the point of tears and hurried out. It was almost as if he were flying, a tiny, airy-boned bird.
He has no child of his own, Uri reflected, and was glad about that.
Uri did not understand what was happening to him, but he found he had been accepted in Alexandria.
And not by just any family either, but by the family of Alabarch Alexander, the richest and most influential of all Jewish families in Egypt, and hence in the whole world, the family for whom the very first row of stone benches on the west side of the stoa of the Basilica was reserved.
Alabarch means chief tax collector, the person who collected all the customs duties on goods carried along the Nile and paid these in to the Roman state treasury. All of Egypt had become the private property of the Roman emperor, by edict of the Deified Augustus, when sixty years ago he crushed Mark Antony. Uri could well imagine that the alabarch held on to a tiny bit of it as there was no one to keep a check on him.
The prefect of Egypt, commander in chief of the two Roman armies stationed in the country, had no trouble with them as it was peacetime, but his entire day was taken up by dispensing justice, and acting as the guardian of all rights — an office which had devolved on him from the kings of Egypt by the grace of Augustus — and he did not concern himself with excise matters. He was the alabarch’s superior nominally, but not in practice. A twenty-five percent excise was assessed on goods arriving in Egypt from abroad, payable at the port of entry — in other words at Alexandria, Canopus, and Pelusium. The alabarch was not concerned with these as he only exacted internal duties. Uri was amazed that a Jew could be a chief tax collector on all the goods freighted along the Nile, even if it was one who had been granted Greek citizenship rights. In response to which he was told that for two hundred years and more Jewish soldiers had been standing guard along the Nile because the Egyptian kings had judged them more reliable than the Greeks, and the Romans had left things that way: don’t fix what isn’t broken, a wise dictum.
The stargazers whom he had met at the Basilica — and who wanted to maintain good relations with him because he was now living at the house of Philo, elder brother to the alabarch — related that Alexander had now been in office for fifteen years, to the evident satisfaction of the emperor, ever since Germanicus — a general of whose successes Tiberius, his stepfather, was jealous — had appeared in Alexandria, causing a huge commotion during his short stay of just a few weeks, with throngs of people, Greeks and Jews by turn, holding processions daily to cheer him, in their desire to please him and his wife Agrippina. Germanicus had the state’s grain stores opened, and thereby the price of grain across the length and breadth of Egypt plummeted, at which point Germanicus made tracks out of Egypt and back to Syria with his wife and small children, and before too long he was dead, poisoned by Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, who while the court hearing was in progress took his own life in Rome, yet on the orders of Tiberius, the trial continued as if the accused had been still alive. It was at this juncture that the governor of Egypt at the time relieved the former chief tax collector of his duties, appointing in his stead Alexander, who as it happened had just returned from Rome where he had gone before Germanicus arrived in Alexandria. There might be some connection between the two, smirked the stargazers, and they also related that Emperor Tiberius had unexpectedly granted Germanicus’s mother, Antonia, vast lands in Egypt, and Alabarch Alexander — for reasons one can only guess at — had become the estate manager of those lands.
Uri did some quick reasoning: that must have happened around the time when Tiberius had expelled from Rome both the Jews and adherents of Egyptian cults, as a result of which he and his parents had roved around the countryside, with him carried piggyback by his father. Strange that he should be enjoying the hospitality of a family whose lucky star had at the time happened to be in the ascendant. Antonia, Germanicus’s mother, must have supplied the emperor with signal services if, after Roman dominion was instituted she alone had been granted private estates in Egypt. Germanicus and Agrippina had been exceedingly popular, and the rumor was still making the rounds that Germanicus had been poisoned either by Piso or someone else. Tiberius subsequently banished the widowed Agrippina and had her murdered on the island of Pandataria. Of the sons of Germanicus only Gaius was still alive, along with three daughters, and Tiberius kept Gaius with him on the island of Capri.
Could it be, by any chance, that Antonia had sacrificed her unguarded son, Germanicus — whom popularity had turned soft in the head — to protect her other son, Claudius, and her grandsons? And had Alexander the alabarch played some role in this?
The astronomers divulged no secrets, telling Uri only things that were common knowledge in Alexandria, but still they were honoring him with their trust, and for that reason alone he sensed they would be expecting some favor in return.
The first Friday evening that he took his seat among the Jews of Alexandria in the double-colonnaded Basilica, on the first row of stone benches to the west(and near the middle of the row at that), opposite the bimah, the very place where he had developed such a hankering to sit the day of his arrival, he found himself seated next to Alabarch Alexander’s second son, Tiberius Julius Alexander, who bore the nickname Tija and was just a year older than himself. He almost had to force himself to marvel that it all seemed so natural, the impossibility that he, a good-for-nothing from Far Side in Rome, had been accepted so smoothly and speedily by the most powerful Jewish family in the world.