And people stared: Who is that young man; why have we never seen him before? Uri refrained from looking back, he grew — not exactly eyes, but more an ear on the back of his head — and even if he couldn’t quite make out the whispers about him, he understood them well enough: the astronomers must have gossiped, and the rumors had been passed on. There was a big crowd of people for services at the Basilica that evening. Philo was unmarried, and nothing was said about Alexander’s wife (maybe she had died or he had driven her away), but on Alexander’s right was seated his firstborn son, Marcus, a tall, ash-blond young man; also seated in the front row of stone benches were several collateral female relatives and their husbands, siblings and children. Uri was introduced to them, though he was incapable of registering who was who.
“The leathermakers’ Kahal,” someone next to Uri had whispered, meaning that a representative of the koinon of Jewish leather-dressers was doing the reading from the Septuagint that day. All the crafts in Alexandria were organized into koinon, which in Ptolemaic Egypt was the name for a guild, which just as with the Greeks had their own leaders, notaries, and secretaries, and these were rotated in strict order for officiating at the divine services on Friday evenings and other feast days, just the same way as the tribes of priests and Levites succeeded each other in Jerusalem. Uri was told by an elderly woman from the alabarch’s family that lots were not drawn, as in Jerusalem, but rather the order was settled collectively each Rosh Hashanah by democratic deliberation and calculation, with no further arguments for the rest of the year.
It crossed Uri’s mind that his father would be listening to that same passage in their modest house of prayer in Rome, and it was quite within the bounds of possibility that a tanner was also reading it out there. Next to the reader, standing ramrod-straight, was a tall man with a solemn expression on his face, the very image of one with a holy mission to do. He held a pale red kerchief in his hand, and when he held the kerchief aloft the ten thousand or so in the assembly said “Amen.” That kerchief was necessary, because although the acoustics in the Basilica were good, the tanner’s words were nearly impossible to hear beyond the first few rows due to all the rustling.
Few went home after the prayers, with the mass staying in the Basilica. On countless trestles under the roofed sections stood food and drink, and everyone was free to take as much as they cared to. Nobody chided the children who spilled wine or threw food onto the floor, chased and frisked about: a group already chosen would tidy up tomorrow evening. The cost of the spread was covered by a common fund, drawing on compulsory donations from the three-hundred-thousand-strong Alexandrian Jewish community. Uri asked if everyone was present, but of course not: most of the city’s Jews would celebrate Friday evening at their own local houses of prayer, scattered across the other four districts of the city, the feasts in these being just as copious.
The stargazers gravitated toward Uri and were delighted — especially Hippolytos — to greet him. Uri was also pleased to see them, though they had little in common to talk about and the conversation grew increasingly tiresome. Uri couldn’t manage to slip away — even aged Heraclitos, eminent and funny, would not let him go, pressing after him as he tried to make his way to the next table. Nothing of importance was said, but Uri still sensed that he — a gadabout good-for-nothing — was being fawned over by these agreeable, scholarly men merely because Philo had shown him favor, and he also had the feeling that Philo esteemed by them not on account of his philosophical oeuvre but for being brother to the all-powerful Alabarch Alexander.
Philo’s younger brother was a vigorous man, his brow wrinkled by many laughter-lines. Alexander also had supervisory charge of the postal service in Egypt, Uri was later to learn, and thus he was able — should he so desire — to find out what anybody wrote in their letters. He too was a great bibliophile; in Rome, Antonia’s lame, deformed boy Claudius, was a bookworm just like Philo, and the two often sent each other bibliographic rarities. By no means incidentally Antonia was close friends with Berenice, the mother of Julius Agrippa, and Claudius had grown up side by side with Julius Agrippa, a grandson of Herod the Great, one of whose names was given after Julius Caesar, the other after Herod the Great’s friend, Agrippa, who was so loved by Jews that the largest synagogue in Rome was also named for him.
Alexander was recognized by all as the real leader of the Jews of Alexandria; no major decisions were taken without him. And somehow he, Gaius Theodorus, a nobody from Rome, had won access to this of all families. He would have liked to tell the stargazers that everyone was mistaken: he had been given no important mission by anyone, it was all a misunderstanding, but instead of doing that he just smiled inanely back and started inquiring about the ingredients of some of the unfamiliar dishes of food.
The alabarch’s palace was not situated in the Jewish Delta district, but in Beta, the second district. As the inner city of Alexandria was laid out by the Ptolemies according to a regular rectilinear plan, it was divided into five districts, and special Greek councils were convened to arrange the affairs of the districts entrusted to them. They even took pains to reorganize the rural Egyptian populace and all manner of immigrant settlers into invented, artificial tribes, which were named after Greek divinities. Over the centuries, these tribes had gradually come to bear the names of the divinities with such pride — so said Philo — that by now they were all convinced that they were lineal descendants of Artemis, Poseidon or Athene. Greeks had two names officially, their own and that of their god, and in all official documents they were obliged to use both; Jews had only one name, but beside that they had to write that they were Jewish.
The single-story building, which had an extensive floor plan and inside was divided into many spaces, was surrounded by Greek palaces, villas, shrines, and tenement houses and was guarded by the alabarch’s own armed men. These had been recruited from among the Nilotic excisemen, and they included Greeks who accepted Judaic eating customs. It would have been impossible to tell which of the members of the alabarch’s private army were Jewish and which Greek, they wore exactly the same uniforms and spoke exactly the same way.
Uri would have been curious to know how big the alabarch’s annual income was, but all he knew that the tax paid to Rome on produce was two and a half percent of the value, and by custom the alabarch’s personal income was the same, though of course out of that he had to pay the excisemen and a lot more besides, as it was more than likely that local and municipal councilors were also paid out of this, so the alabarch did not earn as much from Egypt as Rome did. That said, he earned enough to be rolling in it. Uri found it hard to imagine how the two and a half percent excise duty payable to the alabarch was imposed on goods that flowed down the Nile to the harbors, and he assumed it was not paid in ready cash but in goods, but then those would have to be stored somewhere; yet there were no granaries or slaughterhouses in the inner-city areas of Alexandria; goods destined to be shipped were piled up in warehouses at the docks. The alabarch also had to attend to transport on dry land because the many-branched Nile was not navigable right up to the sea.
This was the domain of the family that had received him into its ranks, and — an even greater asset — he was accepted as a friend by Tija, which is to say Tiberius Julius Alexander, whose full name betrayed the high hope his parents had of him in his career: to be as unwavering as the emperor Tiberius, under whose rule he had been born twenty years ago, but also as clever and wise a general and statesman as Julius Caesar, and as mighty a warlord as Alexander the Great. That was a huge burden to carry, but Tija, so it seemed, effortlessly bore all the grave associations of his name.