Philo guffawed; he was enjoying the exchange.
“Gaius is right,” he said. “Tiberius can speak excellent Greek, yet for some reason it was Latin that he would have liked to hear everywhere, and he was irate, as long as he was living in Rome, then not even all the senators spoke it!”
He turned to Uri:
“I’ll take you on as Tija’s instructor in Latin,” he declared forthrightly. “He could do with one. At the Gymnasium he almost totally ignores Latin out of sheer arrogance. Read a bit of Cato and a bit of Cicero together and you’ll be done with the matter.”
After hesitating a moment, Tija decided with a nod of the head to accept. It was an odd smile, more in the way of a grimace. Uri shuddered, but he was glad that by this means, under the pretext of teaching Latin, he would have the chance of officially spending some hours with this prodigy, and that delight dispelled the momentary aversion.
Alabarch Alexander was seldom seen in the palace, attending to his business affairs across the city and along the Nile, whereas Tija kept to his suite of rooms from Friday after dusk until Sunday evening, being a boarder at the Gymnasium. Uri was thus free to read in the palace library or roam around town and in the evening, by the light of a multitude of gorgeous candles, he conversed with Philo, who on weekdays during the daytime would visit the Musaeum’s famous Library which Uri himself so longed to do.
It transpired that it was no simple matter to visit the Library. to enter it, one had to be a citizen of Alexandria, and if one were Jewish only those who were Alexandrian Greek citizens could set foot in the sanctum of the Library; it was not enough merely to have rights of residence in Alexandria. An Alexandrian Jew might feel he was a cut better than a metic (a Greek resident alien), but not much.
Philo clarified: an Alexandrian citizen did not pay electoral taxes; these were paid by those who merely had rights of residence in Alexandria, as was the case with most Jews. Citizens who were exempt from paying the electoral tax (and all Greek natives of the city belonged to that category) clung to that privilege and were loath to award rights of Alexandrian citizenship to Jews and other non-Greek nationals. To this day, the peoples living in the villages on the sites on which Alexandria was built — Persians, for instance, who had arrived with the Babylonian invasion, and whose descendants still lived in the city — had not been granted rights of citizenship even though it was the Greeks who had “assimilated,” not them. The Jews, whose ancestors had been resident in Alexandria centuries before, had long been fighting to be accepted as Greek citizens by virtue of being born there and had already addressed countless petitions on the matter to both Augustus and Tiberius, but — though it was hard to say why that was so, because the electoral tax amounted to no great sum — assent had been slow in coming. All the same, Alexandrian Jews were not united on the issue, as many preferred to pay the additional tax and stay segregated from the Greeks as members of the Alexandrian Jewish polity, fearing that by coming under the same jurisdiction as the Greeks they would lose their status as God’s chosen people.
“How much is the electoral tax?” Uri queried.
Philo, being a Jew with full rights of Greek citizenship, was stumped: he didn’t know exactly, but he would make inquiries.
“But then I don’t even know the price of eggs at the market,” he confessed with a blush. “I’ve never had to buy anything in person.”
Uri felt that the time was ripe for him to mention that he would be happy to buy this or that for himself, but he didn’t have a penny to his name. Philo again blushed.
“Don’t take it amiss, dear boy. I completely forgot about that… I’ll instruct the majordomo to provide you with daily pocket money. How much do you need?”
Uri paused. He could name any price at alclass="underline" Philo would have no clue as to its value, but decided nonetheless to stick with a small amount, about as much as his tessera would get him in Rome.
“You’ll get twice that,” said Philo, shaking his head in dissatisfaction with himself.
Still, Uri had to make himself useful for that per diem, a half to two-thirds of which he would put aside each day: during their evening discussions Philo would grill him, pleasantly but methodically. And Uri would have to muster his entire knowledge in responding. The talk ranged from literature to matters of history or philosophy, and sometimes Philo would interrogate Uri about Rome and Judaea, having visited neither. Uri was worried he would start questioning him about Agrippa, but he was spared that, and it suddenly occurred to Uri that they already knew more than enough about Agrippa not to need any information from others.
Tija was present on one occasion when Philo made a strange assertion about Agrippa: that unconscionable, prodigal, giddy, greedy charlatan would someday become the greatest Jewish king there ever was, just wait and see, even greater than Herod the Great.
He even stated his grounds: Agrippa owed people in Rome left, right, and center, not just Jews but also senators, and the only way they would get the money back with interest was if they were to use their united might to make Agrippa king of the Jews. Philo laughed, and Uri could only gape, flabbergasted. Tija added that Antipas too was bidding for Judaea, Samaria, and everything else which had at one time been part of his father’s realm to be annexed to Galilee, and there was even some chance he would achieve that, but he was going about it in a very stupid way, because he didn’t owe money to anyone in Rome.
Uri was surprised at how Philo, the omniscient great philosopher, was so ill-informed about conditions in Rome and Judaea that he knew virtually nothing about the lives of Rome’s Jews, the Judaean countryside, even Jerusalem itself. With a deft, witty choice of words, Uri sketched what he knew. Philo was immensely diverted to learn that a Jewish house of prayer was to be constructed in Ostia purely because someone had by chance, and at no cost, had laid hands on four Greek columns.
“Those Jews!” he shook his head contentedly. “Those Jews!”
Uri had a good mind to give an account of the Jewish bordello in Syracusa, the prison cells that filled the shop premises in the palace of the high-priest, and similar topics, but he checked himself: there was no way of knowing what might provoke Philo, who had perhaps never truly had to come to terms with the practicalities of living.
In exchange, with regard to the lesser-known works of certain individual philosophers, Philo willingly held little lectures, in the manner of the Peripatetic school, pacing up and down the room as Uri slowly braced himself to ask again: how might he, without Alexandrian citizenship, be able to get into the renowned Library so as to be able to read these works. It was not that Philo’s explanations were in any way deficient, but he loved the smell, the feel, of parchment and papyrus…
Philo would shake his head: that was no easy matter, Uri was a newcomer, not even a native Alexandrian Jew. Precise records were kept of all the three hundred and some thousand locally born Jews, and copies of these were sent to Jerusalem so that the information would be safe if any harm were to befall the genealogical volumes in Alexandria. Reports were also made on those Jewish citizens of Alexandria who were permitted to enter the library, because a number of those were of priestly descent.
“How might I get to be an Alexandrian citizen?” Uri asked audaciously.
Philo was astonished.
“You want to settle here definitively?”
“Not that,” Uri responded diplomatically. “But I very much like this city… It’s not that I want to live off you permanently,” he added. “Having the pleasure of your family’s hospitality cannot last for long, and I would not want to abuse that. I’d be glad to take up some respectable trade and earn my keep… If that’s not possible, then I’ll go back to my father.”