During his weeks in Alexandria, Uri’s body had grown slack and he found the running hard, stopping more than once to pant, developing a stitch in his side, so that the others, Tija among them, watched him scornfully as he slowly padded along and sweat, whereas they expertly sauntered around the circuits.
He had difficulty even in throwing the discus: it refused to go off in the direction he wanted, or he released it too early or too late from his hand, so that those around him would run off in real or faked terror lest they be hit, and those who were spectating would simply laugh in derision.
The javelin went half as far for him as it did for the others, but worse still, he regularly pulled his shoulder muscles. A left-hander, a southpaw, the others averred, but Uri did not see why that was important until he grasped that in wrestling it was advantage for a person to be left-handed, though in the beginning he was thrown to the ground by everyone else.
The standing long jump was the most complicated movement of alclass="underline" identical big bronze weights had to be held in each hand and swung backward and forward, and then, when one judged there was a good rhythm, leading with the weights, both legs would be lifted from the ground. A good few times Uri found the weights flying out of his hands, and it was pure luck that he avoided hitting anyone. The others would grin and scoff.
Oratory was also classed as one of the physical exercises, which was not all that surprising as that was also the case among the wealthy of Rome. What was unusual was that the tutor would set a time limit as well as the subject. Both the subject and the time would be drawn by the student from sets of parchment slips placed face-down on the table; the tutor, holding a larger or smaller hourglass in his hand, would then measure the time allotted for the oration, and if the student did not finish with his topic on time, or finished early, a notch would be scored against his name with a stylus on the wax tablet. This meant the student would have to make a renewed oration on the given subject though he would not know for how long as he would again have to draw a slip. The duration of orations made by lawyers was likewise time-limited in Rome.
If a student succeeded in finishing a nicely rounded address on time, the notch would be omitted. All the orations, however long or short, had to be listened to by the others, and at the end they would have to evaluate every one of them. The topics were varied: an indictment in a murder case, a defense in a case of robbery, prosodic problems, historical problems, astronomy, navigation, the conduct of war, the establishment of military supply lines, tekhne — anything at all.
His fellow pupils said that all the best rhetoricians had gone off to Rome, where they were better paid, but Uri was more than happy with Theocritus as his rhetoric tutor, setting high store on his wry, unobtrusive humor.
Their fare was simple: greens, fruit, various kinds of boiled pasta, and meat only on Fridays, which the three Jews did not eat. That was how Uri identified the Jewish Apollonos at lunchtime on the first Friday: he was a stocky, square-headed, insignificant-looking young man who showed no external sign of having a brain. The food they got was simple, but never quite enough as to leave them feeling that they had ate their fill. They were never served wine, only water, and they were allowed no snacks apart from the communal meals. Uri did not notice any attempts to smuggle in anything from outside: he found the slight gnawing of hunger quite easy to take, having known periods of much greater starvation. The others hankered after food, swapping recipes with one another, and meanwhile he read with a gently rumbling stomach: it was possible to borrow scrolls from the Gymnasium’s richly stocked library, which contained many rarities.
The mathematics lessons were given by a mad teacher by the name of Demetrius. Ten of them were assigned to him; he explained outrageous laws, writing things down rapidly with his stylus on the board and then, before the class understood what he was talking about, he got to the end of the board and rubbed it clean before carrying on. Uri considered himself lucky to have taught himself the elements of mathematics when still a young boy, on his own at home, because he at least got an inkling of what this fervent fellow — to whom geometry meant everything and who stoutly maintained that Earth was spherical with a circumference of 252,000 stadia — was trying to communicate to them. Uri was already familiar with this fact from reading Eratosthenes, but only now did he learn how this had been calculated: the Sun’s angle of incidence was measured simultaneously at the summer solstice in Syene and in Alexandria, five thousand stadia away (the distance was paced out by servants in the traditional fashion); the difference was one fiftieth of a right angle, so five thousand stadia was therefore one fiftieth. Poseidonus had come to a smaller estimate, but the teacher stood firmly by Eratosthenes’s result.
The astronomy tutor was Hyperion, a gaunt, slow-speaking man, who could never be asked anything because he would shake his head and continue to say what he had decided in advance to say. Uri imagined this dour man could make a tidy income with astrology outside, in the city, and wondered why he had chosen instead to teach at the Gymnasium. He was surprised, then, when he started to explain the Mithraists’ Great Cycles and that the constellations arose from deviations from the earth’s orbit that had accumulated over the millennia. The others could grasp nothing of this, but Uri considered that Hyperion knew his business, just not how to communicate it.
For philosophy they — that is to say, the five-strong group that Uri was in — were instructed by a short, chubby old man, who chortled hugely during the lectures. True he could not tell Uri anything new, but it was entertaining that he was able to present the greatest of the Greeks, from first to last, even Aristotle, as parodists, although that was of course taking it a bit far. Uri would gladly have spoken to him, but Antonius Lollas, the uproarious old coot, fended him off and so he restricted himself to listening to the prepared essays and praising them to the skies, as did the others.
The military discipline appealed to Uri, and he was highly discomfited at falling so far behind in the physical exercises. The other students did not pay him much attention in the first week, with Tija acting as if he had never seen him before, in response to which Uri did not speak to him either: it seemed that either Tija was disloyal by nature, or that was the custom.
On the Thursday he asked one of the gymnastics teachers if one could practice alone, and learned that it was permitted. From then on, every evening between supper and the solitary prayer time, he would return to the Gymnasium’s stadium and, in the gathering darkness, as the rest spent their free time chatting or lounging about he would run, jump, and throw the discus and javelin.
In the first week he had his sandals stolen, but he did not make the rounds looking for them, nor did he ask who was the culprit, nor did he ask for a new pair. He simply went barefoot.
He could also have obtained a pass at the end of the first week but he decided that he would rather stay back, reading and training: he was well aware by then that his body would be in good shape by the end of the second week, or at most the beginning of the third. That was indeed the case, and the others were amazed. Even the gymnastics instructors noticed that he was hurling the discus and javelin farther and more accurately, and was able to endure longer distances than he had at the start. The other students had not walked as much he had and had less knowledge of what their bodies were capable of when pushed, yet even Uri was pleasantly surprised how well the standing long jump went — so well, in fact, that by the beginning of the third week the gymnasiarch himself, of whom hitherto there had been no trace, took a look. One of the gym masters must have had a word with him, and the rest were astonished too, as the head was not in the habit of dropping in on their physical training lessons; the great scholar, they said to one another, without saying a word to Uri, who did not initiate any conversation with them but could hear what they were saying among themselves, now heard: what on Earth can that exceptional philologist, who hates physical training of any sort, be poking around here for?