“But Flaccus put the centurions in Egypt on their toes,” exclaimed the alabarch.
Philo nodded.
“He has the two cohorts eating out of the palm of his hand!” the alabarch continued. “All the judges are under his thumb! He has them all under his control! He has banned Greek shrine fraternities, or placed them under his personal supervision… All within six months! For five years now there has not been one protest, not one riot, not one disturbance of public order in Alexandria! Macro is well aware of that, and he will be able to say so to Caligula if it ever comes to that.”
This information surprised Uri, but Tija corroborated it: Alexandria had not always been the tranquil, peaceable city that Uri knew.
Under earlier, weaker-handed prefects street skirmishes, armed robberies, murders, and burglaries had been the order of the day, the greater part of those crimes committed by soldiers of the cohorts, in league with robber gangs funded by wealthy Greeks, because the centurions had systematically skimmed off their weekly pay, and even the rank and file had to live off something. The very first prefect, Arius, was unable to cope with the troops, which is why he retired early to Rome under Maecenas’s protection, and that was why Augustus then sent Magius Maximus (who erected the obelisk in the Forum Augusti) back for another spell as prefect, and things remained much the same through the tenure of the prefect prior to Flaccus, the Egyptian-born Hiberus, who had died seven years ago, not entirely by chance soon after Sejanus’s fall. Throughout, soldiers had been on the loose, roaming the streets and joining the Greek gangs, all the while making use of weaponry bought by the state, the centurions even paid for the overtime they devoted to robbery, taking a cut as receivers of stolen goods. It even went so far as mercenaries selling their state-owned arms to the riffraff, simply reporting them as stolen once they got back to camp; ordinarily a soldier could normally expect to be demoted, even executed, for such a thing, but instead they were given new weapons from the stores, if they paid, so they paid, and who to but the centurions again? Army accountants hid the losses — again in exchange for a tidy payoff. The whole scam was a neat, nicely rounded system, and it’s said that many cohorts and legions in Germania or Gallia go about it in exactly the same way even today.
Uri commented that this was also the case in Judaea. Tija stopped short but then picked up: Flaccus had quickly seen through the game, having quite probably been briefed beforehand in Rome. He cut the number of days of leave that could be granted, and ordered that any weapons in civilian hands be collected, with all articles brought to the harbor to be cataloged and stored in a special warehouse. The investigation went on for more than six months, with many houses searched and several hundred civilians, a dozen soldiers, three book-keepers, and two centurions executed, and ultimately order was restored.
As far as the judges were concerned, it is no surprise that they would favor whoever paid most. In principle, the prefect was the chief justice of the whole of Egypt, exercising the emperor’s personal judicial right on his behalf, but before Flaccus came along those functions were not discharged, whether out of laziness or corruption. As soon as he was appointed, Flaccus went around all the koinons, paying particular attention to the judges’ guild. He summoned all the judges from all over Egypt and announced that any of them caught engaging in bribery would be executed. The judges ardently nodded their approval, then returned home and had a good laugh. Flaccus followed up by having a few judges of them crucified at random (though not, of course, without any grounds), and the others soon knuckled under. During the first two years of his prefecture, Flaccus made a habit of dropping in unannounced on judicial proceedings and sitting through them to the end without uttering a word. That was enough to set the judges quaking, and they did so to the present day. He achieved all that in Alexandria even without having next to him the ten legal advisers whom Rome usually sends to assist every prefect!
“But that doesn’t stop a court recorder from falsifying a judges verdict,” said Uri.
“Certainly, Lampo and a few other characters do that,” Tija acknowledged, “but the judges are still scared. You can’t set up a little Flaccus everywhere; you are never going to have total legal security in Egypt, but then that is also true of Rome when the emperor sticks a paw in… In my view Egypt has never had a prefect who was as well suited for the job as him, nor will there ever be another. Regardless of that, of course, the emperor can replace Flaccus whenever he chooses by hanging some charge of high treason around his neck that even you wouldn’t dream up in your worst nightmare. I can quite understand Flaccus having sleepless nights: he dare not sleep for fear of being plagued by such nightmares.”
Uri mused. Flaccus was a friend and schoolmate of Augustus’s grandsons. Tiberius had begun his own reign by having Augustus’s last surviving grandson, Postumus, murdered. Our Aulus cannot ever have considered himself safe. There was no way of knowing how he had done it, but he had wormed his way into Tiberius’s graces, even his most intimate circle, which is how he happened to have been there on Capri when the last prefect died, to be nominated by the emperor as Hiberus’s successor. Flaccus was no fool.
In the middle of May they learned that Antonia had died on the first day of the month.
She had survived Tiberius by six weeks.
Antonia did not kill herself, it was said; her vital force had simply given out and she followed Tiberius into death, as surely as if she had been his wife. Antonia’s birthday, January 31, had been a holiday throughout the empire, including Alexandria, with the Greeks offering sacrifices, and now the day on which she died was proclaimed an official day of mourning. Both had been made state holidays: her birthday would still be celebrated next year, and on May 1 shops and markets across the empire would be closed to commemorate her, though in her life no statue had ever been erected to her, few even knew her, as for nineteen years she had remained in the background, spinning a web of Roman and Egyptian political threads (she may well have had a role in Sejanus’s fall) like a melancholy, wise Fate. Unquestionably, it was fitting to mourn the present emperor’s grandmother across the empire.
The death affected the alabarch’s family profoundly.
“An era has passed,” said the alabarch gloomily. “An era has passed with her death.”
Philo said nothing; Tija just shook his head; Marcus, as usual, held his peace. The death was a big blow for the alabarch personally; Antonia’s properties in Egypt would revert to the emperor, who was his grandmother’s heir personally as well as by virtue of being the Princeps, so that a large chunk of his income, coming as it did from management of the estates, would be lost.
Uri slowly began to catch on: Philo and the others suspected that Antonia might not have simply have died of grief or out of duty in the wake of Tiberius’s passing; there had to have been some other factor. Antonia had never been ill a single day, or at least no news of that kind had ever been received via the regular weekly courier service by which Alabarch Alexander had maintained with Antonia. Messengers sped regularly to and fro between Roman senators and wealthy Greeks, the Greek students at the Gymnasium had told him, carrying all manner of nostrums. Not that the old decoctions had been forgotten — authors of popular books of medicine everywhere made sure of that — but whenever, say, an ointment of some kind to banish all boils would become all the rage in Rome, or some herbal remedy that cured all internal maladies would become all the rage in Alexandria, or laserpitium would become all the rage someplace else, it would make its way, inevitably, across the empire.