“The shame you bring on us! You think no one saw you? Such an embarrassment!”
Uri decided that was it: he would not speak to her again.
“You can’t do that!” his mother yelled.
That morning Uri did not so much as look at his son and simply rushed out of the house.
Business was faltering, and in the end he went into the business of trading balsam, which he had been invited to do by men who had really respected his father: The money was paltry but certain, they would say with conviction.
A person is never free from what he has been born into: not from his mother, not from debt, not from balsam.
The Eternal One, however, must have wanted life to sparkle in Rome and for Uri to be temporarily freed of his worries.
The emperor arrived!
It was already spring when the news arrived, and souls this side of the Tiber and beyond were imbued with joyful expectation. Something was happening at last! The least of it was that the emperor would stage a parade and make citizens presents of money, entrances to the Hippodrome, and a banquet.
The news proved to be partially false in that the emperor did not cross the city border but remained outside it, encamped in his favorite Hippodrome, the miraculous gardens his mother Agrippina Major had set out on Vatican Hill. Caligula would amuse himself, receiving embassies there, if he received anyone. It was unclear why he was unwilling to cross the city boundary; Uri’s hunch was that he was wrangling with the Senate, a majority of which did not wish to grant him a triumph, at most they could only permit a lesser triumph, which from an emperor’s point of view was so insulting that it was better if they granted him nothing at all. Uri shared that suspicion with Marcus, who confirmed that he had heard gossip of that kind; he did not speak to Tija, who continued to avoid him.
Vatican Hill lay close to Far Side, and the members of the Jewish delegation laughed at how, by chance, they had gained a big advantage over other delegations.
Rome was teeming with hundreds of delegations, who had been hanging around the city for months on end on unfinished business, and now they were all racing about, jostling and shoving to be among the first whom the emperor received.
There were many matters on which only an emperor personally could be of assistance. That had been so in the time of Caesar and Augustus and up through the first half of Tiberius’s rule: land disputes with neighbors; disputes over authority with degenerate, power-hungry family members; problems with tax and excise remittals; grave religious disputes over major issues of prestige; quarrels over precedence as to which tiny island this or that divinity had originally hailed from, and who had a right to erect a temple in his or her honor; which nation stemmed from which, and which was the more ancient, the more authentic; who owned fishing rights on the sea coasts; and so on and so forth. Any party who won a concession from the emperor could, for at least a decade, exercise arbitrary rule over his own little dunghill back home. In any of these far-reaching matters neither senators nor consuls were competent to reach a decision in place of the emperor, who now had arrived at last — or almost arrived.
Nevertheless, news did arrive that back in winter unrest had broken out in Jamnia, where the largely Jewish population had destroyed a Greek altar erected in Caligula’s honor; Herennius Capito had pitched into them with his troops and killed many. This was the same Capito who a while before had captured Agrippa and demanded he pay up on three hundred thousand sesterces of debts, though Agrippa had escaped to Alexandria.
No friend of the Jews was this Capito, supervisor of imperial property for Jamnia and Ashdod, Phasaelis as well as Archelais, with its celebrated groves of palm trees, and also a large palace in Askelon that had at one time belonged to Salome, the sister of Herod the Great. Upon his death Herod had bequeathed these to Livia, Augustus’s spouse; Tiberius inherited them after his mother died, and after him they passed to Caligula. The territory was thus a personal property of the emperor’s, and it was always the imperial prefect who administered it, with its own special taxation. Herennius Capito had acted as prefect under Livia and Tiberius, and Caligula, exceptionally, had retained him.
Philo lamented: Of all times why did it have to happen now? Why now? The Jews of Jamnia might have waited. What was the purpose of injuring the cause of Alexandria’s victims with such idiotic capers?
Tija was sure it had been a provocation, coming directly after the Bane.
“Of course it’s a provocation!” The little old man’s anger flared. “But why couldn’t they wait until the emperor had reached a decision in our case?”
Not knowing any details, Marcus bet that the Greeks had deliberately built the altar too close to a Jewish house of prayer, possibly letting Capito in on the plan. That sort of thing was bound to happen so long as Rome had Greeks and Latini serving as prefects for Jewish territories, he added.
Philo noted that more Philistines than Greeks lived in Jamnia, at which Marcus fumed that it made no difference.
“It serves as a good pretext for the emperor not to intervene in either matter,” Tija surmised. “That way he settles the matter in a balanced manner, without bias: Alexandria in one pan of the scales, Jamnia in the other.”
Marcus went on:
“Jamnia and the surrounding district are able to raise forty thousand soldiers, compared with none from Alexandria and Egypt… Maybe that was why Jamnia weighed more heavily in the balance.”
Philo reproved him too for his cynicism.
Marcus burst out:
“That incident in Jamnia might yet come in very handy! The emperor will have to realize that a Jewish prefect needs to be appointed to govern Jews.”
“You’re not implying that we set the whole thing up premeditatedly?”
Marcus was miffed.
Tija snickered:
“The Jews are onto a good thing as long as they have Greeks or Latini governing them,” he said. “Every time they’ve had a king of their own kind they’ve torn each other to pieces.”
The alabarch was infuriated, and with good reason; after the Bane he had spent a lot of money sending hundreds of messengers throughout Egypt, Judaea too, with the aim of safeguarding the Jews from Greek provocations. He had cautioned them against responding to provocation with violence, but it had never crossed his mind to send anyone to Jamnia, seeing that it constituted imperial property.
“Where else was I supposed to send an envoy? Athens, Dalmatia, the summit of Mount Ararat, the ruins of Carthage?” the alabarch roared. “Where else? Antioch, Delos, Samos, Cyprus, perchance Rome? What makes the Jews such brainless idiots?”
Uri was now well able to imagine how Pilate, the prefect, in his palace at Caesarea, must have screamed when he learned about the carnage at Mount Gerizim. Would he have sent a cohort there as well to prevent Lucius Vitellius’s soldiers from staging a massacre? And where else?
It was on the tip of Uri’s tongue to point out that since Jamnia was an imperial property it was unlikely that anything happened there without the emperor’s imprimatur, and maybe this was Capito’s way of paying for the emperor’s confidence, but he swallowed it.
The emperor had arrived and they, the Jewish delegation from Alexandria, had to arrange to be received by the emperor.
Through cordial, unselfish companionship and obscure (though obviously material) promises, Marcus, Tija, and the alabarch had managed to get appropriate senators and equestrians to divulge whom they needed to turn to on the matter of obtaining an interview.