Homilus, some suggested — he was the imperial counselor on matters of delegations, and was the one who saw all delegations first and decided the order in which they would be admitted into the emperor’s presence. He was an intelligent man, speaking, in addition to Latin and Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, and one of the Germanic languages.
Not him, others said; Helicon was a better bet.
He was a Greek freedman who alone saw to all Caligula’s private affairs, a sort of entertainment chamberlain. Night and day he stayed beside the emperor, and even accompanied him to his bed. A funny man, he instantly comes up with caustic and witty repartee for any situation, having been well instructed by his original master, who gave him to Tiberius; the former emperor freed him from slavery, and he was inherited by Caligula, who supposedly said that this one man had more sense than the whole Senate put together, and only his favorite horse, Incitatus, was cleverer.
The highly ranked informants added regretfully, with much sighing: we were living in such dismal times when a nonentity of a freedman could hold more power than the entire Senate and the whole equestrian order.
Philo was devastated.
Helicon’s the one who arranged for Isidoros and Lampo to be Flaccus’s public prosecutors. The emperor has received them several times and heaped them with gifts. One could well imagine what sort of things this fellow has whispered into the emperor’s ear regarding the Jews of Alexandria.
It was quite certain that only for a huge sum could Helicon be persuaded to call the emperor’s attention to the Jewish delegation. It was said that he was not exactly averse to money.
“For all that,” the alabarch said angrily, “the emperor appointed Agrippa as king, and for all that Galilee was made Agrippa’s!”
Tija threw out the suggestion that it would do no harm to invite Agrippa to Rome.
That incensed the alabarch even more.
“Aren’t there enough of us as it is?” he yelled. “Who does Agrippa think he is anyway! It was us who made him king! We stuffed him with money! We still have him eating from the palm of our hand!”
Philo took the line that August 31 was still a long time away; if no triumph went ahead, then Agrippa would only come to Rome for the emperor’s birthday, when all the other kings, princes, tribal chiefs, prefects, and legates would make their obligatory pilgrimage to the capital city of the empire, and indeed it would do no harm if he were to arrive early.
Tija waited until his father had calmed down a little before quietly stating:
“It would also do no harm if we were finally to marry into Agrippa’s family.”
Asilence fell; Philo flushed and cleared his throat.
“Marcus,” he said.
Marcus, as usual, had been leaning with his back to a wall, but now he broke away and he, too, flushed.
“I don’t think there’s any need of that!” he exclaimed disconsolately.
The alabarch remained silent.
“That’s a practicable proposition,” Philo said gloomily. “Agrippa’s son Drusus is still a young boy. If anything were to happen to Agrippa — let’s say he were to eat himself to death one evening — the kingdom of the Jews would go to the dogs.”
Marcus uttered a groan.
“What’s Agrippa’s eldest daughter named?” he asked mournfully.
“Berenice,” said Tija cheerfully. “Soon she’ll be twelve… She’s said to be pretty. Let’s just pray she doesn’t grow up ugly.”
The next day couriers set off to Agrippa, telling him to leave his fresh acquisition of Galilee and make haste for Rome. The couriers, five in number, were sent by different routes to Galilee with the promise that whoever reached Sepphoris first would earn a special reward.
That was how Uri learned that Agrippa, had moved the capital of Galilee to Sepphoris from Tiberias. By this decision, Agrippa generously and collectively left to Antipas those officials who had been living in the previous capital, and returned to the old adminstrators of the district (or, to be more accurate, to their descendants) as he knew they would serve gratefully and faithfully. Nor could it be said any longer that Galilee’s capital city was unclean, as Sepphoris was not built on a cemetery.
Claudius had also returned with the emperor, but as he had no reason not to cross Rome’s pomerium he did appear in the city. Philo went to call on him, taking Uri with him.
As they arrived, Claudius was scrambling around, blinking sleepily in a rumpled smock and slippers in a disorderly house full of scrolls, statues, and tapestries. He was glad to see Philo and embraced him; he cast a glance at Uri and muttered something cordially before starting to grumble about his nephew, the beastly fellow, for not letting him live. Uri thought at first that he was still piqued at the emperor for having furiously shoved him into the river, but it turned out that it was not that: Claudius was despondent that he, as Caligula’s priest, was forced to take part in all sorts of lunatic ceremonies.
“This whole thing is not for me,” wailed this large-bodied, large-headed man, who spoke excellent Greek. “I get myself taken over there in the palanquin, with my guts jolted this way and that; then once I get there I have to sit for hours in the sun, and if I pull my toga over my head, they tell me off, they jabber nonsense, and then sometimes I have to stand up and stutter something, and I’m not even allowed to read or sleep. It’ll be the death of me!”
He pulled his left leg a little and spoke a bit oddly: in the middle of sentences his voice began to crack to a higher register, as if his throat were constricting, and he was only able to end the sentence at a squeak.
“This house is no longer mine!” Claudius cried out. “I have had to mortgage it, and my name is still on display in the Forum! Eight million sesterces I had to pay for the unprecedented honor of becoming one of Caligula’s priests, which he was so gracious as to offer me! Never in my life did I have more than a hundred thousand! Never! And even that I could never have spent either! It started with my house burning down! Augustus rebuilt it, but apart from that I got no more money from him! I’ve lived, and still live, off loans! I can be evicted from here at any time! Made homeless! Where will that leave my daughters and servants?”
Philo asked after the emperor’s health, at which Claudius — a grandson of Augustus and Mark Antony, and priest to Emperor Caligula — just shrugged his shoulders.
“He pretends to have gone mad,” he said. “But he’s just wicked. He’s putting on an act. He’s testing boundaries just the way an adolescent does.”
Philo then asked what sort of reception might Alabarch Alexander encounter with him.
Claudius mused.
“He’s unpredictable,” he said. “He has one thing and another running through his head, but as to what comes out on top at any moment even the gods cannot say.”
Claudius and Philo then started talking about authors and scrolls, mentioning the name of the historian Cordus, and, forgetting about Uri, they wandered off into another room. So Claudius had a copy of Cordus’s celebrated scroll, which Augustus himself had ordered be burned. Cordus, having come into conflict with Sejanus, starved himself to death, and the writer’s daughter, Marcia, had preserved a copy of the book and was now having it republished. Cordus had eulogized the virtues of Brutus and Cassius, Julius Caesar’s assassins, barely concealing his Republican sympathies. Uri gazed longingly in the direction Philo had headed: he would be reading through it right now. Uri was left standing alone in the hall and did not know what he should do.
In stormed a black-haired, plump woman in disarray, wearing a dirty gown and barefooted. She stared at Uri.