He also added, “Don’t take anything with you; everything must stay here.”
That “everything” meant the sack, which contained nothing except a jug, tefillin, and a cloak.
“There are not enough berths in Jerusalem,” Plotius explained to Uri. “Many hundreds of thousands make pilgrimage for the feast, often more than a million, and it is not easy to find accommodation, even though we are privileged persons. The later we arrive, the happier they will be; it doesn’t matter if we make a nuisance of ourselves here until the last minute.”
Uri was delighted that at last he would be left alone and could ramble on his own. Maybe Matthew would manage to arrange an audience with Pilate for them. Pilate himself was of no great interest: Gaius Lucius must be wealthier than him, a provincial governor was no big deal, but if he happened to be there, he would quite like to see Herod’s palace from the inside.
He got to the vicinity of the palace. It was a vast edifice, as imposing from the outside as Matthew had described it. There was little chance of being able to inspect it from the inside; Simon the Magus was preoccupied with calling in the money that was owed to him, but without him Matthew could not present himself to the palace saying that they had an audience with the prefect. They were an important delegation, but not so far as Pilate was concerned.
No trace of preparation for the feast could be picked up among the Jews in Caesarea. Of course, for them it was simple: it was enough for them to set off four days beforehand. Matthew wasn’t making much effort to make contact with the Jews of Caesarea; they wouldn’t be able to offer them a more pleasant or comfortable place to stay than Simon’s. There they were given an ample breakfast, and the suppers were marvelous; the table in the dining room was permanently laid and the servants saw to it that they should instantly be given fresh food and drink whether they appeared on their own or with several of the others. Even so, Uri was starving during the day; he had not an as to call his own. He had not the slightest idea what the money here was worth, nor had he even seen any, as he was unable to sit out on the terrace of a tavern to have food or a drink.
In the evenings his companions talked mostly about money. Plotius and Matthew would attempt to explain how much each coin was worth. From the second evening onward that became a daily task for them before going to bed; Uri would lie on his couch, listening to them, perceiving their disputes over exchange rates as a monotonous psalmody. Stupendous amounts of money were in circulation, it turned out, virtually all the denominations that had ever been minted within the field of attraction of the Great Sea, and the exchange between these was impossibly complicated. “Tetradrachma, sela, shekel, sacred shekel, ordinary shekel, dinar. Tropaik, asper, ma’ah, tresith, pondion, issar, prutah, zuz, mina, shekel, dupondius, zuz, mina, shekel, dupondius, drachma, drachma, drachma, dinar, prutah, lepton,” Uri crooned to himself on the couch the names of the coins that he heard, and as he drifted into sleep these magic words droned on of their own accord. The one conversion factor that he registered was that one lepton was worth one eighth of an as, or in other words half a quadrans. It amused him that the smallest coin in Rome also had a half counterpart here, though even a Roman pleb like himself did not measure value in quadrans back home but in asses, and it particularly tickled him that this tiny coin, a lepton, had two names, its Semitic name being the prutah. He had taken note of that because his companions were constantly teasing Hilarus to tell them how many prutah made a lepton, and every time the teacher would give them some other figure for the exchange rate, never realizing that it was the same coin.
It pained Uri that in Syracusa he had been so brazenly robbed of half a sestertius: never again will I be such a numbskull, he vowed keenly.
Early on in the morning all his companions would leave the house, so Uri supposed he could not stay either. Each set off alone and also arrived alone. Uri did not ask them what the devil they were up to; he would have a good feed in the morning and until the evening would stroll aimlessly, hungry and thirsty.
He had seen a house of prayer, a fair-sized building; even the largest synagogue in Rome was not that big. Maybe that was the one that stood on the Greek’s plot of land. He would have gone in, but it was closed. There were a lot of Jews living there, so why was their house of prayer closed? Was there another one? He asked a Greek, and of course there was another. Uri followed his directions and walk there. That too was closed.
That evening he questioned the others. Matthew explained.
“In Palestine houses of prayer are only left open on market days. Mondays and Thursdays are the market days; that is when peasants come in from the villages, bringing their produce, and if they are able to sell anything, they buy themselves something. That is also when they would visit the house of prayer, if they were going that way — not to pray, mind you, but to litigate. That would cost them, so they would take home less money than they had come with, even if they managed to sell something. The Jews of Palestine adore litigation. The courts hold their sessions in the refectory of the house of prayer, hearing cases late into the evening. The houses of prayers are open on the Sabbath as well, of course, but on those days only the members of the local congregation would eat supper there because, being the Sabbath, peasants are not allowed into the city.”
“Here Monday and Thursday are also days of fasting for pious Jews,” Plotius said. “They abstain from eating until sunset, if I understand it right. Our forbears made a wise decision lest peasants, on the pretext of litigating or praying, should demand free meals in the towns.”
Uri felt tempted to sit through a whole day of court cases, but then he decided he’d prefer to wander aimlessly in the harbor area on the off chance that some more interesting diversion would arise.
He noticed a poster. It advertised two events: the theatrical performance of a play by the poet Agathon, which would have been of interest, and an appearance by the famous philosopher Makedonios, who would be speaking in the interval between chariot races.
The very man he had heard in Syracusa.
He must have set off from Syracusa a few days before them and then, after visiting several towns, arrived here after them. Would he be plagiarizing this time too, Uri wondered, or finally reading his own work?
Uri was unfamiliar with Agathon’s dramas, but he been interested in the strange author ever since reading that Aristotle had criticized his plays for breaking all the rules. There has to be something to them if Aristotle loathed them so. Definitely something to be seen.
That was all well and good, but what, he wondered, would the philosopher be saying in the interval between chariot races?
The two events were at the same time on the same day. Which should he choose? Whichever he wouldn’t have to pay for, the free one: he had no desire to ask for another loan.
He made inquiries in the harbor, and found that both productions were free.
There was also a proletariat in Caesarea, Uri concluded. It was just that, at first, he couldn’t figure out why there were no crowds of ordinary people out and about on the streets, strolling, gossiping, and acting big like back at home, in Rome. Then he finally realized why this delightfully built town was so dead: there were no dockworkers bustling in the port, no trade. Even a city like this, devised by cool heads, would burst with life if there were poor folks chatting and making a fuss somewhere in it.
He decided to go to the stadium; maybe he would get a chance to see Agathon’s work back in Rome.
It was early in the afternoon, the weather was glorious. A large proportion of the crowd streaming toward the edifice was made up of soldiers. They were not carrying weapons but they were in uniform. They marched under the leadership of their officers, with the civilians, most of them Jewish, respectfully making way for them.