False God of Rome (40 page)

‘Yes, I felt it as I came through the Jewish Quarter. Why doesn’t Flaccus do something about Paulus?’

‘Ask him yourself,’ Alexander replied, replacing Ataphanes’ gold back in the box. ‘I don’t know, but I think that it’s because he doesn’t care; after
all, what’s another new religion to a Roman? You embrace them all.’

‘And rightly so, if it doesn’t involve having your foreskin cut off. But this one sounds different.’

Alexander closed the box. ‘It is different and it’s dangerous because it doesn’t acknowledge any earthly authority; its appeal lies in the promise of salvation and reward in a
world to come, not in the here and now. If it is allowed to take root, then the whole emphasis of our civilisation could change from a philosophical debate on how to live in the present, to a
spiritual debate on how to prepare for a theoretical afterlife. I’ve been thinking about it and I wonder what would happen to science and learning if all that people worried about was the
idea of an immortal soul.’

‘I’m afraid that you’ve lost me there,’ Vespasian replied as Alexander began to write out a receipt. ‘However, I can see the danger of a religion that doesn’t
acknowledge the ultimate authority of the Emperor – whatever he may be like. But surely this is just a small sect created by one man?’

‘But it will grow because Paulus aims his preaching at the poor and slaves who have nothing in this world to lose and everything to gain from his idea of salvation and spiritual riches in
the next; it’s very potent. Paulus is an extremely ambitious man who believes that his abilities have never been truly recognised and that all his life he’s been denied his rightful
place in society. He asked, demanded even, to marry the High Priest’s daughter, just before he went to Damascus, and was refused; I think that he saw that as the final indignity and decided
to find a way to power in his own right because it was shortly after that he disappeared. Now he’s back and I believe that he has found a way to turn this world upside down with him finally
at the top.’

‘I’ll speak to Flaccus and try to get him to arrest Paulus,’ Vespasian said, before realising that Alexander had done exactly what Flaccus had predicted: got him involved.

Alexander smiled and handed him the receipt for Ataphanes’ gold. ‘Thank you, Vespasian, I would appreciate that; but he needs to do more than arrest him, he must execute
him.’

Vespasian looked into the piercing blue eyes of the Alabarch and saw that he was in earnest. He was genuinely afraid of this new sect. ‘Very well, I’ll suggest that,
Alexander,’ Vespasian agreed, getting up and proffering his arm. ‘I should go now; I’ve a busy day ahead. Would you be able to tell me where I can find the late Lady
Antonia’s steward, Felix?’

Alexander grasped his forearm across the desk. ‘He’s in the city at the moment; you’ll find him at Antonia’s house right next to the south side of the
Gymnasium.’

Vespasian followed the Alabarch out into the courtyard; the reading stopped immediately and Alexander’s two sons stood in the presence of their elders; they were both in their teens.

‘Senator Vespasian, this is my eldest son, Tiberius,’ Alexander said, gesturing to the taller of the boys who looked to Vespasian to be about seventeen, ‘and his brother,
Marcus.’

The boys bowed their heads.

‘Your father keeps you hard at your studies,’ Vespasian observed.

‘He seems to find pleasure in our suffering,’ Tiberius replied with a grin.

‘Either that or he’s trying to numb our minds with pointless repetition,’ Marcus suggested; he was a couple of years younger than his brother.

Alexander smiled with pride at his sons. ‘For that cheek you can learn an extra fifty lines. I shall test you at sundown.’

‘You’ll have to find us first,’ Tiberius said, quickly ducking a playful clip around the ear from his father.

‘Enough of this,’ Alexander said laughing, ‘back to your studies. I shall see you out, senator.’

Despite being carried, Vespasian was sweating profusely as they progressed west back along the Canopic Way; even though it was not yet midday the dry heat and the still air
combined to make the conditions almost intolerable, especially when wearing a woollen toga. Unlike Cyrene, which was built upon a plateau overlooking the sea, Alexandria did not seem to benefit
from a cooling breeze.

‘How do you cope with this, Hortensius?’ Magnus asked, sweltering even though he only had on a tunic. ‘Your helmets and armour must be cooking you alive.’

‘You get used to it, mate,’ the optio replied in a friendly way, ‘once you’ve been here for ten years or so.’

‘You mean you just stop caring.’

‘You’re right, mate,’ Hortensius concurred with a laugh, ‘ain’t he, lads?’

His men agreed good-naturedly. Vespasian could tell that Magnus had used the time waiting outside the Alabarch’s house to fine effect and had got on good terms with their guards.

‘Looks like Paulus has been moved on,’ Vespasian commented to Magnus, seeing the arena where he had been preaching was now empty.

‘Did you find out from the Alabarch what he’s doing here?’

‘I did, and you won’t believe it—’

A series of shouts and the hard stamp of many running feet cut him off. A couple of Jews came pelting across the street, from south to north, followed by a howling mob of Greeks waving
improvised clubs and hurling stones at their quarry.

With a sharp, curtailed cry the hindmost Jew was brought down with a direct hit to the back of his head; crashing forward on to the paved road he skidded along for a couple of paces tearing the
skin off his face. His colleague ran on into the Jewish Quarter as the chasing mob surrounded the stricken man, hitting and kicking him as he lay motionless on the ground.

‘With me, lads,’ Hortensius shouted, drawing his gladius, ‘line abreast, two deep, shields up and use the flats of your swords.’ He broke into a run with eight of his men
on either side. Women in the street screamed and the men drew back, hurling abuse or encouragement depending on their race. Vespasian stepped out of his chair and, with Magnus and Ziri, followed
slowly as the legionaries charged into the mob, who were so intent on beating their victim that they did not notice the threat until nine interlocked shields punched into them, cracking bones and
hurling men to the ground. Burnished iron flashed in the sun as the legionaries brought the flats of their blades cracking down on the heads of the closest men still standing, felling them.

Those who could turned and ran, leaving the legionaries kicking and stamping on their fallen mates.

‘That’s enough, Hortensius,’ Vespasian shouted, ‘call your men off.’

It took a few moments for the legionaries to respond to their optio’s orders but eventually, after a couple more arms were snapped and another skull cracked, they pulled back, leaving a
half-dozen blood-stained bodies on the ground. A couple of them were shrieking in agony but the rest lay either unconscious or rolling around clutching shattered limbs and groaning with pain.

‘Have a look at him,’ Vespasian ordered Magnus, pointing to the blood-spattered Jew who lay motionless.

Magnus stepped over a couple of bodies and knelt down, turning the man over; one look at his glazed eyes told him all he needed to know. ‘Dead,’ he announced as men and women came
rushing from the Jewish Quarter.

Hortensius formed his men up in a protective wall around the dead and the injured. ‘Stay back!’ he warned as the first of the Jews drew close.

‘That’s my brother,’ a middle-aged man shouted, stepping forward from the crowd.

Vespasian recognised him as the Jew who had been running with the murdered man. ‘Let him through, Hortensius,’ he ordered, ‘and get these injured men locked up; they should be
tried by the prefect for murder.’

The legionaries parted, letting the man through to his stricken sibling; he knelt and, taking the lifeless head in his hands, wept.

‘Why were they chasing you?’ Vespasian asked.

‘There’s been a preacher of heresy in the city; he was here again this morning. My brother and I went to argue against him but he doesn’t listen; he just insists that God loves
all people whether they follow the Torah or not, and the way to God is through eating the body and drinking the blood of the man he claims was God’s son, Yeshua. It’s
blasphemy.’

‘Eating his body and drinking his blood? That’s ridiculous; Yeshua’s been dead for five years or so.’

‘He says he turns bread and wine into his body and blood.’

Vespasian struggled to understand the concept. ‘Do you mean literally?’

‘I don’t know; I can only assume so, why else would he say it? After the meeting was broken up the preacher told his followers that he would perform this ceremony; my brother and I
followed them to find out what happens. They went to a house by the Lake Harbour, a few hundred paces away; we managed to climb onto the roof and look down through a crack in the tiles but before
we saw anything we were spotted and had to run for our lives.’

‘From the preacher’s followers?’

‘No, from ordinary Greeks; we Jews are not welcome anywhere in the city outside of our quarter at the moment. They chased us away but they’ve never done anything like this
before.’ He indicated to his battered brother’s corpse and started to sob.

‘Take his body for burial,’ Vespasian said, sympathy colouring his words. ‘Tell me, what is your name?’

‘Nathanial,’ the distraught man answered through his tears.

‘I will ensure that his killers are brought to justice for this, you have the word of a Roman senator who owes your Alabarch a favour for a service he’s just rendered me.’

‘Thank you, senator,’ he replied, lifting his brother with difficulty. He looked at Vespasian with bloodshot eyes. ‘I don’t think that my brother is going to be the last
person killed in this city just for being Jewish.’

Vespasian turned to Hortensius who now had an escort of only eight legionaries, the others being busy dealing with the Jew’s murderers. ‘Let’s get going, optio,’ he
ordered wearily, ‘I’ve got much to do.’

‘It ain’t good when people start getting murdered just for being Jewish,’ Magnus observed to Vespasian as they set off again.

‘People get murdered just for having a weighty purse on them.’

‘That ain’t what I mean, sir. The way I see it is that if more of them get murdered for being Jewish then it won’t be too long before they retaliate and people find themselves
getting murdered just for being Greek or Egyptian or, the gods forbid, Roman.’ He looked pointedly at the senatorial stripe on Vespasian’s toga. ‘If you take my
meaning?’

Vespasian did indeed.

It was the fifth hour of the day by the time Vespasian and his depleted party reached the Forum, which was, like everything else he had seen in Alexandria, truly impressive.
With a panoramic view over the Great Harbour it was set between the theatre, seating over thirty thousand, to its east and, to its west, the Caesareum, the palace, guarded by two needle-like
obelisks, built by Cleopatra for her lover and named after him. Two hundred paces long and a hundred across and surrounded by a colonnade of immense proportions constructed of different coloured
marbles, the Forum teemed with people of many races going about their business; it was the beating heart of a great city.

Thales proved easy to find as he turned out to be one of the most important and respected bankers in the city. Vespasian’s senatorial toga enabled him to jump the queue but to the relief
of the other disgruntled clients his business did not take long. He left within a quarter of an hour with a receipt for his bankers’ draft and a promise from the bald and immensely overweight
Thales that upon his return the following morning there would be 237,500 denarii in cash, paid in gold for ease of transport back to Rome. Thales had made 12,500 denarii commission on the deal but
Vespasian did not let that sour his mood as they made their way past the extensive Gymnasium complex and found the Alexandrian abode of his late benefactress.

Magnus pulled on the bell chain and almost instantly the door was opened by a dark-skinned, wavy-haired slave who looked very much like Ziri.

‘Senator Titus Flavius Vespasianus here to see Marcus Antonius Felix,’ Magnus announced.

They were immediately granted entry and were escorted through to an atrium with many fountains, not just in the impluvium but at intervals all around the room, cooling the atmosphere and filling
the air with the constant but gentle sound of falling water.

‘Senator Vespasian,’ a voice said from the far end of the room, ‘what a pleasure to see you; I had heard that you had arrived but did not expect to be honoured with a visit so
soon into your stay.’ Felix appeared from behind a statue of Poseidon – a small replica of the one crowning the Pharos but, nevertheless, twice life-sized; it gushed water from its open
mouth.

‘That is because you said to come if you could be of service, Felix,’ Vespasian replied, walking towards his host, ‘and, most certainly now, I do need your help.’

‘I didn’t say that it would be impossible,’ Felix quietly reminded Vespasian and Magnus, ‘I said it would be difficult but not impossible.’

‘Well, it looks impossible to me,’ Magnus muttered.

‘But it has to be done,’ Vespasian said flatly but wondering nonetheless how Felix thought that it could be achieved.

They were standing in the dim interior of the burial chamber in Alexander’s Mausoleum at the heart of the Soma, the sacred enclosure where the bodies of his heirs in Egypt, the Ptolemys,
rested. Before them, ten feet away, resting on a granite slab supported by two similar slabs on their sides, lay a sarcophagus of translucent sheets of crystal set in a latticed bronze framework.
It shimmered orange and golden in the flickering light of three flaming sconces burning on its far side from low down, giving the impression that it glowed with a light generated internally.
Cocooned tightly within it, Vespasian could see the silhouetted outline of the mummified body of the greatest conqueror known to the world: Alexander of Macedon.

Although the sarcophagus could be viewed by means of a shaft cut through the ceiling to the temple, thirty feet above, the chamber itself was not open to the public. However, the priests of
Alexander’s cult were happy to allow access to the body for visiting dignitaries, and as the first senator to visit Egypt for over four years Vespasian was admirably qualified and they had
been honoured to grant his request. Only Ziri had been refused access because of his slave status and he now waited in the Temple of Alexander above them.