‘“All these gods – you know what the Jews believe?”
‘“No, Caesar.”
‘“That there is only one God. Clever people, the Jews. You understand my instructions about placing the head of the one God on this multiplicity of divine bodies?”
‘“Yes, Caesar, but what do we do about the goddesses?”
‘“Easy, you fool. Put my head there, but also hair, hair, hair in abundance.” And he made the gesture of conjuring a sprouting of lavish locks from his own bald scalp, at the same time giggling manically. Gaius Caligula – the name still makes me shudder. It even induces a physical nausea. Ask me no more about him.’
It was to a Rome ruled by a still reasonable and indeed benevolent Gaius that the two sisters of Caleb were marched, though not lashed, in light chains. They had both been violently sick on the voyage from Caesarea, huddled under the hatches with too many other slaves, some of them Samaritan captives, but the Cytherea, a sailing ship wholly dependent on the winds and not on banks of wretched slave rowers (who were indeed only employed on the biremes, triremes and quadriremes of home waters at that time), was often becalmed and put in at many ports of the Roman Levant, thus granting periods when the tossed stomach might recover. Both Ruth and Sara had become thin, unable to eat salt pork and drink foul water though they later devoured broiled fresh fish with the hunger of animals, fighting for it. Ruth wept much but Sara set her beauty to a fierce grimness which, even when, as you shall hear later, she was manumitted, she never entirely lost. She was determined to live and dreamt much of revenge. She had also a sense, perhaps perverse, that it was better to learn about the great world even through slavery than to sit muffled at home in the metaphysical servitude imposed by the Jewish law. There was nothing metaphysical about Roman whips; there was indeed a kind of brutish honesty in Roman doctrines of buying and selling: no hypocrisy about the Romans: you knew where you stood or lay or tottered. It was a three days’ march along the Via Aurelia, with an exhausted flopping-down in the fields under guard when nightfall had brought its tubs of water and its hurled bread ration.
And here at last was Rome: the Janiculum, the Marine Theatre of Augustus, the bridge over the Tiber that led to the Palatine. In the streets low people jeered at the slaves and some spat; Sara, unveiled now for ever, spat back, but the wind blew from the east. There north were the Forum and the Temple of Jupiter and the Circus Flaminius and Pompey’s Theatre, but the slaves were to see none of these things: they were split into groups and impelled according to their imposed functions to this or that part of the slave quarters that lay beyond planted groves to the north of the imperial palace. Sara and Ruth were to be put to kitchen duties. They were greeted by a slavemistress from the Rhineland who barked at them. Sara barked back and was cuffed. They were herded with other women, many of whom wailed, to a windowless barracks filled, like a monstrous stable, with straw. Ruth lay down and wept for Jerusalem. Sara saw there was no way of escape.
‘Our master said that we should be his witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and also Samaria,’ Philip told the Samaritans in one of the synagogues of Sebaste. ‘So I am here.’ The sun from the high window enflamed his hair and made it seem a sign of something. ‘You have a word which you use much, and that word is ta’eb, meaning him who shall restore. What shall he restore? He shall restore health and wholeness after sickness and wounds. He shall restore the lost vision of the faith as a faith of love. The ta’eb appeared in Judaea and I bring his message. A message of tolerance, forbearance, charity. A glib and useless message, so some of you will say, smarting as you are from the fury of the Romans, the predations of an unjust procurator. Some of you dream of vengeance and a new rising of the people. We Nazarenes do not dream. We offer instead a practical answer to tribulation and pain. We must love our enemies, and such love, which it would be foolish to believe capable of gushing spontaneously from the heart, has to be learnt as any other skill is learnt. You burn your finger in the fire, and the throbbing finger causes you pain. Do you then hate your finger? No, for it is part of yourself. So when men cause you pain, blame the fire that is in them, but remember that such men are your brethren, are part of the body of God as much as yourselves. Love is a hard thing to learn, but if we do not learn it we are lost.’
The members of the synagogue listened not because they found great sense in the words but because Philip had been showing a certain therapeutic power which the simpler of the folk deemed thaumaturgical. A couple of cripples had been healed, and in public too. The imputation of the miraculous troubles me, as it must trouble any rational person, and I insist, along with my old dead sadly missed physician friend Sameach, Efcharistimenos in Greek, that certain conditions of the body have a basis in the soul, and that a cure may consist in unlocking the soul and plucking out the cause. Thus, a man who had struck his mother in rage found, as he thought, that God struck that hand and rendered it paralysed. He repented of his act, but that repentance was unheard by the deaf and dumb organ of grasp and touch. Philip apparently soothed him to an acceptance of his human lot, the unexorcisable devil that got into man with Adam, presented his own unfilial rage and violence as part of an ineluctable condition, and released him from an inner tension that, by some inexplicable traffic of the nerves, had stiffened his hand to an unbreakable stoniness. Alleluia, cried the man, wagging his fingers, Christ Jesus is great.
After his discourse in the synagogue, Philip was engaged in effecting what looked like a cure at a street corner in Sebaste. An old woman had fallen in a faint and lay as if dead near, but not on, a heap of uncleared camel dung. The Samaritans always had the reputation of a dirty people and employed no municipal streetcleaners. Philip knelt near to the woman, put his ear to her breast, heard a faint but rhythmical heartbeat. He knew she would recover so, with Greek cunning, used the circumstance to the advantage of the faith. ‘Ponder on the goodness of God and his Son Christ Jesus,’ he told the surrounding crowd, including a couple of uneasy armed police on its fringe. ‘To God all things are possible. Let us pray.’
Two men, with staves and bundles, heard the prayer which Philip was teaching the crowd – ‘Our Father in heaven, may your name be blessed,’ and so on – and praised God that the work was proceeding. When the old woman was shakily on her feet again, though shrieking at the sight of camel dung, they pierced the crowd to greet Philip. Philip cried:
‘Peter. John. You come in a good time. There’s plenty to do in Samaria.’
‘A bad time in Jerusalem,’ Peter said. He was white as a baker with the dust of the road, but John, of an exquisite frail body that accorded oddly with his thunderous voice, had cleansed and brushed himself in a tavern at the town’s end.
‘Saul?’
‘Having suppressed the Greek Jews he starts now on the Hebrews,’ John said. ‘As Peter’s always saying, we never thought we’d be kicked into preaching the word abroad. Have you room for us?’
‘I’m staying,’ Philip said, ‘in the house of a certain Simon. The Great Magician he calls himself, or used to. A performer of tricks that make the mob gape. He called them Egyptian miracles. He’s reformed now. I baptised him last week. I think you’ll be welcome there.’
Simon had made much money from his street and theatre performances and his house was large and furnished with Alexandrian bad taste. At the moment he was in the main room of that house, a neatly dressed man with a beard trimmed and greased in the Assyrian mode, looking gloomily at a dead sparrow that lay, legs up, on a salmon-pink cushion. The girl who was his mistress as well as his conjuring assistant sat on the floor beside the little bird, weeping. She was a pretty girl in blue silk, her hair a black lustrous river, and her name was Daphne. She sobbed:
‘It hasn’t helped much – your joining this new faith.’
‘The subject has to believe. You can’t expect a sparrow to believe. Although, according to our friend Philip, God watches even over sparrows. No use. I’ll buy you a new one at the market.’
‘But
it won’t be the same. Death’s a terrible thing. Even the death of a sparrow.’
‘My sweet Daphne, you’re too tender-hearted. Only animals know death. Men and women live for ever. That’s the new teaching.’
‘You believe that?’
‘It’s a consoling thought. We die – but then we start a new life – somewhere. I’ve never much cared for the una nox dormienda.’
‘You know I don’t know Latin, if that is Latin.’
‘One long night to be slept through. With no awakening. Catullus wrote that. He also wrote a poem on the death of a sparrow.’
‘Poor little thing.’
Philip arrived with Peter and John. ‘Peter,’ Philip said, ‘John.’ Daphne looked up at them, drying her tears with her hair. ‘Simon. Daphne.’ John saw a pretty girl with black lustrous hair like a river and felt an all too manly response. Was it right or wrong to respond thus? This girl might be that man’s wife, though he thought not. There had been little time for feeling just glandular responses to female comeliness. It had been a hard time, no doubt of it. ‘We would all be grateful,’ Philip said, ‘if you would allow my friends to share my room. These are very exceptional friends. They were the first followers of the Lord Jesus.’
‘Most welcome,’ Simon said, now on his feet. ‘Friends of Philip are friends of mine and of my ah helpmeet here.’ John had been right to think not. ‘So,’ Simon said. ‘You are come here to add to the miracles Philip has already wrought?’
‘That’s not the main task,’ Peter said. ‘The main task is preaching the word of salvation. That poor bird there looks dead.’ Daphne renewed her weeping. ‘There, there,’ Peter said. ‘Best bury it and get a new one. I had a pet thrush when I was a boy in Galilee. When it died my mother cooked it. There was not much meat on it.’ Daphne wept.
A man walked in, a stranger to Simon. ‘Open house,’ Simon said with sarcasm. ‘All welcome.’ The man was chewing, as if he had run here from his midday meal. He swallowed and said:
‘It’s my brother. He’s leaping like a fish and making strange noises. The man Philip has to come.’
‘Has to? Has to?’ Simon rebuked. ‘He’ll come when he’s ready. The fowls should be cooked by now,’ he said to Daphne. Fowls of the air. She wept. ‘Unseemly,’ Simon said, ‘to cry in front of our guests. Go to your duties, girl.’ So she went to the kitchen.
‘We’ll have a look at your brother,’ Peter said.
He was in the house round the corner. Baked fish lay cooling on the table, and there was a great spilth of wine on the floor. A large family ranging from a great-grandfather to a wondering thumb-sucking child kept to the walls, allowing a young man, naked with a hairy body, to leap about the floor, crying words like nagfalth and worptush. He had evidently torn his clothes off. Peter, John, Philip and Simon watched. Peter growled: ‘Out of him, quick.’ He meant devils. He cried, more formally: ‘I conjure you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to depart from him. Leave. Torment him no more.’
I suppose that some doctrine of possession by evil spirits will serve to explain, at least for the unlearned, such phenomena as we often see in our cities: men and women, usually young ones, who thresh around, froth at the mouth, emit what sounds like strange language but may be merely the mechanical grinding of organs of speech which are out of control. I would refer this ecstasy or riot of the limbs to some physical cause such as faulty diet. It does not last long. The sufferer becomes exhausted and lies still, exorcised as the exorcisers would say. After Peter had growled or shouted further objurgations, the young man’s open mouth gave out a stream of filthy language which made the women of the house tut and shut their ears. Then he snored in his exhaustion.
‘Another miracle,’ Simon said as he led his guests home to eat.
‘Beware of that word, Simon,’ Peter said. ‘I too am named Simon, by the way, but that’s another story. We did nothing. The grace of the Lord did it all.’
‘But,’ Simon said, ‘the power is in you. And in Philip. It’s a kind of magic.’ He led them in and to the set table, where the scorched fowls already sat, legs in the air. Peter sat, looked at him sternly, said:
‘And what do you mean by magic?’
‘The power to change things that are not changed in the course of nature. I once had the appearance of that power. I called it magic but it was trickery. I learnt it in Alexandria. Moses too learnt this trickery in Egypt. You can take a drugged snake that stiffens itself to the appearance of a stick, then you throw the snake down, it comes out of its trance, it wriggles and hisses.’
‘We learnt this nowhere,’ Peter said. ‘The power is not in us. The power is in God.’ And, famished, he began to work at a chicken leg, showing strong brown teeth.
‘I’d like that power,’ Simon said.
‘Why?’ John asked. ‘Why would you like that power?’
‘Well,’ Simon said, ‘to do good in the world. To show the world that I am one of God’s favoured people. Like you.’
‘You mean perhaps for your own glory,’ Peter said, licking his fingers.
‘I did not say that. I did not mean that. I was once a magician. Then I learnt, with Philip’s help, to follow the Christ and abjure all that trickery. Now I am no longer Simon the magician. I am a man without a skill. But you three have a skill, and a very precious one. I would like that skill.’
John had found the wishbone. He smiled at the red-eyed Daphne, who stood by the table in the manner of a servant. He offered her the wishbone to pull with him. But she would not. Peter said:
‘The curing of the sick, the healing of the lame and the blind – these are nothing, Simon. They’re but sparks out of the flame of faith in the Lord. They show God’s power, yes, but it’s more important that we learn of God’s mercy.’
‘Bob’s buv,’ Philip went, his mouth full. Then Simon said:
‘I want the power. I can pay for it.’
They all looked at him, silent over the ravaged fowls.
‘I can pay well. I made much gold and silver out of duping the people with my tricks. Now that money can go to you – to do with as you will or as God wills. But I ask that in exchange you give me the power.’
Peter turned to Philip, who sat to his left. ‘You’ve not taught him much, Philip. He understands nothing at all. Nothing of the mission or the faith.’ To Simon he said: ‘You want to buy God’s grace, power, mercy?’
‘I wish to do only good – to heal the sick, to bring the dead back to life—’
‘To your own honour and glory,’ Peter said.
‘The power is in your hands. I have seen that same power in the hands of Philip. I wish, to the glory of God, to have that power in my own hands. I can pay well – ten thousand sesterces, twenty thousand—’
‘To hell with you,’ Peter said. ‘To hell with your money. Repent of your wickedness while you still have time.’
‘Wickedness?’ Simon was genuinely puzzled as well as hurt. ‘What wickedness?’ John said, with unaccustomed faintness:
‘You perceive no wickedness in trying to buy God?’
‘A question to be asked is this,’ Philip said. ‘Is there as much wickedness in wilful ignorance as in wilful sin? Is sin a kind of ignorance, as ignorance is a kind of sin?’
‘Let’s have none of your Greek nonsense,’ Peter said. ‘We have a hard case here. I don’t know whether to be sorry or glad that I’ve eaten his victuals. I can’t cancel the hospitality he’s already given us, but I don’t think I want any more.’
‘But,’ Simon said in his bewilderment, ‘Philip taught here in Sebaste that Jesus Christ himself made a bargain with God. He sold himself on the cross. He bought our redemption, isn’t that what you said, Philip? The whole of life is buying and selling. Again I say – sell me the power.’
‘It’s been a brief stay,’ Peter said, ‘and I thank you for the offer of free lodgings. But we must go elsewhere.’ He got up and made a clumsy bow in the direction of the girl with the black lustrous river and the red eye
s for the loss of a sparrow. The two others got up with him. Simon was still bewildered.
Marcellus, the new procurator of Judaea, had already landed at Caesarea. The ship, named The Heavenly Twins, with a wooden painted effigy of Castor and Pollux embraced on its prow, lay at anchor, its cargoes human and mercantile discharged, new cargoes of furlough and time-expired troops, as also of sweet Palestinian wine and dried fruits of the country, to say nothing of tax money in strongboxes, ready for boarding when repairs to the hull had been effected as well as a torn topsail resewn. Caleb the Zealot was in Caesarea, his hair cropped in the Roman fashion and his beard shorn. He spoke Greek in this town of Greeks and offered himself at one of the port offices as a trained ship’s cook whose papers had been stolen by dirty Jews. He wished, he said, to work his passage back to the Italian mainland where his family lived. He was told there was no berth available. In conversation with the boatswain of The Heavenly Twins in a dockside tavern, he discovered who the undercook was – a Syrian, sweaty and of great girth. With no compunction Caleb knifed him in one of the streets of brothels, not mortally but enough to ensure that he would undertake no voyage for a time. On presenting himself again for employment on a seagoing vessel he learnt that he was in luck. He gave his name as Metellus.
‘If you’re Metellus,’ the overcook said, ‘I’m Pompey the Great.’ He was a small wiry Calabrian whose first language was Greek. The ship’s stewards were insolent, and their insolence was prized as a comic speciality of Caesarea by the ship’s officers.