“Well, dry your tears,” said the practical Plotius. “At sunset you will leave this room and go into the quarters of the slaves, with a broom which waits you without. You will then be inconspicuous. In the meantime we must disguise that lily complexion of yours with this dark brown oil. Be discreet! Speak to no one; mutter constantly under your breath like a simpleton. Then you will steal from the Palatine, mingle with the crowds of the city, then walk to the Esquiline Gate as fast as possible.”
He gave Lucanus a sharp short dagger, which he was to conceal under his clothing. “One never knows,” he said. He smeared the brown oil carefully over Lucanus’ face and neck, and adjusted the black wig, and helped him dress in the rural garments. “Now,” he said with a laugh, standing back to admire his handiwork, “not even Julia would look at you!”
He hesitated, then suddenly embraced Lucanus as a brother, and kissed his cheek awkwardly. “May the gods preserve you,” he said. “I do not say farewell, for I believe we shall meet again.”
Part Three
“Life belongs to God; for the activity of the mind is life, and He is that activity. Pure self-activity of reason is God’s most blessed and everlasting life. We say that God is living, eternal and perfect; and that continuous and everlasting life is God’s, for God is eternal life.
Aristotle Essay, “Divine Reason as the Prime Mover”
Chapter Thirty-One
Sara bas Elazar to Lucanus, son of Diodorus Cyrinus:
Greetings, my dearest friend, my one beloved. The Day of Atonement is over, and I bask in the peace of God, knowing that He has forgiven me and that I am inscribed in the Book of Life. A beautiful tranquillity rests on Jerusalem. From my window I can see the Temple, shining like a golden shield in the light of the full moon, and the city sparkles restlessly like a field of fireflies. The hills are copper, the wind a breath of a winery, and slowly, beneath me, the yellow leaves drop from a tree like small flames. The women are in the courtyard, drawing up water, and their voices are calm, and from the windows and the doorways of the inn there is a pungent smell of roast lamb and bread and spices, and the flicker of lamps. For man has been forgiven of God again, and there is quiet rejoicing, for all know His love and His promise of the ages.
Ah, if only you were here beside me, holding my hand, and lying in this peace! If only you would come once to Jerusalem! Yet, always, when I speak to you of this, you evade my eyes, as if you feared a terror in the city. I do not understand this, but I remember the last words of our dear friend, Joseph ben Gamliel, before he died two years ago in the sight of the Temple: ‘One day Lucanus will come here, and he will find Him whom he has been seeking all the days of his life’.
I prayed today for joy in your soul, your health and happiness. I pray so each year, all these long seven years since first we met. You have repeatedly implored me to marry, and to forget you; there is not a letter you write to me which does not contain this admonition and plea. But how can a woman who loves forget him whom she loves? How can a spring be filled with water if its source becomes dry? From whence will come the wine if the vine perishes? To ask me to lie in the bed of another man is to ask me to degrade my spirit, to deliver myself up like an infamous woman even though I should first step under the wedding canopy and take the hand of a stranger. My soul is wedded to yours.
Dearest beloved, we last met in Thebes, and though your words were rejecting and sad I saw the light on your face when you saw me. We conversed quietly in the shade of your garden, but what we spoke in our hearts was not the words of our souls and understanding. Why can you not forget your bitterness against God? I have told you often, as did Joseph ben Gamliel, that God created man perfect and whole, without the threat of sickness and death. But men disobeyed God, and brought these things into the world with their disobedience. It was man who exiled himself from joy, who attracted to himself the spirit of evil, who caused a curse to be delivered upon the earth.
Wherever I go, through all the cities and the ports, I hear your name as a great physician. I know you care nothing for this; you wish only to alleviate pain, bring comfort, and delay death. Nevertheless, it is a happiness to me to hear you acclaimed by the poor and the abandoned, the slaves and the oppressed. They talk of you in the market places.
Though I never knew him except in your own words, I grieve with you in the death of your old friend and teacher, the physician, Keptah. I prayed for his soul today, for God has said it is good to pray for the souls of the dead, who sleep in the dust. Their memory is a blessing to us.
Sometimes, when I am most sad, I remember your stories of Rome, and I laugh happily. I understand that there is little in the world of today to excite one’s risibilities, for the Pax Romana, in the guise of world peace, has brought oppression, suffering, slavery, and exploitation to all the people of the world. Power is corruption; it is in the nature of man to injure what he dominates, and the urge to dominate lives in us all like a dark disease.
I rejoice with you that no harm has come to you, my dear one, when you have visited Rome once or twice a year during all these years. How I should love to see your beautiful mother, your charming sister, your brothers, and all your friends! I laugh for hours when reading of your old tutor, Cusa, the clever rascal.
I have had a strange experience, though when I relate it you may find nothing strange in it at all, except the sentimental thoughts of a woman of twenty-four who must fill her lonely life with portents and imaginings and fantasies.
Jerusalem, as you know, is filled and surrounded by pilgrims from all over the Land of Israel on the holidays. The wealthy can find comfortable accommodations in the inns and the taverns, or at the homes of friends, where they can celebrate the New Year in pleasant company and at pleasant tables and in pleasant conversation. But the poor find what crevices they can in the crowded city, or camp outside the great walls in tents or in caves. Often I walk among the huddled thousands of pilgrims outside the gates, observing their rough clothing, their bare feet, their tangled beards, their crying children, their herds of goats, and listening to their voices accented by the dialects of Galilee and Samaria and Moab and Perea and Decapolis. They make merry on the New Year, and their browned faces are devout, and they gaze at the Temple with passionate love, and observe the slightest laws with much gravity. They sleep to the shrill barking of jackals, and their food is poor and their wine wretched. Yet they are happy, and the gaiety and prayers on the dusty hillsides below the walls have a deeper meaning and resonance than those heard in the large houses, surrounded by gardens, within the city. Once you observed bitterly that the poor pray more passionately because they have no pleasures, but only God. In this truly they are blessed, for if a man has not God he has nothing, and if he has God then he has all else besides in his heart.
At sunset, on the New Year, the pilgrims crowded the narrow and winding streets of Jerusalem, their children in their arms or at their heels, and they were a hot and multicolored river, moving under a silver cloud of dust. I alighted from my litter, on an impulse, and accompanied them beyond the walls, where their poor feasts were set out on cloths on the ground, and the moon rose over them and brightened their fires. Many were the invitations shouted at me to join a family for wine or bread or a little meat, for, as I was dressed humbly, they thought I was a young woman without a family, or who was lost in the crowded caravans. I listened to their songs, their laughter, the voices of their running and hungry children, the cries of their animals, their prayers. All at once I was oppressed by loneliness, and my longing. I stood apart near a twisted tree and looked at the fires spurting on the hillside, and their reflection on the simple faces. It was then that a young man approached me in his rough blue robe; his sandaled feet fastened by harsh ropes.
This young man could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, and he stood near me with tall stateliness and smiled at me, and instantly we appeared alone and infinitely lonely together. It was as if a circle of silence surrounded us, and voices and cries dimini
shed to a dream. There was a deep wisdom and gentleness on his face, and an enormous tenderness, as if he understood that I had no one and pitied me. He had an earthen goblet in his hand, filled with wine, and he offered it to me, and I took it and drank of it, as simply as he had given it. All at once my eyes filled with tears and sobs choked me, and I wished to pour out to him all my grief and exile and sadness. He took the emptied goblet from my hand, while I tried to control myself. He waited until I was more composed, and then he said to me in the sweetest and strongest of voices, ‘Sara bas Elazar, be of good heart and dry your tears, for God is with you, and you are not alone’.
I was astonished and mute. How had he known my name, and the sorrow in my spirit? He smiled at me deeply, and a near fire flared up, and I saw his large blue eyes, and they were like infinite stars. In that moment I desired to fall at his feet and embrace them. I felt that he knew everything, not only about me, but about the whole world, and that there was peace beyond imagining in him, and all love and hope.
The tears blinded me, and when I had wiped them away, and my heart had ceased to shake, the young man was gone. I almost thought I had dreamt this, but the taste of the wine was on my lips. A sudden awful sensation of loss came to me, and I searched for him among the pilgrims, but I did not see him again. I could not sleep that night, but each time that I wept a comfort came to me that was not the comforting of man.
Enough. Even the memory of him sets me to dreaming and into a sense of joy. Was he an angel, dressed humbly, as were the angels whom Abraham entertained in his tent? I wish to believe it; I almost believe it. I cling to the memory of his face.
I am addressing this letter to you in Athens, at your home, where you are to remain for a few weeks longer. I salute you now, my dear Lucanus, with all the love in my heart and my spirit, and plan for our next meeting. And one of these days, in your searchings for my brother, Arieh, you will find him. He is nine years old now, and all within me convinces me he is alive, and that one day he will be restored to the arms of his sister and his people.
God be with you.
Lucanus had at first reflected that in the land of his people, Greece, he would find his home. But after a while the bitter realization came to him that here too he was a stranger, and that he had, truly, no home anywhere. He had been born in Antioch, and Antioch had not been his home; he had lived near Rome, and had seen it occasionally, but he was a stranger there also. He had visited all of the ports and the cities along the Great Sea, and had small houses in many of them when he left the ships, yet nowhere did he possess a home, or enjoy the company of friends, or have peace. The wretched, the humble, the poor, the abandoned and forgotten, the slaves, the miserable little merchants in the bazaars and shops blessed his name and kissed his hands and his feet. But he was a stranger, forever a stranger in a strange land, and though he knew many tongues it was as if an alien spoke them. His only delight was in comforting and healing, and in the letters he received from his family and from Sara bas Elazar. A terrible restlessness and mournful anxiety and emptiness filled him always, and he was like a man searching for water in a desert.
Three years ago he had bought a little house near the outskirts of Athens. When returning to his home in Athens, as when he returned to his other homes, it was not like one returning to a familiar spot and to familiar voices and gardens, but as a wayfarer, tired and pausing only for a night.
Here was the land of his fathers, but it was not his land, though the aesthete in him rejoiced in its stark and light-filled beauty, its bony plains, its sparkling silver hills, its shining rocks, its fiery blue seas, its rosy or light brown roofs, its marbled history, its white temples, its dusty ilexes, laurels, olive trees and myrtle, its grape terraces under a brilliant sky, its glorious Parthenon nobly rising on the Acropolis like a crown of graceful stone. Here was the land of Helios, the land of demos, of Pericles, of Homer, of Phidias, of Socrates and Plato, of all science and art and grace and poetry, of the very soul of civilized man, of the calm foreheads of the gods, of Olympus. Here law and justice had set their mighty feet on marble, and out of this dry, astringent air had blown the wings of deities, and philosophies, emerging like shadows of brighter light out of light itself. Here the oracles spoke, and the fleets of Jason stood at every port. Here, in this land, heroism had stepped forth, with a shield like the moon and a sword like the lightning, and here the mountains gazed at Marathon, and Thermopylae still vibrated with the memory of those few who had defeated the hordes of the Persian. The glory lay on the brow of Greece for all the ages to see, and would never be quenched.
This modern Greece was not the Greece of Pericles; but she lived as a dream still, eternal and not to be imitated. And here, as always, Lucanus was a stranger, brewing his potions, lonely, nameless except to the poor and lost, cultivating his garden, in which he grew flowers and herbs, drinking his lonely wine, preparing his meager meals with his own hands, reading, meditating, writing his letters, and watching the stars slope down the dark arch of heaven.
Often, at dawn, when the pale sun had hardly thrown its frail rays over Athens, and the city was only beginning to stir slightly, Lucanus would pass the Temple of Theseus and climb the long white stairs to the top of the Acropolis, and to the Parthenon. There alone he would wander through the colonnades where Socrates had taught, and he would gently run his hand over the Doric columns which were silvery in the first light. He would gaze reverently at the winged statues seemingly about to leap into glowing and hollow space, and would stand before the western pediment of the Temple of Zeus, or move through the cella to admire the vast statue of Athena with her high helmet and her great, noble face. He would drift on to the eastern pediment, to marvel at the grouped, reclining Fates with their delicate marble draperies that appeared to move in the dry and luminous wind. As a physician he would wonder at the genius of the sculptor who had carved the recumbent figure of Ilissos on the western pediment, and who had given alabaster the aspect of living flesh. Here wisdom trembled on stone, and beauty set her hand in shining shadows on low reliefs and on argent body and grave face and chaste breast and imperial profile and immaculate limb. Here was silence, but immortal presences could just be detected beyond the bounds of the eye, like a translucent chorus, and all this crowded mighty company carved from marble awaited only a mysterious summons to move into godlike life, to fill the ear with immortal song and sonorous voices. At last the cool turquoise sky stood between the white columns, painted and clear, and the robes of the caryatids turned to gold.
Here Lucanus was less lonely than when among men. Standing among the statues in his white robe, he was one with them. Moving among them, it was as if he were the first to awake. In the midst of beauty and solemn heroism and frozen grandeur he could again hope that, as man had created all this, there was a far possibility that men would become men once more, speaking in majesty and poetry, revealing secrets of eternity. His footsteps would echo among the columns and along the colonnades, and sometimes he would pause, half believing that he heard stronger footsteps behind him made by heroic feet which had stepped down from pediments onto the white and glimmering floor.
The sun would turn a brighter gold, and the city below would stir visibly, and the pink or light yellow roofs would move into light, and voices, restless and imperative, would rise up to the Acropolis like a flight of quarrelsome birds. Then his loneliness would return, and he would flee from the Parthenon.
Why was it not possible that when men attained the ultimate in glory they could not sustain it, but must fall from heaven? Was it because even at the heights they must commit the follies and the crimes that inexorably led to extinction? Thucydides had written, ‘The kind of events that once took place will by reason of human nature take place again’. Therein was the tragedy.
Lucanus knew, from his growing restlessness, that he must be on his way again very soon. Within two weeks he must accept a berth as a ship’s doctor plying between Crete and Alexandria, and he had consented to be employed so
for three months. He was much in demand, not only for his healing powers, but because his fee was so low. He always distributed this fee to the crew on his departure.
One morning, descending from the Parthenon, and feeling an aversion to returning to his lonely house at the end of the Panathenaic Way, he merged with the crowds of the Agora and wandered about the Stoa of Attalus, feverish with men and the noise of trade and shops. The little dark Greeks were more active and more effervescent than the Romans and much shrewder, much gayer, and more charlatan; they robbed with a debonair manner in their twenty-one little shops at the back of the columned promenades. Their goods were more colorful, and shoddier, for here no stern Roman law of values prevailed; yet their wares had charm. As always, even this early when the shops were just opening and the merchants were noisily scurrying about unlocking doors and dusting their stock, a fervid speaker was already on the platform haranguing the indifferent crowds. He was an old man with a ragged gray beard, and with a staff in his hand. Lucanus paused to hear his incoherent words. He was crying, and waving his staff, and rending his beard: “Repent, repent! The Kingdom of God is at hand!” The man must be a Jew; they were always exclaiming those words, and no one listened. Lucanus looked at the impressive public library, and remembered that he must return some books before his journey; men and women were beginning to climb the steps to the opened doors. Young girls, in bright scarlet or yellow or blue robes, had gathered in the fountain house to fill their pitchers; their voices were like parrots as they exchanged gossip, and laughed, and jostled for position in the double line. And now there was the law court, very dignified, and declaring, in its broad columns and arches, that the rule of law was the way of civilized mankind, and not the rule of men. Lucanus smiled cynically. He stared with coldness at the two Roman legionnaires standing at attention at the bronze doors. Where naked power existed, there was no law at all but the law of force. He could hear musicians practicing in the odeum for the day’s concerts and plays. He stopped a moment to look at the round house, where the bureaucrats squatted and spewed out their onerous regulations, in the immemorial way of all evil and oppressive men. An enormous procession of the devout was beginning to march up the Acropolis to do honor to Pallas Athena, and they carried struggling doves in their arms; Lucanus stepped aside to let the procession pass, and as he looked on the troubled faces of the worshipers he felt his old and chronic sadness again.