The marketplaces were already in great ferment, and wagons were being unloaded from the country and the merchants and farmers were haggling with blasphemies and oaths and threats and shaken fists and wild and furious eyes. One marketplace was a replica of another; the awnings were blue or red or green, and the narrow streets were weltering with hurrying men and women and children, all vociferous. But many of the houses still slept quietly behind their yellow walls, while slaves cleaned the gates and washed down the courtyards and tended the new gardens. The early sun was already warm and the breeze fresh from the distant sea.
Milo soberly discussed the condition of modern Rome with his father, and their faces became increasingly somber as they rode steadily to the Joppa Gate. “We have talked of this before, my father,” said Milo, “and have come to no conclusion save that Rome as she is now cannot continue unless the good citizens are more and more oppressed and finally enslaved in the service of the inferior. We know that newborn infants can no longer be supported by parents once called the ‘new men,’ the middle-class, and are being exposed so that they must die. Each day that passes sees more onerous taxes inflicted on the industrious and reverent and productive men, for the enhancement of a lavish court, subsidies to farmers, the looting of politicians, the free housing built for the idle, slothful, stupid and degenerate mobs, the free entertainment provided for those self-same mobs, the erection of grand government buildings to shelter the ever-growing and lustful armies of the bureaucrats and other petty officials, the granaries which dispense free food to the rabble, and the ambitious dreams of the sons of freedmen to remake the streets, the alleys, the roads, the houses and the villas and the countryside of Rome into a grandiose ‘city of alabaster!’ Then, there are the wars to nourish the manufactories which make war materials and blankets for the mercenaries, and which drain the public purse—now almost empty. Tiberius Caesar began with a noble thought: To restore the Treasury, to pay the public debt, to encourage the thrifty and to punish the idle. But he, too, succumbed under the evil pressures first established by Julius Caesar, who paid the mobs to support him.”
“No nation,” said Aulus, who was a student of history, “took that path without perishing. So, Rome must perish.” His face darkened with pain.
Milo said, “In our lifetime we can live virtuously and with strength, scorning the weak and the depraved, detesting the luxurious, honoring our gods, paying our debts.” He smiled. “And our taxes—when the murderous taxgatherers catch us.”
“If all good citizens of Rome refused to pay taxes, what then could a tyrannous government do?” asked Aulus, with an eager glance at his son, compounded of humor and wryness.
Milo laughed, reining back his tall black horse to prevent the treading down of a scurrying child. Then he no longer laughed. “Do you think the lustful mobs, the luxurious, the decadent, the abandoned, the slothful and the contemptible, would not fight for their sustenance from the purses of the proud? I tell you, Caesar would turn the mobs on good Romans and let them loot and burn and destroy as they would, and kill, until Rome was one river of blood and the fruitful men reduced to beggary and slavery. You will recall that Catilina attempted that, but he had Cicero to oppose him and finally to destroy him. But we have no Cicero now, no loud patriotic voice, alas, and few Romans remain to fight for their country, for the honor of their gods, the ashes of their fathers, and for their heroic pride.”
“Despair,” said Aulus, “is not an evil. It is a virtue, and can inspire men to restore grandeur to their nation and virtue and industry and pride. But the swine have taken even despair from the hearts of men and have left worms behind and Circe seducers who say that all is in vain, that sufficient it is to the day to endure and survive and let tomorrow fend for itself. So men who should man the battlements and guard the gates look upon their wives and children and shrug helplessly, and do not despair. Despair left them long ago, when liars told them it was useless to oppose tyrannical government which professed to love the mobs and had infused those mobs with envy and greed and lusts and had informed them that those who worked for their bread were their ‘natural enemies,’ and should be looted through taxes. If I dared,” said Aulus, “I would erect a temple to the goddess of Despair and clothe her in flaming armor and give her a terrible bright sword, and would implore her to destroy the festering creatures who are eating my country alive and devouring her bowels and drinking her golden blood!”
“As my mother would say, ‘Amen,’” said Titus Milo Platonius. “Do not the Jews say, ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat?’ Amen. Amen. Once Rome had such admonitions, but it is so no longer. However, as Cicero said, do not a people deserve their government, their fate? It is true.”
They had reached a converging of streets. Milo and his father drew in their horses abruptly, and their entourage halted also. A wild and roaring crowd had drawn together, and they were raising sticks and bringing them down furiously on the heads and bodies of half a dozen men in their center, and cursing and reviling them. The men had fallen on their knees, protecting their heads with their arms and wailing for mercy. About them were strewn books and papers and pens, and the mobs stamped upon them and dispersed them and spat upon them.
Milo lifted his mailed hand and a soldier trotted his horse to his side. “Inquire, if possible, as to what is causing this unseemly disturbance,” he said.
Aulus frowned. “It is my duty, as a centurion, to keep order.”
“True,” said Milo, and he was faintly smiling again. “But I think, in this matter, that you would prefer to turn aside your eyes.”
The soldier trotted back, saluting. “Lord,” he said, “the men are beating the taxgatherers, and it would seem that they not only desire their blood but their lives.”
Aulus prepared to dash forward, but Milo put a restraining hand on his father’s horse’s neck. He lifted his eyes serenely to the broad blue sky.
“It is a pleasant day, and I am enjoying the first part of my journey,” he said. “Let us enter this street, which is peaceful.” And he turned his horse sharply aside.
Aulus gaped at him, frowning deeper. “We employ the taxgatherers,” he said. “They are doing but their duty,”
“And with pleasure,” said Milo. “They oppress their own people, because they are mean and evil little men, who enjoy the sight of pain and distress. Therefore, let them have a taste of what they bring upon others. In a small way it is our own revenge on the taxgatherers of Rome, herself, and would that Romans had the spirit of these poor and distracted Jews! For once, let the goddess, Justice, be satisfied.”
Aulus smiled in his beard, and the entourage turned down the quiet street and left the shouting and tumult and screams behind them, until they could hear the sound no more.
I have been remiss, thought Aulus. My duty was plain. But, is it not a fearful thing when one’s duty is tyranny and the rescue of the abominable and the punishment of those who are justified in their despair and anger? When does the maintenance of law and order descend into the offal-pit of oppression?
Behind him, he heard the chuckling of Milo’s men and he hoped that they were chuckling with the same thoughts that were passing through his own mind.
Twenty-five Jewish taxgatherers were attacked in the streets of Jerusalem that day by the despairing people, and ten died of their injuries. For a time, thereafter, the taxgatherers, though protected by the Romans, walked carefully and did not rob nor extort nor torture nor seize property nor call upon the guards to arrest. They knew the hatred their own people bore them, and the desire for vengeance in their hearts, and so for a time they did not provoke them, and moved with circumspection. Romans were not always present.
This was partly due to the intervention of Aulus Platonius who issued a proclamation to the effect that any taxgatherer caught in a venal act would be executed. He would collect scrupulously and fairly, and without threats and implications of punishment, and would not extort any longer nor take the bread from the mouths of ch
ildren nor the roof over a man’s head. Otherwise, he would die, and publicly, as an example to other criminals.
A general “arrest and seize” had been issued by Aulus against those desperate men who had maimed and killed the taxgatherers, but for some strange reason none were ever arrested. “After all,” said Aulus virtuously, to fellow officers, “it is truly none of our affair. We employ the taxgatherers. That is true. But if they are criminals, themselves, let their own people administer their rude justice. Have we not said that of all nations we have brought into the Pax Romana? Above all, we wish peace.”
With less irony but with even more virtue Shebua ben Abraham, the Sadducee, said, “It is a monstrous thing that government agents and officials cannot pursue their office and duties without being threatened by rebellious creatures, who have no respect for law and order.” But then, Shebua, through his friendship with Herod and Pontius Pilate, paid little in taxes, and much of his profits was discreetly banked in Rome and Athens in the care of even more discreet bankers, who professed not to know the true names of their clients. The friends of Caesar bore no burdens nor suffered hardships, and preened themselves on their safety and their devotion to law, and no one menaced their households nor seized their property nor inflamed their crafty hearts with wrath, nor diminished their fortunes. Nor did they look upon the conquerors of their nation with anger and hate, for they had no pride, and love of God and country was dead in them, or had never lived.
Hillel ben Borush, weary with winter and afflictions, looked upon the spring gardens of the house of Shebua ben Abraham and stood in the dew, and he said aloud, and softly, in the words of Solomon:
“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone! The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. The fig tree puts forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a sweet fragrance.”
He went down the red gravel paths, winding his way around fountains brightly twinkling as if they, too, rejoiced, and he saw the buds of the white lilies rising through the leaves and the red cases of roses within their thorns, and the purple and yellow banners of blossoms opening on the walls, and the fig trees and the palms painted with bright green, and he smelled the pungent scent of the cypresses and the karobs, and the whole earth to him appeared freshly created, bright with the first dews, arched by the first peacock sky, and when he heard the birdsong he wanted to weep with pure joy.
He found his son, Saul, sitting alone on a marble bench beneath a spreading sycamore tree, and he knew at once that Saul saw nothing of the blue wings of the morning nor the black swans on their pond nor the water lilies nor the beautiful marble statues or fountains, nor the soft shadows on the paths nor the roses and the lilies. And Hillel said to himself, as an old father had said before, “My son, my son, would that I had died for you!”
Saul sat huddled in a heavy fur cloak, though it was warm, for his heart was like black frost, and he was no longer young in his soul, and he appeared ill and exhausted and emaciated, for his recovery had been slow. He heard his father approaching and he lifted a dull face without expression. The half-paralyzed blue eye gave him an arcane appearance, and his freckled face was very sallow under the gingery spots. Hillel sat next to him and said, “You can travel, my son. We leave in three days.” He paused, and sighed and smiled. “Your sister is with child, and this is an occasion for rejoicing.”
Saul did not speak. Hillel cried out in his sudden sharp pain, “Do you not see the earth about you, Saul, and its pristine glory as on the first morning of creation, and the benign sun? Do you not smell the sweetness of life, the frail fragrance of hope? Are you blind? Are you insensible? To be blind is to be pitied. To be insensible is to be blind of the spirit, and that is man’s sin and God’s affliction through man.”
He saw it was useless. Saul saw nothing. Hillel thought he was remembering only the day of those dread crucifixions. In this Hillel was wrong. Saul was pondering with a strange intensity on the feverish dream he had suffered before his collapse, and he could not shake it from his mind, nor its dread and terror, nor his own passion to reap the corn and join the laborers. He could not forget the swelling of his heart, his hopeless struggle, and, at the last, his enormous unease for the unknown man he had seen crucified, then dropped into the earth. Wherever he glanced, even this morning, he saw that man’s eyes, compelling, commanding, filled with love and recognition. But what they had compelled, what they had commanded, he did not know, and his whole spirit was wracked with the longing to know.
“I understand,” said Hillel, laying his fingers on his son’s knee, “that you have endured much, but the sorrow should not be kept before you, nor should you remember your illness. You are young. Your eye may have some deformity, the lid half fallen, but still it is not blind. Saul! The world lies before you, and you can do what you will for Israel, and for God!”
Then Saul, who rarely spoke these days, replied to his father in the words of Job, dolorous and slow and heavy:
“‘Oh, that I might knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to His seal! I would order my cause before Him and fill my mouth with arguments. I would know the words which He would answer me, and understand what He would say to me.—Behold, I go forward, and He is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive Him! On the left hand, where He does work, but I cannot behold Him. He hides Himself on the right hand, that I cannot see Him.’”
Hillel’s mouth opened in compassion and kindred suffering, and he did not know that his tears touched his cheek. He pressed his son’s cold and unresponsive fingers. He said, “You have not completed what Job said:
“‘But He knows the way that I take. When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold!—For He performs the thing He has appointed for me.’”
Saul looked at him fully and fiercely for the first time. He tried to speak, but only a mournful sound came from him. He seized his father’s shoulders in his hands and pushed his intensely agitated face close to his, and Hillel was afraid, for Saul’s passion seemed to presage a seizure or a return of his illness.
“Do you believe what you have said, my father?” cried the youth.
“I believe. Before God, I believe.”
Saul still stared at him while he slowly dropped his hands from his father’s shoulders. He still searched his face, for a kind falsehood, for false compassion. Then when he saw that Hillel believed, that he had spoken what he felt was the truth, the youth burst into silent tears and bent his head. And he shook that head over and over, and at last he whispered, “He has hidden Himself from me, for I am not worthy.”
Before Hillel could answer, Saul continued: “I do not know who that man is, though I have seen him three times, twice in reality, once in a dream. He haunts my soul. I do not know his name. I cannot flee from him in my thoughts; he pursues me like one on the heels of a deer, and would have me. When I sleep, I hear his voice. He would have me do—but I do not know what it is he would have me do!”
“Who?” asked Hillel, in consternation, and thought of the physician, for Saul was distraught.
Saul said, “I do not know. But I must leave this place, for it was only in my dream that he died, and he walks this earth and I am afraid that I may encounter him again. He is an enigma. There are times when I do not believe he exists, that he is a chimera of the Greeks, a fantasy, a nightmare, a threat.”
Hillel put his arms about his son and drew that tormented face to his breast and he thought of angels—or of demons. From both, thought the wretched father, may mere poor mortal man be delivered!
“Hush, hush, my dear one,” said Hillel, with tenderness. “We shall go home. We shall not remember enigmas nor fantasies nor chimeras, in the safety of our house, in the peace of our gardens. You shall recover your health and grow into full manhood, and then God will reveal His will to you, blessed be His Name.”
Saul said in his broken voice, “I would know God’s infinitude, for noth
ing else will satisfy me, and I have been denied.”
“Listen to me!” said Hillel, “for this is a story I heard in my boyhood, and it was vouched for that it was true.
“Three holy men went into the Temple to pray and contemplate and reflect, and they were pious and good men of much learning and wisdom. They sat in silence in the shadow of. the great columns, near the High Altar and gazed upon the veil that hid the Holy of Holies, and they thought of infinity.
“They let their minds roam over God’s endless universes of which the Greeks speak, and of the constellations and the galaxies, and one wheeled beyond another, and another beyond that one, and they extended into eternity, and of eternity there was no end.
“The human minds of those men pursued the universe and the constellations and the galaxies into the farthest of space and time, and roamed on and on, and there was no end and no beginning. And their minds reeled with the thought and could not understand nor comprehend nor enfold it, for surely, their human intellects told them, and their knowledge of reality, there is a beginning, there is a border beyond which there is nothing—and at the thought of nothingness, at the thought of endlessness, and even beyond that the abysses of other endlessnesses, and more universes and constellations and more nothingness and no borders, their minds were stricken, and they shrank, and they were filled with the awful cold horror of the thought of infinitude—for what man can grasp it?
“Now one of the men rose up and drove a dagger into his heart, for he could not endure infinity, for it became of unearthly horror to him. And the second man went mad, and ran roaring and raving into the street. And the third man—” Hillel hesitated. “The third man lost all his faith and he returned to his companions and said, There is no God.’”