Across the Waters of Time- Pliny Remembered

by Ken Parejko

  I could only smile, then started again up the road. If we but take the time, I thought, nature will provide us all we need. She gives us not only our food, shelter, good company, and music, but even an odd comedy now and then. And all this without having to pay with sesterce or phony applause.

  Other than Castor, I had yet to meet anyone who shared my deep feelings of wonder and gratitude for nature’s gifts. Everyone else seemed busily betting on gladiators and chariot-races, seducing women, building temples, fora and amphitheaters, conquering barbarian tribes, or worrying over their own careers. More and more people were moving into the city. I remembered as a child hearing the shepherds and laborers on father’s estate tell stories of natural marvels they’d seen. Simple stories of birds who just for the fun of it flew upside down, of two gophers caressing, then kissing. Of gigantic fish seen jumping in the lake. Of nearly stepping on a grouse in the brush, and when she’d flown watching a dozen chicks scurry, cheeping plaintively, and then because they were so well-camouflaged, suddenly disappear.

  Most couldn’t wait to trade the rustic rural life for life in the city where human-made marvels awaited. The problem was, to create all those marvels -- the big wide racetracks, the sparkling gems mined for our women, the stone for all the temples and offices --- day by day nature was being destroyed. And no one seemed to notice or care.

  And now I myself was walking toward the city, to leave nature behind and re-enter bustling Antioch. I paused again, to take in the calm of the evening, and the flowing waters of the river. I’d come a long way from Comum and the little villa on the lake where Little Sparrow and I had played. If it was the pax romana which brought plants and wares from the farthest corners of the earth, it was also the pax romana which took Romans out to those corners. One might sneer at this pax romana, as Drusus had in his dream so long ago, but thanks to it, here I was in the midst of life remarkable and exotic.

  I remembered my first days on the Rhine, how foreign it seemed to me at the time. Now I was on another river, this one exuberantly tropical and even farther from home. My life was so different from the peasants along the Lake whose lives never took them more than ten miles from home. Yet they seemed happy. Was my love of travel and the need to experience the new and exotic a blessing, or a curse? I’d never asked myself that question before.

  Though sometimes I felt out of place in this distant land, yet exotic as it was I felt at home among the plants and animals along the river. Wherever I was, nature seemed willing to welcome me. In the quiet softness of the evening I let my mind and heart relax and expand into the natural world, as they first had when I was a child, and as I’d rediscovered in Castor’s garden.

  While the orange glow of sunset, the settling warm haze along the river, the birds and their songs, and the dogs barking in the distance and nearer baaing of the sheep played their part in reassuring me, the smells of the evening, held there by the heavy, still haze through which I walked, played at the edges of my consciousness.

  I stopped. Yes, the smells. Now I remembered. Theophrastus had written that the reeds and rushes of Syria were especially fragrant. Yes. My nose entered the smells of the evening: the smoldering wood-smoke curling out from the mud huts along the river, the decaying dog up along the road, its body caressed by a cloud of flies, the terebinth flowers and the others I could not name, but behind all that the rich, earthy smell of the river-plants.

  Under the guiding hand of Theophrastus I’d followed the trail of my senses to where they intersected my intellect. So, I realized, sensual pleasures such as these rich perfumes of the Syrian night can lead us to intellectual pleasure. Now in my mind the smell of the reeds conjured the reassuring crack and crinkle of the papyrus of Theophrastus’ De Causis Plantarum, as so many times I’d unrolled it and read it on into the night.

  I stood there, a middle-level Roman bureaucrat deep in my own middle age, alone at the end of the earth, captivated by the evening quiet and its smells. I noticed that my breathing was calm and smooth. It had been a subtle thing, something I’d not paid attention to before, how my breathing eased along the river, as it had when strolling Castor’s gardens. For this, and for Castor and Theophrastus, without whom I wouldn’t have noticed the richly fragrant rushes, and for the river and the terebinth tree, and the millions of little silkworms I’d just left busily weaving their threads, for all this I was grateful, and again perplexed that so few of my countrymen cared for all that the earth gave us.

  I started again toward town. The light was fading rapidly; the first stars already twinkled through the hazy sky. The few straggling passersby I met on the road ignored me, or at most bowed shyly. In the distance I could hear a woman singing, her gentle voice floating to me from across the river. The song merged with the evening light, Juno Lucina’s light, rising in many colors from off the water, Now I saw half a moon shining silvery from out of the east; the woman’s song, the light off the river, the dark from the sky and the moon wrapping me in the soothing calm of the tropical night. What a lovely song, lilting and lively, and though its language was foreign to me I understood it completely. It was a song of reassurance, of womanly strength, a lullaby of sorts, not blindly denying the dangers of the world, but an affirmation in human voice that for the moment, at least, those dangers would be held at bay. The voice reminded me of the songs my mother sang to me so long ago, so that here far from Comum and from Rome, here along the shores of a foreign river in a land with a violent history and an unknown future I felt suddenly, amazingly at home. My heart smiled to the unseen woman who did not know me, who might for all I knew despise me and all I stood for but whose selfless, soothing offering to the world reached across the river to me.

  I had a fleeting sense, for but an instant, of how I missed the presence of a woman in my life, a feminine presence to counterbalance all the men with whom I spent my days. I’d grown used, before coming to Antioch and while I was still at the Lake, to having Plinia around me. Every day I passed by women in the market and on the streets, hardly noticing them. Women prepared my food and cleaned my apartment and office. How long had it been since I’d touched a woman? This was a missing word or phrase from the text of my life which confused the meaning of the rest.

  I was just jotting this thought down in shorthand on the papyrus of my mind when a bevy of naked young boys, shouting in their shrill barbaric voices, suddenly appeared running at full speed from around the corner of a tumble-down hut and bearing straight at me. The instant they saw me, a Roman officer in their own backyard, they stopped. Not many strangers came out this far. I was clearly a novelty. They stood silently as I passed them. One, the youngest of the gang, perhaps four years old, bid me farewell with a sudden stream of urine which splashed quietly onto the dusty road; whether out of fear, contempt or merely a full bladder, I could not say.

  I left the youngsters behind and rounded a bend in the road and caught sight on one of the river's largest islands of the Circus where on festival days large noisy crowds came to enjoy the games. I was reminded that our footprint on this part of the world was wide and deep. Antioch was a city Julius Caesar loved and lavished with attention. The administrative buildings I worked in and the temples around them were largely of his era. In the battle for power after Caesar’s death it was here in Antioch that Mark Antony married Cleopatra. But after Antony and Cleopatra’s plans to together rule the twin empires of Rome and Egypt were sunk by Octavian’s navy at Actium, Octavian -- who as emperor became Augustus – hurried here, and aware of its importance as a crossroads of commerce, made it Syria’s capitol.

  Some, like Antony and Cleopatra, had come to Antioch to love, some to die. It was here in Antioch that Drusus’ favorite son Germanicus had died at the height of his fame, only thirty-three years old, with a clear hereditary claim to the throne. The pleasure-gardens of Daphne, with their springs and mineral-baths, were a favorite of the Roman elite. Germanicus’ last hours were spent there, in the lovely gardens and luxuriant villas on the far side of the ci
ty from where I now walked.

  Germanicus had died here forty-eight years ago, not long before I was born. It had grown nearly dark now, as I passed through the city’s gate and walked through the very forum in which Germanicus’ body had lain in state, past the very spot Germanicus’ wife, Agrippina the elder, first lifted his ashes to carry them back to Rome. It was the love the public felt for her father that helped lift her daughter Agrippina the younger first to the throne as Claudius’ wife, then as Nero’s mother, and finally to her own banal death at Bauli.

  So the shade of Agrippina, who I’d first seen in the colonial city named for her on the Rhine, and again in her golden dress at Fucino, had followed me across the miles and years here to the distant streets of Antioch.

  It was not an easy thing to understand. If nature was ruled by natural law, then where did these monsters come from, the two-headed calves, dwarfs and giants, evil power-hungry men and women, or the unspeakable brothers? It still troubled me. My mood darkened with the evening. As I left the narrow street for the quiet courtyard and steps leading up to my room I left behind that sense of expansiveness and comfort in the world, my quiet gratitude replaced instead by a low, simmering anger, first for the monstrous outrages fate foists upon us, then for the double pain they bring in the realization that there is no explaining them.

  I ate a light dinner and was early to bed. I fell asleep quickly, more quickly than usual. My walk had worn me out. I slept a good, long, dreamless sleep.

  I woke at dawn, and spent an hour writing down what I’d seen the evening before, the silkworms and the birds, trees and rushes along the river. Then I went to the office, where without my usual enthusiasm I managed the business of the day. I returned to my apartment for lunch and a brief afternoon nap. Every day around noon a nice breeze started up the valley of the Orontes and blew on through the afternoon, bringing a pleasant respite from the hot Syrian days. I would lie in my room for an hour or so, letting the breeze lap over and cool my body, then rise refreshed to again go about my business, all the while continuing an intimate conversation with the wind during the evening meal and again, while sitting up late into the night over my journals. The six months since I’d arrived in Syria had passed quickly. The increment of my journals had more than doubled since my arrival, and it was this growing stack of papyri which more than anything marked for me the passage of time.

  In the midst of this regular life, in the spring of sixty-seven, the terebinth trees in the pleasure-gardens of Daphne in full bloom, the city alive with flowers and exotic smells, Fortune set Vespasian's tempting offer before me.

  Rome’s most troublesome colony lie just to my south, where the praefects Pontius Pilate, Fadus and Cumanus one after another stumbled badly at dealing with the Jews. Judean politics were enough to give anyone a headache. Augustus’ strategy of appointing local client-kings worked quite well: to the Judeans a Jewish king, even if tied to the Romans, was better than a Roman governor. But when Herod’s grandson Agrippa died, Claudius’ appointment of a Roman proconsul to rule Judea began a downward spiral in our relations. Within the Jewish ranks there was no unanimity in how to deal with us, which made things all the harder. The countryside crawled with Zealots, Sicarii, Sadducees, Pharisees and a score of messianic cults, from Simeon bar Giora to Josep ben Matthias to the Nazarene Christus' followers so attractive to Lucius.

  There were pro-Christus Jews and anti-Christus Jews. Just five years ago when Festus, procurator of Samaria died and before we had time to appoint a new governor, the Jewish high priest Ananus had the martyr Christus’ brother James arrested and executed. Christus’ followers denounced Ananus to Agrippa II, who then had Ananus removed after only 3 months in office. Our presence in the region danced a complex dance on a high-wire, with different factions thrusting at us and trying to push us off. The rebellion which had defeated Gallus’ army at Jerusalem, and now drew Vespasian and his legions to the region, was only one of many. But as Gallus’ army retreated, they abandoned wagons full of weapons which fell into the rebels’ hands, a turn of events we could not ignore.

  My supervisor Licinius Mucianus, governor of Syria, knew Judean politics as well as anyone. As he explained to me, the Jewish rebels fell into two groups. The larger group, least well-armed and organized, consisted mostly of peasants. But their anger, fed by fundamental religious fires and made worse through the decades they’d suffered under us and the Jewish upper-classes, made them dangerous. There was one thing, Mucianus said, that came directly from the commandments of their religion and therefore was non-negotiable to them: they would stand for neither sacrifice to nor image of any Roman emperor or god in Jerusalem’s Temple. Images of even their own god Jahweh – I was surprised to learn they couldn’t even speak or write his name -- were forbidden by their Second Commandment, which Mucianus read to me from a papyrus collected by one of his spies: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt. You shall have no other gods beside Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters below the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I the Lord your God am an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments.

  Everywhere we set foot sculptures and busts of our gods, goddesses, emperors and generals sprout like weeds in a field. This, Mucianus said, is where the Jewish peasants drew a line in the sand: this is how they would be different. No sculptures, no images. Peasant leadership changed hands almost monthly. They were undisciplined and the rag-tag militias they put together were hard to control. At their worst they slipped into roving troops of bandits, reaping the chaos of war for personal gain. They fought us with guerrilla warfare and the tactics of terror, striking out of the dark against our legionaries, or as the Sicarii did, pulling out their curved blades in the bustling marketplace to assassinate officers and high-priests alike then vanishing into the crowds.

  The second faction we faced, according to Mucianus, was a coalition of the wealthy and the hereditary nobles. They chose to work with rather than against the client-kings, and read the commandments less literally. The peasants viewed this wealthy faction, whether Hasmonean or Herodian, as a parasitic class of overlords. Here were the priests too, especially the hereditary line of high-priests such as Ananas, who played a complex political game. While on the one hand collaborating with us, some secretly supported the peasants because, they believed, when we are finally thrown out of their land they and not the poorly-organized and illiterate peasants will fill the power vacuum.

  But the peasants weren’t fighting for the sake of the Jewish nobility or the high-priests. They fought and died to wipe the slate clean and start all over, in a kind of messianic millenialism. One of their primary goals was to make the priesthood not hereditary but elected. In that sense theirs was an egalitarian, though very patriarchal revolution. It was from the stratum of peasants that the new cult of the Christi arose. The hope of the lower classes was to overthrow us and the hereditary Jewish ruling classes in a great cleansing fire, an Armageddon which would bring to the world a New Age of peace and equality. Mucianus pointed out that the real danger would rise if the two factions, peasants and priesthood, formed a coalition.

  But at the moment in Jerusalem the peasants and high-priests were at each others' throats. Ananias had openly challenged the peasants by insisting that only the hereditary Pharisees be allowed into the inner sanctuaries of the Temple. John of Gischala stepped forward to lead the peasants. He denounced Ananias' decision. A disorganized army followed him into the Temple, where they slaughtered the high-priests' guards, murdered Ananias then hurried off to burn his palace. The burning of the royal palaces, seat of the ancient Herodian nobility, was more than symbolic. It was in the palaces that the royal archives were kept, which recorded generations of debt holding th
e peasant's families to the land as little more than slaves, and the roiling black smoke rising from the burning papyri signaled the death of the old gods and announced the arrival, it was hoped, of a new and more just future.

  Next the peasants turned their anger at us, attacking our garrisons. First the Sicarii conquered Masada, which Herod had promised would be impregnable. Then they took Antonia, the fort we'd built on the very edge of Jerusalem's Temple. Now one faction or another controlled the countryside from the north of Galilee south to the Nemeb desert and the red, cave-pocked cliffs of Idumea.

  In Antioch Mucianus could only stand by and watch Judea fall into chaos. It was his entreaties to Nero, delivered while the emperor was on his acting tour of Greece, which finally convinced the increasingly unstable emperor to summon Vespasian.

  One morning when I arrived at work I was told Mucianus wouldn't be in all day. Vespasian and his aides had arrived from Greece and while the army gathered Mucianus was briefing Vespasian on the complexities of the Judean situation.

  Obviously Antioch, the provincial capitol nearest Judea, was strategically important. But the city had a deeper significance to Vespasian. His father, Titus Flavius Sabinus, had worked here, years ago. Vespasian’s father had tried his hand at different businesses and was unsuccessful enough at all of them to be grateful to find work here as a tax-collector. We relied heavily on the two and a half percent tax on goods flowing from the east through the city. Vespasian's father, I'd already learned, had carried off that unpleasant job with so much understanding, fairness and steady equanimity that busts of him sprouted around the city, something almost unheard of for tax-collectors.