Priscilla of Alexandria

by Maurice Magre

  In the narrow redoubt behind his shop where he slept, Amoraim considered his garments, laid out on his meager bed. His only robe of almost-new black cloth and his broad belt were soiled by the impurity of Christian blood. Having examined them carefully he made a little heap of them in order to burn them the next day.

  He certainly did not aspire to elegance, but when one is old and alone, one has few joys. The solidity of a robe that hangs well, the suppleness of a belt that holds warmly were petty quotidian satisfactions of which he would be deprived henceforth. He thought that he no longer possessed anything to cover his body but a few miserable rags.

  Bur no matter! He accepted that new humiliation without bitterness. He had escaped a great danger while accomplishing that which seemed to him to be just. Old Amoraim would have the appearance of a beggar, but he would wear a fine vestment of duty accomplished. Then again, was there not in what had just happened a sign of a small protection? Perhaps God was about to commence showing a little more clemency to a pious old man?

  And he repeated, before going to sleep: “You have always sinned out of pride. Be humble, Amoraim!”

  V. The Three Philosophers

  Aurelius allowed the book that he had just reread for the hundredth time fall from his hands. It was the life of Apollonius of Tyana by his disciple Damis.23 He traversed the interior courtyard of his small square house and appeared in the midst of the accumulation of white roses that grew in his garden and climbed the colonnades of his terrace.

  His ever-sorrowful face had just brightened. He had drawn himself up to his full height, and the two patches that the graying of his temples made in his thick hair gave the impression of two roses detached from one of the bushes posed to either side of his forehead.

  Once a day, only, he emerged from his reading or a somnolent ennui. It was when his slave Touta returned from Alexandria, where she had gone to the market—for he lived near the Canopic Gate, outside the city wall, beside a little wood of sycamores that extended along the shore of Lake Mareotis.

  Every day he interrogated Touta with his gaze, and she, while lifting vegetables, oil or fruits out of her wicker basket, almost always gave him the same response.

  “I encountered her alongside the apostases. I had to wait a long time because she came out late. She was with her father this morning.” And she almost always added: “Priscilla is certainly the prettiest young woman in Alexandria.

  That was all. Aurelius’ gaze lost its gleam, the interest that he had in living vanished; he went back to sit in his library in the midst of the scrolls of papyrus in their wooden cases, written in all languages, and half-effaced tablets that were almost indecipherable.

  Those books had been his consolation. Seven years before he had experienced a great and mysterious chagrin about which he had not talked to anyone. Dolor that does not escape in words causes interior ravages. An intimate mechanism had stopped in Aurelius’ soul and had ceased to provoke the reactions of his will. He had lost the courage to go beyond the limits of his garden and he had never crossed its threshold again. His friends believed that he had departed on a voyage. Solitude had formed around him. He had dismissed his servants, with the exception of Touta, a young Armenian slave who paid the taxes, went in search of garments and nourishment, and was his only link of communication with the world.

  He had devoted himself to philosophy with the ardor of a lover for the body of his mistress. The books he possessed were inestimable. A part of the precious library of the Serapeum had been brought to him by the only two men he continued to see, Socles and Olympios, former friends of his father. Those two old men, who had once professed sciences and philosophy at the Museum, came regularly once a week to sit among the white roses of Aurelius’ garden at the hour when the declining sun set the waters of Lake Mareotis ablaze, in order to discuss matters of wisdom.

  Twenty-six years before, both of them had played a role in Alexandria in revolution. Emperor Theodosius had just ordered the destruction of the pagan temples, and Bishop Theophilus, Cyril’s predecessor, had pursued the execution of those orders with a furious fanaticism. Olympios and Socles had helped to fortify the ancient temple of Serapis, the palladium of paganism and had attempted to resist the Christian fury. They had tried to defend the intellectual wealth of the library, which was immense, for the Serapeum contained the six hundred thousand scrolls once given by Mark Antony to Queen Cleopatra, which had been drawn from Greece, Syria, Persia and all the countries of the world by Eumenes, the literate King of Pergamon.24

  In a golden tube there was a papyrus in the hand of Pythagoras, annotated by Ammonius Saccas and by Plotinus, which the erudite only consulted with a pious emotion. There were unknown works by Philo the Jew and a few writings by the legendary Dositheus, who was reputed to have been the master of the legendary Simon Magus. There were works engraved on thin stones, which came from the druids of Brittany. There were some made of parchment impregnated with an oil so persistent that one could still find the fingerprints of a Chaldean mage who had handled it a thousand years before. Others formed a succession of copper leaves and came from India. A jade box contained several pages of the Book of Changes of the Chinaman Fo-Hi. There were some in Zend script, in Devanagari, in cuneiform characters or hieroglyphics; there were some that were composed of primitive trigrams and others written in a language that no people spoke. One little red tablet came from vanished Atlantis.

  On the night that preceded the final assault on the Serapeum, Olympios and Socles, foreseeing the destruction of the library, had been able to remove a considerable number of the most precious works and hide them in Alexandria. At dawn, they had witnessed the burning of the books they had not had time to remove.

  They had fled in order to escape reprisals, and had not reappeared until the death of Theodosius, when the appeasement had taken place. Socles had then returned home, but Olympios, having spent a year in the hut of a herb-picker in the marshes surrounding the salt-pans of Shedia, had found that the solitary life was the best possible for a man in search of the truth. Years had gone by. He had not given the lie to rumors of his death. In the image of the anchorites of the Thebaid, he slept on the hard ground, sheltered by a roof of reeds, only nourishing himself on a few vegetables and fruits. Every week, he crosses the fifty stadia that separated him from Aurelius’ house, where Socles came to join him. The three men, equally fond of philosophy and solitude, conversed all night about the eternity of the soul, the powers of ecstasy and the mysteries of reincarnation.

  With what ardor they pursued the truth then, and strove to demonstrate it to one another! What beautiful hours those sages, almost equally detached from earthly things, lived in the mind! Sitting under the marble portico, they breathed the fresh nocturnal air of the lake, not as soft after the heat of the day as the spiritual breeze born of their words.

  Touta sometimes amused herself chasing away the mosquitoes from their foreheads with a large palm leaf, and they smiled at one another as they gazed at her corporeal youth, as if she were a living symbol of the invisible light they sought.

  When the star Sothis25 commenced to pale and the lake turned a more ashen blue, Touta went to sleep, her head on her folded arm, on the mosaics of the terrace. The three philosophers walked under the sycamores, the silver of their hair like a shifting aureole around their head. Their discussion was never concluded, and they promised one another for the following meting an irrefutable demonstration of the eternal verity. A competition was born between them. Each claimed to know a purer source than the others.

  It was that competition that had just impelled Socles to undertake a mysterious voyage to the south, from which he had brought back an element essential to their research. He had not given any further explanation but he had assured his friends that on his return, which would be in exactly three months, he would be able to take a decisive step toward the goal they were pursuing.

  Finally, Socles had obtained consent from Aurelius, by means of affectionate pleas, tha
t he would come with Olympios to meet him at Sais, where he expected to arrive on the first day of the month of Choiac. In accord with Olympios he had counted in the desire that Aurelius would have to see him again to vanquish the singular loss of will-power that had robbed him of the ability to leave home. Aurelius had ended up accepting, and Touta, who was also to make the journey, made sure that he did not change his mind.

  As she opened the door to the garden on the eve of the appointed day, Touta perceived her master, who was waiting for her on the terrace, as usual. She noticed with satisfaction that his gaze was more assured and his stance more upright.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I’ve seen Priscilla, and even followed her into the Church of Theonas,”26 Touta replied. “An extraordinarily ugly black man accompanied her. She knelt down and almost touched the stone with her forehead.”

  Aurelius made a melancholy gesture.

  In order to deflect his thoughts, Touta hastened to tell the story of everything she had heard at the shops.

  Forming small groups, more than six hundred monks of Mount Nitra had entered Alexandria through the Canopic Gate.27 They had a savage aspect and were hiding weapons under their robes. It was said that they had come to avenge the death of the Christian Hieros, murdered by Jewish fanatics. It was also said that Bishop Cyril was making inspired speeches in the churches, which he announced that there would soon no longer be a single Jew in the city. He was taking advantage of the opportunity also to hurl maledictions against Hypatia and all the philosophers of the Museum.

  But Aurelius listened to that news distractedly.

  “Touta,” he said, “I’ve made an important resolution. I’m going to go to India, like Apollonius of Tyana in order to reach the abode of the wise men where he learned the truth.”

  Touta and the three philosophers, lying in a large flat boat with four oarsmen under and awning of orange byssus, were now descending the branch of the Nile that went toward Canopus and the sea. They left to their right the great mass of red granite formed by the wall of Sais, the tombs of Apries and the Saite kings, and the funerary monument of Amasis. The moon illuminated the muddy waters and caused the boat to glide over a river of ocher.

  Socles had not wanted to say anything to his friends about the result of his voyage before they were all installed comfortably to their woolen cloaks and the last songs of the mariners of the landing-stage had died away.

  “I’m prepared for my disappointment,” said Olympios, smiling.

  Finally, Socles spoke.

  “Have you ever wondered why, when he had conquered Egypt, Alexander the Great plunged into the desert, at the price of a thousand perils, trying to reach the Temple of Ammon?”

  He stopped to enjoy his companions’ surprise.

  “All the historians report it,” said Aurelius. “He wanted to consult the oracle, to receive from the Egyptian priests that title of son of God, which all the pharaohs had borne before him. But it isn’t to ask us that question that you’ve gathered us together solemnly after an absence of three months.”

  Socles shrugged his shoulders and went on: “Should he not have remembered that the army of Cambyses had been engulfed by the sands while attempting the same expedition? Did he not know almost exactly, by way of his master Lysimachus,28 one of the greatest magicians of antiquity, the duration of his brief existence, and had he ever been seen to waste time and effort for an uncertain end? He had been initiated, his armies occupied Canopus, where he was, and the priests of Serapis could have proclaimed him a son of Jupiter with the same authority as those of Ammon. So why did he go? Of what did he go in search, so far away?”

  “What do the actions of that warrior matter?” said Aurelius. “You’ve just said that Alexander was an initiate. I don’t believe that. Not because he caused the deaths of a great number of men in battles and futile conquests, for an initiate can be the instrument of a murderous fatality whose design escapes us, but because his life was full of personal violence and crimes inspired by his rancor or his vanity.”

  “It was in Samothrace,” said Socles, “that Alexander was initiated into the mysteries by his master Lysimachus. After that he honored all the gods indifferently with the same fervor. He prostrated himself in the temple of Serapis at Memphis, in that of Hercules in Tyre. He advanced alone, on foot, before Jadduah, the high priest of the Jews, near Jerusalem and fell to his knees. The magi of Chaldea were heaped with riches by him, and he brought back from India, as if he were a king, the old gymnosophist Calamos, who was to burn himself alive to prove how small a price he attached to life.

  “Alexander knew that it was the same God who was worshiped under different symbols, and it was of scant importance to him whether the appearance was that of Moloch or the bull Apis. That knowledge clearly indicates that he had received initiation. The unity of the world of which he dreamed and attempted to realize by the mingling of races is a further indication. In all the countries that he conquered, did he not think first of imposing marriages? He wanted to unite the victors and the vanquished by blood ties because he saw therein the seeds of a universal peace. Mingle with one another, that was his dictum. Love one another, Jesus was later to say. One employed force, the other sentiment, one united by blood, the other by love, but the objective was the same.”

  “That’s a part of the truth,” said Aurelius, “but once again, I don’t see...”

  “I’m getting to the purpose of my journey. Lysimachus, Alexander’s master, was already very old when he taught Philip’s son. He has not left any writings, but I have been able to reconstitute parts of his life and his teachings via fragments in the works of later philosophers that mention him. He was a very elevated intelligence, and the great sorrow of his life was to be misunderstood by his peers because of his difficulty in expressing himself and a certain expression of stupidity spread over his face. He traveled in all lands, visited all temples. He spent three years among the Celtic Semnothei, whose sanctuaries were subterranean and formed perfect squares. He studied the art of presages among the Pazate magi of Babylon and the laws of generation in the colleges of Thebes. It was from Egypt that he brought back certain curious information concerning the march of human events.

  “He claimed that, through countless ages, wisdom had been transmitted like a sacred torch by a small number of unknown men who were its depositories, and only revealed it in a measured fashion because of the destructive force that wisdom allows to burst forth when it is divulged before time. He knew that some of those elite men, those guides invested with a quasi-divine mission, were to be found in that epoch in the temple of Ammon in the deserts of Egypt, others on an isle lost in the northern seas, and others, finally, in a monastery in India on the banks of the mysterious River Ganges. Did he dream of approaching them and participating in their wisdom? That’s probable. What is certain, what is proven by Clitomachus of Carthage at the end of his Conversations,29 is that he was rejected at the temple of Ammon and returned disappointed to Samothrace.

  “A few years before his voyage to Egypt he had commenced practicing intoxication by wine. Perhaps it was for that reason that he was not judged worthy of a more elevated initiation and not, as he later allowed it to be believed, for the apparent stupidity of his face, which would not have deceived the conductors of humankind. It was, I imagine, that habit of intemperance that impelled him to recount that which ought not to be spoken, the secret that should only be formulated between the echoless stones of sanctuaries.

  “He said that a man, in order to become perfect, has three paths: knowledge action and amour. Three heroes were to be born successively, the first of them, Pythagoras, had already accomplished his task by furnishing the elements of Hellenic thought. He knew by his science of divination that the third would only appear later, in the kingdom of the Jews; but he, Lysimachus, had the honor of instructing the second, the man of war, the one who would drag the races out of immobility, the one who would tempt by violence to make a single people out of all p
eoples. To tell the truth, he did not profit from that honor, since Philip separated him from his son, because of his increasing drunkenness—but he had convinced Alexander of his divine mission.

  “It was to see the spiritual masters of the earth that Alexander went to the temple of Ammon and he obtained, as Lysimachus had asked him to do, a papyrus in which one of them had traced with his own hand a summary of the science of the universe. Almost all the portraits of Alexander that historians have made for us represent him with a little chain of green bronze around his neck, from which a somber metal case was suspended. On learning that Alexander had returned from Egypt, Lysimachus, although afflicted by a serious illness, set forth from the depths of Macedonia. He died before reaching him. The precious papyrus remained around the sovereign’s neck and later, when he died, we know that Perdiccas, who had received his last will, when the embalming was concluded and the solid gold coffin was about to be sealed, replaced the black cylinder on the breast stuffed with aromatics. It should still be there.”

  Socles considered his interlocutors. Aurelius, supporting his chin on his fist, was listening with a passionate interest. Touta was blinking her long-lashed eyelids and seemed to be struggling against drowsiness. Olympios was smiling. In the distance, to the left, the lamps had just been lit in several small villages bordering the Nile. The travelers heard a vague rumor of musical instruments reaching them.

  “So,” said Aurelius, excitedly, “You’ve attained at the first attempt the goal that I was proposing to attain myself by undertaking a much more distant voyage. I also knew the legend of the initiates and was inspired by it. Apollonius of Tyana spoke about it often and I know almost by heart the parts of his life written by his disciple Damis that deal with his adventures in reaching the monastery of clay near the inaccessible city of Palibothra, under the fabulous palm trees of unknown India, which he called the abode of wise men. I had sworn that I wouldn’t die before reaching it. I only wanted to vanquish my weakness in order to go myself along the River Ganges to the place where, as Apollonius reports, seven narrow clay cells with a small altar in the middle form the design of a lotus. Speak. What did the sages of the temple of Ammon say? Are they the supremely intelligent adepts of the fraternity of the elect that lives in India?”