Thief of Corinth

by Tessa Afshar

  “He was not the only Stoic philosopher who questioned me.” Paul set down his spoon. “There was a row of them waiting for me every morning when I showed up. And a different row made up of Epicureans. I don’t know who they heckled more—me or each other.”

  Dionysius dipped his bread in fish sauce. “The Epicureans are a familiar target for our wit. You offered fresh pickings. Much more enjoyable.”

  The Epicureans believed that the principal aim of life was to find tranquility and happiness. Death simply marked the end of existence. They had no room for the gods or an afterlife.

  My brother, by contrast, was a Stoic. He believed in the Logos, a force—a power within nature that sustained life and bestowed reason. Like the famed statesmen Cicero and Seneca, my brother believed in a universe permeated by reason, though some of his contemporaries called it God or Providence.

  “After ten days of listening to him, I invited Paul to join us on Mars Hill,” Dionysius said. “So he could speak to the Council of the Areopagus.”

  Paul wiped his mouth with a plain napkin. “I should note that Athenians seem to like nothing so much as talking. They spend untold hours discussing ideas. I have never heard so many words spoken in one place. If words could feed the belly, Athenians would be a stout people.”

  I guffawed. I could like this Jew.

  “We do like the sound of our own voices,” Dionysius admitted.

  “What did Paul say to the high council?” I asked Dionysius.

  “Do you remember the altar of the Unknown God? The one near the marketplace?”

  At the mention of my favorite god, I stopped pretending to eat and sat up. “Yes. What about it?”

  “Paul said he knew the identity of that god.”

  A shiver went through me. I stared at Paul and tried to quiet my stretched nerves. Anyone could claim to know a god. “And who is it?”

  “He is the God who made the world and everything in it.” Paul stretched his hand, like an invitation. “Can you imagine such a God—one with enough power to raise up a mountain as if it were an anthill, with majesty vast enough to create the skies, with beauty wild enough to birth the oceans—can you imagine such a God inhabiting a man-made temple? It is childish to think so.”

  “You sound like the Stoics,” I said. “Out with the old divinities and their mercurial ways and pretty temples. Let us turn, instead, to the way of reason, to the force at work in the natural world.”

  “That is what I first thought.” Dionysius sprang up from his reclining position. “But it is not so. For the Logos I believed in was not knowable. It was merely a power. A force at work.”

  I noticed my brother said believed rather than believe.

  Paul pulled on his beard. “It would be sad, indeed, if the world were at the mercy of an impersonal force, a detached power without the ability to love. The God I speak of gives life and breath to everything. To this clump of mint, to you, to me. He knows the number of hairs on your head. He cares for the desires of your heart. Underneath the currents of your life, he stretches his everlasting arms. He has set his affections on you, though he knows your every weakness. The broken and the good in you. His love makes you whole. No man can give you this. Only God.”

  I laughed, but it was a forced thing, limping out of me. I yearned to be known and loved. To be made whole. I had longed for Justus to give me that. This Jew was claiming that somewhere in the world there was a god who could give me what I longed for.

  “And how much will this god cost me?” I said, my teeth on edge.

  Dionysius rubbed an eyelid. “I understand your skepticism. I felt the same. But Paul is not asking for your money.”

  “This is true. I am asking for a lot more.”

  Justus grinned. I glared at him. He held up a conciliatory hand. “What? He is amusing.”

  “What are you asking for?”

  Paul did not seem discomfited by my unfriendly tone. I suppose he was accustomed to such treatment from strangers. “God’s purpose was for every man and woman in every nation to seek after him. In the dark confusion of this life, he wanted us to feel our way toward him. To find him, though he is not far from any one of us. Wasn’t it Epimenides who said, ‘In him we live and move and have our being’? He is closer to you than your own heartbeat, Ariadne.”

  “What are you asking for?” I said again.

  The brown eyes turned the full force of their power on me. There was an odd tenderness in that gaze, but also something unbendable and sharp. “I ask nothing. God . . . Well. He asks for everything. God wants you, Ariadne. Every part of you.”

  The rest of our dinner passed through a haze. I noticed Father and Justus and even Theo engaged in animated conversation with this odd man who said his god wanted everything. That claim alone should have caused them to turn their backs and run in the opposite direction. Instead they asked questions, probed deeper. The whole while, Dionysius supported Paul’s claims, expanded on them with his own explanations.

  I had seen Dionysius study philosophy all our lives. In his younger years, he swayed from one ideal to another, studying for hours, practicing rhetoric, until he threw his lot in with the Stoics. But this was different.

  This wiry man with his mix of Roman and Hebrew education didn’t offer a mere philosophy. He sought to change our lives. Under the layers of his gentle promises, he came with a volcanic eruption.

  Late that evening, after our guests had departed and my brothers retired to bed, Father found me sitting in the atrium.

  He perched on a stool in front of me. Without prelude he whispered, “Dionysius has asked me to give up stealing.”

  My head snapped up. “Wait. When—?”

  “I have agreed.” His voice was pitched low so no one could hear us. In his quiet tones I sensed a firmness I had never heard before.

  “What? What?”

  “He is right, Ariadne. What I have been doing, what I have caused you to do . . .” He shook his head. “I have lived a life of misguided arrogance. Of selfishness. And I have tainted you with it. I want to start afresh. A new life.”

  “We have had this conversation before,” I said, trying to calm him. My body started to feel icy cold. “Because of us, Galatea is free. How is that wrong?”

  “If we wanted to free her, we should have paid for her with our own money.”

  “Which we don’t have.” I threw my hands in the air. “Be reasonable. All of Corinth loves you.” I bent toward him. “Is this Paul’s doing? This is what he means when he says that God wants all of you?” My lip curled. “This fresh start you long for is the dictate of some religion? We are going to lose our home and our land for the sake of a hokey God, raised up in who knows what crumbled corner of the empire?”

  A touch of steel colored Father’s voice. “Don’t be disrespectful of what you do not understand. I am giving up the Honorable Thief. That is all you need to know.”

  I watched him leave in disbelief. He had never spoken to me like that, with that note of finality. With such unbending disapproval.

  Dionysius found me in the early morning hours, still occupying the same spot on the cracked couch. Gingerly, he folded his long body next to me. “Father spoke to you.”

  “He said he is changing his life for you.”

  He adjusted the drape of his toga over his left shoulder. He had turned Roman in Corinth. In Athens, he wouldn’t have touched a toga, though he had every right to it.

  “You are angry with me.”

  “What right do you have to impose your precious beliefs on us? If Paul and his God are what you want, then go and extol your divinity. Laud and magnify him to your content. Why do you insist that Father should dedicate himself to your faith?”

  “I insisted nothing, Ariadne. I did not impose my ideas on Father.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned away. “That poor man is so afraid of losing you again that he would go to any lengths merely to keep you. Is that not an imposition?”

  “When I first knew I had t
o return to Father, I intended to give him an ultimatum: give up theft or lose me. Stealing is wrong. As a Stoic I believed it. When I became a follower of Christ and read the Holy Scriptures, I became even more convinced of its wrongness. I have memorized the books of the Jewish Law and they support my reasoning. I told Paul what I intended to do.”

  “I knew it,” I cried. “That man is behind this.”

  “That man censured me for my harsh attitude. ‘There is a world of difference between knowing the Word of God and knowing the God of the Word,’ he said. The Lord offers us mercy, unearned and undeserved. That is the God I serve, Ariadne. Paul taught me that Father needs my forgiveness, not my judgment. I came to him in love. The decision to change was his, entirely.”

  There was bitterness in my voice now. “You are stripping him of everything he enjoys. You call that love?”

  Dionysius came to his feet. “Perhaps he does not enjoy this life as much as you imagine.”

  Dionysius, trained as he was in rhetoric, would always have an answer to the objections I raised. He would win every argument. I was not Athenian; I was done with words.

  I knew what I had to do. Dionysius expressed his love one way. I would love by another means. I would not allow my brother’s new faith and moral convictions to rob Father of his home and lands. Of his dignity. We needed only two more robberies to pay off our debts and establish a secure future. Two more evil men punished.

  We did not ruin lives, I told myself. We only took what was spurious, the crumbs of a corrupt man’s luxuries. I would cause no harm. The opposite, in fact. I would bring about a touch of justice, and give my father the stability he deserved. I was not a thief.

  I was not planning to make a life of thieving. My actions would be an aberration. An exception. Why, it was almost my duty.

  PART 3

  Love Never Fails

  Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

  1 CORINTHIANS 13:4-8, NIV

  CHAPTER 21

  IT TOOK SEVERAL WEEKS to decide who my next victim would be. Weeks to prepare, study the house and its fortifications. Weeks to devise a plan.

  During that time, Paul was a regular visitor to our home. Sometimes he came alone. Sometimes he brought with him another Jew named Silas. He was a quieter man than Paul. When he spoke, his words were gentle, full of a soothing acceptance that made you feel the world was safe so long as this man was with you. A young half-Greek athlete called Timothy accompanied them occasionally. Theo liked Timothy and took to training with him at the gymnasium.

  Justus seemed as drawn to Paul as Dionysius and my father. Even Theo delayed his travels to listen to him drone on about his precious Jesus.

  When Paul spoke, he insisted on inviting every servant and slave in our household to join us if their duties allowed. He made no distinction between us, Roman or Greek, male or female, rich or poor. He seemed to think of us as equals, and even said so upon occasion. He could outrage you with claims like that, make you laugh the next instant, and befuddle you with convoluted doctrines before you had a chance to swallow your spit.

  One night I joined them, sitting on the periphery, my arms crossed, my ankles crossed, my lips a flat line. Paul was speaking about love. His gaze swept the chamber, landing on different faces.

  “The love of God is deeper than anything you have tasted,” he said. “I will prove it to you. Close your eyes. Close them and think of a person you love with all your heart.”

  I kept my eyes firmly open. But everyone else obeyed the Pharisee.

  “Now,” he said, “let us put your love to God’s test, for this is how God loves. Say to the one you are thinking of: My love for you is patient. I have never been impatient with you. Not by word or deed have I ever shown you any impatience.”

  “Well, I’m done for already,” Delia said. “I cannot say that without lying. I have no patience.” Everyone laughed.

  Paul smiled. “Now make this declaration if you can: My love for you is kind. I have not spoken to you unkindly in all the years that I have known you. I have never harbored an unkind thought toward you.”

  A few people began to squirm on their seats. I was among them.

  “It is a hard test, is it not?” Paul pulled on his beard. “But we have a long list to cover. Next, say this to your beloved: I have never been envious of you. Never felt jealous of your abilities or possessions. I am not resentful or angry when you spend time with others or show them affection.”

  Justus snapped his eyes open and cleared his throat. I found this odd, for so far as I knew, the man had never tasted of jealousy in his life.

  Paul moved about the room. “I have never spoken rudely to you.”

  By now, everyone had opened their eyes and was wincing a little. Who could make these claims with honesty?

  He went quiet for a moment, then pivoted, locking his gaze with mine. “My love for you does not make selfish demands. I have never insisted that I should have my own way.”

  My heart began to pound. I felt for a moment as if he had burrowed into my thoughts and unearthed my secrets. Unearthed my insistence to have my way about the Honorable Thief. To keep stealing even though Father had forbidden me to do so and my brother thought it wrong.

  He turned a fraction, and I could breathe again.

  “My love is not easily angered,” he said. “I have never held on to offenses you have committed against me. Indeed, I have wiped them from my heart and memory.”

  My brother’s eyes welled with tears.

  Still the man went on. “My love for you has never given up, never lost faith, never stopped hoping for the best. I have not given in to despair or discouragement, no matter what we have faced. My love for you will endure through every circumstance.” He placed a hand on my father’s shoulder. Father dropped his face into shaking fingers.

  Paul now closed his own eyes as the rest of us watched him.

  “My love for you never fails. Not even in the darkest hours.”

  Then, opening his eyes, he surveyed the room. “You see, my friends, true love is patient and kind. Godly love is not jealous or boastful or proud. It is not rude or irritable. It does not demand to have its own way. Love never gives up. Never loses faith. It is always hopeful. Love endures through every circumstance. That kind of love never fails.”

  If this was love’s standard, then we had never loved. Not truly. The room sank under the weight of our failure.

  Paul sat at the edge of a heavy pot bearing an olive tree. He studied us, eyes heavy-lidded with sympathy. “We fail. We fail because we have never tasted of such a love. We do not know how to receive it, how to give it. It requires a power beyond our own to live out this love. To experience it. That power can come only from God himself. From the Spirit of our Lord. How I pray that you will have the spiritual strength to comprehend how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ for you. And tasting of that love, learn to love as Jesus loves.”

  Paul waited in silence. Let his words sink in. Then he said, “My brothers and sisters, God is love. God is all that. And he asks us to live by the same measure. And when we fail even with his help, then he reaches out in mercy and covers our gaps.”

  Paul’s speech was like a thunderbolt in a black sky, illuminating everything in sharp contrast. Those words made you see your own heart, the empty places you hid in the dark. They were words that made you hungry. Who wouldn’t want to be loved like that? A love without boundaries, a love that endured and forgave all things. A love that never failed.

  Those same words were a whip to the soul. I knew I had never loved anyone like that. Not Theo or Dionysius or Father. Not even Justus.

  The man I targeted as my victim traded in antiquities. Velasio Grato had a fond
ness for helpless widows. While they were grieving and in shock, he would swoop down to charm, bully, and frighten them into selling valuable possessions for a fraction of their worth.

  A woman of my acquaintance had lost two statues of inestimable value to Grato. Widowed young with two children still toddling, she had been frightened by his tales of doom and conned into hawking her fortune for a pittance. She could have had a comfortable life if those statues had fetched a fair price. Instead, she and her children lived in poverty. I brought them food each week and did what I could to help. From her, I heard other horror stories. Grato struck without mercy, leaving behind him a trail of misery, growing fat on the suffering of others.

  His villa was situated two houses down from the residence of Spurius Felonius, Claudia the Elder’s husband. I had been in the neighborhood for the wedding feast, which had been held in Felonius’s home. Grato’s villa, unlike Felonius’s residence, did not offer tight security measures. It had no additional land attached to it. The villa’s walls came up to the street, and other than the large central courtyard, there was no outdoor garden. Climbing its walls hardly offered a challenge.

  I wrangled an invitation to Felonius’s home through Claudia the Younger and met Grato there. From that meeting, it was only a matter of a few suggestive words to win an invitation for Claudia and me to attend a banquet at his house.

  “Explain again why we are attending this boring party?” Claudia asked me on the night of the banquet. “Everyone will be twenty years our senior.”

  “At least his house will be filled with pretty works of art. Think of it as an education for your soul. Besides, you might meet an eligible bachelor. Your own sister is married to a man twenty years her senior.”

  “And look how that turned out,” Claudia said. The elder Claudia had grown more sulky and vicious since her marriage.

  “Yes. Well, perhaps that is not a good idea. But Grato is famous for the excellent desserts he serves.”