by Rice, Anne
As for Antioch, I had been far too embroiled in the life of Rome to know or hear much about this city. If Tiberius had stationed his “heir,” Germanicus, there to get him away from Roman popularity, then I thought: Antioch must be the end of the civilized world.
Why in the name of the gods had I not run away in Alexandria, I thought? Alexandria was the greatest city in the Empire, next to Rome. It was a young city, built by Alexander, for whom it was named, but it Was a marvelous port. No one would ever dare raze the Temple of Isis in Alexandria. Isis was an Egyptian goddess, wife of the powerful Osiris.
But what had that to do with things? I must have been plotting in the back of my mind already, but I didn’t allow any conscious plot to surface and blemish my highborn Roman moral character.
I quietly thanked my Hebrew guardians for this intelligence, for keeping it even from the young Roman Marcellus, the other man they had rescued from the Emperor’s assassins, and I asked for frank answers to my questions regarding my brothers.
“All taken by surprise,” said Jacob. “The Delatores, those spies of the Praetorian Guard, are so swift. And your Father had so many sons. It was your eldest brother’s slaves who jumped the wall at their Master’s command and ran to warn your Father.”
Antony. I hope you shed their blood. I know you fought with your last breath. And my niece, my little niece Flora, had she run screaming from them, or did they do it with mercy? The Praetorian Guard doing anything with mercy! Stupid to even think so.
I didn’t say anything aloud. Just sighed.
After all, when they looked at me, these two Jewish merchants beheld the body and face of a woman; naturally my protectors should think a woman was inside of me. The disparity between outward appearances and inner disposition had disturbed me all my life. Why disturb Jacob and David? On to Antioch.
But I had no intention of living in any old-fashioned Greek family, if such still existed in the Greek city of Antioch, a family in which women lived apart from the men, and wove wool all day, never going out, having no part in the life of the world whatsoever.
I’d been taught all the virtuous female arts by my nurses and I could indeed do anything with yarn or thread or loom that any other woman could do, but I knew well what the “Old Greek Ways” had been, and I remembered vaguely my Father’s Mother, who had died when I was very young—a virtuous Roman matron who was always making wool. So they had said of her in her Epitaph, and in fact, they had said in my Mother’s Epitaph: “She kept the House. She made wool.”
And so they had said of my Mother! The very same tiresome words.
Well, no one was going to say that on mine. (How humorous to reflect on the fact now, thousands of years later, that I have no Epitaph!)
What I failed to realize in my overall dejection was that the Roman world was enormous, and the Eastern portion of it differed dramatically from the Northern barbarian lands, where my brothers had fought.
The entire of Asia Minor, towards which we sailed, had been conquered by Alexander of Macedon hundreds of years before. As you know, Alexander had been the pupil of Aristotle. Alexander had wanted to spread Greek culture everywhere. And in Asia Minor Greek ideas and styles found not mere country towns or farmers, but ancient cultures, like the Empire of Syria, willing to receive the new ideas, the grace and beauty of the Greek enlightenment, and willing to bring in tune with it their own centuries-old literature, religion, styles of life and dress.
Antioch had been built by a general of Alexander the Great who sought to rival the beauty of other Hellenistic cities, with splendid Temples, administrative buildings and libraries of books in the Greek language, its schools where Greek philosophy was taught. A Hellenistic government was established—quite enlightened compared to ancient Eastern despotism, and yet there lay beneath all this the knowledge and customs and possibly the wisdom of the mysterious East.
The Romans had conquered Antioch early on because it was a huge trade center. It was unique in this way, as Jacob showed to me, drawing a crude map with his wet finger on the wooden table. Antioch was a port of the great Mediterranean because she was only twenty miles up the Orontes River.
Yet on the Eastern side she was open to the desert: all the old caravan routes came to Antioch, the camel merchants who brought fantastic wares from fabled lands—lands we know now to have been India and China—silk, carpet and jewels which never reached the markets of Rome.
Countless other traders came and went to Antioch. Pine roads connected it in the East with the Euphrates River and the Parthian Empire beyond, and to the South you could go to Damascus and Judea, and to the North, of course, lay all the cities made by Alexander, which had flowered under Roman rule.
Roman soldiers loved it there. It was an easy and interesting life. And Antioch loved the Romans because the Romans protected the trade routes, and the caravans, and kept peace in the port.
“You will find open places, arcades, Temples, all that you seek and such markets you would not believe. There are Romans everywhere. I hope to One Most High that you are not recognized by someone from your own background! That is one danger of which your Father had no time to plan.”
I waved it away.
“Does it have teachers now, and markets of books?”
“From everywhere. You will find books which no one can read. And Greek is spoken by everyone. You have to go out in the country to find some poor farmer who does not understand Greek. Latin has now become common.
“The philosophers never stop; they speak of Plato and Pythagoras, names that don’t mean much to me; they talk about Chaldean magic from Babylon. Of course there are Temples to every imaginable god.”
He went on, reflecting as he spoke:
“The Hebrews? I think personally they are too worldly—they want to hang around in short tunics with the Greeks and go to the public baths. They are too interested in the Greek philosophy. It invades everything, all this thinking that Greeks did. Not good. But a Greek city is an inviting world.”
He glanced up. His Father was watching over us, and we were too close together, at this table on the deck.
He hastily filled me in on other facts:
Germanicus Julius Caesar, heir to the Imperial throne, the official adopted son of Tiberius, had been granted the Imperium Maius in Antioch. That is, he controlled all of this territory. And Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso was the governor of Syria.
I assured him that they would know nothing of me or my old-fashioned family or our quiet, old house on the Palatine Hill, squeezed between so many other extravagant new mansions.
“It’s all Roman-style,” Jacob protested “You’ll see. And you come with money! And forgive me, but you are still beautiful at your age; you have fresh skin and you move your limbs like a girl.”
I sighed and gave Jacob thanks. Time for him to break away unless we wanted his Father coming down upon us.
I watched the ever rolling blue waves.
I was thankful in secret that our family had withdrawn from the parties and banquets at the Imperial Palace, but then I blamed myself for such thankfulness, knowing that our reclusiveness must have paved the way for our downfall.
I’d seen Germanicus on his triumphal procession through Rome, a gorgeous young man, much as Alexander had been, and I knew from my Father and my brothers that Tiberius, fearing the popularity of his appointed heir, had sent him off to the East to get him away from the Roman crowds.
The Governor Piso? I had never laid eyes on him. The gossip was that he was sent East to devil Germanicus. Oh, such a waste of talent and thought.
Jacob returned to me.
“Well, you go nameless and unknown into this vast city,” said Jacob. “And you have protectors of high character who are beloved of Germanicus. He’s young and sets a tone of vitality and gaiety in the city.”
“And Piso?” I asked.
“Everyone hates him. Especially the soldiers, and you know what that means in a Roman province.”
You can look at th
e crashing, undulating sea from the railing of a deck forever, or just for so long.
That night I had my second blood dream. It was keenly similar to the first. I was thirsty for blood. And enemies were after me, enemies that knew I was a demon and must be destroyed. I was naming. My own kind had forsaken me, thrust me out unprotected to the superstitions of the people. Then I saw the desert and knew I would die; I awoke, sitting up and crying out but covering my mouth quickly so no one heard it.
What disturbed me so terribly was the thirst for blood. I could not imagine such a thing when I was awake, but in these dreams I was the monster that Romans called the Lamia. Or so it seemed. Blood was sweet, blood was all. Was the old Greek Pythagoras right? Souls do migrate from body to body? But my soul in this past life had been that of a monster.
During the day, I closed my eyes now and then and found myself dangerously on the edge of the dream, as if it were a trap in my mind, waiting to engulf my consciousness. But at night, that is when they came most strongly. You have served me before! What could this mean? Come to me.
Blood thirst. I closed my eyes, curled up in bed and prayed, “Mother Isis, Cleanse my Mind of this Blood madness.”
Then I resorted to plain old ordinary eroticism. Get Jacob into bed! No such luck. Little did I know that Hebrews had been, and would be forever, the most difficult of men to seduce!
It was all made clear with great grace and tact.
I considered all the slaves. Out of the question. First off were the galley slaves, among whom no great “Ben Hur” was chained, waiting for me to rescue him. They were just the dregs of the criminal poor, fastened Roman-style, so they would drown if the ship went down, and they were dying, as all galley slaves do from the monotony and the whip. It wasn’t a pleasant sight to go down into the hold of a galley ship and see those men bending their backs.
But my eyes were as cold as those of an American watching color television pictures of the starving babies of Africa, little black skeletons with big heads screaming for water. News Break, Commercial Break, Sound Bite, CNN now switches to Palestine: rock throwing, rubber bullets. Television blood.
The rest on board were boring sailors, and two old pious merchant Hebrews who stared at me as if I were a whore, or worse, and turned their heads whenever I came out on deck in my long tunic with my long hair swinging free.
Such a disgrace I must have seemed! But what a fool I was then, really, Irving in numbness, and how pleasant that voyage—all because true grief and rage had not yet taken hold of me. Things had happened too fast.
I gloated over my last glimpse of my Father dispatching those soldiers of Tiberius, those cheap assassins sent by a cowardly, indecisive Emperor. And the rest—I banished it from my mind affecting the attitude of the hardened Roman man or woman.
A modern Irish poet, Yeats, best characterizes the official Roman attitude towards failure and tragedy.
Cast a cold eye on life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
There was never a Roman born who would not have agreed with that.
That was my stance—sole survivor of a great house, commanded by her Father to “live.” I didn’t dare to dwell on the fate of my brothers, their lovely wives, their little children. I couldn’t envision the slaughter of the children—little boys being run through by broadswords, or babies bashed against the wall. Oh, Rome, you and your bloody old wisdom. Be sure to kill the offspring. Kill the whole family!
Lying alone at night, I found myself amid more horrid blood dreams. They seemed fragments of a lost life, a lost land. Deep echoing vibrant tones of music dominated the dreams, as though someone were striking a gong, and others beside him beat solemnly on deep drums with soft coverings. I saw in a haze a world of stiff and flat alien paintings on the walls. Painted eyes around me. I drank blood! I drank it from a small shuddering human being, who knelt before me as if I were Mother Isis.
I woke to take the big jug of water by my bed and drink all of it down. I drank water to defy and satisfy this dream thirst. I was almost sick from drinking water.
I racked my mind. Had I ever had such dreams as a child?
No. And now these dreams had the heat of recollection! Of initiation into the doomed Temple of Isis, when it had been still the fashion. I had been intoxicated, and drenched in the blood of a bull, and dancing wildly in circles. My head was filled with the litanies of Isis. We were promised rebirth! “Never tell, never tell, never tell …” How could an initiate tell anything of the rites, when you were so drunk you could hardly remember them?
Isis brought me memories now of lovely music of lyres, flutes, timbrels, of the high magical sound of the metal strings of the sistrum, which the Mother Herself held in her hand. There were only fleeting recollections of that naked blood dance, that night of rising into the stars, of seeing the scope of life in its cycles, of accepting perfectly just for a little while that the moon would always be changing, and the sun would set as it always rose. Embraces of other women. Soft cheeks and kissing and bodies rocking in unison. “Life, death, rebirth, it’s no series of miracles,” said the Priestess. “To understand it and accept it, that is the miracle. Make the miracle within your own breast.”
Surely we had not drunk blood! And the bull—it was a sacrifice only for the initiation. We did not bring helpless animals to her flower-laden altars, no, our Blessed Mother did not ask that of us.
Now, at sea, alone, I lay awake to avoid these blood dreams.
When exhaustion won out, a dream came with sleep as if it had been waiting for my eyes to close.
I lay in a gold chamber. I was drinking blood, blood from the throat of a god, or so it seemed, and choruses were singing or chanting—it was a dull, repetitive sound not quite worthy of being called music, and when I had had my fill of blood, this god or whoever this was, this silken-skinned proud thing, lifted me and placed me on an altar.
Vividly, I could feel the cold marble beneath me. I realized I wore no clothes. I felt no modesty. Somewhere far off, echoing through these great halls, came the weeping of a woman. I was full of blood. Those who chanted approached with little clay oil lamps. Faces around me were dark, dark enough to be from far faraway Ethiopia or India. Or Egypt. Look. Painted eyes! I looked at my hands and arms. They were dark. But I was this person who lay on the altar, and I say person now because it had come clear to me with no disturbance during the dream itself that I was a man lying there. Pain tore at me. The god said, “This is merely the passage. You will now drink from each of us, only a little blood.”
Only when I woke did the brief transition in the masculine gender leave me as puzzled as everything else. I was drenched with a sense of Egyptian art, Egyptian mystery—as I’d seen it in golden statues for sale in the marketplace, or when the Egyptian dancers performed at a banquet, like walking sculptures with their black-lined eyes, and black plaited wigs, whispering in that mysterious tongue. What had they thought of our Isis in Roman dress?
A mystery taunted me; something attacked my reason. The very thing the Roman Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law.
My Isis had been a Roman goddess, really, a universal goddess, the Mother of us all, her worship spreading out in a Greek and Roman world long before it had come into Rome itself. Our Priests were Greeks and Roman, poor men. We the congregation were all Greeks and Romans.
Something scratched at the back of my mind. It said, “Remember.” It was a tiny desperate voice within my own brain that urged me to “remember” for my own sake.
But remembering only led to confused and jumbled thoughts. Suddenly a veil would fall between the reality of my cabin on the ship, and the tumbling of the sea—between that and some dim and frightening world, of Temples covered in words that made magic! Long narrow beautifully bronzed faces. A voice whispered, “Beware the Priests of Ra; they lie!”
I shivered. I closed my eyes. The Queen Mother was bound and c
hained to her throne! She wept! It had been her crying. Unspeakable. “But you see, she has forgotten how to rule. Do as we say.”
I shook myself awake. I wanted to know and I did not want to know. The Queen wept beneath her monstrous fetters. I couldn’t see her clearly. It was all in progress. It was busy. “The King is with Osiris, you see. You see how he stares; each one whose blood you drink, you give to Osiris; each one becomes Osiris.”
“But why did the Queen scream?”
No, this was madness. I couldn’t let this confusion overcome me. I couldn’t deliberately slip from reason into these fantasies or recollections supposing they had a true root.
They had to be nonsense, twisted images of grief and guilt, guilt that I had not rushed to the hearth and driven the dagger into my breast.
I tried to remember the calming voice of my Father, explaining once how the blood of the gladiators satisfied the thirst of the dead, the Manes.
“Now, some say that the Dead drink blood,” spoke my Father from some long ago dinner talk. “That’s why we are so fearful on all these unlucky days, when the Dead are supposed to be able to walk the Earth. I personally think this is nonsense. We should revere our ancestors …”
“Where are the Dead, Father?” my brother Lucius asked.
Who had piped up from the other side of the table, to quote Lucretius in a sad little female voice that nevertheless commanded silence of all these men? Lydia:
Of earth return to earth, but any part
Sent down from heaven, must ascend again
Recalled to the high temples of the sky
And death does not destroy the elements
Of matter, only breaks the combinations.
“No,” my Father had replied to me quite gently. “Rather quote Ovid: ‘The ghosts ask for but little; they value piety more than a costly gift.’ ” He drank his wine. “The ghosts are in the Underworld where they can’t harm us.”