The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Naked, he walked among the equally naked young men, commenting upon their skill, and he came at last to the dark-haired youth Menelaus, who had unusual strength in his shoulders. He pulled aside the young man’s opponent, saying, “Watch me for a moment,” and he engaged Menelaus; and as soon as he had done so he felt the youth’s power bearing down upon him, forcing his practiced knees almost to buckle, and he grunted, “Good lad, keep pushing,” while he himself began to respond to the contest and the other wrestlers halted to watch their gymnasiarch fighting with Menelaus.

  Had the young man sought preferment from Tarphon he would surely have allowed the gymnasiarch to win, but this was an even contest, and the powerful youngster ripped and grabbed at Tarphon’s trim body, trying to catch him off guard; while the older man, recalling many such conflicts in the past when he was a major competitor in Athens, tried to lead the eager youth into one trap or another. Once Tarphon felt he had the boy, and with a grab he reached for his right leg, but Menelaus deftly pivoted and not only escaped but put himself in position to grasp the gymnasiarch by the neck, almost jerking him off his feet. Then the older man’s experience asserted itself, for having anticipated what might happen, he moved partly forward as if he were under the young man’s power, and this caused Menelaus to throw all his weight into the fight, whereupon Tarphon skillfully tossed him into the crowd of watchers, where he stumbled and fell to his knees.

  The athletes crowded about the red-haired governor, applauding him as if he were one of their own age, and some older toadies who had been watching the wrestlers began crying, “There are few in Seleucia who could defeat our gymnasiarch in wrestling.” Upon this, Tarphon called young Menelaus to him and in a slow recapitulation which all could follow explained where the overeager young athlete had made his error. As Tarphon outlined the steps those in the steaming room could see the muscles of the two men stand out and could understand what must happen next in such and such a case. It was a beautiful exhibition, controlled and effective. “Demetrius!” Tarphon called. “Protect yourself!” And he threw his naked body at a tall young man less skilled than Menelaus had been, and they re-enacted the maneuver, but this time the younger man was no match for the governor and when he made his first error Tarphon spun him against the wall, whereupon Menelaus jumped into position, crying, “Gymnasiarch, protect yourself!” And he slammed at the older man with such vehemence that he forced Tarphon back and would have thrown him solidly, except that Tarphon began laughing and slapped his vigorous challenger on the shoulder.

  “You win!” Tarphon conceded, but the watching sycophants said in loud voices, “Had our gymnasiarch really wanted to win, he would have thrown the boy easily.” So that none could hear, Tarphon told his young opponent, “We know better. At the games in Ptolemais you will surely win easily. And you could win at Antioch, too.” He paused as if about to say something of importance, but changed his mind.

  It was a moment of rare fraternity, of sweating bodies tired to exhaustion, of muscles pulled almost beyond the point of resilience, and slaves appeared among the wrestlers with strigils which the men used to scrape away the dirt on their bodies before they went to the baths, but as Governor Tarphon drew the rough-edged strigil across his bare thighs, relaxing in pleasure as the bronze metal scraped his tired leg, another slave came into the room to say, “Gymnasiarch, the Jew Jehubabel is here,” and Tarphon said to Menelaus, “You’d better go to the baths before your father comes.” The room emptied. The toadies went elsewhere to praise lesser men, and Governor Tarphon stood alone, completely naked, with not even a strigil in his hand. The door opened and out of the steamy heat loomed the incongruous bearded figure of Jehubabel, completely covered in a long unkempt robe. The two men stared at each other, epitomes of the struggle that had been joined that day: Tarphon the Greek, whose ancestors had built the walls around Makor making the town as it now was, a naked athlete who thought of his finely trained body as a temple; and Jehubabel the permanent Jew, to whom the grandeur of Greece was an unopened book and the naked body an insult to YHWH. Looking now at the undraped gymnasiarch Jehubabel recalled the saying current among his people: “Only a fool takes pleasure in the swiftness of a horse or the strength of a man’s leg.” Few Jews in Makor bothered with the gymnasium or its pagan rites.

  Tarphon, aware of Jehubabel’s abhorrence of nakedness, deferred to the older man by grabbing a robe left behind by one of the wrestlers and throwing it over his shoulders; but as soon as he had done so he was sorry, for the robe was both long—which made him look awkward, which he tried never to be—and smelly, which made him seem unclean, which he never was. But he had taken it and could not easily discard it, so he wrapped himself in it and led the way to his room.

  No sooner, however, had Jehubabel left the nakedness of the wrestling room than he found himself facing the absurd statue of Antiochus Epiphanes as a discus thrower, and the towering expanse of white marble with the godlike head and the huge genitals appalled the Jew. He could not forget that today’s execution and its savagery had been ordered by this fool who had decreed himself to be so represented, claiming to be both a god manifest and a naked discus thrower. The round-faced, pudgy Jew was disgusted, but he could not speak, for in the past he had picked up the suspicion that his friend Tarphon hoped some day to be represented in Makor by a similar statue, and he thought, turning his back on Antiochus and his glaring nudity: No one can understand a Greek.

  Tarphon led him into the small room where on a table lay the report he had been writing, held in place by what Jehubabel considered a curious object: a life-size marble hand, broken off at the wrist and holding an instrument which the Jew had not seen before. “How was the statue broken?” he asked in the Koine.

  Tarphon smiled indulgently. This was the kind of question one might expect from a Jew, for although he found the Jews of Makor industrious and well behaved, he also found them notoriously deficient in a sense of beauty. The Greeks had not been in Makor a dozen years before they began building the lovely temple to Zeus, but the Jews were still content with their squat and ugly synagogue. Greeks loved silk, the cool feel of marble, the smell of spices and the sound of lyric poetry being read at night, while the Jews remained a peasant people to whom beauty and luxury were equally abhorrent. With condescension Tarphon explained that no statue had been broken. “The artist carved the hand this way,” he said, also in the Koine.

  “Why would he do that?” Jehubabel asked.

  “From little, much,” Tarphon replied. When Jehubabel looked blank, he added, “By looking at the fragment you can imagine the whole statue.”

  “But if he wanted you to see the whole statue, why didn’t he carve it?”

  Tarphon was irritated but he was also amused. “In the spring haven’t you ever tasted just one bite of a Damascus plum? It was so good that you could sense all the plums for that year?”

  “I don’t eat plums,” Jehubabel said.

  “But this carving? Doesn’t it call to your mind the entire human body?”

  The round-faced Jew drew back suspiciously to consider this preposterous theory, and he found that to him the broken wrist conveyed no such language. He saw a rather lifelike hand holding an object he had not seen before, and that was the end of the matter. “What’s he holding?” he inquired.

  Tarphon was taken aback. It had never occurred to him that a grown man would not recognize a strigil and he summoned his slave to fetch the one he had left in the wrestling room. When it arrived he passed it along to the Jew. “Can’t you guess what it’s for?”

  Jehubabel studied the metal scraper for some moments but could not fathom its mystery. “It has a dull point, so it might be used for digging,” he reasoned. “But it also has a sharp edge, so it might be intended for cutting. I don’t know.”

  “It’s for scraping your skin,” Tarphon explained. Jehubabel looked at him in astonishment and made the governor feel self-conscious. “After athletic contests,” he added lamely. In an attempt to demonst
rate he reached for some part of the Jew’s anatomy, only to find that all of Jehubabel’s skin except for the backs of his hands and a small part of his face was covered—either by his robe or beard. There was a moment of embarrassment, during which it became obvious that Jehubabel did not intend to uncover any part of his body, so Tarphon switched to his own, throwing aside one end of the smelly robe and drawing the strigil over his exposed thigh. “It’s most refreshing,” he said, but the round-faced Jew looked at him as if the governor were going out of his mind.

  Having drawn aside the borrowed robe Tarphon was reminded of its offensive smell, and while Jehubabel studied the sculpture he took off the robe completely, stretched out upon a bench and called for his slave to bring a container of heated oil, which the latter began applying to Tarphon’s body. Spreading the warm oil liberally over the gymnasiarch’s back, he massaged the muscles and with his thumbs worked the lotion into the pores, and as he did so the aromatic spices permeated the room, providing a good ending to the day’s exercise. “This oil is the only luxury I allow myself,” he explained to his friend. “They make it in Macedonia and I used it when I wrestled in Athens.”

  “The smell of the rose and the taste of the grape do not abide till the morrow,” Jehubabel observed, and Tarphon winced. The only unpleasant aspect he had found in working with the Jewish leader was this constant barrage of pithy statements in which Jehubabel took refuge whenever intellectual problems were to be faced. The Jew was known in Makor as a learned man, but he never referred to the great books of Judaism; against the works of Plato and Aristotle he never quoted Jews of equal gravity. It was always some cryptic proverb gleaned from the fields or culled from the shearing sheds that was supposed to summarize the Jewish position. Some years ago, when Tarphon promised to protect the Jews against the law of Antiochus, Jehubabel had stated his reaction clearly: “A friend is a friend at all times, and brothers are born for adversity.” Next year, commenting upon the worsened laws, he had said, “Whom the gods love they chasten, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights.” In fact, for a man with the wide-ranging interests of Governor Tarphon, talking with Jehubabel for any length of time was apt to be a bore, and the Greek often wished that his colleague would forget his little gems of wisdom and for once face the reality at hand.

  Why did he bother with Jehubabel? Because in the shifting Greek world of Ptolemais and Makor, the Jew was the one completely honest man with whom Tarphon had contact. He wanted nothing of the gymnasiarch, practiced no flattery, kept his word and worked hard for the betterment of the town. He paid his workers at the dye vats well, educated his children and assumed responsibility for the synagogue. Tarphon often told his wife Melissa, “If we had a dozen more like Jehubabel, governing this district would be a pleasure, but apparently only the Jews can produce such men.” Because Tarphon appreciated the rock-hard constancy of the man he was prepared to put up with his boring, almost niggardly, manner.

  Now, from the rubbing bench, Tarphon said, “Tell me honestly, Jehubabel. The execution today. Was it the end of a difficult period or the beginning of real trouble?”

  Jehubabel looked away from the naked body stretched out on the bench, belly up, for it offended him. Also, he could still see the accusing face of the martyred man staring at him as he shouted out the defiant prayer of the Jews, and he was driven to make a somewhat harsher reply than he would have otherwise done: “Once a river leaves its banks it does not return until the rains cease.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Tarphon asked in some irritation.

  “If these laws persist there could be serious results.”

  “Could be, yes. But will there be?”

  Jehubabel wanted to believe that what Tarphon had told him earlier would come to pass—that when Antiochus knew how the Jews felt about the new laws they would be rescinded; so he clung to that hope: “If Antiochus retreats a little I feel sure trouble can be avoided.”

  The slave washed Tarphon with a damp cloth, then brought clothes into which the gymnasiarch slipped, leaving most of his body still exposed. Moving to a chair beside the table he asked, “If trouble should become inevitable, what will cause it?”

  “The swine we can forgive,” Jehubabel said reassuringly. “And we acknowledge Antiochus as ruler … even as god over his own people. But there is one thing …”

  “That you’re afraid of?”

  “Jews will continue to circumcise their sons.”

  “No! No!” Tarphon protested. “On this matter I agree with Antiochus. The human body is too precious to be altered whimsically by any religion that comes along. Why do you suppose we outlawed the branding of slaves? And mutilation? And tattooing?” He brandished the marble hand with the strigil as if it were a pointer and demanded, “Tell me this. If your Jewish god, who is as perfect as you claim, made man, why should you try to improve on his handiwork?”

  For once Jehubabel did not retreat to an aphorism. He said, “When the creator finished his perfect work he took Abraham aside and said, ‘I have made a perfect man. Now I need a perfect people. To prove to the world that you are my chosen people, you shall circumcise your sons.’ In doing so, we act not contrary to divine will, but in furtherance of it.”

  Tarphon was surprised at the Jew’s clear statement, but he shrugged his shoulders. “The law is plain, Jehubabel. No more circumcision.” Then he added, “Please.”

  The stocky dyer considered this appeal, the latest in a long series, and once more he conceded: “I don’t think any Jews would circumcise their sons without first discussing the problem with me.” Tarphon smiled. He knew that within the Jewish community it was only Jehubabel who performed the circumcisions, so if the law of Antiochus were to be broken it would be Jehubabel who would be responsible, but he did not embarrass his friend by admitting that he understood this fact. The long-robed Jew concluded, “So if the Jews ask me for advice I shall tell them that for a little longer …”

  Tarphon was relieved. This was all he needed, a little time, for he felt sure that with time he could alleviate the troubles. Taking the second sheet of his report from under the marble hand he tore it up and threw it in a basket. “I was about to send Antiochus words which he did not need to hear,” he said with a nervous laugh. Then as he led Jehubabel to the door of his room the two men saw looming above them the gigantic statue of Epiphanes, and Tarphon said, “I’m glad you understand, Jehubabel. Against his great force you weak Jews could not prevail. It is with reason we’ll soften his laws.”

  Jehubabel preferred not to look at the indecent statue. Instead, he took refuge in a Jewish proverb whose application not even he understood: “The breath of the king withers the barley, but at the end of winter comes rain.”

  Tarphon thought: He’s truly a sententious bore, but without him we’d have trouble. Then, to help Jehubabel comprehend the situation, the gymnasiarch said with a certain enthusiasm, “Don’t be misled by that statue. Would you be surprised if I said I thought it preposterous too? But I also know Antiochus the man. As he rules in Antioch. He moves among the common people of that enormous city in a way no tyrant would dare. At night he suddenly enters a drinking place and sings with the sailors. He acts in plays, or wanders unknown in the alleys to see how the poor live. He has one consuming desire. To be loved. And when at the games his people cheer him he becomes in fact a god and dispenses justice to all. Believe me, Jehubabel, when he hears that his laws have made you Jews unhappy …”

  “As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more,” Jehubabel said, “but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.” Tarphon shook his head, as if the middle part of the sentence had fallen out of the conversation, but in friendship he grasped the Jew’s shoulder and said, “When Antiochus reads my letter, the law will be changed.” And he accompanied his friend to the exit.

  But as they left the gymnasiarch’s room, from the other end of the building appeared a group of seven handsome young men—the athletes with whom Tarphon had been wrestli
ng. They were lean, clear-eyed young fellows dressed in a uniform which the older men of Makor had provided them to wear on their trips to compete with other communities: broad-brimmed hats with low crowns, handsome fluttering capes of light blue fastened at the neck with silver clasps, and white flexible boots whose laces crisscrossed up to the knee. In these gay uniforms the seven athletes looked like seven statues of Hermes, poised for whatever commission Zeus might hand them, and as they clattered noisily past the looming statue of Epiphanes, Jehubabel saw that the tallest of the group was his own dark-haired son Benjamin; but he took no pride in this fact.

  When the boys were gone Tarphon walked with his friend to the exit, saying, “Jehubabel, your son Menelaus will be the finest athlete Makor has ever produced.”

  “ ‘A wise son maketh a glad father:’ ” Jehubabel quoted from Solomon, “ ‘but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.’ Wrestling is foolishness. Discus throwing …” He pointed over his shoulder to the statue of Epiphanes. “Foolishness.”

  “No!” Tarphon protested. “Days when such sayings were true are past. A boy today must have some wisdom, yes. But he must also know games, the social pleasantries. Nothing in excess. Great change is in the air, old friend, and you must change with it.”

  But Jehubabel, haunted still by the face of the dead martyr, said, “Wisdom is still the only thing, if with wisdom you also get understanding.”

  “I got my understanding from wrestling,” Tarphon replied, but this the Jew could not believe and he walked alone up the broad avenue leading to the temple of Zeus, where against his will he was drawn to look at the gigantic head of the man who posed as god, illuminated from below by an oil lamp which burned perpetually. “ ‘Vanity of vanities,’ ” he quoted from an ancient saying. Then he saw the spot where the old man had been flayed; it was still damp. For a few moments he prayed there and then turned east to walk down the main thoroughfare, whose numerous shops contained importations from all parts of the world: flashing ornaments made from the tin of Cornwall, silver beads from Spain and bright copper pots from Cyprus; there was gold from Nubia, marble from Paros and ebony from India. Some shops offered foods that a century before were unheard of in this town: sesame candies from Egypt, sharp cheeses from Athens, figs in honey from Crete, cinnamon from Africa and sweet pannag from Byzantium.