The Road to Bithynia: A Novel of Luke, the Beloved Physician

by Frank G. Slaughter

  “Thank you, Probus.” The young man accepted a towel from the tall scribe and went to wash his hands at a basin in the corner of the room. Probus, the apothecary and scribe, uncovered a small table upon which was placed a platter of cold meat and bread, with a bottle of wine beside it. It was the custom of the priestly physicians, after taking their turn at impersonating the god in the rite of incubatio, to take refreshment here before going to their quarters. Probus poured wine into two goblets and handed one to the younger man. “You were magnificent tonight, Luke,” he said. “I almost thought Asklepios himself had favored us with his presence. Mnesilochus, the actor, could have done no better.”

  Luke smiled and took a fragment of meat from the platter. “My last performance should be my best,” he said. After five years of study Luke was now a full-fledged priest-physician, respected in the temple because of his knowledge of medicine and his skill with the scalpel. Of the apothecary-scribe, Probus, he still knew next to nothing, except that he was a kindred spirit, for all his outward sarcasm, a man of great learning and deep philosophy, whose speech revealed familiarity with cities throughout the far-flung reaches of the empire. In the year that the lean and sardonic man had been chief scribe and medicine compounder for the temple, he and Luke had become fast friends.

  “Did the chief priest beg you to stay?” Probus asked.

  “Not exactly.” Luke smiled. “I think he was relieved when I told him I would leave at the end of my term of study.”

  “Well he might be,” Probus grunted. “With your skill, you could have had his office within a few years. Naturally he would be glad to get rid of you.” He drank deeply of his wine goblet. “Anyway, you would be a fool to stay here. Physicians of less than your caliber are getting rich in Antioch, Ephesus, and Rome.” Then for a moment his blue eyes were serious. “But I pity the sick who come here after you leave. You should hear the pronouncements of the divine Asklepios when some of your brother physicians are wearing the mask.”

  Luke sipped the wine and ate a piece of beef from the platter. “I wonder,” he said thoughtfully, “how much longer this mockery of medical science will keep up.”

  “Careful,” Probus warned. “That is heresy, and you are still in the temple.”

  “But Hippocrates dared to treat the sick without wearing the mask of a god that does not exist. And Celsus did the same recently in Rome.”

  “Rationalem quidem puto medicinam esse debere,” Probus intoned in Latin, then translated expertly into flawless Greek: “I am of the opinion that the art of medicine ought to be rational.”

  “Where did you learn the words of Celsus?”

  “Among other things, I once studied medicine. And remember that Chiron, the father of apothecaries, is also the father of medicine.”

  “Why did you not keep on?” Luke asked.

  Probus shrugged. “An apothecary charges as much for his medicines as you physicians receive for prescribing them. And rich men will pay a philosopher well merely to insult them in words they cannot understand.” He put down his goblet and went to the bag containing tonight’s offerings which the slave had deposited in the corner. “Hah! Asklepios is well paid tonight. He will not miss these.” From the bag Probus took a handful of gold coins and put them in the pouch that hung at his girdle. “You should have adopted this habit long ago, Luke. Your brother physicians rob the god regularly.”

  Luke smiled. “I have no need for money. Theophilus, my foster father, is rich. I can always live with him in Antioch and practice my profession.”

  “Are you going to Antioch, then? When last we talked you were not sure.”

  “No. I think I will join the army as a surgeon.”

  “The army!” Probus looked at his young friend as if he had suddenly gone mad. “Why the army?”

  Luke took a small scroll from his robe and handed it to the apothecary. “Here is a letter from Silvanus that came only yesterday.”

  “Silvanus? Oh yes. He is the centurion you spoke about.” Probus began to read the letter:

  I write you, knowing that your term of study is almost at an end and that you will soon be returning home. Petronius, the governor of Syria, has been ordered by the emperor to send an army to join those now being prepared by Sergius Paulus for an expedition to Paphlagonia, where some have dared to defy the empire and refused to pay taxes. Apollonius, your brother, has come from Rome to march with the Syrian Legion and I go, too, so that I may be near him, for he is inexperienced yet in warfare. I have spoken to Theophilus of this, and it is his hope that you will accompany us, since your time in the temple is so nearly finished. We have received excellent reports of your skill as a physician, and I know that Theophilus would rest easier on account of Apollonius if he knew you were with us. If you can find it in your heart to come with us, both Apollonius and myself will welcome you with open arms. You will not even have to journey back to Syria, for we join the forces of Sergius Paulus at Pisidian Antioch, which is only a few hundred miles from Pergamum.

  As for me, I shall not return there when the campaign is finished, since my soul yearns for the peace which awaits me in Bithynia. It joins Paphlagonia, where we are going, so I shall remain when our work is finished.

  If you can join us for at least the duration of this expedition, I know that Apollonius and I will welcome you, and Theophilus will rest easier at home.

  All here send love to you,

  Silvanus

  Probus frowned. “Why does he want to go to Bithynia?”

  “Silvanus is getting old. When I was a boy he used to describe the land to me. I am sure he thinks of it as something of a heaven on earth.”

  “It is a beautiful country.”

  “I did not know you had traveled there,” Luke said.

  “There are few places I have not seen,” Probus said with a shrug.

  “Is there truly peace in Bithynia?”

  Probus smiled. “I suspect that the only peace man ever attains lies within himself, Luke. When do we leave for Antioch?”

  “We!” Luke exclaimed. “But you aren’t going, Probus.”

  The apothecary looked pained. “So you no longer wish the company of your friends now that you will be associated with important people?”

  “B-but,” Luke stammered, then realized that Probus was making sport of him. “You are jesting.”

  Probus walked over to the mask of Asklepios and gave it a sharp kick. “Not at all. I have been planning to leave for some time; only my devotion to you, Luke, kept me here. Now that you are going, there is no need for me to remain longer. Especially when I take this with me,” he added, picking up the emerald which lay in the basket with the wax tablets and putting it into his purse.

  “But your position. You are the chief apothecary.”

  “For which I am paid no more than I would make as a circumforaneus [a traveling dispenser of medicine, literally a quack]. If I did not rob the god regularly, I could not afford to stay.”

  “There will be even less pay for an apothecary in the army,” Luke reminded him.

  Probus lifted his eyebrows. “Remember that I am also the best scribe in the world, in addition to being a roller of pills. When we join the legions I will seek out the military commander and become his personal scribe. In war men say and do things they would never think of doing in peace, and thus I shall learn all of his secrets, who his supporters are, and to whom he owes money. When he has won the battle and comes back a hero, he will remember what I know about him and make me rich, as a reward for keeping my mouth shut.”

  “And if he loses?”

  “Then his enemies will pay me well to write a memorial telling the things that he did wrong. Good night, Luke. Do we leave tomorrow?”

  “No. The day after. I had planned to purchase a mule and ride to Pisidia over the Via Augusta.”

  Probus made a wry face. “My backside cried out
already in protest, but I am a philosopher, so perhaps the pain in my bottom will stimulate the thoughts in my mind. Good night, Luke.”

  “Good night, Probus,” Luke said, smiling. “And I am very glad that you will be with me.”

  Luke did not feel sleepy, although the hour was late, and he let himself out into the temple gardens. The night was cool, for it was late summer, and as he walked among the pools and beds of growing flowers and shrubs, his thoughts went back over the past five years since he had first come here to study. This great establishment had been his home, school, and working place in one. As an acolyte he had assisted the priest-physicians in the small audience chambers to which the sick were admitted during the preliminary days of fasting and purging. Here he had studied disease and its effects upon the human body, for the pretense of godly intervention was only a front behind which the priest-physicians went about the practice of medicine, just as did more skillful physicians outside the temples who dealt directly with their patients, rather than through a theoretically divine agent.

  In these small examining chambers he had learned to recognize symptoms and the body changes which caused them. And he had learned, too, the treatments prescribed by physicians through the years and handed down by word of mouth from master to apprentice, or set down in scrolls. These same prescriptions were later uttered by the priest wearing the mask of Asklepios during the rite of incubatio. Luke’s hands, facile and sensitive, had been trained by the skilled temple lithotomists and surgeons until no one in the entire establishment was more skilled with scalpel and forceps. In the hidden inner chambers of the temple he had cut up the bodies of animals to study their organs, and sometimes the temple lithotomists could be bribed to arrange a dissection of human bodies outside the walls. The priest-teachers of the temple were conveniently blind to such activities, for they, too, realized the truth of the admonition of Rome’s famous physician, Celsus: “Mortuorum corpora incidere discentibus necessarium.” [To open the bodies of the dead is necessary for learners.]

  In the library Luke had found his greatest pleasure. Studious by nature, he had spent many hours among the racks of ancient manuscripts summing up the total of medical knowledge. Here were the mythical pronouncements of the real Asklepios, a physician of ancient Greece, later deified, and accounts of the daring feats of those skilled surgeons and sons of Asklepios, Machaon and Podalirius, who had ministered to the heroes of the Trojan War. In other scrolls were descriptions of medical treatments by many races, including clay models of the livers of sheep used by the haruspex, or soothsayer, in diagnosing disease and predicting the future by studying the livers of animals killed for the purpose.

  Set down, too, were ethical rules governing the conduct of physicians, going back as far as the earliest of medical codes, that of the Babylonian physician, Hammurabi. Reading them, Luke had felt thankful that he lived in more enlightened times, for one rule went: “If a physician shall produce on anyone a severe wound with a bronze operating knife and kill him, or shall open an abscess with an operating knife and destroy the eye, his hands shall be cut off.” Looking back on these five years, Luke knew that they had been a busy and profitable period when he had grown from a youth to a man and during which he had learned much. He had been an over-serious youth when he had journeyed from Antioch to Jerusalem, Joppa, Tiberias, around the jewel-like Sea of Galilee, and thence to Damascus, and back to Antioch to take ship at nearby Seleucia for Ephesus and Pergamum to begin his studies, and the memory of that journey had soon grown dim. Letters from Mariamne had arrived regularly for a while, brought by caravans passing through Damascus on the way westward along the Via Augusta, the great highway through Lesser Asia. But Luke had been too busy with studies to be a good correspondent, and there had been no word from her for a year now, since a hurried note told of persecution against the Company of the Fish in Damascus and the flight of Mariamne and her father to their old home in Tarsus, which, being primarily inhabited by Greeks and Romans, was a much more tolerant city.

  Of Saul of Tarsus, whom he had last seen going into the wilderness beyond Damascus, and of the scroll containing the sayings of Jesus, Luke had heard not a word. Remembering Saul, he wondered now what could have happened to the dynamic Jew whom he had almost followed into the wilderness that day on the road to Antioch.

  Yes, he told himself as he turned back to his quarters in the temple, they had been good years. Lately, however, he had been filled with a strange unrest, a feeling he could not name, but certainly a sense of inadequacy, of lack of purpose. Perhaps a change was just what he needed, he thought, and there could be no sharper change from the quiet and peace of the temple than the rigorous life of a surgeon in a military campaign.

  IV

  Antioch-in-Pisidia lay some two hundred and fifty miles to the east of Ephesus on the frontier of the district of Phrygia. A highly civilized Greek and Roman city, it was one of the sixteen Antiochs established by Seleucus I Nicator and had been a Roman colony for nearly fifty years. Located on the lower slopes of the mountain range rising on the right bank of the Anthius River, it was admirably situated as a base for military operations. A network of excellent Roman roads converged upon the strongly fortified city, and a large aqueduct, built also by the Romans, brought an ample supply of water from the foothills of the mountain range above the city.

  The Camp of Mars, as the Roman military camps were always called, was located outside the city on a low plain beside the river. Luke had never visited this lesser Antioch before, and he looked about him with interest as they rode through it on the way to the Camp of Mars. Nowhere in his travels had he seen sculpture and architecture so effectively combined.

  “The Roman part of the city was built by Augustus,” Probus lectured him. “That upper square was constructed in his honor and is called the Augusta Platea. The lower one is the Square of Tiberius and dates from a later period.”

  A broad flight of steps connected the two squares, and at the top were three archways of the triumphal Propylaea erected to the glory of the Emperor Augustus, while the reliefs in the spandrels that studded the arches commemorated the great victories of that emperor on land and sea.

  “Look at the temple there on the Augusta Platea,” Probus directed. “I have never seen anything to compare with that frieze of bulls’ heads.”

  “Who is their god?” Luke asked.

  “A local deity called Men, the God of Agriculture. I believe his worship is related to that of Mithras. This city is an important stop on the travel route from east to west. The Via Augusta from Babylon to Ephesus runs through here, and another road leads northwestward to Troas and the northern cities of the coast.”

  They emerged from the city and rode out on the plain where the Camp of Mars stood. Seeing it at close range, Luke was startled by its size, but Probus, who was more experienced in such things, sniffed, “This must be a small-scale war. There are not more than three legions here.”

  “That is almost twenty thousand men,” Luke protested. He knew that a legion numbered about six thousand, besides auxiliary troops.

  “The barbarians can easily mount fifty thousand soldiers. These are not the days of Julius Caesar, Luke, when a handful of Romans could conquer the world.”

  As they rode nearer, Luke scanned the banners waving in different parts of the camp, indicating the legions already there, but saw no sign of the men from Antioch and northern Syria. The camp itself was arranged roughly in the form of a rectangle, the long side running parallel to the river and extending back for about a quarter of a mile. The tents of the legions were pitched in orderly rows, like streets in a city, the rich purples and blues of the officers’ quarters contrasting with the drab goat’s hair fabric of the men’s. Small groups were drilling in open spaces here and there, but the thud of their sandaled feet and the rattle of their harness were drowned out by the clang of blacksmiths’ hammers and the roar of armorers’ forges. Close to the river hundreds of horses
were tethered in parallel rows; behind them were the chariots and carts upon which the mobile part of the army moved. Down the roads from the mountains and the country back of the city moved a steady procession of farmers’ carts, loaded donkeys, and camels bringing fodder for the animals and suppliers for the troops.

  They were stopped at the entrance to the camp by a sentry, who demanded the nature of their business. Luke answered, “I am a physician, and this is Probus Maximus, an apothecary and scribe. We seek the legion from Antioch-in-Syria.”

  “They have not yet arrived,” the sentry said, “but are expected daily.”

  A centurion came out of a small building that served as a sentry post. “Did you say you were a physician?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Luke said.

  “Then Sergius Paulus will want to see you. He is in the devil of a temper with gout and refuses to let the camp physicians into his tent.”

  They were conducted by a slave to the tent of the Roman commander in a grove of trees beside the river. When Luke and Probus were ushered in, Sergius stared at them with eyes red from pain and lack of sleep. He was a tall, commanding figure, a typical Roman aristocrat, but now he sat in a chair with his right foot swathed in bandages and resting on a cushion, his expression truculent. “Well?” he marked irritably. “What do you want?”

  Luke spoke courteously. “I am a physician, come to join the legion of Antioch. My name is Luke.”

  The commander’s face brightened. “Can you relieve the gout? I know there is no cure.”

  Luke knew better than to make rash promises. Gout was a knotty problem indeed. A strict regimen of diet, avoiding all rich foods and taking only a little thin wine, sometimes helped, but relief was uncertain and recurrence frequent.

  Sergius Paulus divined his thoughts, for he said resignedly, “Well, you might as well look at it and tell me to starve myself and drink no wine, as the others have done. But I am doing that already and the toe is worse.”