Ancient World 02 - Raiders of the Nile

by Steven Saylor

  A flash of movement caught my eye. Someone was running toward us, shouting and laughing.

  As the figure drew closer, I noticed several things in quick succession.

  It was a young woman.

  She was not exactly running, but rather skipping, whirling, and dancing as she hurtled forward, giggling and crying out.

  Also, she appeared to be completely naked.

  And, if Bethesda had not been standing next to me, I would have sworn that the naked, laughing woman was—Bethesda!

  III

  “Follow me! Follow me!” shouted the girl.

  As she passed the dress shop, she looked me in the eye and gave me a playful tap on the chin, then performed a somersault right in front of me, never breaking stride, and continued on her way, waving her hands in the air. Had she truly been naked, the somersault would have given me quite an eyeful, but instead I perceived that she was wrapped in some sort of close-fitting, very sheer garment that matched the shade of her tawny skin. Exactly where the girl ended and the garment began was a mystery, which could be solved only by taking a closer look.

  I began to follow her up the street.

  “Master!”

  I turned to see that Bethesda remained where she was. She gave me a blank, catlike stare.

  “Come on,” I said. “You heard the girl. She wants us to follow her!”

  “She wants everyone to follow her,” muttered Bethesda—and to be sure, a considerable crowd was coming up the street. “She must be rounding up a crowd to watch a mime show.”

  “A mime show? Wonderful! A mime show would be just the thing.” I laughed and waved to Bethesda to follow. When she continued to hesitate, I hurried back, took her by the hand, and pulled her after me.

  “Besides,” I said, “did you not notice her face?”

  “Was it her face you were looking at, Master?” Bethesda sounded skeptical.

  “Among other things! But seriously, did you not notice whom she looked like?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “She looks like you, Bethesda. The resemblance is uncanny.”

  “I hardly think so.”

  “Nonsense. You’re alike enough to be sisters. Twins, even.”

  “I do not have a sister,” she said, rather firmly. Though she had been born a slave, and though both her parents died young—her father first and then her mother—Bethesda had known them both, or so she had told me. She would have known if she had any siblings.

  “I don’t mean to suggest that she’s literally your sister,” I said, then shrugged and gave up the argument. Nothing made me feel more absurd than to realize I was struggling to explain myself to Bethesda, who was, after all, my possession, and by every law and custom was supposed to accept everything I said without question.

  Not far from the street of luxury shops, but closer to the harbor, we came to a small public square decorated with splashing fountains, flowering shrubs, and towering palm trees. In the center of the square a mime troupe had set up a small tent and was getting ready to put on a performance. A considerable crowd had already gathered. A muscular juggler wearing a nemes headdress and not much else was cracking jokes and warming up the spectators, who seemed to be in a boisterous mood.

  “A rather elegant part of town for a mime show,” I commented. “You can even see a bit of the royal palace from here, above those rooftops. Most of the mime shows I’ve seen are in shabbier neighborhoods, where the officials don’t seem to care what goes on.”

  Bethesda made no reply, but I could see that she had relaxed and was getting into the spirit of things. I think she was enjoying the chance to show off her new gown. A number of spectators, especially the men, gave her second glances. Who could blame them?

  Mime shows were peculiar to Alexandria; in my travels, I had seen nothing like them elsewhere. Plays are different; plays are put on everywhere in the Greek and Roman world, because scripted dramas and comedies are part of religious and civic festivals, paid for by the authorities and featuring professional actors, all of whom are men. Alexandrian mime shows are very different. Women as well as men perform—what a scandal that would cause in Rome!—and the performances can hardly be called plays. A typical mime show is a ragbag of topical skits, naughty songs, and indecent dances, with jokes, strongman acts, and acrobatics to fill the intervals. No civics authority controls or regulates the mimes, and while the targets of their satirical skits are often stock types—the nosy housewife next door, the sadistic tutor, the fast-talking lawyer, the lying businessman—the mimes are also known to make targets of those in power, though the names and circumstances are changed to sidestep charges of slander or sedition.

  We Romans like to think we are freer than other people, since we elect our leaders, but it would be hard to imagine the authorities permitting anything like a mime show in the streets of Rome. People would object to the indecency, for one thing, and powerful Romans do not like to be made fun of, especially in public. If a Roman magistrate did not ban such a performance, the gang of some riled politician would surely break it up, and crack a few heads in the process. So, while they may be ruled by a king, it seems to me that the Alexandrians are freer than the Romans at least in this regard, because virtually anything can be said about anyone, even including the king, so long as the ridicule takes place in a mime show and no one is identified by his real name.

  This mime show was not only being staged in a nicer part of town than usual, but it seemed to be attracting a more rarified audience. As I watched, a magnificent litter arrived. The occupant was hidden inside a box screened by yellow linen curtains. The box was fitted atop long wooden poles that were elaborately carved and brightly painted, like two lotus columns from an Egyptian temple laid on their sides. The poles rested upon the shoulders of bearers who were veritable giants, half again as tall as me, twice as broad, and midnight black; such giants are said to come from the land where the Nile begins. Making way for the litter, a vanguard of bodyguards, also giants, bullied their way through the crowd, so that the litter was able to claim a spot at the very front. Some of the spectators who were forcibly displaced grumbled and shook their fists, but the bodyguards stared them down. The curtains of the litter were opened a finger’s width on all sides, allowing the occupant to see out without being seen.

  Two young boys circulated through the crowd, holding out cups to solicit offerings for the troupe. One of the boys stopped in front of me and rattled his cup.

  “Shouldn’t I see a bit of the show before I decide what I wish to pay?” I said.

  “Better to pay now.” The boy grinned. “You never know what might happen.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that, but begrudgingly I pulled the thinnest copper coin from my depleted purse and dropped it into the cup. The rattle it made seemed to satisfy the urchin, who moved on to badger the people next to me.

  Some moments later the two boys disappeared from view, slipping around to the far side of the tent. With its entrance hidden from view and its rear side facing the crowd, the tent would serve as both changing room and backdrop for the presentation. The two boys soon reappeared, both clutching Pan pipes, and stood to either side of the tent, using their bodies to mark the boundaries of an imaginary stage. As they played a shrill fanfare, the crowd settled down, and the show commenced.

  It began innocently enough with a skit about a befuddled brothel keeper, who was all leering eyebrows and salacious grins, and his oldest “girl,” an actress with wrinkles drawn on her face with kohl and a huge pair of drooping stage-breasts. She was not merely her employer’s oldest whore, but was also the first well ever drilled in Alexandria—or something like that. The Greek dialogue contained a great many puns that seemed to play off the local dialect. Bethesda got more of the jokes than I did, laughing at bits of dialogue that were merely Greek to me.

  When not reciting her lines, the actress turned this way and that, knocking over small props (chairs, table, standing lamp) with her
massive breasts. To accompany this buffoonery, the two boys played rude notes on their pipes. Some of the men and women around me laughed so hard they wept and had to blow their noses. A mime show cannot be too bawdy for Alexandrian tastes.

  Suddenly, despite her makeup and costume, I recognized the actress.

  “Bethesda, look! It’s her. Your double.”

  Bethesda gave me a sour look.

  “No, seriously. It’s that girl who was running through the streets naked—well, practically naked. You can hardly recognize her, but that’s the girl. I’m sure of it. Amazing, how these mimes can transform themselves!”

  Bethesda rolled her eyes and shook her head, still unconvinced of the resemblance.

  The skit came to a climax with yet another pun that was completely unintelligible to me but that set off howls of laughter in the audience and earned a sustained round of applause. As the two performers took a bow, it seemed to me that the actress made a special flourish toward the unseen occupant of the elegant litter.

  A musical interlude followed, then an acrobatic act in which three men balanced themselves atop the shoulders of a fourth. Then a trained monkey appeared and tried to snatch away the loincloth of the man on the bottom, which caused the human monolith to stagger and sway and finally come tumbling down. The crowd roared with laughter.

  More skits followed. The subject matter grew more topical as the program progressed, leading up to a skit about a grotesquely fat merchant throwing back cups of wine and getting very drunk while dictating letters to a scribe. When the fat merchant felt the need to relieve himself, and had to summon two servants merely to rise from his chair, even I knew whom he was meant to represent: King Ptolemy. Everyone in Alexandria knew the story—the king had become so enormously fat, he could no longer relieve himself either fore or aft without assistance.

  While the audience hooted with laughter, the actor in the fat-suit waddled across the stage area toward an imaginary latrina (represented by a chair with a hole in it). Assisting him were the two young pipe players, each clutching an elbow and struggling to support his massive weight. When the three of them arrived at the latrina, one of the boys made a great show of searching amid the voluminous robes hanging from the merchant’s vast belly. At last, with a squeal of triumph, the boy revealed a small phallus that looked to be made of leather and brass and was evidently attached to a hidden wineskin or some such container, for a moment later the merchant threw back his head and gave a loud sigh of relief as golden liquid streamed forth from the spout. At first the boy carefully aimed the stream into the latrina, but then, mugging shamelessly to the audience, he began to direct the stream this way and that, deliberately making a terrible mess. The merchant, with his head thrown back and his eyes shut, remained oblivious.

  At last, with his bladder finally empty and his phallus tucked away, the merchant began to waddle back toward his chair—then suddenly raised his eyebrows in alarm and shouted for his servants to reverse course. With a great deal of awkward confusion, the three of them turned around and headed back to the latrina.

  What followed was an incredibly vulgar display, with the merchant repeatedly attempting to settle his enormous posterior on the latrina, and his two assistants frantically striving to pull apart his huge, unseen buttocks (which remained hidden by the folds of his garment). When at last the merchant was seated, with a great deal of grunting and heaving and a cacophony of gassy squeals (produced offstage, from within the tent, I think), he began to eject a peculiar array of debris from his rear end, which the assistants stooped down to retrieve, one by one. These included various pieces of pottery and bronze ware—lamps and bowls and serving implements—which the servants first displayed to the audience, then offered to the merchant, who wrinkled his nose and waved them away, as anyone would at something that came out of his backside. The laughter of the audience was thick with derision.

  At first I took this display to be mere nonsense humor, until a nearby spectator suddenly got the point and muttered aloud, “Ah! They all come from Cyrene!”

  Observing the pottery more closely, even I recognized the blue and yellow pattern distinctive to the workshops of Cyrene, a city some five hundred miles to the west of Alexandria—and then I understood the joke. Since the time of Alexander, Cyrene and its surrounding territory, called Cyrenaica, had been a part of Egypt’s kingdom, a western frontier traditionally administered by a younger brother or cousin of the king. Until eight years ago, the regent of Cyrene had been King Ptolemy’s bastard brother, called Apion; but when Apion died, childless, he left a will that bequeathed Cyrenaica to the Roman people. King Ptolemy, deeply in debt to Roman bankers and fearful of Roman arms, did not dare dispute the will—and so the kingdom had lost one of its principal cities, and the Romans had been allowed to establish a province bordering directly on Egypt, only a few days’ march from the capital.

  The people of Alexandria had reacted violently to this turn of events. Armed force had been necessary to quell the riots. Though eight years had passed, their resentment still simmered, and their conviction that King Ptolemy had betrayed his birthright had only deepened. In their view, Cyrene had mattered no more to the king than his own feces mattered to the merchant.

  Emptied at both ends, and assisted at every step by the two boys, the merchant gave a sigh of relief and waddled back to his chair. He began a conversation with his scribe having to do with two rivals who were engaged in a fierce competition. One was from Rome and the other was a distant relative from Pontus, and the merchant was in a quandary because he couldn’t decide which side to take.

  If the mime in the fat-suit was meant to be King Ptolemy, then the rival merchants clearly represented Rome and King Mithridates of Pontus, who (by some genealogical twist I had never untangled) was a cousin of King Ptolemy’s. In the last year, Mithridates had overrun all of Asia, driving out Rome’s provincial magistrates and Roman businessmen. The impacts of this war were being felt all over the Mediterranean world, but Egypt had managed to remain neutral.

  “If only I didn’t owe so much money to that filthy Roman,” the merchant whined, “I’d stab him in the back this minute!”

  “Why don’t you simply pay him off, and be free of him?” asked the scribe.

  “Pay him with what? My cousin from Pontus took the rest of my money. And took my little boy, to boot!”

  This was a reference to King Mithridates’ recent seizure of the island of Cos, where Egypt kept a treasury and where King Ptolemy’s son, still a teenager, had been residing, presumably at a safe distance from the palace intrigues of Alexandria. (This was a son from the king’s first marriage, not his current marriage to his niece.) Mithridates had seized not just the island, but the Egyptian treasury and the Egyptian prince as well, ostensibly treating the boy as an honored guest but in fact holding him hostage.

  “And don’t forget the cloak he took!” said the scribe.

  “Piddle! What’s a moth-eaten old cloak to one who wears silk?” At this the crowd loudly booed the fat merchant. The reference was to one of the treasures seized by Mithridates, a cloak that had belonged to none other than Alexander the Great.

  “They say your cousin goes about wearing it and putting on airs,” said the scribe. “Don’t you want it back?”

  “I hardly think it would fit me!” said the merchant, shaking his bulbous arms and getting a laugh from the audience. “Oh, if only my mother were still here, to tell me what to do!”

  “But she’s not,” said the scribe. “Don’t you remember?” He made a hacking sound and mimed the universal gesture of a finger drawn across the throat.

  “What about my big brother? Where is he? He’d know what to do!”

  The scribe rolled his eyes. “You and the old lady ran him off! Have you forgotten that, as well?” This was a reference to the king’s older brother, who had his own turn at the throne before being driven into exile some years ago.

  “If only big brother could come home!”

  “Really
? Most husbands dread a visit from their father-in-law!”

  “He was my brother before he was my father-in-law.”

  “And master of the house before you kicked him out!”

  “If only big brother would come, I’m sure he could sort things out.”

  “Be careful what you wish for.” The scribe shook his head. “Two of your sort are two too many. And yet, I wish there were three of you.”

  “Three?”

  “Three hatchlings from your mother’s nest, so I could have another choice for a master. Are you sure you haven’t got a bastard brother hidden away somewhere?”

  “A bastard?”

  “You know, a cuckoo’s child, slipped into the nest when no one was looking?” The scribe mugged at the audience.

  “Of course not. There’s only the two of us.”

  “Ah well, then, I suppose your older brother will have to do. I’ve heard a rumor that he’s on his way here right now.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now!” The scribe looked straight at the audience and enunciated in a slow, dramatic voice. “And he may … arrive … any … minute!”

  The merchant clapped his hands to his cheeks with an expression of horror. The two boys took up their pipes and played shrill notes to mimic his alarm. Then the discordant music suddenly changed to a giddy tune, so infectious that the fat merchant forgot his worries and leaped to his feet. With various parts of his body jiggling in different directions at once, he performed an absurd dance, spinning, jumping, kicking his legs, and waving his arms. This was another jab at King Ptolemy. Despite his drunken laziness and his inability even to take a piss on his own, he was still known to break into wild dances in the midst of his orgies.

  Beating drums and shaking rattles, other members of the mime troupe emerged from behind the tent to join the merchant in the dance. Among them I spotted Bethesda’s double, no longer made up to appear old but looking quite lovely in a green linen gown; the wooden bangles adorning her tawny arms made a clacking sound as she cavorted. Encouraged by the players, members of the audience joined in the dance. The music became louder and shriller, and the atmosphere grew raucous. Even the Nubian bearers of the elegant litter joined in, clapping their hands and stamping their feet.