Ben-Hur

by Carol Wallace

  Before speaking, Arrius studied the young man, who, in the dazzling Mediterranean light, was even more remarkable. Arrius himself was not small, but the rower loomed over him. He wore nothing more than a ragged loincloth, and his tangled black curls flopped over his eyes. Yet he stood upright, swaying easily to the roll of the ship, with a self-possessed air that surprised the tribune. In his years of naval action, he had met with slaves who were angry, sullen, resentful, vicious, terrified, and so deeply distressed that barely a spark of humanity showed in their eyes. This man, in contrast, looked directly at him with wary curiosity. His body was young, but his face showed the marks of a long-held grief—or anger.

  “The hortator says you are his best rower,” Arrius began, surprised to feel somewhat at a disadvantage.

  “He is kind,” the slave answered flatly. Courteously, but only on the surface. Rage simmered not far below.

  “Have you seen much service?” Arrius went on.

  “About three years.”

  “All of them at the oars?”

  “Every single day,” the rower answered, stressing each word equally.

  “Really?” Arrius exclaimed. “Few men survive beyond a year.”

  The oarsman paused and met Arrius’s glance before answering. “Sir—the hortator told me you are a tribune, named Quintus Arrius, and that you have been a naval officer. So naturally, you have some idea of our lives.” Arrius was surprised to be spoken to almost as an equal, but he nodded to encourage the rower. “Spirit can improve endurance,” the younger man went on. “I have seen some weak men survive where men who were physically stronger weakened and died.” He said no more, but the implication was clear enough: he had chosen to live.

  “Am I right in thinking that you are a Jew?” asked Arrius.

  “I am,” the young man said. “My ancestors were Hebrew before Rome ever existed.”

  “And you exhibit their pride,” Arrius answered, taken aback.

  “Pride is always loudest in chains.”

  “And what cause do you have for pride?”

  “That I am a Jew,” the rower answered simply.

  Judah (Ramon Novarro) with fellow slaves in the galley ship in this scene from the 1925 MGM film

  Arrius smiled. “I’ve never been to Jerusalem, but I have heard of its princes. I even knew one. He was a seagoing trader. He was rich and cultured and as proud as any king.” Arrius looked away for a moment, at the whitecaps racing toward the bow, regularly spaced across the sparkling water. “What is your position in life?”

  “My position,” the young man said, with a biting tone to his voice, “is the position of a galley slave. I am a galley slave,” he repeated. He glanced into the distance, as Arrius had, and his voice was almost whipped away by the strong, steady wind. “My father was a seagoing trader and was rich and cultured. He probably came through the Strait of Messina dozens of times. I often think of him, on his deck, with his precious cargo, navigating these seas where I pull an oar. My mother always said that he was a frequent guest of Augustus in Rome.” The breeze flung his curls back from his face, and for an instant he closed his eyes tight.

  “What was his name?”

  “Ithamar, of the house of Hur.”

  “You are a son of Hur?” Arrius exclaimed. “How is that possible? How did you become a slave?”

  There was no answer for a long moment. Arrius watched as Ben-Hur took one deep breath, then another in the effort to master himself. Those large hands curled into fists but his voice was even when he turned to Arrius and said quietly, “I was accused of trying to assassinate the procurator Valerius Gratus in Jerusalem.”

  “That was you?” Arrius realized he had taken a step backward, away from the rower, and stood straighter to compensate. “Rome spoke of nothing else for days. I heard the news myself on shipboard, in the Iberian Sea.”

  The two men, elder and younger, tribune and slave, stood silent, each reconsidering the other. For Arrius, the tumbled hair and shaggy beard, the prominent muscles and the bare feet now seemed to disguise a different man, the son of the princely merchant he had once known. He noted the fine features and told himself he could see the father in the son, while Judah for his part found himself talking not to a commander, but to a man who had known of his family in another life entirely. In a real life.

  Arrius spoke first: “I thought the Hur family had vanished from the earth.”

  Ben-Hur’s eyes flew to his face. “But you have never heard anything about my mother and my sister? They were taken away because of what I did. . . .”

  “Nothing,” Arrius answered. Ben-Hur had moved closer, his immense callused hands touching Arrius’s cloak where it had fallen from the tribune’s shoulder. That momentary sense of menace was gone and the Roman felt a pulse of sympathy. Ben-Hur must have been little more than a gangling teenage boy when he came to the galleys. Roman justice was harsh and swift—as it had to be, Arrius knew, to control the vast empire around the Inland Sea. He had not considered it, though, from the viewpoint of those who were not Roman.

  The young man glanced down at his hands and dropped the fine purple fabric, taking a half step backward. But he kept talking, as if he couldn’t stop, with a new tone of desperation. “It has been three years, and every hour a lifetime of misery—a lifetime in a bottomless pit where the only relief is to be stunned by labor. All that time, I’ve never heard a word about my family. Not a whisper.” He shook his head. “I know that I have been forgotten by the world, and sometimes it seems I have deserved it. Wiped away as if the family of Hur, the princes of Israel, had never existed. All through my action! But . . .” He looked away from Arrius, squinting into the sun to try to master his emotion. “I may be forgotten, but I can’t forget,” he went on more softly. “My father was dead, I was the head of the family, and my mother and sister were dragged away, looking back, pleading, waiting for me to help them.”

  He faced Arrius with a bleak expression. “I don’t have to tell you about the many ways death arrives in the galleys. You can die from battle, starvation, exhaustion, plague, fire. I’ve seen men fall from their oars and drown in a few inches of bilgewater. I’ve seen them flayed to death by a wicked hortator, and I have envied them.” He looked down at his palms and rubbed them together. “We do become like animals, you know. But these years would have been more tolerable if I really were the brute beast the hortator sees. Then I wouldn’t remember my sister’s eyes on mine as two Roman soldiers lifted her off the ground and dragged her away to a fate I . . .” He stopped speaking, then added in a near whisper, “I would be glad to know that my mother and Tirzah were dead. Two sheltered women at the mercy of . . . And all my doing.”

  “Do you admit you were guilty? That was a capital crime,” Arrius pointed out sharply.

  Ben-Hur’s face hardened. “No, I don’t. By the God of my fathers, I swear that I am innocent.”

  Arrius turned away from him and took a few steps toward the bow, then looked back. “You pleaded innocence at the trial?”

  “There was no trial.”

  “What? Roman law . . . ,” Arrius began. “No charges? No witnesses? Who passed judgment?”

  Ben-Hur shrugged. “They chained my hands behind me and hauled me to a cell in the Antonia Tower. I saw no one. No one spoke to me. Next day soldiers took me to the port, and I have pulled an oar ever since.”

  “Could you have proven innocence?”

  “It was an accident! I was on the roof, looking down at the procession as Gratus entered the city. I leaned over and dislodged a tile. It fell—Gratus fell. What a ridiculous way to try to kill someone, though! In broad daylight, surrounded by his soldiers, all fully armed. And I had so much to lose! Tribune, you understand these things. Rome rules with the cooperation of people like my father. We had a great estate. I was just a boy. Why would I ruin a good life?”

  “But is there any proof? Who was with you?”

  “No one. My sister, Tirzah, had just left me,” Ben-Hur answered, looki
ng down at the deck. “She was fifteen. Very sweet. Pretty. Innocent. She knew nothing outside our world; she never left the palace without my mother or a servant. I can’t imagine her surviving imprisonment.” He looked directly at Arrius. “Sir, since you are a tribune, could you find out?” But he had said too much; he knew right away. He had gone too far. “No,” he said. “Of course not. I’m sorry.”

  Arrius was still looking at him soberly. He was shaken by Ben-Hur’s story. He had spent his life in the service of Rome, and he believed in the empire. He knew that its laws were strict, but he also knew that Roman rule brought order and prosperity to the lands it subdued. If the Jew was telling the truth—and it was well-known that slaves lied—an entire family had been destroyed to atone for what might have been an accident.

  “That’s enough,” he said. “Go back below.”

  Ben-Hur bowed his head to the tribune and turned away. After a few silent steps he spun around and said, “But I beg you to remember that I only asked you for news of my family. I requested nothing for myself.”

  Arrius watched him cross the deck, moving with the ease of a natural athlete. What a competitor he would make in the arena! He had the balance, the stamina, the mental fortitude, and the physical strength to make an invincible gladiator. “Wait!” Arrius called and followed him. “What would you do if you were free?”

  Ben-Hur’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t mock me, tribune. I know I will die a slave.”

  “No, it’s a serious question.”

  “Then I would never rest until my mother and Tirzah were brought back to the life they knew. I owe them everything they lost; I would recover it, somehow. Our palace, our ships, our trading partners, our warehouses, our bales of silk and barrels of spices, down to the last golden pin for my mother’s hair—I would get them back. And I would wait on those women day and night, more faithfully than any slave.”

  “And what if you were to find out they were dead?”

  PALAESTRA

  Borrowing from Greek practice, Romans used a palaestra much as people today might use a gym membership: for exercise and social interaction. Men could spar in sports like wrestling, boxing, and javelin. Unlike a gladiatorial ludus, however, the palaestra was not a designated training school; rather, it allowed Roman men to incorporate fitness and athletics into their everyday lives.

  There was no answer for a moment as Ben-Hur contemplated the clean white boards of the deck. Then he sighed and said, “The night before the accident, I had made a decision, and it would be the same today. I would train as a soldier. And in all the world, there is only one place to learn that profession, even for a Jew.”

  “In a Roman palaestra!” exclaimed Arrius.

  Ben-Hur shook his head. “In a Roman military camp.”

  “You would need to learn the use of arms,” Arrius commented, then caught sight of a sailor within earshot. He had been carried away. As commander of the ship he had no business discussing a future with even this remarkable galley slave. The man was his best rower. The ship must reach Cythera and join the fleet as fast as possible, and no man could be treated as anything other than an element of a fighting machine.

  Yet he could not resist adding, “Just think of this. There can be no glory for a soldier who isn’t a Roman citizen, and that’s impossible for a Jew. But a gladiator, of any origin at all, can earn honor and wealth and recognition from the emperor. Go back to your bench now and take up your oar. Don’t dwell on this conversation. It’s the fruit of an idle moment.”

  But Judah Ben-Hur went below the deck with a tiny jet of hope in his heart.

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAINS

  The sun raked across the lapis surface of the Aegean, striking glittering bands where the wind fractured the waves. In the distance, veils of haze hung over one island or another, but the people of Naxos, from their hilltop, directed their eyes southward to where the Roman fleet was gathered. There had never been such a sight in all the years of the boat-owning, seagoing, island-dwelling observers. The galleys sailed in precise formation, four abreast, heading eastward, then wheeling north like so many lines of cavalry, each row of galleys coming about at the same point. Flags and pennants streamed from the masts, but even more remarkable was the relentless precision of the oars that drove each ship forward.

  “So many!” a shepherd cried, gasping for breath as he crested the hill. He shaded his eyes against the setting sun and counted the columns still gliding toward him. “Are they going to kill the pirates?”

  “Or be killed,” his neighbor answered.

  “There must be scores of them,” the first man continued, adding on his fingers as he turned to estimate the ships that he now saw stern-on.

  “A hundred. And the pirate fleet, they say, is sixty strong. Biremes and triremes—two and three banks of rowers.”

  “So then, the Romans will win.”

  “The pirates are real desperadoes; you know that. They eat men up there beyond the Bosporus. They eat babies to help their beards grow.”

  “Every enemy eats babies, they say. And the Romans won’t let a bunch of thieving corsairs get near them. They’ll use those galleys to ram and sink the pirate ships; then they’ll pour oil onto the water and set it on fire.”

  “I forgot about the oil. Have you ever seen it?”

  “No. Just heard of it. Like eating babies. It probably isn’t true. Look, the sun is setting.”

  The light was turning redder and redder, the span of the rays diminishing. There were only three more columns of sail left to round the invisible mark and turn northward.

  “Let’s go. I hate this hillside after dark.”

  “But I just got here,” the shepherd protested.

  “What more will you see once the sun’s gone down?” his friend asked, setting off.

  “I would like to see the battle, wouldn’t you?” the shepherd asked as they filed down the narrow path.

  “Yes, but I heard the pirates headed north. If I were the pirate chief, I would slip into the channel between Euboea and Hellas. There are lots of rich towns there; the fleet can move from one to the next, raiding as it goes.”

  “What do you know about rich towns and Hellas and raiding?” the shepherd scoffed.

  “At least I’ve been off this island,” his friend retorted. “And once we were blown all that way north in a storm. Right through the Cyclades, all the way to Athens. The bay there, they told me, narrows and goes all the way up the coast, just like a finger of water. The raiding fleet can hide from the Romans.”

  The shepherd didn’t answer for a moment as he crossed a steeply tilted boulder. “The problem with shelter is it can also be a trap,” he said. “It happens all the time with sheep. They wander into a gully, feel sheltered and safe; then they can’t get out. Maybe that will happen to the pirates, too.”

  “What a piece of luck for the Romans if it did,” agreed his neighbor.

  When the news reached Arrius that the pirate fleet had indeed slipped into the channel between Euboea and Hellas, he was sure that the goddess Fortuna was smiling on him. He could split his fleet, stationing half of them at the southern end and sending the other half north toward Thermopylae, snaring the pirates as the shepherd on Naxos had described.

  Once the fleet had rounded Naxos, the order went out to make all possible speed to the northwest, threading through the islands clustering in the Aegean until Mount Ocha reared up black against the twilit sky. At a signal, the fleet rested on its oars while small boats went from ship to ship, making sure that every single captain understood his orders. Arrius was to lead one group into the mouth of the channel, while the rest of the squadron would sweep northward along the coast of Euboea, then turn south into the channel to pin the marauders between the two Roman forces. There would be no escape for the pirates.

  Meanwhile Ben-Hur and the other slaves remained at their benches, pulling their oars. No one spoke to them. No one explained where they were going or why. No one mentioned the vast, orderly fleet
in formation behind them, each galley powered by its scores of slaves. Night fell and the pace set by the hortator did not slacken, but a new scent drifted down the gangway from the deck: incense. Ben-Hur closed his eyes for a moment, shutting out the gloom of the cabin and the impassive face of the hortator. Incense! That meant the altar had been erected in the bow and the tribune had made a sacrifice. On every ship where Ben-Hur had pulled his oar, this had been the first step in the preparation for battle.

  On the benches all around him, he sensed a new alertness. The perpetual struggle with the oar kept every part of the body busy; there was no way even to turn and catch a fellow rower’s eye. But as he pulled the blade of his oar through the dark water outside the hull, he heard single whispered words hissed along the benches as rowers understood the prospect before them. For a sailor, or for one of the marines on board, battle meant struggle, danger, excitement, glory, wounds, or death. For the galley slave, there was even more at stake. If the ship were captured, the slaves also changed hands. They might have a new master, for better or worse. They might even be freed. On the other hand, during a battle every slave was chained to his bench. If the ship sank or caught fire, the men who had pulled the oars suffered the same fate as the planks of the hull. It was what everyone dreaded most, that helpless plunge into the sea, shackled to the timbers. Down and down, struggling for air, into ever-darker water . . . Ben-Hur shivered and tried to redirect his thoughts. Had he not told Arrius that he longed for death? Then why did he flinch from its potential approach?

  Soon a sailor brought lanterns into the cabin and hung them on the stanchions supporting the deck. The marines trotted down the stairs silently and began assembling the battle machines, light catapults, and a boarding bridge. Spears and javelins as well as sheaves of arrows were handed out, breastplates and helmets secured. Finally great jars of oil were carried up from the hold along with baskets of cotton wads that would be soaked in it, set alight, and hurled at the enemy.