The Inquest (10 page)

Martius was thinking about the slave girl Miriam who was soon to become the questor’s property. In his estimation she truly was a head-turning beauty. Martius envied his superior; he would gladly have accepted a gift of one of the queen’s beauties.

Crispus lapsed into despondency on the brief journey. The queen had left the banquet before he could recite a single poem. What an opportunity lost! To have recited before the famous Queen Berenice. After she had left them, Crispus had suggested to Varro that he might voice some of his works anyway, for their entertainment, but Martius had quickly spoken against the idea, and Crispus’ verse had never reached his lips. Stomping into his tent on the return to camp, Crispus ordered his servants to stand in front of him. He then proceeded to recite all the poems with which he had intended to regale Queen Berenice that night. He concluded the eighth poem two hours later.

Varro returned to camp thinking neither of poetry nor of the bewitching beauty who had been gifted to him. His mind was troubled by his undertaking to the queen. It was dangerous to be a spy at the best of times, but to be a spy in matters of the heart, involving the emperor’s son and heir, this was doubly dangerous.

Northern Galilee, Tetrarchy of Tracnonitis.
April, A.D. 71

The rhythmic tramp of marching feet on the flagstones attracted giggling children to the roadside to watch the Roman column pass. The expedition was leaving Caesarea Philippi. No one at Agrippa’s capital had come forward in response to Varro’s request for information, and both Agrippa and Berenice had politely declined invitations to dine with the questor at his camp. After several fruitless days, Varro had decided to move on.

The party had been joined by Miriam, slave from the court of Queen Berenice. She had been delivered by Bostar the day following the dinner at Berenice s palace. The young woman wore a shrouding headscarf and veil, but all the same Varro found her presence unsettling, for himself and for his men. He had put Callidus in charge of her, and arranged a tent all her own. On the march, he decreed, she would ride a spare pack mule. Then on a Saturday, several days after Miriam arrived in camp, Callidus had come to say that she was refusing to leave her tent. It was the Sabbath, she said, the day of rest. Miriam was a Jew. In the light of this, Varro had decided to make Antiochus responsible for her; as a former Jew, he should know what customs she would need to observe.

Predictably, Antiochus had objected. More than merely protesting that he was no nursemaid, he had said that he had abolished the day of rest for all Jews in Antioch and saw no reason why this slave should be treated any differently. Varro thought otherwise. He knew that Titus had even permitted the Jewish residents of cities he was besieging in Galilee to observe the Sabbath, ceasing operations on Saturdays to accommodate them. It had not altered events; Titus had inevitably triumphed. Equally, Varro saw nothing threatening or offensive in piety, and told Antiochus that Miriam could honor her Sabbath day as she saw fit. Antiochus had wanted to argue, claiming the girl would require special lamps and food prepared in a certain way. But Varro waved away the objections and told Antiochus to do what he could to accommodate the girl, warning him that he would be held personally responsible for Miriam’s welfare.

Now, with the column well into its second hour on the road west and commencing to cross a bridge over the swift-flowing Jordan River, the girl was some distance behind the questor, covered from head to foot and riding at the rear of the freedmen on a mule led by a muleteer. From this point on, Varro vowed to himself, he would not think about Miriam until this mission was at an end. A sudden commotion behind Varro drew him from his thoughts and caused him to turn in the saddle, to see that Diocles the physician had tumbled from his horse. Suspicious of the cause, and preferring not to halt the column, Varro called to Martius. “Look to the physician, tribune,” and kept riding.

Martius turned back, and as Diocles’ five attendants came running from the rear the tribune dismounted and strode to the doctor, who lay on his face at the roadside near the river. Pushing back the slaves as they panted onto the scene, Martius knelt beside Diocles. “Drunk!” the tribune spat with disgust when he rolled the fat physician onto his back and found him mumbling incoherently, his breath reeking of wine.

Martius stood, looked at the river beside him, then called for Optio Silius and four men. As Silius and a quartet of legionaries came at the jog, men of the passing cavalcade looked down at the supine doctor with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and disgust.

“Into the river with him!” Martius ordered when the soldiers arrived, pointing to a pond-like eddy beside the bank formed around the bridge’s piles by silt carried down from Mount Hermon by the fast-moving waters.

The four legionaries lay aside their equipment, took an arm or a leg of the mumbling physician, and then threw Diocles into the Jordan River. He hit the water of the eddy horizontally, making a thunderous splash, then submerged. For a moment, it appeared that he would not resurface. Then his head appeared. Gasping for breath, floundering in panic, he spluttered frantically in Greek, “I drown! I drown!”

Martius motioned to the soldiers, who slipped down the bank and went in after the physician. The eddy waters where he was struggling turned out to be no more than knee deep. Dragged to the riverside, Diocles lay on dry ground like a beached whale. Shaking his head, Martius stood on the bank glaring down at the sodden doctor. “You will not drink on this expedition, physician!” he called with tempered fury. “That was the questor’s directive, Diocles, and you will obey it. If I again find that you have flouted that order, I shall personally tie a thong around your penis and pull it tight. That will stop you drinking; you will never pass water again!”

Laughter erupted from the soldiers standing around Diocles. As for the doctor himself, his dunking had sobered him somewhat, and his eyes now widened in terror at the tribune’s threat. Diocles groaned, knowing that Marcus Martius was not one to make idle threats; the doctor had seen the body of Fulvus the Vettonian cavalryman.

Martius had not finished. He glared at the physician’s anxious servants. “As for you useless nitwits, I should be drowning the lot of you. Be aware; if I find that your master has touched another drop of wine, you fellows will have to become accustomed to passing water
without
a penis.” To emphasize his point, he patted his sheathed sword.

The servants shrunk back from him with horror-stuck looks on their faces.

“You have been warned!” Martius added, before swinging on his heel and striding back to his horse. As Martius was gathering the reins of his mount, Prefect Crispus came riding back to check on the doctor’s condition.

“What is Diocles’ condition, tribune?” Crispus inquired with concern.

“Wet,” Martius returned, motioning for one of the nearby soldiers to give him a boost up into his saddle. “Perhaps the Jordan will wash away his bad habits,” he said with a scowl in Crispus’ direction once he was up. Looking down at Diocles, now being helped up the bank, he called, “Optio, put the physician back in his saddle. We have dallied long enough.”

“If he cannot stay on his horse, tribune?” Optio Silius asked. “What then?”

“Tie him to the saddle if you must!”

Eight miles due west along the Tyre road from Caesarea Philippi the column came to an intersection with the main north-south highway. North, the road led to Sidon and the coast. To the south lay Galilee. The column turned south. Ten miles on, the expedition camped beside the road for the night.

Next day, the expedition passed along the lush upper Jordan River valley and entered northern Galilee, part of Agrippa’s realm. The countryside here was among the most fertile that Varro had ever come across. Stretching away either side of the river were trees of a variety the likes of which he had never before seen in the one place. Date palm plantations competed for space with walnut groves, while fig tree orchards stretched to the slopes of the Galilean Hills
where olive trees and grape vines flourished.

Like most members of Roman nobility, Varro had received a solid education in agricultural matters. He was expected to oversee the family’s estates, one at Capua in Campania, south of Rome, where he had been born, and several others near Forum Julii in southeastern Gaul. Part of his correspondence while stationed in Syria had been with his distant estate managers, covering everything from plantings and harvests to farm buildings and runaway slaves. How he wished he had an estate here in the Jordan basin. Varro turned to Pythagoras and Artimedes, who were riding not far behind him. “I would not have thought that palms and walnuts could grow in the same place,” he remarked. “Surely, one requires hot air, the other cold?”

“The goddess Ceres has blessed this land,” Pythagoras commented sagely.

“A farmer I met in Caesarea Philippi, my lord,” Artimedes remarked, “told me that the fig trees and vines of this area produce fruit for fully ten months of the year. The Hebrew people certainly chose a bountiful place for themselves.”

The column reached the town of Capernaum, on the northern shore of a body of fresh water in the shape of an inverted pear called Lake Tiberias by Romans and known as the Lake of Gennesaret to the Jewish people who had inhabited the region for centuries. More generally it was called the Sea of Galilee. Capernaum had been a major regional center when Herod Antipas was Tetrarch of Galilee, the base of a fishing fleet and a port for trading craft which plied between the towns fringing the lake, and the site of a customs station. It had also been the home of a squadron of light, fast warships, vessels with a single bank of oars and the task of combating lake pirates. Wherever there is commerce there are thieves, and just as the roads of Galilee had frequently been ravaged by bandits its lakes had attracted brigands in small boats who had plagued trading vessels. In earlier times too, Capernaum had been home to a force from King Agrippa’s army and to small detachments of Roman troops, mostly cavalry, under a centurion who had charge of the entire district.

The Revolt had changed Capernaum. Because it had remained loyal to Agrippa and to Rome it had not suffered material damage in the fighting, unlike some towns and cities of the region which had gone over to the rebels and subsequently been besieged, overrun, looted and sometimes burned. Still, many of the Jews of the town had fled to the partisans or away from the Romans during the first year of the Revolt, and few had survived to return. Now, Capernaum was occupied by a mixture of Jew and non-Jew, some, refugees from the carnage in other places, others, opportunists who had come in search of a better living. There was a stone fortress in the town which Varro found occupied by a detachment of auxiliary cavalry of the Nervian Horse from Belgian Gaul and a cohort of Agrippa’s archers. The Nervian unit’s prefect was away at Caesarea.

The questor gave instructions for his column to pitch a camp outside the town, and once quarters had been prepared Varro called his chief subordinates together and reviewed their one precious piece of written evidence, the Lucius Letter. The document mentioned Capernaum several times, telling how the Nazarene had used it as a base of operations over several years and had recruited a number of his followers here, among them his deputy, Simon Petra. The obvious first task, said Varro, was to locate sites which could be connected with the Nazarene.

That task was made easier when, next day, the commander of the archer cohort stationed here told Varro that the town records had survived the Revolt, hidden in a vault by one of Agrippa’s officers. The records were located, and Pythagoras and Artimedes set to work studying them. Within hours the documents yielded results. From poll tax records it was possible to identify a large house near the lakefront which had been the home of a Simon bar Jonas, who, during the
reign of Tiberius Caesar, had lived here with his brother Andreius, their mother, Simon’s wife and children, and Simons mother-in-law. Matched with the Lucius Letter, this information pointed to Simon Petra. The letter indicated that Jesus had stayed at this house whenever he was in Capernaum, so, on Varro’s orders Centurion Gallo and several squads of his men temporarily ejected the current occupants, who were unrelated to the Bar Jonas family, and then searched the house, looking for anything which might prove useful. Nothing of interest was turned up.

On the second morning in Capernaum, Varro went walking in the town’s streets, accompanied by just Callidus and the lictor Pedius, to post notices seeking information and to obtain a feel for the place. Apart from Pedius’ wooden staff, they went unarmed. To begin with, Varro deliberately sought out the town’s Jewish synagogue, where, said the Lucius Letter, Jesus had taught his doctrine.

Here, in the silent, empty, colonnaded building, Varro lingered. For the first time, now that he was treading the same stones that the Nazarene had trod, he tried to imagine the man who was at the center of his quest. A man of a similar age to Varro himself. Pythagoras had assured the questor with authority that this man would have assumed the appearance of a Greek philosopher, allowing his beard to grow long, going barefoot, and wearing a coarse cloak of goatskin or the like. From the pages of the Lucius Letter a picture emerged of a seemingly gentle man, a man without malice, yet this was at odds with the fact that the Nazarene had been executed for sedition, for bearing arms against Rome. Was the Lucius Letter a fabrication, Varro wondered? Just how reliable was the letter’s information, which Varro was using as the basis of his inquiry? Time would tell.

As the questor and his companions moved on, they came to a tavern plying its trade. It was a typical pavement wine shop, open to the street with shutters thrown open. A stone bench separated customer from server. Stools of stone lined the pavement. A side door led to back rooms where more private pursuits could be followed. There were pots for hot food set into the bench top, with round wooden lids. At the back of the room there was a line of long, narrow wine amphorae in cradles, which could be tilted for pouring. Several listless slaves waited to fill drinker’s cups. There was not a customer in sight, and two sprightly old men with white hair behind the counter, apparently the tavern’s owners, beckoned the trio of passers-by.

“Come, gentle lords, and try our best wine,” said one.

“A special price for distinguished visitors,” said the other, having noted Pedius’ staff of office and an Equestrian’s gold ring on Varro’s left hand.

Varro led Pedius and Callidus to the counter. Declining wine, he had Callidus give the tavern keepers a coin and asked for walnuts and figs. They soon had a bowl of freshly cracked nuts and another of figs in front of him.

“Your accents are not local,” said Varro as he motioned to his colleagues to sample the nuts and figs. “From where do you hail?”

“We are Roman veterans, Your Lordship,” said one of the pair proudly. “We are both retired centurions of the 3rd Gallica.”

“The 3rd Gallica?” said Pedius, impressed, crunching a hut. “A renowned legion.

“None moreso,” said one of the tavern keepers proudly.

“You are a living testament to the legion life,” Varro said. “You both look exceedingly healthy.”

“How old would Your Lordship say we were?” said one with a wink to the other.