“Can boats be moored by the palace?” Alexandros inquired.
Matthew paused to think. He had not seen a boat over in that direction, but there seemed to be no reason why not. He looked at Alexandros with some amazement.
“Why? Do you want to deliver something directly to the palace?” he asked with a grin.
Alexandros shook his head; he was just interested.
“No doubt Herod sited his palace,” chipped in Plotius, “in a place that he would be able to escape from by ship, if need be, so as to avoid a possible naval blockade of the harbor.”
Uri did not understand what had put such a sharp edge to the tone of Plotius’s voice. Matthew must also have sensed something of the kind because he abandoned his attempt to sketch the history of the town and stared fixedly at the shore.
Uri was glad they had arrived, but he was unable to say goodbye to the dog. He searched and called, but Remus was nowhere to be seen; maybe he had hidden away somewhere in grief. Uri was astonished that he should almost come to crying over a dopey dog.
When they stepped from the gangplank to the shore, Matthew knelt and kissed the ground, which at this point was composed of slabs of marble. Uri hesitated but on seeing that the others did the same, he kneeled down likewise, though he did not kiss the slab, jut touched it with the tip of his nose. Hilarus and Alexandros shed tears, and even Valerius was moved, wiping his nose on his shawl.
A toll of six sesterces per head had to be paid to the Greek exciseman. Matthew had forewarned them that these were not like the Greeks in Italia, with whom it was possible to joke along; these Greeks hated Jews. It mattered not that Jews were multiplying faster than the Greeks; the city was still not truly theirs.
It was typical that the largest house of prayer stood on a plot of land belonging to a Greek merchant, who would not sell the plot. There was no way of compelling him to do so. It had not raised any problems, but whenever he was approached with a new proposal to sell it, he threatened instantly to build on the neighboring plots, because those also belonged to him, and he could block access to the house of prayer. The concept of easement was familiar enough in Caesarea and Judaea, but it was not exactly clear how large it should be; it would not be helpful if the Greek landowner left only an alleyway for the Jewish faithful.
“It’s Alexandria writ small,” Alexandros declared derisively, perhaps hinting at the Greco-Jewish rivalry there, but perhaps also because it was conspicuous how bereft the oversize harbor was of ships.
Plotius remarked that less than half the inhabitants of Alexandria were Jewish, so the comparison did not quite stand, to which Alexandros rejoined that if there were more Jews in Caesarea, then it was high time they forced the Greeks out, but Matthew held that to be foolish because the Greeks would take their revenge on all the Jewish minorities living in Syrian towns. Hilarus tried to put a stop to the senseless squabbling by repeating again and again that they had arrived, they had arrived.
Uri lazily wondered, as they walked over from the mole to the promenade fringed with all the grand buildings, what he would need to do to prevail on his companions to make the return leg of the trip via Alexandria. Maybe the ship would cost more, but it was a shorter route, so part of the extra expense could be recovered.
Caesarea was packed with magnificent buildings, vast palaces and villas, constructed in the finest of Greek styles — a miniature Rome with parks, a theater, a stadium, baths. The town’s location was favorable, and over the city rose a mountainside dotted with attractive big buildings. The harbor surpassed that of Syracusa — smaller perhaps, but orderly and clean. Well-tended date palms and cypresses, planted and pruned to uniform shape, bordered the promenade, which also had a stretch on which lulav and etrog were being grown for Sukkot. Uri could scarcely believe his eyes; he peered, went closer, and stared until tears came. Up till then he had only seen a lulav, with its long, slender branches dense with small leaves, or etrog, with its fruits, in painted images or ritual carvings, placed next to a menorah or shofar. So these plants really did exist! On the fifth day after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on the fifteenth day of Tishri, comes the festival of thanksgiving, when the autumn harvest is celebrated in Palestine; then lulav branches and etrog lemons have to be taken into the Temple, traditionally, but not in the houses of prayer across the Diaspora, partly because they are not native elsewhere, but also because there is but one Temple, the one in Jerusalem. Word had it that only the Jews of Alexandria were unwilling to acknowledge this, and therefore they carried lulav branches and etrog lemons into their largest house of prayer, the Basilica.
They had to pass a huge temple. Mounted atop a tall stone pillar at the top of the steps in front of its Doric columns was a huge marble statue of a person who was identifiably the emperor Tiberius. The statue was at least as high as the one of Augustus in Rome.
“The Tiberium,” said Matthew. “It took five years to construct. Pilate started building it the moment he was appointed, bringing the plans with him from Rome. The site had been picked out in advance, and a lot of expensive villas had to be demolished to make way for it, and the owners were given a considerable amount in compensation, albeit none too readily, as the lawsuits dragged on for years. Inside the edifice there are statues of Julius Caesar and Augustus, as well as Jupiter, Venus, and Priapus. There was also one of Sejanus, but when he was disgraced Pilate had his head smashed.”
“The torso has been put in storage,” Plotius snickered. “Malicious tongues say it is waiting for the next emperor. It only needs a new head to be carved and joined on.”
Uri went closer to the temple while his companions stopped and watched impatiently. He walked up the steps and around the statue.
The colossus was at least sixty feet high. From below all he could see clearly was Tiberius’s jutting jaw, which blocked out his nose and other features. The sculptor, whoever it was, had fashioned an enormous, pugilistic chin for the figure. In Rome there were numerous busts of the ruling emperor, so Uri looked on him as almost a personal acquaintance; nevertheless there were not all that many depictions of him, as early in his reign he had forbidden statues of himself to be raised. Later he did give up on the ban, but sculptors worked slowly and had to fulfill commissions from cities all over Italia.
Uri searched for the edges of the marble blocks that had been fit together, but these had either been so well finished they were hidden, or else they were too high up for him to see clearly, so even from close up the statue seemed to him to have been carved from a single block. That could not possibly be the case, however. He wondered how much a statue of that size cost. The marble alone must have cost a great deal, to say nothing of the transport.
He stopped at the top of the steps and looked back toward the harbor.
Streets laid out in straight lines, carefully planned buildings, marble, gilded roofs, blinding white colonnades. He blinked hard and squinted through a crack in his fingers.
It was a cold, unfriendly town. No alleyways, or random narrowings and widenings. It was a planned city; it did not live.
“You’ll have time later to gape at everything,” Matthew called out angrily, when Uri got back to the group. “Let’s go! People are waiting for us.”