Hermes smiled with superior knowledge. "You saw that big ear-bangle he was wearing?"
"I saw it."
"He wears it to cover a split earlobe. In Cappadocia, a slave who runs has a notch cut out of his left earlobe." There is a whole world of slave lore most of us never learn.
Chapter V
"It sounds like nonsense to me," Julia said. We stood on the steps of the Soma, the tomb of Alexander the Great. She was beautifully dressed as a Roman lady, but she had already started to use Egyptian cosmetics. It was a bad sign.
"Of course it's nonsense," I said. "When everybody is lying, as they usually do when you're investigating a crime, the art is to sort through the nonsense, and especially the things they don't say, to find the truth."
"And why are you so sure Ataxas is lying? Just because he was once a slave? Many freedmen have done well after earning their freedom, and they usually don't brag about their former status."
"Oh, it's not that. But he said that they were carrying on a dispute of long standing. But I saw them together and it was the only time that evening that Iphicrates kept his voice down. During a dispute! You heard him. He bellowed at the top of his lungs anytime anyone questioned him in the slightest fashion." And that reminded me of something else: another man I would have to question.
"I admit it seems unlikely," she said. "Now what's this I hear about you assaulting the Commander of the Macedonian Barracks? Someone was complaining to the king about it. Are you incapable of staying out of trouble, even in Egypt?"
"The man was insolent, and he tried to draw his sword on me. You can't let foreigners get away with that sort of behavior."
"It isn't a good idea to make enemies, either, especially in a land where you have no stake in the status quo and where the local politics are unfathomable."
"Cautious good sense sounds strange coming from the niece of Julius Caesar."
"When Roman men are so reckless, sanity becomes the province of women. Let's go inside."
The Soma, as with so many of the marvels of Alexandria, was not a single building but rather a whole complex of temples and tombs. All of the Ptolemies were buried there, along with a number of other distinguished persons. At least, they were famous in their lifetimes. I had never heard of most of them. The Soma proper was the central structure, a magnificent house in the form of an Ionic temple that stood atop a lofty marble platform populated with an army of sculptured gods, goddesses, Macedonian royalty, soldiers and enemies. The kings Alexander had conquered were depicted on their knees in chains with collars around their necks. The roof was plated with gold, as were the capitals and bases of the columns. All was built of colorful marble drawn from all the lands Alexander had conquered.
At the entrance we found a small group of foreign visitors waiting to be shown the place. This tomb was sacred to the Ptolemies and you couldn't just go wandering through on your own. Before long a shaven-headed priest appeared. Instantly, he caught sight of Julia and me and he hurried over to us.
"Welcome, Senator, my lady. You are just in time for the next tour." I should hope so, I thought. You'd better not keep us waiting out here. The others showed him their appointments. We, of course, needed no such thing, It was a mixed group: a wealthy spice merchant from Antioch, a historian from Athens, an overpainted dowager from Arabia Felix, a priest or scholar of some sort from Ethiopia, nearly seven feet tall. This sort of gathering was not at all unusual in Alexandria. We passed through the massive, gold-covered doors into the interior.
The first thing to greet our eyes within was a huge statue of Alexander, seated on a throne and looking very lifelike but for the odd addition of a pair of ram's horns growing from his temples. In Egypt, Alexander was worshipped as the son of the god Ammon, whose tutelary animal was the ram. The boy-king was depicted as about eighteen years old, his long hair overlaid with gold. His eyes were extraordinarily blue, an effect I later learned the artist had achieved by inlaying the irises with layer on layer of granulated sapphire.
"Alexander of Macedon, surnamed the Great," the priest intoned, his voice echoing impressively, "died at Babylon in his thirty-third year, the 114th Olympiad, when Hegesias was Archon of Athens." I tried to remember who the Consuls of that year might have been, but I couldn't. "Before he went to join the immortal gods, he conquered more land than any other man in history, adding to the empire of his father the entirety of the Persian Empire and miscellaneous other lands. When he died his lands stretched from Macedonia to India to the Nile cataracts." Match that, Pompey, I thought.
"He died in mid-June," the priest went on, "and since the godlike Alexander had no adult heir, his body lay in state for a month, during which his generals settled the future of the Macedonian Empire. Then skilled Egyptians and Chaldeans were called in to embalm his mortal remains."
"They left him there for a month?" I said. " In June? In Babylonia?"
Julia dug an elbow into my ribs. "Shh!"
"Er, well, it may be that some thoughtful person drained the, ah, bodily fluids to aid the preservation and placed the king in some cool part of the palace. In any case, undoubtedly the body of Alexander was not as that of other men. He had joined the immortals, and it is likely that, as when the corpse of Hector was dragged behind the chariot of Achilles, his fellow gods preserved his body from deterioration."
"I would hope so," I said. "Must've made the whole palace uninhabitable, otherwise." Another jab from Julia.
"The body," the priest went on, "was swathed in Si-donian linen of the finest quality and then, as you shall soon see, was completely encased in plates of gold exquisitely wrought so as to preserve and display the exact contours of both frame and features. This was encased in a coffin, also of gold, with the spaces between filled with rare spices. The lid of the coffin, likewise of gold, was also wrought in the exact likeness of the late king.
"A funeral carriage was prepared, of a splendor never seen before or since. It was cunningly crafted to endure the shocks of travel through Asia. Its superstructure combined the elegance of Greece with the barbaric magnificence of Persia. On a throne base covered with a Tyrian carpet of fabulous weave lay the sarcophagus of Pantalic marble, carved by a master sculptor with episodes of the king's heroic life. The sarcophagus was protected by a cover of gold, over which was spread a purple robe, heavily embroidered with gold thread. Atop this were placed the arms of the king.
"Housing the sarcophagus was a mortuary chamber ten cubits by fifteen cubits in the shape of an Ionic temple, its proportions identical to the temple in which we now stand. Its columns and roof were of gold, embellished with precious gems. At each corner of the roof stood a statue of the winged victory wrought of gold. Instead of cella walls, the temple-chamber was surrounded with a golden net, so that the king's subjects could see his sarcophagus as the funerary procession passed by. The netting bore painted tablets, taking the place of an Ionic frieze. The tablet on the front portrayed Alexander in his state-chariot, with his Macedonian bodyguard on one side and his Persian bodyguard on the other. The tablet on one side displayed war-elephants following the king and his personal entourage. That on the other, cavalry in battle formation. The rear tablet showed ships of war ready for battle. Golden lions stood at the entrance of the mortuary chamber."
I was beginning to wonder whether there was any gold left in Alexander's empire. But there was more to come.
"Over the roof was a huge golden crown in the form of a conqueror's wreath. As the great vehicle moved, the rays of the sun were dashed from it like the lightning of Zeus. The car had two axles and four wheels. The Persian-style wheels were shod with iron, their spokes and naves overlaid with gold, the axles terminating in golden lions' heads, with golden arrows in their mouths." This, I was sure, had to be the end of it. But such was not to be.