Revelation

By Norman H. Maclean

About the Book
The Number of the Beast? The End of Days? Everyone knows about them, but few understand them in their historical context.
Set in the ancient Mediterranean, REVELATION takes as its theme the contents of the world’s most famous letter, a lengthy document sent from the Greek island of Patmos by a notorious exile, John the Elder, a Presbyter from Ephesus.
Universally believed to be a prophetic insight to our time, Revelation, the final book of the Bible, is historically and more accurately regarded as allegory, reflecting on the political and religious upheavals of the first century CE.
Despite hundreds of published theories about the supposed prophecies, no novel has dealt with this subject in the context of the age in which the letter was written. Unique in this aspect, REVELATION examines not only Christian origins but the metaphorical flux and flow of apocalyptic thought throughout the era in which that mystically symbolic work was written.
From Jerusalem to Rome and on Patmos, the early Christian world is revealed.
About the Author
Widely travelled in the near East and the Mediterranean, Norman H. Maclean, a teacher of art and classical studies, is a New Zealander. He holds a lifelong fascination with both Jewish history and the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. He is involved in the artistic life in his hometown, including painting, print-making, and directing theatrical productions. Maclean adheres strongly to a view insisted upon by the ancient Roman statesman Cicero: If a man has a garden and a library, he has all that he needs. (A studio in which to paint is also added to this ideal lifestyle.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781649138736

Book preview

The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Norman H. Maclean

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Acknowledgements

The writer wishes to acknowledge the many historians and liberal Biblical scholars who have long realised that the Biblical book of REVELATION is not prophetic in the widely accepted sense, but a coded statement reflecting the emergence of Christianity at a crucial point towards the end of the 1st century C.E.

Tribute should also be paid to those early Christian Fathers who deliberated over whether or not this document should be included in the canon of approved books that constitute the New Testament. Their concern is understandable since the writer not only swung far away from any concept of divine love as expressed in the beliefs of ordinary converts but relished the punishment of those he deemed to be the enemies of truth. He furthermore made use of esoteric and often terrifying imagery, much of it appropriated from earlier apocalyptic sources, which he seemed to be offering his readers as an almost unbearable prospect of suffering and misery. The consequences of this are unfortunately to be clearly discerned in numerous manifestations of public hysteria triggered by misinterpretation of REVELATION that have blighted the history of the world over the last nineteen centuries. Many millions still thrive on these eschatological expectations. The ultra-conservative Christian movements of our own time have much in common with the mindset of the man who wrote this last book of the Bible. REVELATION—the novel—addresses this conundrum and acknowledges the growing understanding of primitive Christianity which has emerged through critical scholarship.

To Forbes Robinson, educator and thinker, who first introduced me to a critical understanding of religion and its emergence from mystical expectations. Also to Robert Grono, classicist and teacher who profoundly influenced a devoted senior secondary school student: the Grono mantle has fallen onto his shoulders.

Prologue

If you told me that last night the heavens split open and a man clothed in the sun looked out upon the earth, I would tell you that the heat of Patmos had addled your brain. Then again, visions are personal things, and there are men—and women too—who speak such foolishness with complete conviction.

I should know—I’m one of them. Oh, not a gibbering imbecile like that poor, deluded visionary from Ephesus who claimed he saw the sky roll back like a scroll. I saw things that weren’t there, but I was raised with reason. My mystical insights were mere glimpses of what may come.

But cloud-enthroned giants in glowing garments—no, they’ve never been within my range. I see images in spilt wine, the flight pattern of herons against the fresco of rose-stained sky meeting the quiet sea before dawn. In this respect, I suppose I am no different from your every-day village augur or an official haruspex of Rome’s Capitoline for that matter, except that I charge nothing and mostly hold my tongue about the intuitions such fore-shadowing may stir.

The Ephesian was a sign himself, but it took me a long time to realise it. He was a walking embodiment of the worst that the eastern empire can produce in doctrines for the simple, the faint at heart. Pray that rank superstition masquerading as religion never becomes so widespread that the old gods falter.

He prayed constantly. When I was first summoned to his bedside, he lay with beard jutting towards the rafters, quivering and twitching as he spilled words to the unseen.

Bedside is an overstatement, of course: a straw pallet, thick with fleas despite my best efforts at hygiene, and the fabric he lay on, stiff with dried sweat. I crouched to sponge him, muttering at having been jerked out of sleep at the word of the commander’s boy-servant.

The Ephesian’s back was a lattice of scars and matted with pus. When he was clean, I tipped a tonic of wine mixed with crushed poppy seeds down the poor wretch’s throat. After a time, he stopped his whispered praying. His eyes half opened, and he rattled out the details of his vision—the sun-clad man, the heavens splitting like a ripe pomegranate. After a time, he stopped ranting and fell into a heavy sleep.

About my own age he was but so gaunt—so parched by the sun and his hair white with quarry dust—he might have been my own father, fallen on the hardest of times. I watched his ribcage rise and fall like the hulk of a fishing boat with timbers rotted away, bobbing on some dark sea. Then I went outside.

The sky was resolutely clear and dusted with stars. Not a rent in the celestial fabric—no sign of a colossus hovering over the sea with a golden girdle and a voice like thunder, the way my emaciated patient had pictured him.

It was mildly disappointing.

‘The thing I can’t understand,’ I said to the garrison commander when he called me in to give my report, ‘is why this one poor beggar should be given such care and attention. He’s just a stonecutter like all the rest, isn’t he?’

Drusus Latinus bit into a fig, chewed a moment.

‘Not quite the same,’ he said. ‘I’ve had orders to ensure that our deranged stonecutter actually lives. Seems the Emperor doesn’t want him to become a martyr and have his bones being taken back to Rome for snivelling over at some queer ritual. That sort of thing breeds sedition, he says. He might be right—they’re a funny lot, those Chrestianoi.’

There I had to agree with him. I should know—I’ve seen it all. But unlike the vast majority who merely believe what they’re told in matters of religion, I actually know what happened in the days when their Chrestus walked in Judaea. And I have suffered for it, one way or the other, ever since.

‘How can you guarantee this one slave will live?’ I asked.

"Have him watched the whole time. Spare him the lash and see he gets to the trough before the rest of them.’ Latinus slurped wine from a cheap cup. ‘When the Emperor decides this one criminal has been sufficiently punished, he’ll have the old bastard sent back in the hold of a cargo ship, give him a good talking to, and see if he’ll then agree to keep his subversive mouth shut in his retirement.’

‘Subversive?’ I was intrigued. ‘He’s a rebel?’

‘Jewish Messianist, a Nazorean.’ Latinus seemed to bite on grit.‘It’s all doom and death and destruction of the wicked with that lot, I hear. Guess who’s the wickedest? Our beloved Caesar Domitian! Well, can’t have that, can we? Even as far off as Ephesus, a man can make trouble for the ruler of the world.’

I was not pleased to hear this.

‘And if my treatment of him is faulty—if he dies in my care—what becomes of me?’

‘You get your throat cut, I’d say.’ Latinus gave a coughing kind of laugh that blew damp fragments of fig onto the floor. ‘Tend him well, Kleitos, and you might live too.’

I protested, as I’d done many times before, that I was not a qualified physician—that some city doctor should be summoned—but he pointed out that there was hardly any such thing as a real doctor any more unless you were talking about an expensive Greek. The rest deal as much in magic as in anatomy.

Astute for a garrison commander. I tried again. I argued that I knew only the rudiments: a smattering of basic herbalism, bone-setting, bleeding, little more. He urged me to take extra care in that case. An excessively heavy sleeping draught could push the old fellow into Hades’ realm so easily, couldn’t it?

I went back to the Ephesian’s mat. He lay on his back, the way I’d left him, his mouth half open and his eyes so sunk into his leathery mask, the hollows were smudges of lamp-black. I turned him on his side to guard against the possibility of his choking. The breath that came from him was like a dog’s, and he was feverish.

So I tried prayer myself then. Well, no harm could come from it, I reasoned, and for all I knew, it might do him some good. After a time, he closed his mouth and made tasting sounds, then slept calmly.

Ah, you say—the power of prayer, you see. The faith of the believer is always rewarded.

Suck upon your thumb, infant. Whoever found that a muttered formula will catch the ear of the unseen, will soften some divine heart and bring blessings? Even your Chrestus rejected such a notion which is why they now ascribe to him those hallowed words, ‘Not my will but Yours be done.’ His God was no benevolent grandfatherly archon behind the clouds, doling out honeyed almond favours to those of his adoring little ones who remembered their manners, waited their turn, then addressed him with the reverence his white hair and high rank entitled him to.

But then, your Chrestus was no Christian either.

I went to my own bed. Child-like, I prayed that the old man wouldn’t die and that I might sail up the Tiber once more, go back to a few rooms on the Aventine perhaps, and live a quiet life, in seclusion.

Not my will but Yours be done. There’s submission for you. There’s a statement of faith if ever I heard one.

I wakened to the sound of heavy breathing under my window. Half dreaming, I convinced myself that the Ephesian had died and that some guard had been despatched to slit me open, ear to ear, as I slept, wipe his blade on my blanket, and report back for his extra ration of sour wine.

When I pushed up the shutter, I realised I wasn’t yet that important. It was only Giton, grinning like a puppy at bringing me a bag of scraps, filched from his master’s table.

I blessed him for it, as always. He was happy at that, clambering in over the rough sill and calling me Father as he insisted it was a pleasure to help a holy man. I pointed out that stealing isn’t actually endorsed by Paulus or Petrus or by Chrestus himself for that matter, but he replied that since the shards of pork fat, the sauce-sodden crusts of fine bread, would only be doled out to the slaves in the morning, I may as well be classed as one of them and be indulged before the others.

I decided I would baptise Giton very soon. He was longing for it and had convinced himself that I was the best possible man to perform the rite since I had known…

I move too fast. There are things that must wait.

When Giton had gone, I stuffed myself with scrapings from that triclinium I had so often visualised. I fancied I could detect the scent of perfumed oil on the bread where plump fingers had grasped it. There were raisins and a slab of fish, not pickled but freshly cooked in oil with no trace of rot in its moist flesh. I guzzled, then gave thanks and slept at last.

There were nine men in my care, counting the Ephesian. Most were guards who had the flux and groaned when they crouched to squirt their filth into their pottery pans, but there were three slaves also, considered too valuable to crack over the head, simply because they had broken their ankles or were studded with suppurating boils.

With my limited supply of tonics and only local herbs to stew in honey by way of healing syrups, I tended the men put in my care, as best I could. I kept the sick fairly clean since hygiene in itself is a great healer, and mercifully, the cisterns did not run dry, even in the worst extremes of summer heat. I assisted those who could stagger to the latrine. I sponged them and made them drink boiled water as I was convinced that Anaximandros was correct in asserting that creatures too small to see with the eye, live in all water, causing the bowels to run, the gut to heave its contents and fever to grip with rash and sweating and delirium.

The Ephesian’s eyes were open that morning. I hovered over him with a cup. He parted his cracked lips, drank a little, attempted to smile up at me like a rather ridiculous and raddled child.

‘A friend of the Emperor, I hear—is that right?’ I asked.

He gritted his teeth and made a sound like a dog worrying a stick. I pacified him and explained it was a little joke.

He sighed deeply. ‘Beast without a heart. The Son of Man shall strike down the Beast.’ His voice was hoarse, grating. ‘Alpha and Omega... I am Alpha and Omega. The Son of Man cried out, ‘Write! Write for me.’ I wait your coming, Lord...’

‘You won’t be doing any writing,’ I said. ‘Slaves cut stone on Patmos—they don’t pen letters to their families.’ I settled him back on his thin pillow. ‘Sun-stroke—that’s what you’re suffering from—heat exhaustion. A couple of days’ rest and you’ll be back at the cliff face, courtesy of our beloved Emperor.’

The old fellow screwed his eyes shut. A trickle of moisture oozed from under one lid, found the gully of his cheek.

‘Alpha and Omega,’ he breathed.

I left him to his sleep though the flies were already congregating and the man on the next mat had begun to cough blood.

Alpha and Omega. A beginning and an end are essential to any story. In the telling of it, that end is only certain if the tale is well-worn or the great bulk of it, between those two extremes, is so short and simple, there is an inevitable conclusion like those found in the facile yarns full of Greek aphorisms and coarse puns that the off-duty guards spin out over their mugs of wine.

I have a story with no end. Every day, it runs through my head, seeping to the surface like a spring appearing at the foot of a mountain.

It is there when I perform the brief morning ritual at the little shrine of Aesclepius in the courtyard I face the ornamental snake of healing and find my mouth shaping the reverent words of the litany, but it is a mere formula while my mind is racing off, down through the decades to my infancy.

It is there when I lie down at night and the smell of dirty flesh, soiled fabric, is swamped in that rush of memories that always begin with the warm sweetness of blankets scented in sandalwood.

In the darkness, the lamp of recollection burns bright. It is my mother’s evening lamp, suspended by three chains with a tongue of yellow fire issuing from the bill of a fat, terra-cotta duck that always kept its sightless eye swivelled towards the mattress where I had been laid to sleep.

I am a small child again, curled in comfort, watching to see if the burning beak of clay will open, will speak to me. My sweetly scented cover is loose over me. The hovering bird is benign, vigilant.

The soft and distant boom of the waves is no longer that sea that laps Patmos’ shores but the night-long murmur of water against Caearea’s curving jetties of clean, pale stone.

Alpha and Omega. I am in a race that started far back along the runners’ course, but the finishing line is nowhere in sight. The stands are filled with jeering, it seems: there is no victor’s fillet, no palm to lift in triumph. There are scabbed knees where I have fallen in the dust of the track. I have become a lurching beast on four thin legs, no athlete.

I go back to the starters’ line where once I crouched, full of hope, my youthful eyes on the champion’s laurels. I am poised again, trained, my body flexed. The sun is warm on my skin, well slicked with oil, shining. A hush descends on the stadium.

My toes are hooked for the spring.

Alpha

They told me when I was very young that I had been blessed with the gift of prophecy. A precocious brat, I took to looking solemn and made the effort to recall every dream for precognitive signs. There was in me a natural affinity with the symbolic: I descried images of significance in the most mundane of things. Once, standing guiltily from a small patch of dampness I had caused to appear on the door-step, I wailed loudly—so my mother later told me—as I watched it shrinking in the heat of noon and pointed out the dark image which she failed to detect. To my eyes, it was a runaway horse. The evaporating pattern prompted an inexplicable rush of tears for my father. All afternoon I whimpered for him and would not be consoled.

At sunset, they carried him home on a stretcher. Flung from his mare on the city’s outskirts, he broke his leg, and the normally placid animal trampled him in her sudden flight.

He never walked without a limp after that day but often spoke to me with a curious deference as if he were the child.

No other sons, or daughters for that matter, were rocked under our roof. Though his injuries did not affect my father’s drive to fill the small courtyard with brothers and sisters for his first-born, my mother remained barren after my birth and lavished upon me the affection she should have been able to dispense to several.

‘Look into the fire of the menorah,’ she would whisper when the Sabbath lamps had been kindled. ‘If it has pleased the Most High to make you a seer like the great ones of old, you must develop the gift, Kleitos. What do you see?’

I saw yellow flames, spluttering over the curled wicks of seven bowls. I smelt the slightly rank smoke that always marked the Sabbath burning. But I could not compel visions. Those came upon me, unbidden, in dreaming or in gazing out over the bright water of the harbour where rocking cargo ships and sleek galleys sliding to their moorings were like birds against the blue, their wings spread in the divinatory passage.

Yet no amount of mystical experience helped me understand who I truly was. My mother was a Jew of liberal views; my father, pure Greek, descended from one of the oldest families of Pella in the Decapolis. He had been lured to Judaea’s new maritime city of Caesarea, shortly after the death of its founder, old Herod, the Idumaean. My father was a scholar, trained at the Epicurean university of Gadara. He was regarded as an excellent teacher. When offered a post as tutor of rhetoric to the sons of Coponius—Judaea’s first Praefectus—he did not hesitate.

It was employment of high status in surroundings of astonishing luxury. Both Herod’s sea-side villa and his city palace—the official residence which had become Coponius’s praetorium—were fantasies of frescoed apartments, pillared walks, and sunken gardens where salt breezes blew and fountains jetted from the pursed lips of nereids, smiling dolphins, god-like athletes, green under their own perpetual spouting.

Coponius, the praefectus, consented to my father teaching the house servants to read and write—governors could be civilised men in those days—and my father gladly took on this extra duty he had requested since he believed that education was the key to a better society and that even slaves might improve their lot by this advantage.

Among his students was a thin and pretty lady’s maid with an unusually inquiring mind for a girl. Her appeal was considerable. When she turned fifteen, my father married her.

Coponius was recalled to Rome that spring and the new governor, Ambibulus, showed a similar leniency. Life at the praetorium where they were lodged was sweet, it seems. My mother bore me on a night when the sea was so uncommonly still—it was said in years to come—anyone could hear the crackling of the fire in the high lantern of the lighthouse, our miniature Pharos, that lit the entrance to the harbour.

My father named me Kleitos after his beloved uncle and put an amulet of blue-glazed bronze in the shape of Tyche’s cornucopia round my infant neck. My mother naturally insisted that I should be circumcised. My father, I am told, muttered darkly about barbarian superstitions, ignored her tears, and flatly refused. Normally he felt inclined to oblige her in her ancestral traditions and would even privately admit a strong admiration for the ethical basis of Judaism. But not in this matter of my being cut.

Appropriately clipped, other Hellenised Jews were figures of fun at the baths and the gymnasium. When I grew old enough to accompany my father, I strutted as proudly as any Greek, though forbidden to respond when the Jewish boys thumbed their noses at us, the boys who lived beyond the Law. There was a red-tiled pool where I splashed in the heat; there were shrieking birds and pale monkeys in the zoological courtyard. The black man from Libya who tended the doves could waggle his huge ears to make the cheap rings he wore flash against the column of his neck, and there was the nymphaeum with clear water gushing from a bronze lion’s gaping maw. Caesarea delighted me.

My mother failed to hold another child, miscarrying four times in as many years. Against his better judgement, my father sacrificed to both Demeter and Hera without result. My mother sent her savings to the temple at Jerusalem and consulted both wise-women and synagogue Elders.

I grew up with the sons of servants for playmates, but when Ambibulus was replaced by the surly Rufus, the praetorium gates closed behind us. The new praefectus brought his own extensive retinue of scholars and attendants from Rome. My father was dismissed. My mother wailed of divine displeasure, of curses. He rejected such nonsense, contemplated returning to Pella, then resolved to rent a small apartment near the waterfront where he set himself up as a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy.

He prospered, won renown. He was invited to appear in the theatres of Ashkelon and Ptolemais where he delivered the epics of the ancient poets with the same fire that had brought him prolonged applause in the theatre at Caesarea on those occasions when it became an odeon, offering diversions more refined than those which normally filled its benches.

Fortuna rested upon him. A legacy from his childless uncle in Pella made him moderately well off. He bought a small house with a peristyle garden and three servants to run it. I slept in a room of my own with a shuttered window overlooking the harbour and an oak coffer to hold my clothes.

With Zeus on my right side, Yahweh on my left, I grew up. When it suited me, I was a Jew, happily participating in the rituals and the festivals that my mother faithfully observed while my father grinned indulgently and even agreed to take us up to Jerusalem for Passover when I was old enough as a bar mitzvah boy, to appreciate what he regarded as the splendours and horrors of temple sacrifices, made endurable by the astounding beauty of the temple precincts.

In the world of Caesarea’s docks and quays, I was Greek, learning to swear with the other boys—by the tits of Aphrodite, the bollocks of Jove. I pelted sacrificial bulls with little pellets of baked clay, embossed for luck with the emblems of phallus or the all-seeing eye of Horus—he who blesses herds beside the distant Nile where the simple still pray, I am informed, to a cow-headed goddess. Imagine it!

My father spoke of Deucalion who survived the Great Flood and argued that the Jewish tale of Noah was plagiarized from the Greeks. A new race of men, he said, descended from that diluvium boatman, sounds unlike the murderous and corrupt rulers of ancient Judah and Israel. Better, he said, to learn the lofty words of Homer and Euripides and be able to declaim those phrases of inspiration that urge men to improve themselves without the constant threat of punishment from on high.

If I scarcely understood who I was, I did not mind. Not then.

Attending the synagogue, I wore my tallith and ignored the disapproving stare of the strict and pious among our congregation, few enough since our synagogue was as liberal as any in Caesarea. Most of Judaea’s orthodox—very much a minority, I assure you—had retreated to Jerusalem, that last bastion of conservative Judaism yet so permeated with Hellenic culture that even the Sadducees who controlled the temple priesthood wore short tunicae at home and cropped their hair and permitted their wives to shave their armpits and their shins.

My secular education was from my father himself who had established a small and select school in his couple of rented rooms off the Emporium, facing the sea. As both litterator and grammaticus, he schooled more by persuasion and good humour than by the application of an ox-hide lash to the bared nates. Small boys like me shared benches with bigger fellows—the sons of prosperous merchants and businessmen.

I could read and write fluently in both Greek and Latin by the time I celebrated my bar mitzvah, and such literacy was entirely fitting for a city boy. Aramaic—the guttural tongue of the back streets or of my mother at night, crouched to lull me to sleep with her tales of long ago—that was not for the educated.

It was in my mother’s Aramaic that a world of heroes and warrior kings took shape. And in that long-vanished golden age, the image of the Jewish god lurked, huge, mysterious, nameless.

‘Who then is God?’ I demanded of my father one night. ‘There must be one, true God. Is it Zeus whom we call Jupiter-Jove, or is it the Most High of Israel whose name is too holy to be uttered and must be referred to by seventy-two different titles?’

‘Probably neither,’ my father said.

‘The Most High,’ my mother said firmly, snapping a loose thread with her teeth. ‘He of the Ineffable Name.’

‘Don’t confuse the boy!’ my father said sharply. He put on his reasonable face as when he lectured on the doctrines of Epicurus. ‘The highest good is happiness, as you know. What is its source?’

‘The cultivation of virtue,’ I replied automatically. ‘The tranquillity of mind which this brings.’

‘Exactly! Nothing matters beyond these things,’ he said.

‘No, indeed,’ my mother interjected. ‘God is good. That is central to our Law. We at least agree that goodness should be sought in all things.’

She was trying not to smile at the way my father rolled his eyes, rocked slightly with upraised hands, parodying a synagogue Elder. ‘Only we can be right!’ he intoned. ‘Only we can truly interpret the Law of Moses and explain the nature of the Creator.’ My mother threw a ball of wool at his head but was squealing with laughter—she enjoyed mocking the piety of the village Pharisees as much as we did. My father caught the soft missile, examined it like a beggar given a ripe apple.

‘Out of the boundless comes forth the entire kosmos,’ he said. ‘And if I were to unravel this divine handiwork and drape the whole room with a single, winding strand so that you could see it all at a glance—no part of it hidden—would you understand it any better?’

I shook my head. I was never certain when his joking had stopped and his reasoning had begun. My father squeezed the ball of dyed yarn, flipped it back to its smiling owner.

‘Who knows? Perhaps the Master of All is a woman,’ he said.

I was mildly shocked by this—the thought had never occurred to me.

‘Sky mother!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why not?’

‘A woman clothed in a fabric of light, for argument’s sake,’ my father said liltingly. ‘Out of her celestial womb issues the whole world, a truly divine manifestation.’

‘Now you go too far,’ my mother said, gathering up her spindle and workbasket. ‘He needs no encouragement in blasphemy, that one.’

Neither I did. My companions were either those Hellenised Jews whose adherence to the Law was minimal or boys of mixed race—Syrian, Greek, Latin, Jew—whose common culture was the Graeco-Roman and whose respect for the ancient religion of the land in which we lived was equally insignificant.

Caesarea’s huge harbour swarmed with seafarers of every nationality, every creed. Among jostling crowds of mariners and soldiers and whores and pedlars and slaves, we whiled away our leisure hours, accustomed to myriad styles of dress—or lack of it—to oaths and outlandish rituals and profane habits.

If my lack of religious certainties was a problem, my failure to understand who I was ultimately proved a blessing, as I think you may agree when I have said all that I must.

Personal identity is more a matter of the way in which one is reared than of how one prays or to whom the incense is burned. Nurtured and loved and educated, I grew up secure, happy. And my companions—sons of Israel or Gentiles of assorted shades and cultures—provided a supplementary security. I wanted for nothing.

Forget your notions of Jews as satirised in those Roman pantomimes - psalm-mumbling, dour, dogmatic, joyless. I was typical of the new breed who from the time of Herod Magnus had gradually allowed the mantle of Hellenism to slip over their shoulders. Only the orthodox, especially in the country villages, retained the ways of our ancestors, and even those solemn venerables had reluctantly succumbed to the ways of the West, since the days when Alexander of Macedon brought his armies through this region, more than three hundred years before I was born. The pervasive influence of Athens and, later, of Rome cut our tunicae shorter, clipped our locks, and scraped bare our chins. It swept Galilean peasants into newly built hippodromes to shriek their support for flying chariots. It adorned every city with the refinements of the conquerors.

‘Flux and flow,’ my father would say. ‘All things must change, Kleitos. Yet, within change, there may still be stability. Certain truths—eternal realities—these remain.’

‘Such as?’ I urged.

He would give a little shrug. ‘Love, compassion, mercy—these things matter. They are the beginning and end of all systems by which men may live honourably. The alpha and omega of being, remember this.’

I did. I still do.

When I was ten, Valerius Gratus ended his term as praefectusus and set sail for Rome. His galley must have passed his replacement somewhere on the broad Mediterranean.

I was on the great esplanade facing the harbour with my parents and friends and most of the population of Caesarea the evening when the state trireme with its imperial pennants glided in, around the Drusus tower and into the protective curve of the harbour basin. Trumpets blared; there was incense burning in the stands before the huge temple of Augustus and Roma that turned its smooth-columned facade towards the approaching ship, and expectation rippled through the waiting throngs on the quays.

‘This new man is one to watch,’ my father muttered. ‘It seems he’s the choice of Sejanus rather than the Emperor, and Sejanus is a mad dog.’

My mother jabbed him in the ribs, glanced round fearfully. We had heard the tales brought on the cargo ships that came from Italia—how the Emperor Tiberius had bestowed rank and honour upon his trusted lieutenant, Sejanus of the Praetorian Command, who now held supreme authority in Rome while the aging Emperor indulged his odd passions on the remote and beautiful island of Capri, far from the disapproving scrutiny of the Senate.

The crowd pressed forward as the oars were lifted and the trireme’s ropes were flung and it was hauled up to the dock where the city magistrates and the civil service had assembled in their freshly laundered togas. There was a stretch of red tapestry unrolled to the foot of the gangway. Mandatory cheering rose and resounded from the encircling walls of the harbour to set the gulls wheeling.

The new man paused before descending. I watched the way he ran his sharp, hawk’s profile across the welcoming throng. I had expected the usual attire of Caesar’s deputy, but here was no toga trimmed with Tyrian. He wore full military dress—bronze cuiress with silver embossments that caught the fading pink light. His elaborate helmet bristled with a horse-hair crest of deep crimson, and his mantle was a cascade of imperial purple down his back that he had little right to be displaying.

‘He looks a right arrogant bastard,’ my father muttered. ‘Let’s get home before the rush.’

Gaius Pontius Pilatus was of Spanish extraction, we learned and from a respectable military family. He had served with distinction under Augustus, then had come to Tiberius’s notice in the brilliant handling of his troops, deployed in suppressing a revolt in Egypt. Sejanus had been viceroy of Egypt at the time: his commendation of Pilatus had led to this honourable office.

Unexpectedly, my father was invited to a reception at the Praetorium, doubtless on the strength of his previous service within its walls and the considerable reputation he enjoyed in the city. He was apprehensive before setting out, fidgeting with the clasp that held his synthesis on his right shoulder. My mother bustled, arranging its folds so that they hung in elegant columns. He wore his Gadarean sandals with clips of worked bronze. To me, he looked like a prince.

When he walked home, with one of our three slaves to accompany him with a torch, I was still up, trying to read a copy of Lucretius. My father shuffled off his mantle, threw himself into his wicker chair.

‘Is your mother in bed?’ he asked.

‘And asleep,’ I said. ‘I’ll go now.’

‘Sit down,’ my father ordered. ‘If you can burn good lamp oil in the pursuit of wisdom, you can listen to me.’ He seemed distracted. ‘In a couple of years, you’ll be deemed a man by Jewish law. Men should learn to think for themselves as well as to imbibe the doctrines of the great.’

‘I’m thinking all the time,’ I said.

‘Boys dream,’ he replied. ‘They don’t reason. I met a man tonight who has less reason in him than most of your schoolmates. Pilatus makes all previous governors look like the most distinguished of thinkers.’

I was only mildly interested, and it was long past my bed time, but I sat there with him, in his little tablinum, crammed with tubs of books and racks full of tightly furled scrolls. Slowly, he got off his chest the rage which had been building in him all evening.

Protocol had demanded that leading Jewish citizens be invited to the Praetorium—businessmen mostly, from the prosperous Jewish enclave near the city’s eastern wall. There had been a sprinkling of religious sages too such as the Elders of Caesarea’s several synagogues, including our own. Pilatus had appeared affronted that the high priest from Jerusalem had not come down to pay his respects but sent his father- in-law to deputise for him.

The dinner had been elaborate and was being enjoyed by the whole company until servants carried in trays bearing the central dish for the mensa prima—whole suckling pigs on beds of fennel and rosemary.

The Jews present had, naturally, declined to eat. Pilatus had made light of the gratuitous insult he had offered and was heard to observe that barbarian superstitions should be stamped out, not fostered.

Before the evening was over, every Jew present had been compelled to make his apologies or excuses and withdraw. Pilatus had stayed cheerful throughout, patronising and dismissive as his outraged guests left the triclinium.

‘It is the Selucids all over again’—my father snarled—‘trying to goad the Jews into rebellion and thus have an excuse to crush them if need be. I see the hand of Sejanus in this, very plainly.’

The Selucids were monsters of my mother’s repertoire. I had grown up hearing tales of the heroic Maccabean family who had led a great revolt against them and had triumphed so that idols were no longer worshipped in the courts of the temple and men were again permitted to have their sons circumcised as the Law commands and our ancient scriptures could again be read on the Sabbath. Before being defeated by the Maccabeans of eternal fame, the Selucids had offered pork to Olympian Zeus in the very place where pious Jews had always sacrificed to the Most High of Israel. I was suddenly frightened.

‘Will there be war then?’ I asked.

My father shook his head. ‘Never again—not like that. We have the Pax Romana to protect us. No Emperor could ever permit one of his governors to instigate such a thing and breach the peace of Rome. Even the great Zealot rebellion, which followed the census of Augustus—ten years before you were born—was suppressed rapidly and the culprits crucified in their hundreds. No—a war that drags into its hot mouth an entire country cannot happen here again.’

‘But you said Pilatus is like the Selucids, stirring up trouble,’ I persisted. ‘What will happen?’

‘He will enjoy exercising his authority,’ my father said drily. ‘He will crack a few heads open on behalf of his master—bite a few ankles, like any well-trained guard dog, and in so doing, he will seek to impose new standards—a new order. God knows what that will be but you’—he looked at me hard—‘you will need to foster the things you have learned from me and push your mother’s ancestry aside. Close your mouth, boy! I am not saying you must cease to observe the Law—up to a point—but you must also continue to cultivate friends who are not Jewish. Learn to smile at disagreeable pricks like that falcon-headed bastard up in the Praetorium.’

He had never spoken to me in this way before. I went over and fingered the grapevine my mother had embroidered round the neck of his best tunica.

‘Will I be safe then?’ I asked.

‘While I’m alive, yes. And when I’m gone, you’ll be wise enough to make the right decisions.’ He patted me. ‘Your mouth is like a melon-rind, sad monkey! Come—smile.’

I kissed him goodnight then and was about to leave the room when he picked up the copy of Lucretius I had been struggling with.

‘Ah!’ my father exclaimed, caressing the parchment as if it were a kitten. ‘The splendid Lucretius praises Epicurus, who, as you know, has been my guiding light since I was only a little older than you are now. He was a god, Memmius, a god who first discovered that principal of life which is now called wisdom... Have you read those words yet?’ I shook my head. ‘...And who by his art, rescued human life from storms and darkness and settled it in clear, still light.’

He was smiling now. ‘Be wise, Kleitos! Pursue wisdom and discover what it is to be happy.’

I studied the menorah with its seven upraised branches, each pair growing longer as the hand that lit their bowls moved towards the tallest, central stem. It was a tree, of course—the Tree of Life that may have been an almond, as my mother had explained when I was very small—and it stood for the seven days of creation and for the Elohim—the archangels or spirits of the dawn who are given charge over the seven planets.

‘Always look into the light of the lamps, Kleitos,’ my mother would urge. ‘If the Most High is going to grant you greater visions, they will come through the light.’

‘I never see anything there,’ I complained.

‘Not surprising,’ my father once remarked. ‘Illumination is that which emanates out of darkness.’ He had studied the Gnostics and the Pythagoreans, and though dedicated to Epicurus, he was prepared to countenance other doctrines. ‘Visualise the menorah when you’re lying in the dark. I want to know if Pilatus is going to choke on a pork bone and will not be found until he’s stiff and turning green.’

‘Lysis!’ my mother exclaimed. ‘Do you want to teach him to lay curses? Besides, what if one of the servants heard you and spoke out of turn?’

My father was smiling gently. His permanent limp reminded him that I had exhibited a little of that power which his pragmatism insisted should not exist. He patted my head.

‘See if I’m ever going to get to Athens, boy—I want to stand in the gardens of the Epicurean school just once before I die.’

‘When you will cease to exist, of course,’ my mother gently mocked. ‘When the individual particles of your body will disperse and you will be gone forever. I never heard such nonsense! Kleitos, do not listen to your father when he talks to you of Democritus and his wicked, godless theories.’

‘Why did I ever teach you to read—to think?’ my father demanded. ‘Isn’t it time we had dinner?’

Their conflicting views intrigued rather than puzzled me. I was a good synagogue boy, but I plied my teachers with the kinds of questions that made them chew their whiskers and scowl a good deal. I was commanded to study the Torah where I would find the answers to all mysteries.

But I would loiter near the shrine of Hecate Trivia, where the three highways meet near Caesarea’s eastern wall, and I would watch men and women casting their offerings of three coins into the small spring in the precinct. I would watch the anxious faces of those who queued to consult the oracle, an ancient slattern who had hair badly dyed with henna and wore bracelets round her plump ankles.

‘Do you believe the gods make their will known through mortal instruments?’ I asked my father as we passed the shrine one evening

He laughed. ‘If the gods exist at all, there is not much evidence that they give a tinker’s damn whether we prosper or wither. They certainly don’t manifest like that—choosing some fat old slut as their mouthpiece or revealing their divine will to a castrated half-wit in a green gown who thinks that by shaving his head and rattling a sistrum he will touch the hem of the ineffable.’

‘But if they exist,’ I persisted, ‘or if my mother is right and there is only One—how would he reveal his will?’

My father toyed with the grapes he’d bought from a hawker. ‘By selecting as perfect an instrument as possible,’ he said at last. ‘A man so pure that people might say, ‘this is no ordinary being—the divine will works through him.’ Such men are supposed to have walked the earth in ages past, but they are more the stuff of legend than of history. No educated man takes such a concept seriously.’

There was no disputing with him, but I kept an eye out for a likely candidate just the same. The harbour offered strangers from countries with names I could scarcely pronounce, and it is true that some of them turned heads in a crowd, but I quickly came to realise that this was for the quality of the garments they wore or the weight of polished silver in bands on their forearms or the scent that wafted from beards and barbered hair made slick with oil costing as much as a labourer might earn in a week. The divine failed to manifest on Caesarea’s waterfront.

One evening, a vast crowd of Jews swarmed into the city—several thousand of them—sweat-stained and dusty from travel. They shouted themselves hoarse as they poured through the streets towards the forum and surrounded the praetorium, swaying and chanting like a rank-smelling flood of flotsam from the harbour behind them. The city seethed with them. I ran with my companions to view the spectacle. Word raced through the city: this was a self-appointed delegation that had trudged all the way down from Jerusalem to protest against the outrage of the Praefectus’s new policy for his subject people.

It seemed that when Pilatus had sent auxiliary troops up to Jerusalem to be stationed there over the winter months, he had given orders that the standards of the army were to be publically displayed with their bronze effigies of the Emperor Tiberius flagrantly uncovered. Furthermore, he had given specific orders that the emblems were to be erected on the parapets of the Tower of Antonia—the Roman stronghold—overlooking the temple courts where they would cause maximum offence. Since the time of Caesar Julius, who honoured the Jews, standards such as these had never been displayed in public since Caesar deemed it an unnecessary provocation.

Caesarea hummed with this blatant outrage. No previous governors had attempted to flout the Jewish prohibition against graven images, even though only Jerusalem’s orthodox took such things very seriously these days. No Roman administrator had ever flung down such a contemptuous challenge to the sanctity of the Law.

The mob bawled psalms and chanted verses against Rome—against the man who represented imperial power yet so recklessly ignored local sensibilities. Extra troops appeared along the terrace of the praetorium and on the city walls and in the arcades round the forum. By nightfall, the last of the demonstrators were still straggling in and the crowd had grown so large, the traders could not bring in their wagons with produce for the morning markets.

I arrived home breathless with excitement. The Jerusalemites were actually curling up on the flag-stones for the night, I explained. My mother’s eyes widened. Through the shutters—closed against the cool wind off the sea—came the boom of anger from the forum that made me think of waves breaking against the outer walls of the harbour breakwater.

‘This is typical!’ My father snorted. ‘Everything I’ve heard about that man convinces me he has some agenda of his own—or of that viper’s, Sejanus. Well, you are not to go out—either of you—until this matter is settled. And I fear the way Pilatus will choose.’

We became very tired of the interior of our house. The demonstrators kept up their protest for five full days, and the nights were scarcely quieter. My father reported that the business community was at wits’ end: all commerce and trade was at a stand-still, and even the bakers had run out of flour. Every day, more and more Jerusalemites were arriving to swell the throng.

‘How does Pilatus sleep?’ I asked.

‘I doubt that he does,’ my father replied, ‘and that’s what worries me. When he snaps—what’s going to happen then?’

We found out the following morning. When my father had gone off to his schoolroom, I found my mother draping her head with the shawl she reserved for wearing to the synagogue.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘To join my people in the forum,’ she said firmly. ‘I belong there. You are to stay indoors and you will say nothing of this to your father, or I will tell him the real reason for his statue of Pomona falling over in the peristyle and breaking her nose.’

She rapped her knuckles on my head, kissed me, then, breathing quickly, she left the house. When she was well clear, I went to the atrium.

Otho the house-slave was posted near the door, clearly obeying my mother’s instructions. I went upstairs to my room, climbed out onto the parapet, and inched my way along to the pergola that supported the vine above the peristyle garden. The house-girl was nowhere in sight. I crawled onto the tiles of the roof, slid towards the street edge, and lowered myself with difficulty to the pavement.

Several of my school friends were on the edge of the forum when I arrived. Abruptly, trumpets blared, and the roar of the crowd gradually subsided. Pilatus was actually appearing on the terrace. He was too far off to hear clearly, but the thousands gathered at his feet seemed pleased. There was wild applause, some jeering. Suddenly, in response to something he had said, they turned and surged towards us.

One does not attempt to swim against a flood. We were swept along with them, and we heard them speaking of our destination. Some area of my bowels filled with ice because I was not some exotic animal nor a condemned prisoner, and besides, my parents said the place was an abomination, fit only for the uncultivated.

I had never been to the amphitheatre built by games-loving Herod. The surging crowd swept me past the gladiatorial school and the gymnasium in the same precinct, through the high arched gates of the stadium and onto the arena itself. I stumbled across the sand, praying that my mother would not