Part 12

“So, Longinus, the value of a slave is to be measured in direct proportion to the value of the merchandise—in your case, glassware—he is able to produce? And when tomorrow you leave for Rome with the profits made from your glassware, you will be carrying the lives of many slaves in your package, won’t you? And when at the markets of Rome and Antioch and Alexandria you sell those beautiful goblets with their slender, rose-tinted stems, you will know that you are selling glass colored with the lifeblood of men such as that old Greek, that slave who perhaps by now has been consumed in the very furnace that exacted his life? Isn’t that true?”

“Cornelius, you’re a good soldier, but you’re in the wrong profession.” Longinus leaned forward and cracked his bronzed knuckles. “You should be writing poetry or lecturing classes in philosophy, or even”—he paused, and a grin spread across his face—“be acting as a priest in the Temple at Jerusalem.” Suddenly the smile was gone. “Of course a slave is valuable in proportion to what he can produce or the service he can provide. Aren’t we all valuable in that same proportion? We live awhile, work, love, hate, die. What do we leave? Only what we have produced. Everything else is gone, including us. So, in the end, we and the dead slave are the same ... nothing. But you don’t agree, do you?”

“I don’t want to agree, Longinus. What you say makes sense. But something within me says just as emphatically that you are wrong. Yet I can’t prove it.” Cornelius dug his sandaled heels into the sand at the bottom of the long abandoned boat. “I keep thinking of the old Greek up there. I don’t know what life gave him, of course, before some invading Roman soldiers destroyed his home—if he had a home—certainly his way of life, and dragged him to Rome, where he simply had the bad luck to fall into the hands of the Prefect. But there’s no mystery about what life has offered him since his enslavement. And this man may have been another Pheidias, Centurion, a man more intelligent, more cultured, a better man, my friend, than nine out of ten of the equestrians in Rome. Obviously, then, life has been unfair to him. And you say he is finished, done for, nothing. You say there will never be any chance of his getting a better throw of the dice.”

“Exactly. And throw of the dice is right, too. He shook them in the cup and rolled them, and they rolled wrong; we rolled ours, and they stopped with the right numbers up. That’s all there is to it. Fate, chance, luck, call it what you will. It’s a few years or many, a good life or one of pain ... and then nothing. Isn’t it just that simple, Cornelius? How else could it possibly be? Isn’t any other idea simply superstition?” Longinus leaned over and picked up a small shell. “Look at this,” he said. “What happened to the mollusk who lived here? Did he live out his span of life happily, or was he eaten in his prime? And is his unshelled spirit now swimming about in some sea heaven?” He tossed the shell into the surf. “That old slave up there, I maintain, is just as dead and gone—or will be when his corpse is disposed of—as the mollusk who once inhabited that shell. And both of them are gone for good.”

“Then you put men and mollusks in the same category?”

“Yes, as far as having immortal spirits is concerned. But you don’t, Centurion; you hold with your Pharisee friends—it’s the Pharisees who believe in immortality, isn’t it—that man is a different sort of animal in that he survives in a spirit world....”

“I’d like to; I want to. It’s a damnably unfair world if he doesn’t.”

“And it’s just as unfair if he does. Look.” Longinus leaned forward again. “You say that this all-powerful, all-wise, all-good god, this Yahweh, will see to it that in the next world, the spirit world, that old slave up there will get justice. But I insist that such a god does not exist; if he did, as I argued that day we were sailing down the Tiber, you remember, he wouldn’t permit such unfairness and injustice in this present life. Isn’t that a logical contention, Cornelius? How can a good god, I ask you again, decree, or permit, so much evil?”

“I don’t know,” Cornelius replied. “I’m no nearer an answer to your question now than I was that other day. But I am confident that if this god exists—and I believe he does, Longinus; in fact I’m even stronger now in that belief than I was then—he does not decree evil, he simply permits evil men sometimes to rule in the affairs of this earthly, physical life. It may be that he doesn’t want to restrict man’s freedom. Do you see? That wouldn’t mean he approves of the evil acts of men.”

Longinus slowly shook his head. “No, Cornelius, I don’t see. Your argument seems completely fatuous to me. I cannot comprehend an all-powerful, good god who would permit men to do one another evil. I am convinced that the fact that the world is filled with men who are unjust and cruel and evil indisputably proves that no such god exists.”

“And I would answer that it is strong evidence but not indisputable proof.” For a long moment Cornelius stared out in the direction of a merchant ship sailing southward toward towering Mount Carmel. “You see, Longinus,” he said, turning to face his companion, “we have so little information on which to base an opinion. If there is such a god—if there is, remember—how can we even comprehend his nature, what he is like, unless?...” He paused and looked back to the sea.

“Unless?”

“Unless someone reveals him to us, interprets him to men, shows his works and thoughts....”

“The Jewish Messiah, eh? The carpenter who is about to overthrow Rome?”

“I don’t think he’s ever indicated that he was seeking to overthrow Rome. I think that idea has come down from the old Jewish prophets, who foresaw a great political and military savior of their land. Several times I’ve been in the crowds listening to him talking, and so far as I could tell, he was only trying to explain to the people the nature of this god whom he refers to as his father. He was attempting to interpret this Yahweh to them sometimes even to the extent of utilizing some of this father god’s power. That’s apparently what he did when he restored Chuza’s son.”

“You mean he was clever enough to figure out when nature would do the restoring. But we won’t go into that again.” Longinus twisted around in the boat and stood up. “No, my friend, I insist that your reasoning is not sound, that you have been overcome by this eastern mysticism which seems to fill the very air out here.” He clapped his hand on Cornelius’ shoulder; his friend had risen with him. “Centurion, come with me to Rome; I suspect that you need to be indoctrinated again in the ways of modern thought.”

“I wish I could go with you.” Cornelius stepped from the boat and kicked the sand from his sandals. “But sometimes I wonder just what sort of thinking could properly be termed modern.”

They walked back to the inn to await the loading of the ship on which Longinus would sail for the capital. No further mention was made of the Roman gods, the Greek gods, Yahweh, or the Galilean carpenter. And early in the forenoon the next day the vessel spread its sails for Rome. Two hours later Cornelius and his men started on their return to Tiberias.

26

One of the household servants was waiting for Cornelius when he returned to the garrison’s quarters at Tiberias.

“Centurion, Lucian is desperately ill,” he reported. “In the last few days he has developed a palsy. Your wife bade me tell you that she fears him near death. You must come back with me, sir; she’s greatly frightened and in much distress about the boy.”

“But the physicians? Haven’t they been able to help him?”

The man shook his head. “She has had them all with him, sir, all she could find in this region, and they have done what they could; but the paralysis has spread, and his fever does not abate. All their efforts have been useless. She prays that you hurry, sir.”

As fast as their horses could take them the two raced toward Capernaum. When Cornelius entered the house, his wife rushed to him and fell into his arms. “Oh, I thought you would never get here,” she cried. “Lucian is near death, I know; I don’t see how he can live much longer. And the physicians have despaired of saving him.”

“But there must be something we can do,” he said, as he turned toward the sick boy’s chamber. “Are there no other physicians we could call?”

“None,” she said. “And the paralysis seems to be growing worse. He is deathly ill, Cornelius. Oh, by all the gods, if there were something....”

“‘By all the gods.’ The carpenter! Didn’t he restore Chuza’s son? And though Lucian is a slave, isn’t he just as much a son to us? Wouldn’t the carpenter just as willingly restore a slave boy, even of a Roman soldier?” He had said the words aloud, but they had been addressed more to himself than to his wife.

He turned smiling, to face her. “Do you remember how that young carpenter of Nazareth healed the son of Herod’s chamberlain? Don’t you think...?”

“But he’s a Jew, Cornelius, and we are Romans.”

“No matter.” He turned to the servant who had gone to Tiberias in search of him. “Get me a fresh horse, and quickly!” he ordered. “I’m going out to find that carpenter!”

A few minutes later he stopped to inquire of a shopkeeper if the man had seen the young Nazarene rabbi. “Has he been around today?” Cornelius asked. “Can you tell me how to find him?”

“He passed here this morning,” the shopkeeper answered, “with Simon and the Zebedees and some of those others who are usually with him. They went out the gate in the western wall, and judging by the poor trade I’ve had all day, the whole city’s gone out after them. I hear the carpenter’s been speaking to them from the side of that little mountain over there.” With his head he motioned toward the west. “In all likelihood you’ll find him there, soldier.” Suddenly his face fell; his hands shook as he grasped his scraggly beard. “Now wait a minute,” he sputtered, “this fellow, this Nazarene, he hasn’t run afoul of you Romans, has he?”

“No. No, indeed. It’s on a personal mission that I seek him.” Cornelius smiled reassuringly. “I’m his friend.”

The shopkeeper looked relieved. “Then if you station yourself at the western gate, you’ll surely see him as he returns to the city. Or you might ride out toward the mountain, soldier.”

Cornelius rode on through the gate. He was halfway to the little eminence in the plain west of the city when he began to meet the throng returning. Soon he spotted the rabbi walking in the company of the Capernaum fishermen. Boldly he rode up to them and dismounted.

The men with Jesus formed a circle about him.

“I am unarmed, and I intend no one harm,” Cornelius said, holding out his hands. “I am seeking the rabbi of Nazareth.”

Jesus stepped forward and held up his staff in salute. His brown eyes were warmly bright. Cornelius, closer to him than he had ever been before, saw sparkling in the beads of perspiration rolling down his bronzed smooth forehead the long rays of the setting sun. He saw them, too, in the beads clinging to the thick mat of reddish-brown hair on the carpenter’s chest, for in the sultry stillness of the dying day, Jesus had thrown open his robe half way to his rope-belted waist.

“What would you have of me, my brother?” he asked the centurion.

“Sir, I pray you to restore my little servant boy whom I greatly love; I fear he is near death of a palsy. If, sir, you would but say the word....” He paused, suddenly hesitant.

The rabbi reached out and with strong brown fingers grasped the centurion’s arm. “I will go with you and restore the boy,” he said gently. “Show me to your house.”

“But, sir, I am a Roman soldier”—a feeling of embarrassment, deep humility, strange to the centurion, possessed him as he looked into the face of the young rabbi—“and unworthy that you should enter my house. But if you would only command that my little servant boy be healed, while we stand here, sir, then I know that he would be restored to health.” He smiled, weakly, he thought. “You see, sir, I understand authority, for I am a centurion and when I give a command, it is obeyed.”

For an instant the rabbi said nothing, but his warm eyes lighted with a rapture plain to see. He turned to his friends. “Nowhere in Israel have I seen such faith. I tell you that many will come from the east and the west and with our fathers Abraham and Isaac and Jacob sit down in the Kingdom of Heaven. But many of the chosen likewise will be cast out, and there will be great wailing and mourning, for their faith shall not be as the faith of this Roman.”

Then he turned again to confront the centurion, and Cornelius saw that his face was radiant. “You may go on your way, my brother,” he said. “As you have believed that it might be done, so has it been accomplished. Return in peace to the little boy.”

“Oh, sir....” But the centurion’s eyes were blinded with tears, and he bowed his head, and no words would come. Then he felt a warm hand on his shoulder and strong fingers once more gently squeezing his arm, then the fingers released it. When after a moment he looked up, Cornelius saw that the Nazarene and his friends had resumed walking toward the city gate. In that same instant Jesus turned and looked over his shoulder, his face still alight with a glowing happiness, and raised his hand high in a parting salute. Then he quickly turned eastward again, and the little group disappeared around the bend.

Cornelius stood unmoving, his left hand still clutching the bridle rein, and then he mounted and rode toward the western gate. A few paces ahead he went around the bend and shortly passed the rabbi and his friends, who had overtaken several men who evidently had been out with them at the mountainside; Jesus smiled and once more lifted his hand in friendly greeting.

The centurion, reaching the gate, rode through it and toward the center of the city, where he turned left and followed a cavernous road to the gate in the southern wall. He was in no hurry as his horse picked its way along the cobblestones and out upon the coast road southward. His fright, his sudden hysteria had gone; it had vanished completely as he had looked into the eyes of the young rabbi. Cornelius knew that Lucian would be well; not the shadow of a doubt darkened his thoughts.

When he reached home and turned into his courtyard, a servant came running to take his horse. “Lucian, sir, is well again!” the man declared, almost breathless with the excitement of being the first to give his master the thrilling news.

“Yes, I know it.” Cornelius smiled.

“But, sir, it was only an hour ago that....”

“A man over at Capernaum told me then,” he said and strode toward the house as the servant, mouth open, stared after him.

As he stepped inside from the courtyard, his wife, who had heard him ride in from the roadway, rushed to him and flung her aims about his waist. “Oh, Cornelius, Lucian has been restored! Not only has his fever gone, but so has the paralysis. He can use his arms and hands, and he can walk as though nothing had ever been wrong with his legs!”

She stood back from him, her eyes wet with the sudden surging of her emotion. “Isn’t it wonderful, Cornelius! And it happened so quickly, too; he was low, Cornelius, desperately sick, much sicker than when you left, I’m sure, and the fever was consuming him. I had turned aside from his bed a moment to wet a cloth to spread on his forehead; then, as I wrung it out and turned back to him, suddenly he sat up. I caught him under his arms and discovered that he was no longer feverish; in a moment he was talking and using his hands, and then quickly he stood up and walked toward the table where I had set the pitcher of cool water. ‘I’m so thirsty,’ he said, grinning at me, ‘and hungry, too.’”

“Yes, I knew about it. It happened about an hour ago. Where is Lucian now?”

“He went out to the stables. He wanted to see his horse; he hadn’t....” Abruptly she broke off and stared at her husband, incredulous. “Cornelius, how did you know when it happened? Did one of the servants tell...?”

“Yes, when I rode in a moment ago. But I knew when it happened.”

“But how, Cornelius?” Her amazement was evident.

“Have you forgotten that I went in search of the carpenter of Nazareth? Well, an hour ago I came upon him beyond the western gate of Capernaum. I implored him to heal Lucian, and he did. He told me so. And I knew he had; I had not the slightest doubt. Nor am I in the least surprised to find him well.” His serious expression relaxed into a warm smile. “Did you feed the young imp?”

“Yes. And he was famished. Literally, Cornelius, the boy ate like a horse.”

“Well, he hadn’t had anything in days; he was bound to be empty.”

“But, Cornelius, this carpenter from Nazareth....” She paused, her forehead furrowed in perplexity.

“Yes,” he said, not waiting for her to finish her question, “and, by all the gods, I’d like to see Longinus try to explain this one away!”

Rome

27

When the vessel eased in to dock just below the Sublicious Bridge, almost at the spot from which the “Palmyra” had started its voyage, Longinus went ashore. Quickly he engaged a loitering freed slave to help with his luggage. He had brought little from Phoenicia, only his clothing and a few small presents for his mother, principally some choice pieces of glass, and the package he was delivering to Sejanus.

“I’ll carry this,” he said to the fellow; “it’s glass and fragile.” He picked up the bundle, heavily wrapped. “And I’ll take this spare toga, too. You can carry the remainder. I don’t want any sedan chair; I’d rather walk. I want to get my land legs back.”

The toga had been wrapped about the money packet, which Longinus had kept securely under his arm as he descended from the ship. But it was an innocent looking bundle and only its weight would have excited a bearer’s suspicion. Longinus had determined not to let it get out of his possession until he had locked it in his father’s safe to await its delivery to the Prefect.

They walked from the pier along the way that went eastward from the bridge into the dense, traffic-jammed heart of the city. At the foot of Palatine Hill they turned left and walked northward past the western front of the Imperial Palace. Glancing over his shoulder as they reached the northwest corner of the sprawling great structure, Longinus had a glimpse of the wing that had been Claudia’s apartment; once again he picked out the bedroom window through which that morning he had heard the rising bugle at Castra Praetoria.

“I wonder....”

“Sir, did you say something?” His helper, trudging behind, paused.

“No.” Longinus turned to face him. “I was just thinking, talking to myself.”

All the way from the dock area Longinus had been retracing the route he had come with his century from Castra Praetoria the day they sailed for Palestine. But a hundred paces farther on, instead of continuing past the Forum of Augustus on their left, he turned abruptly westward. “I want to walk through the Forum Romanum,” he explained. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been there. I’ve lost touch with Rome. What’s been happening lately?”

“Very little, sir, as far as I’ve seen.” The fellow shook his head resignedly. “No triumphs, as I recall, no big ones anyway, and precious few games.”

“Why haven’t there been more?”

“Oh, I don’t know, sir. They say the Emperor gets no enjoyment out of such things, and he’s not here in Rome most of the time anyway, and I hear it told that the Prefect doesn’t want to spend the money....”

“They do say that?”

“Now, sir, I have heard such talk. Understand, I don’t know anything about it; I don’t know anything about them, the Emperor and the Prefect. Not a thing. I don’t even know whether I’d recognize either one of them if he came right up to us now.” The fellow’s fear that he had spoken too boldly was obvious. “All I ever get done, sir, is work; I have to struggle hard to make a living. Seems that it’s just like it’s always been in Rome, the way I see it, which is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” He grinned good-naturedly. “I’m meaning no offense to you, Centurion; likely you’re one of the rich ones.”

“I understand, and I suspect it’s a sound observation, that the rich do get richer and the poor get poorer, I mean. But it’s not true of Rome alone; it’s that way everywhere, isn’t it, throughout the world?”

“I couldn’t say as to that, sir. Rome’s pretty much my world.”

Rome was his world, too, Longinus told himself a moment later as the two were propelled suddenly from the shaded cavern of the cobblestoned narrow street into the widened stir and commotion of a veritable forest of marbled columns and statuary.

The centurion’s heart lifted as he strode once more into the Forum Romanum, that busy, marble-crowded flat between the Tiber’s westward bend and the mansion-crowned hills. He took a deep breath, and his chest swelled.

_... This is the veritable beating, pulsing heart of Rome, and Rome is the world. Here is reality. Here are solidity, strength, planning made real, dreams hewn in enduring stone. Here are wealth, accomplishment, power, might. Not twenty paces across there is the Millenarium Aureum, the resplendent bronze column set up to mark the center of the Roman world, the point from which miles are counted along the highways and their joining sea lanes stretching to the ends of the known earth to bind Rome into one colossal, unconquerable, enduring Empire!..._

They paused to catch their breath. Longinus set down the glass, but he continued to clutch the toga-wrapped packet under his arm. In another moment they would push once more into the jostling, shoving multitude milling through the Forum’s crossways. Suddenly the centurion remembered Cornelius and their discussion that afternoon as the two men had sat in the wrecked rowboat near the glassworks. He smiled grimly.

_... But this is Rome. This is reality. This is accomplishment, creation. I can reach out and run my hand over the stone and feel these marbled creations of men; a thousand years from now, were I to live so long, I could rub my hands across their imperishable cold faces. These are tangible things, and Rome is tangible, her power, her strength, her wealth, her dominance over the world. Cornelius may prate of his old tutor’s preachments about the imperishability of the intangibles and the reality of things unseen. But these statues, these temples, this Millenarium Aureum, are tangible. Rome is carved statuary and fluted marble magnificence; Rome is spacious mansions and marching great armies flaunting their ensigns. Rome is poverty, too, and injustice and ugliness at times and in places, but Rome is no pale intangibles, no vaporous conjurations of an eastern philosopher. Rome is not even her gods. This is Rome, this marbled splendor of the Forum; Rome is here and now and touchable and real, and Rome, by all the gods or no gods, will endure._

_... Rome is something else. Rome is strength and power and substance, but Rome is also grace and beauty. Examine these graceful columns, these elegant pediments. Rome is feminine, a beautiful woman. Rome, by the great Jove, is Claudia. Indeed! What is more Rome than Claudia; what is more Claudia than Rome? Rome is beauty and pleasure, tangible, real, to be experienced, enjoyed._

_... And Rome will endure. That carpenter of Galilee, wandering up and down the seacoast with his little band of poor working people, talking of intangibles to illiterate fisherfolk and the dwellers in Jerusalem’s festering Ophel, that fellow to overcome Rome! Even under the silvery softness of a full moon beside the sea in Galilee, it was a preposterous notion. But here in the middle of the Forum, with confirmation of Rome’s might everywhere around...._

“By all the gods, Cornelius. Can’t you see?”