in two months?““Yes; that was absurd. The thing is that over the cabbage field and the girl what I did was extremely unpopular. I have made friends here. Ask yourself what my life would be if I hadn’t. A hundred men come, after two months they go. I can’t consort with the men and every single centurion who has ever come here has resented me, openly or covertly. So they go away and call me a Jew-lover.”
“I sympathise with you,” Quintilius said, and he sounded sincere.
“It’s strange, isn’t it, how unpopularity centres around nationality; in Jerusalem they still call Herod “that Idumean”. He’s a character, if you like. I dined with him one evening. He complained bitterly of the Jews’ ingratitude towards him; he knows he is unpopular, yet he never does anything to endear himself to his people.”
“What could he do? A murderer many times over.” Vatinius remembered the light way in which Quintilius had accused his late wife of murder, and felt bound to explain.
“Jews—the pious sort—have respect for human life; that is why they don’t like the Games or the chariot races.”
“At least Antipater is popular.”
“Is he? Is he? I should say that most people cheer him as a means of knocking Herod on the nose. And it’s dangerous for him. My friends never expect to see him on the throne.”
“Indeed; why not?”
“To be popular isn’t healthy, if you’re Herod’s son.”
“About that, I must tell you a joke.” Quintilius poured wine.
“Caesar made a pun, in Greek—Better Herod’s pig than his son, meaning that Herod would kill his son, but being half-Jew, wouldn’t touch a pig. The point is that when Herod has no Jew at his table, he eats just as you and I would. And what do you think his favourite food is? This is true, he told me himself. That hard, pork-and-garlic, Danubian sausage that you and I used to carry to supplement our rations.”
Sliding back, Vatinius thought, back to the pleasant, rambling talks that we used to have, the kind of talk I’ve never had with anyone else. He was always so interested in everything. And it was his mind I loved, not his body, splendid as it was. Yet when he sold his body—for that is what it amounts to, and he sold it twice, to Marius for money, to the widow for position-I cut him off, disregarding his mind.
“If your friends don’t expect to be ruled by Antipater, what do they look for?”
“How should I know?” Vatinius asked, with a return to his old gruffness.
“The Jews I know are not politicians; they’re poor simple men whose main concern is to make a living. And if they had political opinions they would conceal them from me, out of courtesy. I can tell you this. It’ll interest you. Their main hope centres around a bit of folklore. They believe that their -subjection is the result of their god’s displeasure and that in his own good time he will deliver them by sending them what they call a Messiah. But neither Caesar nor Herod need tremble, because this Messiah is to be born of a virgin. So by my reckoning they have a long time to wait.”
“Oh well, how was Minerva born? Or Mithras? He was born of a rock we are told. As a putative parent, rock or virgin, I’d wager on the latter, wouldn’t you? Remember how we toyed with Mithraism? In those days I thought that the rock birth was symbolic. One says, sound as, solid as, immovable as a rock, Qualities that make Mithras superbly suitable to be a soldier’s god, I understand that more and more go over to him every day. Now a god born of a virgin sounds unlikely to be a deliverer of a subject people, don’t you think? Very innocent, pretty, pure and sentimental. I’ve noticed that at the Games the Vestal Virgins—though, their virginity is largely a matter of nomenclature—are always the first to turn up their thumbs and lead the crowd to spare the defeated. If symbolism counts this Messiah would be a curious kind of god.”
“Ah,” said Vatinius, throwing himself into the argument, ‘according to my friends, he’d also be the son of Jehovah; and about him there is nothing pretty or sentimental. He’s a god of battles, and he laid down a code of behaviour, stricter than any … I ever heard of.” He had paused and added the last four words in a trailing voice, for he had remembered what one of his Jewish friends had said about Jehovah and men like Marius and Quintilius.
“They shall surely be put to death.” And when Caleb had told him that,
Vatinius had thought—Well, thatwould be a way of putting a stop to it, this thing, which like a disease was spreading rampantly, was no longer disapproved of, was used as a ladder by ambitious young men.
And here he was, with the man to whom he had sworn never again to speak, succumbing to the old charm. He folded his hands into fists and pushed the knuckles together, wishing with all his heart that something, anything, might happen that Caepio couldn’t deal with and that he might be called away.
Relief was at hand. The slaves came in and began to reset the table. Quintilius reached for his stick and stood up.
“The bog,” Vatinius said, ‘is next on the right.” Without thinking he had used the old army word.
“And if you want to wash .. .” He indicated the tripod in the alcove.
“I’ll get a clean towel.”
He made no attempt to help Quintilius along the short length of passage to the latrine; he laid the clean towel on the edge of the bowl and then made a rapid survey of his small domain, still hoping against hope that there might be something that would give him an excuse for not sitting down to eat with his self-providing, self-invited guest. Too many memories were involved; all the meals he had eaten with Quintilius; hasty meals on the march, dull regulation meals in barracks, and those happy times, when, their free times coinciding, they could take a loaf, some cheese or meat, a little fruit and if Quintilius had succeeded in one of his little schemes, some wine, and walk away and find a place, sheltered in winter, shaded in summer, and throw themselves down and eat and drink and talk, and be not soldiers, rigid and purposeful, but two young men, interested in everything and involved in nothing.
But in the whole of the little barracks there was not one thing which justified a moment’s absence. He went back to his room, and saw Quintilius drop the used towel on the floor and begin to hobble back to his couch, and then the slaves, with nice timing, brought in the first dish.
“These mullet;’ Quintilius said, ‘were alive this morning in a pool not far from the Antonia. And if Plautus, my flat-foot, has smothered their delicate flavour with a sauce too highly spiced, he’ll smart for it.”
Fresh fish, as opposed to the salted and smoked kind upon which inland places were bound to depend, offered Vatinius an impersonal subject for talk. He had theories about diet. He said that he -was certain that the irritable skin lesions, the softening of the gums which so often afflicted soldiers—and it was said, all sailors—was caused by too much eating of preserved, easily portable food. It could be cured, he said, and he had proved it time and again by the eating of fresh meat, fruit, vegetables.
Especially cabbage.
“To my mind the least pleasant vegetable; but as a medicine, maybe acceptable,” Quintilius said.
“Tell me, are you much bothered by guerrillas?”
“Very little. There have been incidents. Fewer of late.” And he thought—Curse you for bringing that subject up, ruining what little appetite I had. He saw that in becoming the friend, the near-intimate of a few Jews, he had put himself in a well-nigh untenable position. Ebenezer and Caleb and Reuben were tactful in the extreme, but there had been mention of a man called Josodad whose son Nathan, a wild young man, had with other wild young men, been convicted and executed for the killing of a Roman soldier. It was impossible for Vatinius, a soldier and a Roman, not to feel that the sentence had been just and right; it was equally impossible for anyone who was a friend of the Jews not to see the whole thing as a tragedy. There was no doubt about it, We was easier if you ran on the orthodox lines; you could then say, I am a Roman and whatever the Romans do is right. Vatinius had once held that view; but a ruined cabbage field, a nearly raped girl, had opened his eyes. He’d come to know the people of the countryside, and sometimes he had asked himself—What are we doing here? In Gaul, and by the banks of the Rhine, by the banks of the Danube you could at least give yourself the answer that you were a civilising agent; but here, no. The Jews were civilised.