The Beacon at Alexandria Read online

  A BIT OF HISTORY

  IN THE YEAR A.D. 293, the emperor Diocletian looked at the state of his empire and found it desperate. Staggering out of a half-century of civil war, pressed by foreign enemies along the whole of the northern and the eastern frontier, torn still by civil rebellion, plagued by rampant inflation, administrative corruption, and a crumbling tax base, the Roman Empire was on the brink of collapse. Diocletian pulled it back. After vigorous campaigns against foreign and domestic enemies, he instituted a number of administrative reforms which caused the empire’s citizens to refer to their age as the Diocletian Era for the next century and more. But the empire he created bore little resemblance to that formed by Caesar Augustus.

  Chief among Diocletian’s reforms was the division of the empire into two halves: the Greek East and the Latin West. Each of these had its own emperor, who took the title of Augustus and had his own civil and military staff. The “college” of emperors in theory acted as one. (In practice they not infrequently killed each other, but that is not to the point.) The number of provinces was increased (Britain, for example, became four provinces), and provinces were grouped in dioceses (nothing to do with the church). Thus the province “Asia” became a section of the coast of Asia Minor, and was in the diocese of Asiana. Civilian provincial governors were joined by regional military commanders who bore the title of “comes” or “dux” — commonly rendered here as “count” and “duke,” though this is a bit misleading because the offices were not hereditary.

  Diocletian’s eventual successor, Constantine, further altered the face of the empire by instituting more administrative and financial reforms, by founding a new capital for the East (which he named, with typical self-effacement, Constantinople), and by favoring the (comparatively) new religion of Christianity, which Diocletian had tried to stamp out. Christianity moved within a generation from being the faith of a persecuted minority to being the official faith of the Roman world. The shock to the church was enormous, caused an immediate outbreak of heresies, and left scars that persist to our own day. But the new faith caught on. Constantine was baptized on his deathbed, and his three sons (Constans, Constantine II, and Constantius) were all Christians. Their successor, Julian the Apostate, attempted to reinstate paganism, but met with only limited success before his early death during a campaign against the Persians.

  Following the death of Julian, the army elected Jovian (another Christian) as emperor; when he died shortly thereafter, in February 364, Valentinian, a Christian army officer from Pannonia, was chosen. Valentinian took command of the Western Empire, leaving his brother Valens to rule the East.

  The historical events that form the background for this novel took place between 371 and 378: I have somewhat distorted the chronology, and slipped in a couple of extra years. I apologize to the purists for this liberty, but I can’t say I find it significant. The historical background may be tolerably accurate, and many of the characters are based on real people, but the central events and characters of this novel are my own invention. I wrote it for fun, and in the hope that others would enjoy it.

  I apologize also for the chaotic spelling of proper names. The old tradition was to transliterate Greek names into Latin spellings; the new tradition is to put at least some of them into English spellings. I have followed the new tradition, except where there is some chance that the name will be familiar to my readers. My motive for doing this is not pure pedantry. I doubt that the general reader can tell a transliterated Greek name from a native Latin one, and I thought that this must obscure the considerable cultural diversity that marked the later Roman Empire. But the situation is complicated by the fact that in the late empire, there were plenty of prominent individuals with names neither Greek nor Latin but Persian or Gothic or Alamannic or Syriac or even Judeo-Christian, and it is very hard to know what to do with them. I’m afraid that I gave up on system and simply chose the form of name I liked most.

  Finally, a word of special pleading. Scholars of the period will not need me to tell them of the debt I owe the historian Ammianus Marcellinus: it shouts itself from all the most accurate bits of this piece of fiction. Unfortunately, nonscholars are unlikely even to have heard of this writer. The last English translation printed was, as far as I can work out, C. D. Yonge’s in 1862. This is shocking treatment for a writer generally acknowledged as one of the finest historians of antiquity, who is not only honest, intelligent, and comprehensive but vivid and forceful, elegant and witty as well. Ammianus, like the period he describes, deserves more attention.

  THE BIRD HAD DIED. It lay on its side in the bottom of the wicker basket, its eyes glazed and shrunken in its head. Its feathers still felt warm when I touched them. But it was a warm day.

  I’d found the bird at the bottom of the garden wall. It had a broken wing, and sat under the wall with its beak agape, panting. It didn’t stir itself much even when I picked it up. I guessed that some boy in the street beyond the wall had thrown a stone at it.

  I splinted its wing very carefully, extending it first and then wrapping it crosswise with linen over wool, compressing the material a little over the head of the joint, as Hippocrates recommends. Hippocrates says that people should have a light diet while recovering from a fracture, and can be dosed with hellebore; but I didn’t have any hellebore, and anyway I didn’t know the correct dose for a bird. So I gave it a drink of water and fed it some bread and milk. I put it in a basket, together with some more water, in the loft of the stable, where the hay was kept, and gave Philoxenos, the groom, a present so that he wouldn’t tell anyone about it. My nurse, Maia, didn’t like me playing doctor, particularly to common field birds and animals. “You are a young lady, Charis,” she would say. “You are the daughter of the clarsisimist Theodoros of Ephesus, and I expect you to behave like it!” She meant clarissimus. That’s a Latin title; I think it means something like “very brilliant,” which is a silly sort of thing to call a man like my father, who was really only interested in horse racing and Homer. But it only meant that he was of consular rank and important in the province. Maia never could say any Latin word properly, not even titles, and she loved titles. “My master is His Excellency Theodoros of Ephesus,” she would tell the people in the market, “clarsisimist and consular. He was governor of Syria and of Galatia and held the rank of consul at Constantinople — and you want to overcharge me for a yard of dirty woolens? Off with you!”

  Behaving like the daughter of Theodoros of Ephesus meant wearing long dresses with purple stripes on the hem and gold embroidery on the cloak, and never, ever getting them dirty; having my hair curled and piled up to make it look fashionable, and trying to keep it that way; looking at the floor if a strange man was present; and keeping my mouth shut. It also meant not playing doctor. But I was allowed to read Hippocrates. Well, to be more exact, no one objected when I read Hippocrates. Maia couldn’t read, and thought it ladylike to read anything; my father never knew or cared what I read, so long as I knew my Homer; and Ischyras, my tutor, loved Hippocrates. Not that he was interested in medicine. “Pure Ionic!” he would exclaim delightedly when we read some passage about vomiting. “It’s as good as Herodotos: voh-meet-ing! Such lovely long vowels, so musical!” He never seemed to notice what was being said, only the style it was being said in. Once I suggested that we read some Galen, and he was shocked. “Galen! That Alexandrian quack! Why, he writes almost in the common speech, like a tradesman, not a scholar. No, no, my dear, let us leave science to tradesmen. We shall read something elevated, something in a beautiful style.” I could have pointed out that Hippocrates had written in the common speech of his day, and that it was just luck that this happened to be a beautiful Ionic dialect rather than our own Koine. But I con
sidered myself lucky to be reading him at all, and kept my mouth shut. So we read Hippocrates, bless his beautiful Ionic vowels, and I played doctor on the sly, with injured songbirds and lapdogs, and tried to keep my dresses clean. My brother, Thorion, kept promising to copy some Galen for me in the Celsian Library, but he never did.

  I had brought another dish of bread and milk for my thrush. I’d have to feed it to the guard dog now: taking it back into the house would lead to too many questions. I was very sad that the bird had died. Death is sad, even the death of a bird, and I wished I hadn’t tormented the poor creature with my splinting first. But I couldn’t have known that it would die. And why had it died? It had seemed to be perking up when I had left it.

  I picked the bird up and examined it. There was no swelling in the wing, so I hadn’t got the dressing too tight. Unless birds don’t swell the way people do. Most likely, though, the stone that broke the bird’s wing had damaged it inside as well. There was a little dried blood around the bird’s nose. It hadn’t moved its bowels, so I couldn’t tell anything from that. I’d know what was wrong if I did a dissection. But I’d need some good sharp knives for that, somewhere to work where I was sure not to be interrupted, and something to cover my dress with. In other words, I needed the help of my brother.

  I put the dead thrush back in the basket and climbed down the ladder from the loft. No one was in the stable, except the horses. I took my cloak off and picked all the straw off it, then put it on again and walked out into the yard. Philoxenos was there, exercising a pair of my father’s racehorses on a lead rein. He nodded when I came out. “Fed your pet, then, young mistress?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “It died.”

  “Phew,” he said sympathetically. Philoxenos liked animals; horses in particular, but animals in general. He knew a lot about them too, together with all sorts of remedies for hoof galls and sprained joints. He saw nothing odd about splinting a field bird’s wing. But he was a practical man. “Do you want it cooked?” he asked me. “Nice braised with honey, thrushes are. My wife could do it for you.”

  “No, thank you. Not yet, anyway. Could you please not touch it until this evening?”

  He smiled and nodded. He assumed that I was just squeamish about eating a bird I’d made a pet of. I didn’t want to tell him that I meant to dissect it: he’d see no point in that, and he always got very annoyed when his masters behaved unreasonably.

  The horses had stopped their trotting and were standing with their heads down, nuzzling the gravel for stray wisps of hay to eat. Philoxenos turned his attention back to them; he cracked his whip and shook the lead rein. They started off — in different directions. Philoxenos swore at them and pulled them together again, coaxing and easing the reins until they trotted together in a circle. I went on toward the house.

  Our house was by the northeast edge of Ephesus, where the land rises in the hill called Mount Pion. It actually straddled the city wall, which ran through the back garden. We had a gate set into the wall, so that we could go through it to the stables outside. Thinking back on it now, all these years later with the world changed, it seems extraordinary: a private gentleman knocking a gate into the city wall so that he wouldn’t have to go through the streets to see his racehorses. What if the city came under siege? Even at the time, the city council and the army dukes who stayed in Ephesus didn’t like our postern, but whenever they mentioned it to my father he just smiled and said he couldn’t keep his horses properly if he couldn’t reach them from his house. “And really, Your Excellency,” he would add, if it was a duke, “what’s the use of Ephesus having a wall anyway? There’s not going to be a war here, is there, eh? And even if there were, with you in charge, the enemy would never come anywhere near the city. No, no, you leave my little gate alone!”

  The house was at the end of its street. It had a marble front, but otherwise didn’t look very impressive — viewed from the street. But from the back it sprawled magnificently down the hillside. I stood in the postern for a moment, looking at it. It was a bright, sunny spring day. Behind me the hillside was green and hot, and the sky was still the intense moist blue of spring, not yet faded with the summer heat. The horses, two matched black mares, circled the gravel yard behind me, in step now, their coats shining in the light, their hooves crunching the stones, with Philoxenos crooning at them. The gateway was dark and cool, the stone damp to the touch. Ahead of me the kitchen garden and the whitewashed plaster and red tile roofs of the back of the house seemed to shine: deep green, vivid white, blood red. Rising beyond them was the dome that hung over the central part of the house, painted a light green, like a bird’s egg suspended against the blue sky. It was a whim of my grandfather’s to build a house with a domed banquet room, like a palace; my grandfather had inflated ideas of his own importance. But it was a beautiful house. It had five courtyards, two colonnaded, three with fountains; it had a separate bathhouse and a separate bakery; it had nearly a hundred rooms, with tiled floors and painted walls, hypocausts to keep it warm in winter and gardens to help cool it in the summer.

  It was not an old house. My great-grandfather had acquired the fortune that founded it. He was the owner of a fair-sized farm in the valley eastward, and he profiteered in the sale of its produce during the civil wars, then succeeded in backing the right emperor, proved himself an exceptionally competent administrator, and profiteered further from imperial appointments. My grandfather finished the house and consolidated the fortune: more farms were added to the first, with vineyards and olive groves, wheatfields and orchards, but particularly stud farms to breed racehorses. He left my father one of the largest estates in the province. So my father now passed as a man of established and noble lineage. Well, three generations of wealth is more than the emperors themselves can claim. The father of Their Sacred Majesties, Our Lords the Augusti Valens and Valentinian, was a common soldier from Pannonia.

  I went into the house and looked for my brother Thorion.

  Thorion was really called Theodoros, like our father, but when he had been five and called me Charition, “little Charis,” in a superior fashion, I had called him Thorion back; I was too small then to say Theodorion. He was seventeen, more than a year older than I, and he was supposed to be grown up, while I was still considered a child. Boys are allowed more freedom than girls anyway. When we were both small we used to play together, spying on the household slaves and stealing from the kitchen. When we had to study, I helped Thorion out with his reading — he was never very good at books, though he’d inherited our grandfather’s sense about money. So when he finished school and was given his own room and an allowance and three slaves and his own carriage, it was as though the privileges were given to me too. That was how I saw it, anyway, and Thorion, after some protests, usually agreed.

  I found Thorion in the Blue Court, studying Latin. The Blue Court was called that because of the fountain in it, which was covered with blue tiles and a mosaic of dolphins; it also had a plane tree to sit under, and it was light and cool in the hottest weather. Thorion was sitting on the ground beside the fountain, scowling at his tablet and chewing on his stylus. He’d taken his cloak off and his green tunic was halfway up his thighs: if Maia saw him, she’d be furious. “Theodoros son of Theodoros!” I exclaimed, imitating her. “Look at you, a nobleman of an ancient line, sitting on the ground in your tunic like a peasant, and chewing your stylus! I’m —”

  Thorion threw his tablet at me. I caught it. “Shut up and help me,” he said. “What’s the plural of magister militum?”

  “Magistri militum,” I said, after thinking for a moment.

  “Not milita?”

  “No. They’re already plural, aren’t they? Master of arms, masters of arms?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Thorion. He hated Latin. Our old tutor Ischyras hated it too. “That the world should come to this!” he’d lament. “A Hellene of noble family, studying a barbarian language!” But the law uses Latin, and if you want to get anywhere in the imperial
administration, you have to know it. Thorion wanted to get somewhere in the administration. “Father does nothing but spend money,” he would say in disgust. “Horse racing and magistracies! I’m going to court to earn some. You can get thirty pounds in gold just for recommending somebody as a notary!” He talked Father into arranging lessons for him with the local professor of Latin and law, and dragged me into learning it too, to explain it to him. “You’re good at book-learning,” he told me.

  “Have you copied that Galen for me?” I asked him. I knew he hadn’t, but I’d be in a better position to get his help with the dissection when he admitted it.

  He bit his stylus and jerked his head back: no. That was another peasant habit Maia detested. But Thorion had a lot of peasant in him. He was already big for his age, very wide across the shoulders, with big hands, and his teeth were crooked. His hair was as black as mine, but his curled naturally, while mine had to be fixed with curling irons all the time — unfair. He was said to look exactly like our grandfather. I took after our mother: tall, thin, and bony, with big eyes. “She was such a lady!” all the house slaves said. “So delicate, so polite!” But she had died of childbed fever the week after giving birth to me, so I couldn’t judge of this. I’d rather take after Grandfather.

  “Can I use your room for a bit?” I asked. “And your knives?”

  Thorion scowled. “Did it die?” he asked. He knew about the thrush, of course; I’d shown it to him after I splinted the wing, and he’d been impressed by the splint, though really he thought that thrushes were better braised with honey.

  “I wouldn’t be asking for knives if it were alive, would I?”

  “I don’t know. You could have found something dead.”

  “Well, I didn’t. I want to see why the thrush died.”

  Thorion scowled again. “What’s the point of that? I can understand wanting to make an animal better, but cutting it up after it’s dead . . .”