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Authors: Craig Smith
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strange people, I have heard,' Pilate answered, 'the real Jews.'
'Incomprehensible, I'm afraid,' Gratus answered, his mouth grimacing oddly.
'Sejanus believes all men, Prefect, are handled easily enough if one understands the essentials of management.'
'Sejanus was a boy when I left Rome. But tell me, what does he say are the essentials?'
'Taken together men are like horses, driven by the whip and restrained by the bit. One manages them successfully when neither instrument is abused.'
Gratus' eyes momentarily registered the unintended insult of this remark, but rather than show his irritation, he pretended to be amused. 'With the Jews, sir, one rides a horse whose ears inevitably lie flat against its skull.'
Pilate thought better than to answer this. He had never encountered a Jew in his life, real or otherwise.
'I look forward to learning a great deal from your experience,' Pilate answered.
'Then I must disappoint you. I sail tomorrow at first light.'
'A pity,' Pilate murmured with the satisfaction of one anxious to get started with the business of governing and in no mood for a tired old man's discourses on history.
Pilate had lived so long on the island of Capri that he had nearly forgotten the pleasures a city could offer. Caesarea provided racing and gladiator contests, jugglers, dancers and seemingly endless performances of tragedy and comedy. Hardly a week passed when the new prefect did not entertain hundreds of individuals remarkable for their cosmopolitan character: Romans one night, Syrians, Egyptians, or Greeks the next, once even a delegation of Parthian ambassadors who came for the express purpose of paying homage to the beauty of the prefect's wife, meaning of course they honoured her distant cousin, the emperor Tiberius.
Pilate enjoyed the life, but it did not seduce him. His real passion was his work, and he turned to it the moment Gratus's ship cleared the harbour. An appointment lasted three years and it came with the understanding that a man returning to Rome after that amount of time, if he could last his full tenure, was expected to return as a wealthy individual. He had better, for his extended family expected it, and should he nurse any ambition beyond retirement to the countryside he would need money to win new appointments.
In Capri construction projects had continued steadily throughout his entire six years. His harbour was active, but Pilate's opportunities for financial gain had been limited both by the number of ships arriving and by the fact that the lion's share of building occurred on the Villa Jovis of Tiberius - the one man in the empire it did not pay to extort. Now he would have three provinces as his own, including two major cities and the greatest harbour along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean between Antioch and Alexandria.
The harbour itself was sufficient to make a man wealthy. Appropriate a fig here, a date there, he thought: over the course of a day a man could fill a shop with fruit! And tomorrow another. Then there was the copper, the iron ore, the timber, the precious building stones. Spices, fruits, grain, salt, beef, horses, sheep, pigs, goats - the list was endless. Men of business knew that everything moved swiftly with the Roman prefect's goodwill. The smart ones knew goodwill came at a price.
The new prefect's first encounter with the Jews came early in his tenure and was unaccountably strange. The priests of the Temple of Jerusalem arrived by the overland route some two weeks after Pilate had established himself in the prefect's palace. They came, he thought, two weeks too late. He therefore ordered them to wait in his courtyard just beyond the great hall until he had finished his business. Late in the afternoon, when he would normally retire to the palace baths for exercise, Pilate ordered his adjutant, the centurion Cornelius, to bring the priests into his presence.
Cornelius had long ago completed his required twenty-five years of service. A year or
'Incomprehensible, I'm afraid,' Gratus answered, his mouth grimacing oddly.
'Sejanus believes all men, Prefect, are handled easily enough if one understands the essentials of management.'
'Sejanus was a boy when I left Rome. But tell me, what does he say are the essentials?'
'Taken together men are like horses, driven by the whip and restrained by the bit. One manages them successfully when neither instrument is abused.'
Gratus' eyes momentarily registered the unintended insult of this remark, but rather than show his irritation, he pretended to be amused. 'With the Jews, sir, one rides a horse whose ears inevitably lie flat against its skull.'
Pilate thought better than to answer this. He had never encountered a Jew in his life, real or otherwise.
'I look forward to learning a great deal from your experience,' Pilate answered.
'Then I must disappoint you. I sail tomorrow at first light.'
'A pity,' Pilate murmured with the satisfaction of one anxious to get started with the business of governing and in no mood for a tired old man's discourses on history.
Pilate had lived so long on the island of Capri that he had nearly forgotten the pleasures a city could offer. Caesarea provided racing and gladiator contests, jugglers, dancers and seemingly endless performances of tragedy and comedy. Hardly a week passed when the new prefect did not entertain hundreds of individuals remarkable for their cosmopolitan character: Romans one night, Syrians, Egyptians, or Greeks the next, once even a delegation of Parthian ambassadors who came for the express purpose of paying homage to the beauty of the prefect's wife, meaning of course they honoured her distant cousin, the emperor Tiberius.
Pilate enjoyed the life, but it did not seduce him. His real passion was his work, and he turned to it the moment Gratus's ship cleared the harbour. An appointment lasted three years and it came with the understanding that a man returning to Rome after that amount of time, if he could last his full tenure, was expected to return as a wealthy individual. He had better, for his extended family expected it, and should he nurse any ambition beyond retirement to the countryside he would need money to win new appointments.
In Capri construction projects had continued steadily throughout his entire six years. His harbour was active, but Pilate's opportunities for financial gain had been limited both by the number of ships arriving and by the fact that the lion's share of building occurred on the Villa Jovis of Tiberius - the one man in the empire it did not pay to extort. Now he would have three provinces as his own, including two major cities and the greatest harbour along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean between Antioch and Alexandria.
The harbour itself was sufficient to make a man wealthy. Appropriate a fig here, a date there, he thought: over the course of a day a man could fill a shop with fruit! And tomorrow another. Then there was the copper, the iron ore, the timber, the precious building stones. Spices, fruits, grain, salt, beef, horses, sheep, pigs, goats - the list was endless. Men of business knew that everything moved swiftly with the Roman prefect's goodwill. The smart ones knew goodwill came at a price.
The new prefect's first encounter with the Jews came early in his tenure and was unaccountably strange. The priests of the Temple of Jerusalem arrived by the overland route some two weeks after Pilate had established himself in the prefect's palace. They came, he thought, two weeks too late. He therefore ordered them to wait in his courtyard just beyond the great hall until he had finished his business. Late in the afternoon, when he would normally retire to the palace baths for exercise, Pilate ordered his adjutant, the centurion Cornelius, to bring the priests into his presence.
Cornelius had long ago completed his required twenty-five years of service. A year or
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