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II Third day before the Kalends of Martius. Second hour of the night. [Tuesday, February 27, c. 7:00 p.m.] For the second day I awakened early. Yet the wind has come back to the north, so I did not get up. "I have seen your daughter wandering about in nothing but a nightshirt," I told Florentina when she brought my drink to me. "She will get herself snatched and used like a graveyard whore. What does she think happened to the house gardener's wife?" Florentina regarded me with a superior silence. I presumed she would leave me to my own foolishness. So I was surprised when she said, "The gardener's wife says those things only so her husband won't be surprised when he becomes a father. A girl who's truly been done won't say." I said, "If any of our girls are raped, I expect to be told. I won't have it." She regarded this with the silence which says, You are not merely mad, but pitiable as well. After which, she did leave me. Latona tells me that Florrie is correct: The house gardener's wife has let herself to several of the freedmen. Of course that does not allay my concern about the dangers of this household. The greatest affliction of this drought is that we must have as many Syrian cleaning boys now as in the summer, because of all the dust. I spent the morning dickering with a bookseller who is waiting on a ship. He would not give up his place in the forum to come to me, so back and forth Phoebus went, trying to get a price on a recent pamphlet by Manilius. At last I was told that he did not expect to find copies available -- was I prepared to sponsor a new publication? Certainly not, I sent back to him. But then I foolishly offered him more than I should have if he can locate a copy. So he got the best of me. As a consequence of this lengthy transaction, I missed my nap and went to the bath instead. I lay down at the tenth hour, intending to rest only briefly. Instead I slept heavily. I remember this of the dream that awakened me: It was a place much like the tunnel at Puteoli, a dark passage to which I could see no end. Soon it became a warren of tenements and shops, crowded together and teeming like a slum, but all of it contained deep within the earth. Quickly there were people around me, wearing masks and playing silent flutes. A little girl held my hand. Her dress was crocus-colored. The crowd came around, shouting and pushing. In an instant the child was gone, swept off with the mob. I fought frantically to reach her but the revelers forced me into an alley, dark as night in this sunless realm. I wandered lost and desperate, endlessly turning corners, menaced by the worst kind of ruffians. Men on balconies spit at me. At last I passed a tavern. The people within were obscured by dark smoke or mist. Through that haze I saw the little girl's crocus-colored dress, like a golden mullet in a dark pool. When I approached she had become a swaddled infant. Or perhaps merely an idol. A woman held her in her arms. I knew who the woman was before I saw her face. That foreknowledge did not lessen the dread of recognition. There was a strange light in Metilia's eyes. The blood from her neck covered her breast like a banner. The child screamed like the cry of a bird. In my anger I knew I must awaken. Because of the late hour, there was not even the light that usually penetrates the edges of the shutters. I tasted fear still. I heard a child's distant scream. In my state, I was not certain if it was an echo of my dream, or if indeed I still remained within the dream. Then I understood that the scream had come from the pavilion. I leapt up and went to the door without a thought for my dress. Only on opening the door was I sensible enough to go back for my slippers and a shawl. Yet when I had got them, I heard another scream and ran out with unallayed urgency. The door to the pavilion was already ajar. The sun was just above the sea, a wound in a sky already darkened by dusk. Two children raced about on the terrace. Both were the age of the little girl in my dream. One was a dark little Syrian. The other was unusual, her complexion almost golden. In the thick of this game was Mater's new German girl, pretending to be some sort of beast. She growled at the girls. The little golden girl issued the scream that had brought me out. Mater stood in the arcade, out of the wind but taking the last of the sun. She had wrapped herself in two wool shawls and appeared weary with the whole thing. I asked her, "Who is the fair child?" "Aglae's daughter." (This explains the child's complexion -- no doubt the father was a Syrian, producing a color half between his and the mother's German pallor.) "I didn't know you also bought a child." "I won't buy a mother and leave the child. Mind you this is the first time I've paid as much for a child as for the mother. Only the whore-houses bid on Aglae, you know, because of the runaway's brand. We've dressed it with vinegar and dove crap but with her color it will never go away entirely. The marvel of it is, she's so obedient that if I didn't tell her to eat, she'd starve." "Then why did she run?" All Mater would offer was: "Syrians treat cattle better than their slaves." We watched the children while the sun disappeared. Just as the last ember remained on the horizon, Aglae's daughter walked toward the balustrade as purposefully as a little soldier. Aglae stalked the Syrian girl and did not observe her own child. I did not think the child should be allowed so close to the railing and went to caution her myself. Standing behind her, I said in Greek, "Come back here." She turned. Her eyes startled me -- in that light her eyes resembled Indian opals, with hues of the sea and fire and gold all at once. She reached out her hand to me. Something in her aspect frightened me and I would not reach for her. She ran from me. I watched in terrible fascination as she clambered onto the big stone planter. This she used as a step to achieve the balustrade -- from which another step would dash her to the rocks below. It seemed that the fading light had perished all at once. As much as I understood the urgency of going to this child, I could not move. Perhaps I feared that in attempting to rescue her I would knock her from her perch. Perhaps I remembered another dream. An obscene dream. At last I stepped onto the planter. I imagined that I stared into the foaming waves for a great while. I was surprised at how heavy the sea had become. To my ears these waves were entirely silent. Abruptly the sound of the waves returned to me, an immense percussion trailing to a deep sigh. With unthinking quickness I seized the child and clutched her to me. At the same moment the child cried out. I heard her distantly, as though I were still in my bed, listening to those vague screams from the pavilion. The image that followed was so vivid that I might have lived it. Yet it can only have been the lingering of my dream. I walked in an alley rank with spoiling garbage. On a stained brick wall someone had written in charcoal, something I could not read. Thunder rolled above me in great waves. An instant after this the sea -- not the waves beneath me, but the sea lapping the horizon -- appeared in a sudden dawn. The child called out again. With strength that astonished me she struggled from my arms. She clambered along the planter, still calling out again and again. It was always the same word -- an Aramaic word. I had no idea what she said but she was frantic about it. Her mother came to her. She plucked the child from the planter, and scolded her in Aramaic. The child would not give up with her word. I climbed down from the planter. The sea-scent and cold air restored me to this place. Yet still I heard that girl's single word. The child stared out past the harbor, pointing at something. "What is your daughter saying?" I asked Aglae in Greek. "An insect," Aglae told me. She crawled her fingers in the air. "Centipede." I looked out past the harbor. Almost at once I saw the galley, just below the northern horizon. Its oars moved like dozens of tiny legs. Indeed it appeared to be a black centipede crawling across the water. My interest brought Mater out of her shelter. "I might have expected a freighter full of Jews going to the festival," I told her. "I've never seen a warship this early in the season." The ship approached quite rapidly. "It's a bireme," Mater observed. "A fast dispatch ship -- I suspect without escort. For the two years I was in Corinth with Pilate's father I watched them come and go like that. There's never anyone important aboard, not at this time of year. We'll get news instead. Something has happened." Mater put her hand on the little German girl's head. "An insect," she told me in Latin. "Quite so. This ship is here because the scorpions in Capri have pinched someone's ass." The ship came close enough that the lighthouse was an equal distance between us. Then it pulled up oars and stopped. Certainly the pilot did not want to come into the harbor this evening, given the uncertainty of the light and the waves against the north side of the mole. "We'll see it come in tomorrow," Mater announced in Greek. "When it becomes dark, ships put down their anchors and girls put down their heads." With this she sent off Aglae and the two slave children. Despite Mater's age, I am not accustomed to regarding her as an old woman. Yet today her age was a mask on her face. She observed the black ship as though it were Charon's ferry. Then she asked: "You know where your husband has gone?" "Narbata. If we send a messenger there now, he'll be back before mid-day tomorrow." "No. He changed his plans. He's gone down to Sebaste. We won't have him back until the day after." Mater looked from the ship to me without altering her expression. "He took that woman with him. His tribune's wife. What is her name?" "Cloelia," I said. "Curtius Severus's wife." "It's reckless. He has never been reckless." "I don't imagine he has abducted her. One presumes her husband is pleased that his wife has succeeded in advancing his career." Mater did not answer. She went to the balustrade, as though she might get some notion of the galley's purpose from this infinitesimally closer distance. She quaked with the cold. "Go inside, Mater," I told her. "What do you think has happened?" she asked me. "They don't put good news on fast ships." "Perhaps Sejanus has sent instructions concerning the festival next month. That would account for the urgency." "Is it his habit to do that?" "No. But this is the first Pesah festival since the riot. It wouldn't be surprising if we received special instructions for this one." Mater spit onto the rocks. "Special instructions. Tell me what those plucked assholes in Capri know about Jews." She hardly hesitated before she asked, "What did that delator you saw yesterday want? He's the Jews' Roman errand-boy, isn't he?" "Yes. Caiaphas' lawyer. I sent him away without hearing him." Mater started to go inside. When she had gone a step she turned back. She said like an accusation: "I watched you with that child." I had no idea what she meant. She looked at me as if she were an angry bird. "I've never before seen you hold a child. Try as I will, I can't recall a time when I have seen it. You don't often even give them a pat on the head." As though conciliating my silence, she said, "I suppose it's just as well you turned out barren. You have no affection for children. Though I suppose with your people, with your minders and nurses and such, it isn't expected." I might have said, Don't tell me again how you bathed your dead babies. Instead I said nothing. Mater left me.
I dined by myself, and after came here to make this account. |
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What do we know about Pilate's wife? While we have a relatively detailed contemporary historical record of Pilate. (independent of the gospels, which were written decades after the events they describe), we have no independent historical accounts of his wife; even the gospels provide only a single glimpse of her (Matthew 27:19). Both Pilate and his wife, however, have enjoyed particularly colorful fantasy lives in Christian legends and traditions, many of which are now blithely accepted as history. From the fourth through the seventh centuries A.D. Pilate forgeries and legends were a small industry (read an excerpt from the remarkable c. 6th century A.D. "The Death of Pilate," in which Jesus' robe temporarily protects Pilate from the wrath of the Emperor Tiberius). Pilate's wife first obtains a name, Procla, in "The Giving Up of Pontius Pilate," written no earlier than the fifth century A.D., in which Pilate is beheaded, evidently at the order of no less a moral paragon than Caligula, for crucifying "a certain god." As the centuries wore on Pilate and his wife became converts. One legend held that they both became Christian martyrs; in the ninth century, they were both canonized by the Coptic church, while the The Greek Orthodox church celebrates Pilate's wife as St. Procula. Claudia Procula, the name often featured in passion plays, fiction, and cinema (including the 1961 Pontius Pilate, with Jeanne Crain as Claudia, as well as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, where Claudia Gerini plays Claudia Procle) is a later and even more problematic accretion to the myths, part and parcel of a story that Pilate's wife was the illegitimate granddaughter of the Emperor Tiberius (the Julio-Claudians were Rome's ruling family in the early first century A.D.). The various names, like the legends that generated them, have no historical validity. The commentarii provide a more plausible portrait of a Roman provincial administrator's wife. We learn that Pilate's wife's father was born into the equestrian order, the junior branch -- the Senatorial order being the senior -- of the official Roman plutocracy. The equestrian could get by with less than half the net worth required for membership in the Senate; whereas Senatorial rank was (with a few exceptions) hereditary, an equestrian might arrive at his status from mean circumstances. However, inheritance was socially preferred. Pilate's wife often refers to her childhood in Neapolis (Naples). When she was twelve, her father divorced her mother to marry a woman of considerable wealth, judging from her stepmother, Metilia's, real estate holdings: A townhouse in Rome and a villa at Baiae, the prosperous -- and, by all ancient accounts, swinging -- resort community overlooking the Bay of Naples. Pilate's wife was 32 or 33 years old at the time of her
writing -- a mature matron by Roman standards. |
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(C) 2004 Michael Ennis |
