Rubrius, the senior centurion, and Gallio’s Greek lawyer were my first guests. Hierex appointed a Greek sage to talk to the guests and a skillful dancing-girl with a flute player for lighter entertainment. The food was excellent. My guests left me at midnight in a state of civilized inebriation. Later I found out that they had had themselves taken straight to the nearest brothel, for from there they had a bill sent to me to teach me Corinthian customs. I was unmarried, so I should have acquired a woman guest from the Temple mountain for each of my guests. But I did not want to be part of such customs.
Anyhow, I do not know what would have happened, because Hierex did his best, quietly and gradually, to train me to be the kind of master he wished to have. But it was court day again. Gallio, still with a hangover from the previous night, had hardly sat down and adjusted his toga prop- erly when a crowd of Jews rushed up to him, dragging with diem two men who were also Jews. In the Jewish way, they all shouted at once until Gallio, after smiling for a while, said sharply that one of them should speak for the rest. After they had consulted together to decide on the charge, their leader stepped forward.
“This man,” he said, “is misleading people into worshiping God in an unlawful manner.”
I was depressed and frightened to find that even here, and as a member of the court too, I was to be involved in the quarrels of the Jews. I looked carefully at the accused man. He was nearly bald, his eyes burning and his ears large. He stood proudly upright in his worn goatskin cloak.
As if in a dream I remembered I had seen him many years ago in my father’s house in Antioch. I was even more frightened then, for in Antioch he had caused so much trouble that the Jews who recognized Christ had preferred to send him away to sow dissension among Jews elsewhere.
The man had already opened his mouth to begin his defense, but Gallio, guessing what was coming, signaled to him to be quiet and turned to the Jews.
“If this were a matter of a crime or an evil deed, then I might have listened to you with patience,” he said. “But if you are disagreeing on your teaching and its name and your own laws, then those are your own troubles. I do not wish to sit in judgment on them.”
He ordered the Jews to move away and turned to us.
“If I gave the Jews my little finger,” he explained, “I should never hear the end of it.”
179
But he did not rid himself of them quite so lightly as that. After the court session he again invited us to a meal, but he was distrait and sunk in thought. Afterwards he took me to one side.
“I know that man the Jews wished to accuse,” he said confidentially. “He has lived in Corinth for a year and earns his living honesdy as a tent-maker. His name is Paul. They say he has changed his name to hide his past and taken a new name from a former governor of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus. His teaching made a deep impression on Sergius in his day and Sergius is by no means simple, although he did try predicting by the stars and letting a magician live with him. So Paul is not an insignificant man. I thought his piercing eyes looked right through me into another world as he stood before me so fearlessly.”
“He’s the worst troublemaker among the Jews,” I said without thinking. “In Antioch in my childhood, he tried to drag my good father into the intrigues of the Jews.”
“You must have been much too young at the time to understand his teachings,” Gallio remarked considerately. “Before he came to Corinth, he is said to have preached in the market in Athens. The Athenians took the trouble to listen to him and even said he might do so again. You can hardly be wiser than they.
“In fact,” he went on, “I’d very much like to ask him here in secret sometime to find out properly about his teaching. But that might give rise to gossip and offend the rich Jews of Corinth. I have to keep myself strictly impartial. As far as I can make out, he has founded some kind of synagogue of his own alongside the Jewish synagogue, and he is pleasingly different from them in that he instructs anyone who cares to come, and also prefers Greeks to Jews.”
Gallio had obviously thought a great deal on these matters for he continued to speak of them.
“In Rome I did not believe that foolish story about the runaway slave called Christus,” he said. “We live in a time when all the ground beneath our thoughts is giving way. I cannot talk about the gods. In their traditional forms, they are only images which can amuse simple souls. But the teachers of wisdom cannot make man good or give him peace of mind either. We’ve seen this in the Stoics and the Epicureans. Perhaps this wretched Jew has really found some divine secret. Why else should his teaching provoke so much quarreling, hatred and envy among the Jews?”
180
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270