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TIBERIUS JULIUS ALEXANDER
A Historical Novel
By DANIEL M. FRIEDENBERG Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2010 Daniel M. Friedenberg
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-61614-175-2
Chapter One
It was about ten o'clock in the evening when, slumped in my usual worn brown leather armchair, the telephone rang. "How unusual," I thought, putting down the proofs of my new translation from the Greek of Maneto, whose early account of Egyptian history is so important. I am an old bachelor. In fact it was two years since I had retired as a director of the Chicago Oriental Institute. Who would be calling at this late hour? My only surviving niece? She was on a vacation in Israel and had no reason to call.
With the same quizzical look my two Persian cats, Alexander and Darius, twitched their tails. Alexander purred and then closed his eyes. Darius continued to look at the telephone.
"Professor Fremont? Is that Professor Fremont?"
The voice was familiar but I couldn't identify it. Then the voice changed to Greek and I realized, impossible as it seemed, it was Archbishop Demetrios, head of the dioikein or diocese of Deir Sant Katarin under Mt. Sinai in Egypt, actually the smallest diocese in the world. What in the name of Aristotle was he doing, calling me at this time of night?
"Professor Fremont?" the voice queried again.
"The Most Reverend Demetrios?" I asked. "His Holiness?"
"Indeed. I am calling not from Cairo, where I usually reside with my Coptic brethren, but from what you non-Greeks call Saint Catherine's Monastery. Usually nonbelievers as well, including a certain Professor Fremont."
"Epicurean, Your Excellency, Epicurean. Another type of believer." We had the same joke for thirty years. The archbishop knew I had been born a Jew but considered myself a follower of Epicurus. "Horrible," he had sniffed at my first visit to Saint Catherine's Monastery-so many years ago! But with his sense of humor he had added, "At least Epicurus was a Greek." The archbishop was fanatical about his Greek Orthodox religion, modified by common sense as when the Christian monks had to build a mosque and hospice within the monastery grounds to soothe the Egyptian Moslem authorities.
"You must come to Deir Sant Katarin," said the archbishop after some small talk. "I have to show you an astonishing find."
"As you know, Your Holiness, I am now an old man. Why me? Why not Professor Caldwell Taylor of Cambridge University? He is younger and it is summer recess at Cambridge. If it is a literary find as I suspect, Professor Taylor can also read Koine." That was the written and spoken language from the first Cataract of the Egyptian Nile north to Macedonia, and east from Libya to Syria. It had evolved as a dialect from the Ionian Greek after the conquest of Alexander.
"I prefer you," the archbishop said. "I agree that Professor Taylor is a great scholar of ancient classical Greek, but this find is written in Koine, which is your specialty."
"A find?" I questioned. I must admit I was flattered by his remarks. Professor Taylor and I years ago had divided the Loeb Classical Library translation from the Greek, his being the lion's share, those written by classical Greeks, while mine had been the later Alexandrians, where my knowledge of the Koine dialect was superior.
"What is it?" I asked. At seventy-five with arthritis in my knees and elbows, I was not especially anxious to make another trip to the monastery, where I had toiled almost every summer over a period of thirty years to catalogue their extensive library's collection of ancient manuscripts.
"Do you remember, Professor Fremont, that the north wall of the monastery had been partly destroyed by an earthquake in the fourteenth century and later rebuilt? Some of the brick had fallen out of the weakened section during a recent minor earthquake and in building back the wall we found in a crevice a manuscript. Micegnawed, it is true, but still mainly legible. We sent it to the Hebrew University. As you know," he added with a touch of sarcasm, "you Jews are clever at that sort of thing, and they applied some scientific treatment and unrolled the scroll; actually unrolled three separate parts because some sections had not only been eaten by the mice but were rotted by time."
I held my tongue. Of course I was Jewish by birth but after years of study I had become a skeptic, or more correctly, an Epicurean. But the archbishop, no matter how sophisticated-and he was indeed-could never forget I was born a Jew.
As though to enter the conversation supporting me, my Persian cat Alexander opened his eyes and, walking to me, brushed my legs as if to say, "There, there ... all is well."
"Why did I not call Professor Taylor?" Archbishop Demetrios answered: "It is because ... sit down, Professor. It is a manuscript written by Philon Iudaeus! One of the monks here could read enough Koine to see references to the man you call Philo and to believe not only is it a kind of autobiography but there are references to a Jewish revolt against Rome!"
I was stunned. As His Holiness knew, Philo was my specialty. I had translated all his known dialogues for the Loeb Classical Library and even written a philosophical analysis, which in all modesty is used as the definitive study of Philo's thought in the major universities, translated from English to French, Spanish to Italian, and even into Syriac.
That was the reason Archbishop Demetrios had called me rather than Professor Taylor. Now I understood.
I hesitated. "Is the scroll long?" I asked.
"Quite long, and there are those breaks. But with your knowledge of Philo's style, having done so many translations, you can probably put together some of the missing or faded parts."
I was tempted. "Will you pay my expenses?" I asked. "And some kind of a fee? My pension is not large."
"Yes," he said. "And you can stay with our monks in the dormitory, as you've done before. But of course we have the publication rights."
"Your Holiness, let me think about it. Can I call you back in a few days?"
"I understand. Call me at my Cairo number, which you know. I have to leave this week and will be there some time before returning to Deir Sant Katarin. And stay in good health."
"One great advantage is the dry climate," I said. "At least my arthritis will hurt less."
"Good. I wait for your call. Theos hypsistos. God the Most High spare you."
I got up from the armchair. The room was small. On each side of the entry door were closets for my clothes and linen. Opposite was a line of windows overlooking the grounds of the cooperative. Both sidewalls were lined with shelves holding books, old scrolls, and miscellaneous manuscripts. On one side were the Greek translations of Caldwell Taylor, those of the most prominent Greek historians, playwrights, and philosophers-the usual Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Euripides, etc. Mingled with them were his earlier translations in which I had put slips to show errors in translation. Placed in the bottom row of shelves was a basket where my cat Darius had been trained to sleep.
On the opposite wall were the shelves that contained my translations of Alexandrian Greek literature, fewer volumes and in very limited editions-unlike Taylor, I thought to myself with chagrin and often of persons not even known to many Greek scholars. The writers were all from Alexandria by birth or choice: The great Claudius Ptolemaeus, whose original work in astronomy, mathematics, and geography places him among the geniuses of all time; Erasistratus, who founded a school of anatomy at Alexandria and invented the catheter; and Manetho the historian, unusual for being an ethnic Egyptian.
Most of all I confess that I was the proudest of my translation of Alexandrian Jewish writers who, but for me, might have fallen into oblivion. They mainly dealt with Jewish lore and the Septuagint, the translation into Greek of the Holy Scripture. There was Demetrios, curiously the same name as the archbishop, who wrote Kings of Judaea, attempting to justify the contradictions of the dates of biblical events; Aristoboulos, Explanations of the Mosaic Writ, who in his religious enthusiasm stated that Pythagoras and Plato drew from the Pentateuch; and the amusing anonymous Alexandrian Jew who wrote a love story popular for many centuries called Joseph and Asenath, which tells of a beautiful pagan woman who falls in love with the biblical Joseph and their trials before a happy ending in which she converts to Judaism. On the top shelf were my translations of Philo, which had at least sold a decent number of copies.
Placed in the bottom row of these shelves, which had far more vacant space than those with the books of Caldwell Taylor, was the basket in which my cat Alexander slept. "How can I abandon all these beautiful books?" I asked myself, "if only for three or four months? It might take even longer. And where can I leave Alexander and Darius?"
As if knowing my thoughts, Alexander twitched and sneezed. He then rubbed his paws together and drifted back to sleep. He too had bad dreams, as did my hero, Alexander the Great.
I undressed after running with affection my hands over the books I had translated, got into bed, and tossed uneasily all night. It was difficult to sleep. In a furtive dream Philo came to me and said the manuscript was so unkind to his nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander, an apostate Roman general, that it would be better not to translate. Then Tiberius Alexander answered his Uncle Philo and said, "Why not? It tells a story very few know, namely that the Jewish War was a civil war as much as a war against the Romans, and if I opposed it so did many of the priestly Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Jewish nobility, including King Agrippa II and Princess Berenice, both direct descendants of Herod the Great and observant Jews. Tell the story. Translate the manuscript. Some might even consider, once the facts are known, that the Jewish War was a class war in modern economic terms."
My head was spinning. I had not been aware that Philo wrote of the Jewish War. The idea excited me. How would he analyze it differently than Josephus? And didn't he die before that great uprising started?
Three days later, after calling Archbishop Demetrios, I made flight arrangements for Cairo. A former student, Professor James Hill, successor to my chair of Classical Greek at the University of Chicago, had kindly agreed to keep my cats until my return.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from TIBERIUS JULIUS ALEXANDER by DANIEL M. FRIEDENBERG Copyright © 2010 by Daniel M. Friedenberg. Excerpted by permission.
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