“You can undoubtedly afford to live as you like,” he said. “But to live for a whole year in an inn is downright waste..Corinth is a prosperous city. It would be wisest to put your money into a house of your own and let me help to make you comfortable there. If you’ve not enough money here, as a Roman official you would certainly get as much credit as you have the nerve to ask for.”
“Houses always need repairing,” I replied, “and servants are always quarreling. As a house owner I’d have to pay taxes to the city. Why should I give myself all those worries? It’s simpler to move to a cheaper inn if I think they’re fleecing me here.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” said Hierex; “to look after your worries as best I can. Just give me the authority and I’ll arrange things for the best. The only thing you need do is put your name to a document from the temple of Mercury. Later on you’ll have to return hospitality with hospitality. Think what you’d have to pay at an inn, for instance, when you invite six people to a festive meal with wine. In your own house, I’d do the marketing myself, get wines at wholesale prices and advise your cook. And you wouldn’t have to live like this, when any stranger knows it every time you make water or blow your nose.”
There was a great deal of good sense in his suggestion, and several days later I found myself the owner of quite a large two-story house with a garden. The reception room had a lovely mosaic floor and there were more inner rooms than I needed. I noticed that I also had a cook and a Greek doorkeeper. The house was furnished with comfortable old furniture, so nothing looked new and brash. Even a pair of Greek household gods stood in their niches each side of the altar, greasy and sooty with age, Hierex had also bought some ancestral wax masks at an auction, but I said I did not want someone else’s ancestors.
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 properly 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.”
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 tentmaker. 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?”
I need hardly repeat any more of Gallio’s broodings. But finally he gave me an order.
“Go and find out about that man’s teaching, Minutus,” he said. “You’ve the best qualifications to do so, as you’ve known him since your childhood in Antioch. And also you are in general acquainted with the Jehovah of the Jews and their laws and customs. Your father is said to have been very successful in Antioch as a mediator between the Jews and the city council.”
I seemed to have fallen into a trap and it was useless to object, for Gallio turned a deaf ear to all my protests.
“You must overcome your prejudices,” he said. “You must be honest if you are to seek the truth, insofar as your duty permits you. You’ve plenty of time. There are worse ways of passing it than studying the wisdom of this Jewish savior of the world.”
“But what if he gets me into his power with his magic?” I asked bitterly.
But Gallio did not even consider my question worth answering.
An order is an order. I had to carry it out to the best of my ability. It might be quite important to Gallio to be absolutely clear on what such a dangerous and influential rabble rouser preached. On the day of Saturn, I dressed in simple Greek clothes, found the Jews’ synagogue and went into the building next door. It was not a real synagogue but an inoffensive cloth dealer’s house which he had given up to the assembly Paul had founded.
The reception room on the upper floor was full of simple people waiting with joyful expectation in their eyes. They greeted each other in a friendly way and I too was welcomed and no one asked my name. Most of them were craftsmen, small traders or trusted slaves, but there were also some old women wearing silver ornaments. Judging by their clothes, only a few of them were Jews.
Paul arrived with several disciples. He was greeted with cries of homage as a messenger of the true God, and some women wept with joy when they saw him. He spoke in a loud, piercing voice and was so carried away with the conviction of his own words that it was like a hot wind blowing through the sweating crowd of listeners.
His voice alone pierced me to the marrow. I tried to listen attentively and make some notes on a wax tablet, for at the beginning he referred to the Jewish holy scripts, showing by quoting from them that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified in Jerusalem, in fact was the Messiah or Christus the prophets had predicted.
It was interesting that he quite openly referred to his own past. He was undoubtedly a gifted man, for he said he had studied in the renowned philosophy school in his home town, Tarsus, and later in Jerusalem with famous teachers. In his youth he had soon been elected to the highest Jewish council. He said that he had been a
