took much too hot a bath before the meal. But let us regard this heart attack as a good omen rather than a bad one. You all heard with what rancor he spoke of the Emperor and his mother. His younger brother Lucius took his own life in almost the same way in his day, just to spoil the wedding day of Claudius and Agrippina, when Claudius had broken off his betrothal to Octavia.”
We all began to talk at once of how the heart of an overweight man can burst from too much excitement, and how the face suddenly darkens. Helius fetched Silanus’ physician, who had already retired to bed in accordance with the Cos people’s healthy rules of life. He arrived looking frightened, turned the body over, asked for more light and looked distrustfully down Silanus’ throat. Then he covered his head with his mantle without a word.
When Publius Celer questioned him, he admitted in a broken voice that he had often warned his master against gorging himself with good food, and confirmed that all the signs pointed to a heart attack.
“This unfortunate episode should be recorded on a physician’s certificate,” said Publius Celer, “and also in an official document which we shall all sign as witnesses. An unexpected death causes evil tongues to wag when it is a question of a well-known person. So it should be noted down that I myself tasted the wine before passing it on to him.”
We looked at one another in confusion. It had certainly looked as if Celer had first raised the goblet to his lips, but on the other hand he could quite easily have pretended to do so if the goblet had contained poison. I have described here exactly what happened, because afterwards it was said that Agrippina had sent Celer with the specific task of poisoning Silanus. Certainly his death occurred at a very convenient moment.
Gossip maintained that Celer had bribed both Helius and the physician, and my name was also dragged into the case with a malicious reference to my friendship with Nero. The trial of Celer, which at the request of the Senate was held to investigate the matter thoroughly, was postponed year after year and was finally shelved when Celer died of old age. I should have been glad to have stood witness on his behalf. Helius was later given a prominent position in Nero’s service.
The Proconsul’s sudden death naturally attracted considerable attention in Ephesus as well as in the whole province of Asia. There was no big funeral, so as not to cause anxiety among the people, and his body was cremated in his own beloved garden at his country property. When the pyre had burned down, we collected the ashes and put them in a fine urn which was sent to the Silanus family’s rapidly filled mausoleum in Rome. Publius Celer took over the Proconsulate until the Senate had time to choose a new Proconsul for Asia from those who were waiting their turn. Silanus’ term of. office was soon to have come to an end anyhow.
The change of regime itself had aroused considerable unrest in Ephesus, and the death of the Proconsul worsened the situation. The city’s innumerable fortunetellers, miracle workers, sellers of black magic books, and first and foremost the silversmiths, who sold small models of the temple of Artemis as souvenirs, took advantage of this opportunity to cause disturbances in the streets and to ill-treat the Jews.
Paul, of course, was the cause of this. I now found out that he had been sowing discord in Ephesus for two years, and it was of him that Silanus’ physician had spoken, although I did not realize it at the time.
Paul had persuaded his followers to collect all their astrological calendars and books of dreams, worth a hundred or so sesterces, and burn them publicly in the forum as a demonstration against their rivals. The bonfire of books had aroused the ire of the superstitious people of Ephesus, and even the educated people did not like books being burned, although they themselves did not bother much with the good and evil days of horoscopes or the interpretation of dreams. But they feared that philosophy and poetry might be next to land in the fire.
I was seized with fury when I once again heard Paul named as a disturber of the peace. I should have liked to leave Ephesus at once, but Publius Celer feared more uprisings and asked me to take over the command of the city cavalry and the Roman garrison.
It was not long before the city council sent an anxious message to say that great crowds were on their way along the streets leading to the Greek theater, where an illegal meeting was to be held. The silversmiths had seized two of Paul’s companions in the street, but his other disciples had forcibly prevented Paul from going to the theater. The city fathers also sent a warning to Paul, appealing to him not to mix with the crowd in case it led to murder.
When it became evident that the city council was not in control of the situation, Publius Celer ordered me to call out the cavalry and he himself placed a cohort of infantrymen at the entrance to the theater. He smiled, his eyes cold and his mouth crooked, and assured me that he had been looking forward to a suitable opportunity of this kind to give these unruly people a few lessons in Roman discipline and order.
With a trumpeter and a cohort commantler, I went into the theater to be able to give the signal if the crowd turned violent. The people were noisy and restless in the huge theater; many obviously did not know what it was all about and had, in the Greek way, simply come to shout as loudly as they could. No one seemed to be armed. I could imagine the panic that would ensue if the theater had to be cleared forcibly.
The senior elder of the silversmiths tried to quiet the crowd so that he could speak, but he had already roused them to such an extent that his voice was hoarse and cracked completely when he started to speak. Even so, I managed to make out that he was accusing Paul the Jew of misleading the people, not only in Ephesus but all over Asia, into believing that handmade idols were not gods.
“We are threatened with the danger,” he shouted in his cracked voice, “of the great temple of Artemis losing all respect and she herself her power. She who is worshiped by the whole of Asia and all over the world.”
The huge crowd began to shout on the tops of their voices: “Great is Artemis of Ephesus!”
The continuous roar lasted so long that my trumpeter became anxious and tried to raise his instrument to his lips, but I knocked it away again.
A group of tasseled Jews was standing huddled nearby, and they pushed a coppersmith forward, crying, “Let Alexander speak.”
As far as I could make out, this Alexander wished to explain that the faithful Jews were not followers of Paul and that Paul did not even have the complete confidence of all the Christians in Ephesus.
But when the crowd saw from his clothes that he was a Jew, they did not want to let him speak, and they were right, inasmuch as the faithful Jews did not approve of idols or handmade images of such things. To stop him from speaking, the crowd broke out again with the cry: “Great is Artemis of Ephesus!” This time the roar lasted without exaggeration for two full lines on the water clock.
Publius Celer appeared beside me with his sword drawn.
“Why don’t you give the signal?” he snarled. “We can disperse the whole meeting in no time.”
“Several hundred people would be trampled underfoot,” I warned him.
The thought seemed to please Celer. So I added hastily: “They’re only praising their own Artemis. It would be both blasphemy and political foolishness to disperse a crowd for that reason.”
When the City Chancellor saw us standing hesitandy at one of the entrances, he signaled desperately for us to wait. He even had sufficient authority to quiet the crowd gradually as he stepped up to speak.
Now the Christians were thrust forward. They had been beaten and their clothes torn, but nothing worse had happened to them. To show what they thought, the Jews spat at them, but the Chancellor told the crowd not to act rashly, and reminded them that the city of Ephesus had been chosen to care for Artemis’ idol which had fallen from heaven. According to him, Paul’s disciples were neither temple defilers nor blasphemers.
The more sensible people in the crowd began to glance at my red plumes and at the cavalry trumpeter and then make their way out of the theater. For a moment everything hung in balance. Publius Celer ground his teeth, for if he had found reason to attack, then in the traditional Roman way he could have set fire to and plundered the silversmiths’ shops. The educated members of the crowd fortunately remembered the frightening events of the past and hurried away. As an outlet for his disappointment, Celer let his soldiers besiege the theater and beat a few of the remaining rebels and Jews. But nothing worse occurred.
Afterwards he reproached me bitterly, saying, “Both of us would have been enormously wealthy men now, if you hadn’t been so indecisive. Suppressing a rebellion would have taken us to the top of the roll of knights. We could have put the cause of the uprising down to Silanus’ lax rule. One must seize the opportunity as it arises, otherwise one loses it forever.”
Paul remained in hiding for a while and then had to flee the city. After I had by devious routes sent him a serious warning, we heard that he had gone to Macedonia. Then calm gradually descended again and the Jews found other things to think about Among them were many exiled Roman craftsmen intending to return to Rome in the spring.
The winter storms were now at their worst and in the harbor there was not a single ship due to sail to Italy.
