harbour mouth and was coasting gently with a slow oar beat towards the quay. Flavius Damianus thought it was a pity that the hulk of a merchantman embedded in one of the ever-encroaching mudflats spoiled the approach to the quay. As the morning was well advanced, the onshore breeze had died. With its passing, the smell of decay from the reed beds and the odour of the fish market came to his delicate nostrils.
Possibly it was all to the good that Marcus Clodius Ballista was a barbarian. They were notorious for their savagery, barbarians from the north most of all. Certainly the utmost severity – it might be savagery itself – was needed for the task in hand. The pernicious cult of those who worshipped the crucified Jew was spreading. They tended to keep away from the educated, the wise, anyone sensible, but anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone uneducated, children, them they drew up to boldly. They whispered their poison in the ears of the young: they should leave their father and their schoolmaster, and go along with the women and the little children to the cobbler's or the washerwoman's shop, that there they might learn perfection. Savagery was needed to wash Ephesus clean of the Christians – they were traitors to the emperors, traitors to the gods, atheists whose treachery could turn the gods against the imperium and bring it down in ruin in the coming war with the Sassanid King of Kings.
The trireme swung in a neat circle and backed oars to the quay. Sailors leaped ashore and secured the mooring ropes. A wide boarding ladder was run out. From the warship, a herald boomed out, 'Marcus Clodius Ballista, Knight of Rome, Deputy to the Proconsul of Asia.'
A large man appeared at the top of the boarding ladder. His shoulder-length blond hair betrayed his origins in Germania, but the folds of his toga were well arranged, the narrow purple stripe of his equestrian status gleaming against the dazzling white. He walked slowly down. At the bottom, he seemed to hesitate for a moment before very carefully stepping on to the quay.
Flavius Damianus stepped forward and made a formal speech of welcome. Great Artemis be praised that she had put it in the august mind of the most noble emperor Valerian to send to the favourite city of the goddess the glorious victor of the battle of Circesium. All the citizens were as one in rejoicing in the safe arrival of Marcus Clodius Ballista, warrior of Rome. Flavius Damianus kept it short and reasonably simple, but he felt that his ancestor and namesake, the famous sophist, would not have disapproved.
The object of this praise replied in almost unaccented Attic Greek. He thanked the gods, great Artemis first of all, for this day – all his life he had longed to gaze on the sacred city; the reality before his eyes exceeded his dreams. He would carry out his mandata from the emperors in the sure and certain knowledge that the gods were holding their hands over him. His was also a brief speech.
As the new vicarius was talking, his staff had disembarked and lined up behind him. Formal introductions were made on both sides of those significant enough to merit it.
The essential rituals conducted, Flavius Damianus turned and led everyone through the tall central arch of the gate and off up the long street that ran straight as an arrow to the heart of Ephesus. After receiving polite but rather unforthcoming replies to a couple of light conversational gambits, Flavius Damianus relapsed into silence. Clearly the new vicarius was not in the mood for idle chatter. The scribe of the Demos thus was very startled to be addressed by his accensus. The tone was extremely respectful, Demetrius' phrasing politeness itself, but Flavius Damianus was unaccustomed to being spoken to in public by slave boys, even attractive ones like this, unless he had spoken to them first. In fact, he was so thrown, that the youth had to repeat the question.
Once it had been confirmed to him that the buildings on their left, the Harbour Gymnasium, were where Apollonius of Tyana had been granted his divine vision, Demetrius began to tell the story to Ballista. Apollonius, the great philosopher and wonder worker, as usual ignoring the midday heat, had been lecturing, when things happened that had never happened before: Apollonius lowered his voice. He stumbled over his words. Finally, he looked at the ground and was silent. There was a large audience. Apollonius had converted many of the Ephesians from their love of frivolities – from dancers, pantomime artists, pipers, and such effeminate rascals – to a love of true arete, virtue. A whispering spread through the crowd. Apollonius looked up with a terrible, far-away look. The noise stopped. Apollonius strode forward three or four paces. He cried out. 'Strike the tyrant, strike him.' The crowd was confounded. Some of them thought him mad. Apollonius recovered himself, and in a normal voice explained that he had just then seen the tyrant Domitian struck down, stabbed to death far away in Rome. Sure enough, when messengers came from the eternal city, they confirmed the time and manner of the emperor's death, thus in turn confirming Apollonius' closeness to the divine.
As the Greek youth told the tale – and it had to be admitted that he told it in fine style – Flavius Damianus surreptitiously observed the new vicarius. The big northerner listened attentively, his eyes moving from the youth to the Harbour Gymnasium, a smile playing on his lips.
No sooner had the story ended than they passed the last of the famous fifty lanterns that lit the road and came to the statue of the boar. Immediately, the Greek youth began to tell his kyrios of the founding of Ephesus. Androclos, the son of king Kodros of Athens, had received an oracle. He was to found a colony 'where a fish will show and a boar will lead'. Moored one night, the would-be colonists were preparing their meal ashore when a fish and a piece of burning tinder fell from the fire. Some brushwood caught fire. From the thicket burst a wild boar. Grabbing his spear, Androclos pursued the beast through the hills. Where, eventually, he ran it down, he founded the city of Ephesus.
As the boy talked, the procession entered the square in front of the theatre. Wordlessly, Flavius Damianus led them to the right, into Marble Street. As ever, the main street in the city of about two hundred thousand was crowded. Auxiliary archers went ahead to clear a path through the throng. Flavius Damianus was still covertly watching the responses of the northerner. Marcus Clodius Ballista was nodding his head, now smiling broadly. Once he exchanged a quick grin with his bodyguard.
This was all very encouraging, thought the scribe to the Demos to himself. A hulking barbarian warrior enraptured by tales of the Hellenic past. Flavius Damianus required a vicarius who could be led to carry out the savage persecution the city of Ephesus needed, that the gods demanded, that was so necessary for the forthcoming war with Persia. And had he not had the signal honour of a private letter urging him to keep this Ballista up to the mark from no less a man than the Comes Sacrarum Largitionum et Praefectus Annonae, Macrianus the Lame himself? It should be child's play. Nothing was as malleable, as easily led, as a barbarian enamoured of culture.
XVI
The heavy purple curtains erected to make the walls of the court hung down motionless. Although it was still quite early, it was already hot. There was no hint of a breeze. It was going to be another stifling day. It was 27 August. Ballista had been in Ephesus since the seventeenth of the month. Comfortably lodged in the luxurious palace of the Proconsul, he had been in no hurry to begin his work. But the scribe to the Demos, the earnest Flavius Damianus, had been most pressing. The vaguely distasteful task could not be postponed for ever. If nothing else, the prisons were full.
Ballista shifted on his curule throne of office. The court functionaries appeared to have ceased their scurrying about. They must be satisfied. He looked around. The statues of the reigning emperors, the Augusti Valerian and Gallienus, accompanied by that of the latter's son, the Caesar Valerian, had been brought into the Chalcidium, the committee room at the east end of the Stoa Basilica, and set up in front of and below the permanent statues of the founder of the principate, Augustus and his wife Livia – both depicted seated, larger than life, and with severe expressions. In front, an altar had been placed on which a low fire burned, adding to the heat. The incense in the air was already cloying. All seemed ready.
'Bring in the first prisoner,' said Ballista.
The curtains parted, and a thin man flanked by two soldiers entered. His prominent eyes flicked round the room. He had a strange air of unstable hilarity, as if he had been celebrating a festival on his own.
'Name? Race? Slave or free?' Ballista rattled out the formula.
'I am a Christian,' the man replied.
'You may well be, but that is not one of the questions I asked you.'
'I am a Christ-' The man staggered forward to his knees as one of the soldiers hit him across the shoulders with a cudgel.
