Alexandria

XXV

Sometimes during an investigation, Helena and I just stopped. When the flow of information became overwhelming, we turned away. We fled the scene. We bunked off to the country for a few hours, without telling anybody. Students of rational science might find the fact odd but forgetting all about the case for a time could, by a mysterious process, clarify the facts. Besides, she was my wife. I loved her enough to spend time alone with her. This was not the traditional way to view a wife, but as the noble Helena Justina often said, I was a surly beggar who just loved to break the rules.

Of course I was never surly to her. That's how traditional husbands let themselves down. We two had a union of lustrous tranquillity. If Helena Justina saw a moment of uncharacteristic surliness coming on, she would stalk from the room with a riffle of skirts and a sneer. She always knew how to get in first.

We both pursed our lips over Timosthenes. We agreed he was high quality and almost certainly ethical, but we thought he was keeping things back. 'Men who take refuge in scrupulous good manners can be hard to break, Helena. I can't put the Serapeion Librarian up against a wall and mutter threats in his ear.'

'I hope you don't generally work like that, Marcus.'

'I do when it gets results.'

The Serapeion lay close to Lake Mareotis. We had picked up transport – a horse and cart, with its driver whom I had bargained with when I saw them sitting glumly in Canopus Street. Uncle Fulvius was using his conveyance today. You can't blame a man for wanting to use his own palanquin. (I would blame him if I found out he had lent it to my father – an unpalatable thought, which was unfortunately probable.)

When we left the sanctuary, found our cart and faced that moment of having to decide where to go next, it took no time for us to choose a little afternoon trip. The driver was happy. Even his horse perked up. 'Outside city' had a higher rate.

He took us to the lake first. There, close to the city which it bordered, we marvelled at the size of the inland harbour. The driver claimed the lake itself stretched for a hundred miles east to west, cut off from the sea by a long, narrow spit of land that ran for miles, away towards Cyrenaica. Canals provided links with other parts of the delta, including a large canal at Alexandria. Here on the north lake shore we found a vast mooring pool that seemed even busier than the great Western and Eastern harbours on the sea side. The surrounding countryside was obviously fertile, swept annually by the Nile inundation with its burden of rich silt, and as a result everywhere close to the lake was well cultivated. They had grain, olives, fruit and vines so although at first this seemed an enormous, lonely area, we saw large numbers of oil presses, fermentation vats and breweries. Lake Mareotis was famously the home of endless papyrus beds, so it had all the necessities of the scroll-making industry. Boys paddled up to their knees in water as they cut the reeds, calling out to each other and stopping to stare at us. From the lake itself huge quantities of fish were caught. Then they had commercial quarrying and glass-blowing, plus numerous pottery kilns for the lamp industry and amphora-making for the wine trade.

It was one of the most frequented waterways I had ever seen. Outside the huge harbour, ferries plied both north-south to and from the towns on the southern edge of the lake, and also east-west. The fringes of the lake were extremely marshy, yet lined with jetties. Flat-bottomed punts were everywhere. Many people lived and worked from houseboats moored in the shallows – whole families, including infants who at crawling stage were tied on with a rope around the ankle that just gave them enough play to keep safe. 'Hmmm. I wonder if it would be frowned upon if we tried short tethers with our own dear mites?' 'Julia and Favoma could undo a rope in about five minutes.' The driver refused to stop among the marshes. He said the tall papyrus reeds were full of paths and dens used by gangs of criminals. This seemed at odds with the multitude of luxurious out-of-town villas to which rich Alexandrians migrated for leisure in the countryside. Playboys and tycoons don't put up with brigands in their neighbourhood – well, not unless they themselves are brigands who have made their pile and settled in huge villas on the proceeds. The tycoons' spreads here worked like the grand holiday homes in the coastal strip between Ostia and the Bay of Neapolis – close enough to be reached from town in the evening by weary businessmen, and close enough too for obsessive workers to feel they could nip back to the courts and to hear the news in the Forum without ever growing out of touch.

We had left the harbour behind us and driven out on the long narrow land spit between sea and lake. After a time the driver decided the reeds in these parts were not the dangerous kind out of which brigands might rush to steal his horse. They looked the same as the others to me, but you bow to expert local knowledge. The horse itself was game to plod on, since it made progress at an undemanding pace, allowing itself time to gaze around at the views. But the man needed to get down and fall asleep under an olive tree. He made it plain we required a rest stop, so we obediently took one.

Fortunately we had brought drinking-water and snacks to keep us occupied. Herons and ibises paraded themselves. Frogs and insects kept up low background noise. The sun was hot, though not sweltering. While the driver snored, we took advantage of the peaceful spot. He may have been acting and hoped for intimate behaviour to spy on, but I was alert to that. Besides, sometimes catching up on a case is even more alluring.

'I had a long talk with Cassius this morning, when you abandoned me again,' said Helena, who liked to be part of everything. Her complaint was light-hearted. She was used to me disappearing on interviews or surveillance. She never minded me doing the boring routines, so long as I let her play dice when the game hotted up.

'I was with your dear brother part of the time, looking at the Pinakes.'

'How commendably academic. Oddly enough, Cassius and I were talking about the catalogue.'

'I hadn't seen him as a scrollworm.'

'Well, neither had I, Marcus, but we know very little about him. We just assume Cassius was once some beautiful, vacuous young boy Uncle Fulvius picked up in a gym or a bath house – but he is probably not that young.'

I laughed lazily. 'So you think he's an intellectual? Fulvius chose him for his mind? When nobody is looking, they sit together and intently discuss the finer points of Plato's Republic?'

Helena biffed me. 'No. But he is his own man. I think Cassius must have received an education – perhaps enough to have wanted more, but his family could not afford it. I'm sure he comes from a working background, he's too sensible not to. Anyway, so does Fulvius; your grandfather had the market garden. Now it's Fulvius who takes the lead in their business activities. I reckon that while Cassius is kept hanging around waiting for Fulvius to clinch some deal, he may sit in a corner and read a scroll.'

'Perfectly possible, my darling. It is what I would do myself

'You would buy drink,' scoffed Helena. 'And eye up women,' she added balefully. I could not deny it – though of course it would be only for comparative purposes.

'Not Cassius.'

'Well, I expect he can read and drink…'

'And eye up men?'

'I suppose that would depend how near Fulvius was… do you think men who live with men are as promiscuous as men who live with women?'

I dropped my voice. 'Some of us are loyal.'

'No, all of you are men…' Despite her tone, Helena laid a hand on my arm as if exonerating me. Like many women who understand the male sex, she took a charitable view. She might say, women had to do that or live as spinsters – though she would say it kindly. 'Anyway, do you want to hear what he says?'

I stretched out on my back in the sun, hands clasped behind my head. 'If it's relevant.' It had better be exciting, or I would nod off.

'Listen, then. According to Cassius there are tensions in the academic community. When the Museion was first set up, it was a magnificent centre of learning. The scholars who came to live in Alexandria all carried out new scientific research and lectured; great men published great papers. On the literary side, they conducted the first systematic study of Greek literature; grammar and philology were invented as subjects of study. At the Library, they had to decide which collected scrolls were original, or closest to the original, especially when they had duplicates. And of course there were duplicates, because the books came from various collections which must have overlapped or, as you know, darling, plays in particular have more than one copy. When you wrote The Spook Who Spoke, you were scribbling in a hurry – so errors may have crept in, even to your master copy; plus the actors made their own scripts, sometimes only bothering with their own characters and cues.'

'Their loss!'

'Oh of course, dearest.'

To retaliate for her sarcasm, I made a lunge; despite her pregnancy, Helena managed to shuffle quickly out of reach. Too drowsy for another attempt, I contributed: 'We know how the Library collection was gathered. The Ptolemies invited the leaders of all the countries in the world to send the literature of their country. They backed that up like pirates. If anybody was sailing near Alexandria, teams of searchers would raid their ships. Any scrolls they found in luggage were confiscated and copied; if the owners were lucky they got back a copy, though rarely their own original. Aulus and I saw some of that today – such works are listed as ''from the ships'' beside their titles in the Pinakes.'

'The story is true then?' Helena demanded. 'I suppose you wouldn't argue with a Ptolemy.'

'Not unless you wanted to be tipped into the harbour. So what's the controversy nowadays?'

'Well, you know what happens with copying, Marcus. Some scribes make a bad job of it. At the Library, the staff examined duplicates to decide which copy was the best. In the main, they assumed the oldest scroll was likely to be most accurate. Clarifying authenticity became their specialism. But what started as genuine critique has become debased. Texts are altered arbitrarily. People who feel strongly say that a bunch of ignorant clerks are making ridiculous alterations to works they just don't have the intellect to understand.'

'Scandalous!'

'Be serious, Marcus. Once, literary study in Alexandria was of a very high standard. This persisted until recently. About fifty years ago, Didymus, the son of a fishmonger, was one of the first native Egyptians to become an accomplished scholar. He wrote three and a half thousand commentaries on most of the Greek classics, including the works of Callimachos, the Library's own cataloguer. Didymus published an authoritative text of Homer, based on Aristarchus' well-regarded version and his own textual analysis; he wrote a critical commentary on Demosthenes' Philippics; he created lexicons -'

'Did Cassius tell you all this?'

Helena blushed. 'No, I have been reading up myself… It was a time of excellence. Didymus had contemporaries who were superb literary commentators and grammarians.'

'All this is not so very long ago.'

'Exactly, Marcus. In our parents' lifetime. Scholars here even made the first contact with Pergamum, which in Ptolemaic times had always been shunned by Alexandria because its library was a rival.'

I changed position. 'You're saying that only a generation ago, Alexandria was leading the world. So what went wrong? Piss-poor commentaries are being produced by hack reviewers, with ludicrous emendations?'

'That seems to have happened.'

'Is it our fault, Helena? We Romans? Did Augustus cause it after Actium? Did that start the rot? Don't we take enough interest, because Rome is too far distant?'

'Well, Didymus was later than Augustus, under Tiberius. But maybe with the Emperor as patron and so far away, Museion supervision has failed somewhat.' Helena had a careful way of trying to keep things right. She spoke slowly now, concentrating. 'Cassius blames other factors too. Ptolemy Soter had had a glorious ideal. He set out to own every book in the world, so that all the worlds knowledge would be gathered in his Library, available for consultation. We would call that a good motive. But collecting can be obsessive. Totality becomes an end in itself. Possession of all an author's works, all the works in a set, becomes more important than what the texts actually say. Ideas become irrelevant.'

I puffed out my cheeks. 'The books are simply objects. It's all sterile… I haven't seen any direct controversy about that. But the librarians here do have a fixation with scroll numbers. Theon had a choking fit when I asked how many scrolls he had, and Timosthenes has been stock-taking.'

Helena pouted. I asked Theon how many scrolls he had.'

'Right! It doesn't matter which of us asked -'

Oh yes it did matter. 'Now you are being dismissive. I hit upon a lucky question – I admit it was lucky'

'Purely characteristic. You always count the beans.'

'So you say I am unpleasantly pedantic, while you have intuition and flair…' Helena was not really in the mood for a quarrel; she had something too vital to say. She brushed this niggle aside briskly: 'Well, Cassius told me that from what he and Fulvius already knew about Theon, before he came to dinner with us, there is an ethical controversy and Theon was part of it. He was fighting the Director, Philetus.'

'They quarrelled?'

'Philetus sees scrolls as a commodity. They take up space and gather dust; they need expensive staff to look after them. He asks, what intellectual value do ancient scrolls have, if nobody has consulted them for decades or even centuries?'

'Can this be relevant to the budget Zenon so carefully kept from me? Is there a financial crisis? And is it the difference of approach that Timosthenes was talking about? I can't imagine him ever seeing scrolls as dusty wastes of space… How does our Cassius know about this?'

'That was unclear. But he said Philetus was always haranguing Theon about whether they need to keep scrolls nobody sees, or more than one copy. Theon – who already feared his role was being undermined by the Director, remember – fought for the Library to be fully comprehensive. He wanted all known versions; he wanted comparative study of duplicates to be carried out as valid literary criticism.'

I was not entirely sympathetic to that. I dismissed scholars who spent years narrowly comparing works on a line by line basis. Minutely searching for the perfect version seemed to me to add nothing to human knowledge or to the betterment of the human condition. Perhaps it kept the scholars out of the taverns and off the streets -though if it had led directly to Theon being given an oleander nightcap, he might have done better to be away from the Library, just having a dispute about the government with five fishmongers in a downtown bar. Or even staying longer at our house, eating pastries with Uncle Fulvius, come to that.

'There are others feuding,' Helena said. 'The Zoo Keeper, Philadelphion, resents the international kudos that is given to the Great Library at the expense of his scientific institute; he wrangles, or wrangled, with both Philetus and Theon about uplifting the importance of pure science within the Museion. Zenon, the astronomer, thinks studying earth and the heavens is more use than studying animals, so he tussles with Philadelphion. For him, understanding the Nile flood is infinitely more useful than averaging how many eggs are laid by the crocodiles which inhabit the Nile's banks.'

I nodded. 'Zenon also knows where the purse pinches – and he must resent having to examine the stars from a chair he made himself while, if what Thalia says is right, Philadelphion can lavish gold on every last breed of fancy ibis. From what you say, love, the Museion is seething with animosity. Our Cassius seems to keep up with gossip. Any other nuggets?'

'One. The lawyer, Nicanor, lusts after the Zoo Keeper's mistress.'

'The fabulous Roxana?'

'You are salivating, Falco!'

'I have not even met the woman.'

'I see you would like to!'

'Only to evaluate whether her charms might be a motive.'

At this point, perhaps luckily, the hot, restless breeze that had got up while we were conversing began to agitate the undergrowth more wildly, to the extent that it woke our driver. He told us this was the Khamseen, the fifty-day wind that Zenon had speculated might have upset Theon's mental stability. It certainly was becoming gritty and unpleasant. Helena wrapped her stole around her face. I tried to look brave. The driver hurried us back to the cart and set off for the city, regaling us on the way with tales of how this wicked wind killed babies. There was no need to lure us back with sensational stories. We were ready to go home and check on our daughters.