(this story happens in the month following the debate of Hillel and Shammai)
Herod sails Rhodes to meet with Octavian, the newly coronated Caesar Augustus, ready to supplicate himself to Augustus's feet and, having collaborated with Augustus's Enemy, Anthony, beg for Octavian's clemency to spare the lives of Herod and his court.
As the ship approaches the ruins of Rhodes's famous Colossus, two sailors talk, one Roman the other Judean:
"When sailors sailed under it, they must have peered up. Did they... ,,, get a view of anything underneath?" "There's no phallus among the ruins if that's what you're implying." "How could there not be?!" "Well it's just not there." "It just seems unlikely to go to all that trouble to scare the bejeesus out of visitors by sailing under a statue a hundred meters tall and not give it a sch.." "..I don't know what to tell you." "Maybe you Romans should... y'know... look harder." "Are you saying the fucking Colossus of Rhodes had a small..." "I'm not saying it was small, though it had to be small enough that somebody could make it disappear without noticing." "You're fucking pazzo." "Look, all I'm saying is that something must have happened, and I bet I know what did even..." "Whatdya' think?" "I think some Jewish bronze merchant a hundred years ago said getta load'a that schvantz, and sold it to a Roman senator." "...Get the fuck outa here!" "I really do!" "You think some Yid had the balls to steal a gigantic bronze phallus from the most watched site in the world?" "I think Rome helped!" "You think the penis of the Colossus of Rhodes is in Rome?!" "I think it's standing straight up on top of the fucking Pantheon is what I think."
Only to find when he pulls into the harbor that there are carved statues in the likeness of Herod and Antipater right next to the feet of the old Colossus.
Captain: "What does this mean your majesty?" "It means either that I will be feted as a hero, or I will be killed, my family killed, and all Judea will fall to slavery just as every Roman province does."
Herod embarks from the ship. His welcome? A dozen naked slave girls, who paint his face red, strip him of his clothes so that they can place purple toga on him, then place a laurel wreath atop his head. Herod is put on a chariot and pulled into a Roman-style triumph through the streets of Rhodes. The charioteer continually calls out 'Hail Herod! Rome's protector in the East! Hail Herod! Vanquisher of the Hasmoneans! Hail Herod! Ensnarer of Cleopatra! Hail Herod! Rebuilder of Jerusalem!" Behind him comes an open caravan showcasing an armory's worth of weapons - the short gladius, the long spatha, the tiny pugio, the enormous hasta, the aerodynamic pilum, the flying plumbata - a hundred of them each at least, and a dozen each at least in all matter of catapult: the onager, the ballista, the scorpio; and a thousand dolabras - the tool which every Roman soldier used for digging, along with a thousand helmets and shields. Then came open chests of gold and silver in currency coin and bullion: Aureus, Quinarius Aureus, Denarius, Quinarius, Sesterius, Dupondius, As, Semis, and Quadrans. Then further chests containing giant jewels of pearl, jade, malachite, amethyst, carnelian, topaz, chalcedony, obsidian, olivine, and lapis lazulli. Behind the jewels are further statues and paintings and tapestries: of Herod, Antipater, Mairiam, and all the Hasmonean protectors, and of all the prophets of the Bible.
Six hours later, at the end of the parade, stood Flavius Jacobus, at the foot of Rhodes's Temple of Jupiter, there to bid his old friend into the temple.
"Well, the Temple of Jupiter here is not much of a temple but it'll do for now. Rome and Rhodes bids welcome to its Protector in the East. I hope this trip is turning out as eventfully as you hoped?"
And on the center wall of the Temple, sitting upon Divine Jupiter's lap was Caesar Augustus.
"Well, I don't know if I hoped for such events but..."
"...Such events you now have. We have named you Rome's Protector in the East, and we trust that you will act to Rome's benefit just as you've acted to Judea's. Do you notice all the finery behind you in your triumph?"
"I couldn't help but.."
"..It's yours of course."
"Isn't some slave supposed to shout in my ear to remember that I'm mortal?"
"You're from Judea, nobody forgets there."
"So this is a triumph?"
"It's very much a triumph. Yours and mine."
"Didn't you have a triumph of your own in Rome?"
"Come with me King, let's talk among the ruins."
(Caesar and Herod go to beach of Rhodes and talk among the Colossus's many bronze ruins)
"What ruler who wants to die of natural causes ever throws himself a triumph?"
"So this is..."
"This is my celebration as much as yours. When Divine Julius wanted to celebrate, it was to places like Rhodes he came. 'My boy, when Romans go north you work, when you go east and south, you play.'"
"Your father went to Rhodes?"
"He tried to go to Rhodes, then he was abducted by pirates, just like you were."
"I wasn't abducted by pirates."
"You weren't?"
"I was shipwrecked after Cleopatra sent me to Italy to pitch something straight to you and Anthony. I honestly thought I'd be dead - either Cleopatra wanted me thrown overboard, or have Anthony kill me, and if they didn't, I figured you would. But instead I was shipwrecked and fell into the belly of whale where I stayed for three days."
"You mean like your prophet Jonah?..."
"How do you know about Jonah?"
"A good leader reads..."
"I swear it happened."
"If you say it happened it did. You're a king and kings write their own histories. There are all sorts of things that happened to me which no one would believe."
"If you say so."
Augustus begins to croak and ribbit like a frog. Within forty seconds, three hundred and some frogs appear noisily atop the ruins of Rhodes's Colossus and bow to two of them, within thirty seconds the frogs leave.
"The Gods allow some people to do some very strange things. We great men, we're not made of the same stuff."
"In my country, I'm told there is only one god who grants such permissions."
"But I've heard you believe in two."
"How did you discover that?"
"A good leader also listens."
"I don't necessarily believe in two gods. I've only heard one."
"What god is that?"
"The 'other' God."
"The other god?"
"The God who appeared to me after the destruction of my true home country, Idumea, and told me to avenge my homeland against the Jewish people and Yahweh."
"So it's true!"
"What?"
"You hate your people!"
"And you love Romans?"
"I'm ambivalent about them."
"You fear them!"
"Yes, very much so."
"How much more reason have I to fear mine? They killed my family, they killed the family that birthed my family, they've been killing my family since the time of Lot and Ishmael."
"Well, the Romans did just kill my father, but no, we don't have your prodigal patrimony. Rome is a city of immigrants, and immigrants come to new places to forget their old hatreds."
"Hatred is history's oldest motivator. Let Roman history go on long enough there will be enough hatred to power the rest of Judea's history."
"Don't forget yourself Protector, you're still in the company of the only man in the world you can't rule."
"My apologies your majesty."
"Don't you dare call me that. I'm no king and no emperor, my title is 'Mr. Princeps', Rome's First Citizen."
"You really want me to call you that?"
"It's just ridiculous enough that people won't be in awe of me."
"Whatever you say Mr. Princeps."
"I must say, I'm more impressed than I expected to be."
"What did you expect?"
"The whole world knows of Herod's Odyssian cunning, but I worried I'd find a spoiled killer."
"Well, guilty as charged, that's exactly what you got."
"We have spoiled killers everywhere in Rome, the spoiled killers kill each other and assume they can take their spoils without another spoiled killer coming to take theirs; but you're different Herod son of Antipater. I can't tell whether you're just a little spoiled or just a lot a killer, but men like you either build nations or destroy them."
"What charm of mine gave it away?"
"Don't you know? You, king of a people supposed so skilled in the arts of duplicity?"
"I'm not a Jew."
"Of course you are, all semites are partially Jews, and you rule over them! Were you not the most gifted among a very gifted people you'd just be another Judean prince strangled in a prison."
"I still don't understand."
"Of course you do. You're gifted enough that I'm scared just talking to you."
"Mr. Princeps can't be scared of a vassal king."
"I'm scared of every vassal king who knows to speak less than I do."
"Have I spoken less?"
"I don't know, but had you spoken more, it would have been impossible not to read your mind, and you'd be stunned how many vassal kings speak over me in conversation."
"Ignorance is bold. Knowledge is reserved."
"Indeed, yet amid all this tact and polish, I hear that there is no German horde who can do to people all it's said Herod does, and it's for that reason I trust you Herod-ben-Antipater to pilot a project I hope to institute through the whole empire."
"What project?"
"Jew, how long took it your people to advance from Abraham to such learning as you now have that neither the might of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Syria, nor Greece could destroy you, and you've arrived at such eminence and might that the banks of men like Flavius Jacobus, uncannily scrupulous and unscrupulous whenever appropriate, is the coin of the largest Empire the world has ever seen? Two thousand years?"
"Yes, it would seem that or thereabout."
"It was roughly the same time that Egypt and Sumeria learned to read, yes?"
"I suppose."
"Now look at this bronze Jew. Two and half centuries ago, the might of the ancient world looked upon its work and despaired, and after fifty years, a mere earthquake took it down for all time. I understand there was an earthquake none to far ago in Jerusalem?"
"One of a few. I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Two thousand years it took from Jews to go from a desert people to work at the side of the most powerful empire the world. Prosperity never abides long in the same place, and so this, now, is a once every two millennia opportunity. The most educated nations in the world are also the most powerful."
"I suppose I see that, but I don't understand what to do with it."
"It will not be again unless we educate the world to our standard."
"You think you can do that?"
"I think YOU can do that. Rome may think it wants glory for its senate and its people, but Rome must not be allowed to become a permanent empire of bread and circus! Your people are commanded to be a light unto nations? Well, be that light!"
"I... Mr. Princeps, I think your ambition exceeds even your own power. Who am I that I should be the one to bring the world out of slavery? Does the world even wish to be brought freedom?"
"The world does not know what it wishes, it does not know what it needs. But what the world needs is for all her vassal nations to be as strong as Rome herself."
"Wouldn't that cause permanent war?"
"Not if nations were united in alliance!"
"Mr. Princeps, you surely realize this is madness."
"It is only the mad who seek leadership!"
"And it is surely only the mad who seek the world's improvement."
"Then be mad with me Jew. Surely you've seen the augers. Jupiter is in retrograde for the next fifty years, every horoscope in the world predicts that we are on the cusp of a new age with a new way of looking at the world. Surely you see the evidence all around you."
"The evidence is Rome."
"No, the evidence is change."
"Rome is change."
"No. Change is Rome. Pericles built a republic in Athens, but it was a mere city-state, it became an empire for two minutes, once the Delian League became the Athenian empire it declined within in a generation. Rome's republic has lasted seven-hundred years. For its Republic to survive it must have its own league of nations!"
"How does one affect that?"
"This is my imperial project. This is my imperial legacy.... A religion."
"You want to export the Jewish religion throughout the empire?"
"No, though I could think of worse religions. I want a religion of liberalism."
"Surely you know my people would not accept any god but Yahweh."
"No, but religions can coexist with the religion I have in mind to export. All the local gods can still be worshipped, but we compel their gods to embody toleration, practical logic, knowledge and open exchange.""
"I don't think my people are as intelligent as you think we are."
"But they can be if you educate them! Doesn't your bible encourage charity and indulgence to the poor?"
"You can't interpret everything in the Bible literally."
"Just remember this, King, of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and have control over nothing."
"In what?"
"So many of them already read, so many of them handle money; teach them our higher maths and physic!" '
"Hardly any of them read! Two in every hundred perhaps!"
"Two in every hundred is more than the one in every hundred in Rome."
"I don't even know your higher maths and physic!"
"It only need begin with a couple dozen. You're Herod the builder, teach your people to build so that there are a hundred Herod the builders! We'll send the engineers!"
".... Mr. Princeps, I worry that by saying that I believe in your vision, you'll realize that I'm indulging you. So I would like to tell you a lesson my father imparted to me about his idea of the perfect government."
"Your father was an able man."
"The ablest. If I may speak freely?"
"Always."
"Were he Roman he could have outfoxed your father."
"My father said as much every time Antipater was mentioned. Nothing would delight me more than to hear your father's lesson."
"My father said the perfect government is a government were all its subjects were slaves, but thought themselves free."
"Don't you see Jew, that is precisely the government I seek."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Once the world is educated, they are slaves to their reason, and they will be forever compelled to make the wise choice."
"Sire, I will tell you what I am thinking right now. My father gave me a Greek tutor, as I'm sure your father did."
"Of course."
"So you know your Herodotus."
"Indeed."
"Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this.."
"'..to know so much and to have control over nothing.' Yes Jew, of course I know my Herodotus, I read it once every year and that is precisely the point. So long as Rome is me, Rome knows enough to surrender its hoard of knowledge to the world, and once the world has knowledge, the world's storehouse of knowledge will forever increase and we all will be forever ignorant of its full contents."
"And you know your Thucydides."
"He's a little drier. The limits of my intelligence. I expect you're smart enough to remember every passage."
"Only because the tutor would flay me alive if I didn't. The quote is 'Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in discovering the truth,'"
"'but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.' Yes, my father's favorite maxim. So let's make sure the first story they hear from birth is the truth. But you've also read The Republic."
"Oh god that fucking Greek tyrant. Still worse would happen every time I didn't sufficiently commit it to memory."
"So then you know these quote Jew: Either we shall find what it is we're seeking.."
(both) "..or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know."
"Let's free these men from their caves Jew. I doubt you believe in the augers any more than I do, but the astrologers surely see the new era we all live in and predict accordingly. Let's head off this new era's ignorance and blood by creating an era of our own. You know exactly what I'm going to quote now."
"Pericles?"
"Indeed. Recite it Jew."
“For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples...
"Splendidus Iudaeus. Come, let's embrace on this."
(Herod comes over, Augustus pulls him into a hug, kisses him directly on the lips, then Augustus takes Herod's hand in his gently. The gentle stroke becomes an iron grip, and Augustus severs the artery in Herod's arm with his dagger and it seems as though Augustus is about to cut Herod's arm completley off. Herod's arm spurts blood in volumes and he screams so loud the entire beach hears him. The scream turns into whimpers and Herod cannot help but cry.)
(Augustus whispers a millmeter away from Herod's ear)
"We've documented every manner in which you've ordered a subject executed. Cross me on this project Philistine and you'll watch as we use all those techniques on your children, then save a technique never yet seen in Judea for you."
(Herod continues to whimper. Augustus reaches behind one of the ruins and produces a woolen coat."
"Come, put this coat on. Rhodes gets cold at night and it absorbs the blood like a bandage. No one will will even know you bleed. As Rome's protector in the East you have to sacrifice to Jupiter like us all tonight, and then you'll be paraded in triumph again tomorrow back to your ship. We'll give you golden armor to cover the wound. (Augustus hugs Herod again) Come, they're waiting for us at the temple."
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