Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

captivity

leave them in place on the principle that “a well-fed tick sucks less blood than a hungry one.” It may well be, though, that the previous prefect got mixed up somehow in the Sejanus affair. Agrippina the Elder is another oft-cited example. She was Germanicus’s very popular widow who, fourteen years af ter her husband died, was starved to death by Tiberius. It wasn’t like that, interjects another political commentator: banished to the island of Pandataria, Agrippina went on a hunger strike, a centurion poked out one of her eyes, then she was force-fed, on Tiberius’s orders, but incompetently, and that’s what caused her death. What does it matter? She was murdered. The Jews

are just as up on Roman gossip as any other nation, and they have just as many worthy political commentators. Uri was interested in history; all tales with twists and turns interested him, and he read countless works of Greek and Latin authors in his little alcove. There he was left alone and could spend the whole day musing and piecing things together. The images he saw in his waking dreams were sharp and bright, almost palpable. Imagination is a great thing, if someone has it. He could read Greek, because their neighbors in the Jewish quarter had Greek as their mother tongue, and most Jewish boys in Rome answered to a Greek name. They brought it from Palestine, where Hellenization had proved most successful in the area of

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