It was perfectly obvious that Marcellus was being left in Alexandria. He explained to 
me that his maternal grandmother was still alive, a Greek, and indeed her whole dan.
  "Don't tell me so much, just go," I said. "And be wise and safe."
  He begged me to come with him. He said he had fallen in love with me. He would marry 
me. He didn't care if I bore no children. He didn't care that I was thirty-five. I 
laughed softly, mercifully.
  Jacob noted all this with lowered eyes. And David looked away.
  Quite a few trunks followed Marcellus into Alexandria.
  "Now," I said to Jacob, "will you tell me where I'm being taken? I might have some 
thoughts on the matter, though I doubt I could improve on my Father's plan."
  I still wondered. Would they deal honestly with me? What about now that they had seen 
me play the whore with the boy? They were such religious men.
  "You're headed to a great city," Jacob said. "It couldn't be a better place. Your 
Father has Greek friends there!"
  "How could it be better than Alexandria?" I said.
  "Oh, it is far and away better," Jacob said. "Let me talk to my Father before I talk to 
you further."
  We had put out to sea. The land was going away. Egypt. It was growing dark.
  "Don't be afraid," Jacob said. "You look as though you are terrified."
  "I'm not afraid," I said. "It's only that I have to lie in my bed and think and 
remember and dream." I looked at him, as he shyly looked away. "I held the boy like a 
Mother, against me, night after night."
  This was about the biggest lie I've told in my life.
  "He was a child in my arms." Some child! "And now I fear nightmares. You must tell me - 
what is our destination? What is our fate?"
  
  
  
  
  3
  
  "Antioch," said Jacob, "Antioch on the Orontes. Greek friends of your Father await you. 
And they are friends with Germanicus. Perhaps in time ... but they will be loyal to you. 
You are to be married to a Greek of breeding and means."
  Married! To a Greek, a provincial Greek? A Greek in Asia! I stifled my laughter and my 
tears. That was not going to happen to me. Poor man! If he really was a provincial Greek, 
he was going to have to experience the conquest of Rome all over again.
  We sailed on, from port to port. I mulled all this over.
  It was nauseating trivia like this which of course protected me from my full and 
inevitable grief and shock over what happened. Worry about whether your dress is properly 
girdled. Don't see your Father lying dead with his own dagger in his chest.
  As for Antioch, I had been far too embroiled in the life of Rome to know or hear much 
about this city. If Tiberius had stationed his "heir," Germanicus, there to get him away 
from Roman popularity, then I thought: Antioch must be the end of the civilized world.
  Why in the name of the gods had I not run away in Alexandria, I thought? Alexandria was 
the greatest city in the Empire, next to Rome. It was a young city, built by Alexander, 
for whom it was named, but it was a marvelous port. No one would ever dare raze the 
Temple of Isis in Alexandria. Isis was an Egyptian goddess, wife of the powerful Osiris.
  But what had that to do with things? I must have been plotting in the back of my mind 
already, but I didn't allow any conscious plot to surface and blemish my highborn Roman 
moral character.
  I quietly thanked my Hebrew guardians for this intelligence, for keeping it even from 
the young Roman Marcellus, the other man they had rescued from the Emperor's assassins, 
and I asked for frank answers to my questions regarding my brothers.
  "All taken by surprise," said Jacob. "The Delatores, those spies of the Praetorian 
Guard, are so swift. And your Father had so many sons. It was your eldest brother's 
slaves who jumped the wall at their Master's command and ran to warn your Father."
  Antony. I hope you shed their blood. I know you fought with your last breath. And my 
niece, my little niece Flora, had she run screaming from them, or did they do it with 
mercy'? The Praetorian Guard doing anything with mercy! Stupid to even think so.
  I didn't say anything aloud. Just sighed.
  After all, when they looked at me, these two Jewish merchants beheld the body and face 
of a woman; naturally my protectors should think a woman was inside of me. The disparity 
between outward appearances and inner disposition had disturbed me all my life. Why 
disturb Jacob and David? On to Antioch.
  But I had no intention of living in any oldfashioned Greek family, if such still 
existed in the Greek city of Antioch, a family in which women lived apart from the men, 
and wove wool all day, never going out, having no part in the life of the world 
whatsoever.
  I'd been taught all the virtuous female arts by my nurses and I could indeed do 
anything with yarn or thread or loom that any other woman could do, but I knew well what 
the "Old Greek Ways" had been, and I remembered vaguely my Father's Mother, who had died 
when I was very young - a virtuous Roman matron who was always making wool. So they had 
said of her in her Epitaph, and in fact, they had said in my Mother's Epitaph: "She kept 
the House. She made wool."
  And so they had said of my Mother! The very same tiresome words.
  Well, no one was going to say that on mine. (How humorous to reflect on the fact now, 
thousands of years later, that I have no Epitaph!)
  What I failed to realize in my overall dejection was that the Roman world was enormous, 
and the Eastern portion of it differed dramatically from the Northern barbarian lands, 
where my brothers had fought.
  The entire of Asia Minor, towards which we sailed, had been conquered by Alexander of 
Macedon hundreds of years before. As you know, Alexander had been the pupil of Aristotle. 
Alexander had wanted to spread Greek culture everywhere. And in Asia Minor Greek ideas 
and styles found not mere country towns or farmers, but ancient cultures, like the Empire 
of Syria, willing to receive the new ideas, the grace and beauty of the Greek 
enlightenment, and willing to bring in tune with it their own centuries-old literature, 
religion, styles of life and dress.
  Antioch had been built by a general of Alexander the Great who sought to rival the 
beauty of other Hellenistic cities, with splendid Temples, administrative buildings and 
libraries of books in the Greek language, its schools where Greek philosophy was taught. 
A Hellenistic government was established - quite enlightened compared to ancient Eastern 
despotism, and yet there lay beneath all this the knowledge and customs and possibly the 
wisdom of the mysterious East.
  The Romans had conquered Antioch early on because it was a huge trade center. It was 
unique in this way, as Jacob showed to me, drawing a crude map with his wet finger on the 
wooden table. Antioch was a port of the great Mediterranean because she was only twenty 
miles up the Orontes River.
  Yet on the Eastern side she was open to the desert: all the old caravan routes came to 
Antioch, the camel merchants who brought fantastic wares from fabled lands - lands we