Ancient World 02 - Raiders of the Nile Read Online Free PDF

flourish toward the unseen occupant of the elegant litter.
    A musical interlude followed, then an acrobatic act in which three men balanced themselves atop the shoulders of a fourth. Then a trained monkey appeared and tried to snatch away the loincloth of the man on the bottom, which caused the human monolith to stagger and sway and finally come tumbling down. The crowd roared with laughter.
    More skits followed. The subject matter grew more topical as the program progressed, leading up to a skit about a grotesquely fat merchant throwing back cups of wine and getting very drunk while dictating letters to a scribe. When the fat merchant felt the need to relieve himself, and had to summon two servants merely to rise from his chair, even I knew whom he was meant to represent: King Ptolemy. Everyone in Alexandria knew the story—the king had become so enormously fat, he could no longer relieve himself either fore or aft without assistance.
    While the audience hooted with laughter, the actor in the fat-suit waddled across the stage area toward an imaginary latrina (represented by a chair with a hole in it). Assisting him were the two young pipe players, each clutching an elbow and struggling to support his massive weight. When the three of them arrived at the latrina, one of the boys made a great show of searching amid the voluminous robes hanging from the merchant’s vast belly. At last, with a squeal of triumph, the boy revealed a small phallus that looked to be made of leather and brass and was evidently attached to a hidden wineskin or some such container, for a moment later the merchant threw back his head and gave a loud sigh of relief as golden liquid streamed forth from the spout. At first the boy carefully aimed the stream into the latrina, but then, mugging shamelessly to the audience, he began to direct the stream this way and that, deliberately making a terrible mess. The merchant, with his head thrown back and his eyes shut, remained oblivious.
    At last, with his bladder finally empty and his phallus tucked away, the merchant began to waddle back toward his chair—then suddenly raised his eyebrows in alarm and shouted for his servants to reverse course. With a great deal of awkward confusion, the three of them turned around and headed back to the latrina.
    What followed was an incredibly vulgar display, with the merchant repeatedly attempting to settle his enormous posterior on the latrina, and his two assistants frantically striving to pull apart his huge, unseen buttocks (which remained hidden by the folds of his garment). When at last the merchant was seated, with a great deal of grunting and heaving and a cacophony of gassy squeals (produced offstage, from within the tent, I think), he began to eject a peculiar array of debris from his rear end, which the assistants stooped down to retrieve, one by one. These included various pieces of pottery and bronze ware—lamps and bowls and serving implements—which the servants first displayed to the audience, then offered to the merchant, who wrinkled his nose and waved them away, as anyone would at something that came out of his backside. The laughter of the audience was thick with derision.
    At first I took this display to be mere nonsense humor, until a nearby spectator suddenly got the point and muttered aloud, “Ah! They all come from Cyrene!”
    Observing the pottery more closely, even I recognized the blue and yellow pattern distinctive to the workshops of Cyrene, a city some five hundred miles to the west of Alexandria—and then I understood the joke. Since the time of Alexander, Cyrene and its surrounding territory, called Cyrenaica, had been a part of Egypt’s kingdom, a western frontier traditionally administered by a younger brother or cousin of the king. Until eight years ago, the regent of Cyrene had been King Ptolemy’s bastard brother, called Apion; but when Apion died, childless, he left a will that bequeathed Cyrenaica to the Roman people. King