Claudius the God Read Online Free PDF Page B

during the first flight to Edom, and again but for Silas the family would never have escaped from Tyre the day: that Herod insulted Antipas. And at Antioch it had been Silas who had provided Herod with his disguise for escaping from his creditors, besides, protecting Cypros and the children and finding the vessel for them. When things were really bad Silas was at his best and cheerfullest, for then he knew that Herod would need his services and would give him an opportunity for saying, ‘I am entirely at your disposal, Herod Agrippa, my dear friend, if I may call you so. But if you had taken my advice this would never have occurred.’ In times of prosperity he always grew more and more gloomy, seeming to look back with a sort of regret, to the bad old days of poverty and disgrace; and even encouraging them to return by his warnings to Herod that if he continued in his present course (whatever it might be) he would end as a ruined man. However, things were bad enough now to make Silas the brightest of companions. He cracked jokes with the crew and told the children long complicated stories, of his military adventures. Cypros who usually resented Silas’s tediousness, now felt ashamed of her rudeness to this golden-hearted friend.
    ‘I was brought up with a Jewish prejudice against Samaritans,’ she told Silas, ‘and you must forgive me, if it has taken all these years for me to overcome it.’
    ‘I must ask your forgiveness too, Princess,’ Silas replied ‘forgiveness, I mean, for my bluntness of speech. But such is my, nature. I must take the liberty of saying that if your Jewish friends and relatives were in general a little less upright and a. little more charitable I should like them better. A cousin of mine was once riding on business from Jerusalem to Jericho. He came upon a poor Jew lying wounded and naked in the hot sun by the roadside. He had been set, on by bandits. My cousin cleansed his wounds and bound them up as best he could and then took him on his beast to the nearest inn, where he paid in advance for his room and his food for a few days the innkeeper insisted on payment in advance - and then visited him on his way back from Jericho and helped him to get home. Well, that was nothing: we Samaritans are made that way. It was all in a day’s work for my cousin. But the joke was that three or four well-to-do Jews a priest among them whom my cousin had met riding towards him just before he came on the wounded man, must have actually seen him lying by the roadside; but because he was no relation of theirs they had left him there to die and ridden on, though he was groaning and calling out for help most pitifully. The innkeeper was a Jew too. He told my cousin that he quite understood the reluctance of these travellers to attend to the wounded man: if he had died on their hands they would have become ritually unclean from touching a corpse, which would have been a great inconvenience to themselves and their families. The priest, the innkeeper explained, was probably on his way to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple: he, least of all, could risk pollution. Well, thank God, ‘I am a Samaritan, and a man with a blunt tongue. I say what I think. I - ‘
    Herod interrupted, ‘My dear Cypros, isn’t that a most instructive story? And if the poor fellow had been a Samaritan he wouldn’t have had enough money to make it worth the bandits while to rob him.’
    At Alexandria Herod, accompanied by Cypros, the children, and the two soldiers, went to the chief magistrate of the Jewish colony there - or Alabarch, as he was called. The Alabarch was answerable to the Governor of Egypt for, the good behaviour of his co-religionists. He had to see that they paid their taxes regularly and refrained from street riots with the Greeks and from other breaches of the peace. Herod greeted the Alabarch suavely and presently asked him for a loan of 8,000 gold pieces, offering in exchange to use his influence at the Imperial Court