16

Another
Journey Begins

JULIUS WAS DIMINUTIVE IN STATURE, but in court he was an intimidating figure. On this morning he was dealing with some petty theft complaints made by this “famous” person or that “honorable” patron. Nothing bored or irritated him more. And he did not suffer fools gladly. In fact, his mind was entirely elsewhere: on how he might take into custody the slave prophetess. He had already sent his personal bodyguard, the former chariot racer Hannibal (in the arena he was called Hannibal the Horrible) to take her captive. His pulse quickened as he thought of what measures he might take to extract information from her.

The slave woman, however, whose name was Xanthia, had had a premonition of what was to come. And when she told Hector, her master, that God had told her in prayer that she needed to leave town for a while, Hector did not argue with her and even sent with her his estate agent, Alexander. Hector owned a spice shop in Pella and was sending Alexander to Petra to do business with the spice merchants there.

Now handing Alexander a bag of silver, Hector warned him, “Guard this with your life. Either you or Xanthia must hide this inside your garments, not in your bags, where it could be pilfered at night while you sleep! Remember, body contact! Keep it on your person at all times. When you get to Nabatea, you may have to pay a toll at the border. That’s just the price of doing business.” He hesitated. “It is not proper for you to travel together, as an unmarried man and woman . . . but this seems the safest choice at the moment. I cannot spare anyone else.

Ancient Laundries

The task of cleaning clothes in antiquity, especially fine clothes, was no less time consuming than it is today. Often such cleaning took place in the home, and the finer homes would have had their own “cleaning ladies” to accomplish the malodorous task—malodorous because the way that white togas were bleached back to pure white was by soaking them in urine. There were also public laundromats of a sort in antiquity, where there was a large marble vat to soak the clothes in the urine; for the right price, you could get most anything cleaned. The problem, of course, with using urine as bleach was that if there was any sort of color in a cloak or toga or tunic, any sort of filigree border or the like, it would be bleached to a very bland color as well, though there were apparently some techniques in antiquity to make fabric color-fast. This seems to have been the case when it came to the dye extracted from the murex shell, the so-called royal purple, which was in a sense trademarked by the emperor, in this case Vespasian. Only his agents were allowed to make garments with that dye.

Certain regions were famous for making long-lasting garments with certain colorful dyes, for example the area in Turkey known as Lydia. There is the famous story in Acts 16:11-15 about Paul meeting a woman from Thyatira (at the height of the Lydian kingdom a village in that kingdom, but in Paul’s day part of the province of Asia). We cannot be sure whether Lydia is a personal name (a woman named for the ancient region) or simply a descriptor, “the Lydian”; the Greek favors the former option. In any case, she seems to be a high-status woman with a home and servants of her own, licensed to make royal purple cloth—a trade she presumably learned in her home region, though when Paul met her she resided in Philippi, a Roman-colony city in northern Greece.

While making, dyeing, and cleaning clothes could be three separate professions, in practice, at least, the first and the third were regularly part of women’s work in the home. Dyeing could be trickier and was often left to professionals like Lydia. In any case, it would not be out of the ordinary at all for Hector to have his own cleaning facility and workers in his own home, if he was well-to-do.

“Now, go quickly! Out the back way, through the vineyard, and then down around the city perimeter to the road that leads to the King’s Highway, and head south. This journey will take some time, perhaps weeks, if you drive hard bargains with those spice merchants. As you well know, they are very shrewd. As I always say, ‘Walk away thrice or you’ll not get the spice at your price!’ Ah, well. Alexander, you know how to manage this. Farewell!”

With that, Alexander and Xanthia were off, through the peristyle garden and out the back way through the vineyards and onto the road. Hector did not figure to see them again for a good while. All the better. At least they would be safe.

Scarcely twenty minutes later there was a deafening pounding on his door.

Opening the door, Hector—a small Greek man with curly dark-brown hair—was looking directly at the midsection of a colossus. He looked up into the face of the man, a scarred visage that spoke volumes.

Holding out a writ, the man said in a deep voice, “I am here on official business from Julius, the judge. We have reason to believe a young slave woman of yours has made treasonous remarks, and we have come to take her in for questioning and possible trial.”

“In the first place,” said Hector, stretching to his full stature, “by Greek or Roman law, slaves are property, not persons. They cannot be tried as persons. So I could reject this summons as inappropriate on that ground alone. However, as it happens, she is no longer here. She has left on a long journey to Nabatea, and who knows whether she will ever come back. The roads are full of thieves and refugees from the war in Judea, not to mention soldiers. So she is not now nor shall she be available to Judge Julius any time soon, if ever.”

Hannibal was undaunted. “I have authority to search your house and see where this scoundrel woman is hiding.”

Hector smiled and said, “As you wish. I have nothing to hide, and certainly she is not here.”

Hannibal took the invitation and began rummaging through Hector’s house like a bull set loose in a villa. He turned over couches, peered into closets and bedrooms, stomped through the wine cellar, sniffed in the laundry area—but only briefly, since the smell of urine, used for bleaching, was overwhelming—and then inspected the vineyards. His search took more than an hour, but he turned up nothing that looked even remotely like a young female slave.

Hannibal might not have been the brightest brand in the fireplace, but he knew when to give up. Finally he stomped back to the tablinum, where Hector was sitting, dealing with his day’s work. “I find nothing. But if and when this woman returns, I will be back. Judge Julius does not give up easily, I promise you.”

“Very well,” said Hector. “Your master should have known better than to try and arrest a slave and treat them as a person without involving me. In the future, he will have to deal with me directly, since Xanthia is my property. But as I say, who knows whether she will return at all.” With this Hector stood and escorted Hannibal to the door.

Stadion

This basic Greek unit of measure is said by Herodotus to amount to six hundred feet (157 meters), though in an Olympic stadium it was more like 176 meters. Races in such arenas were measured by how many stadion they were rather than by yards or meters. The Latinized form of this Greek word is stadium, from which the English word comes. The plural would be either stadii or stadia.

“Vale,” said Hector, raising his hand as Hannibal started out the door.

Turning back, Hannibal remarked, “Don’t be surprised if you see me again. Next time I shall not be so friendly.”

Once Hannibal was out of sight, Hector summoned his chief messenger among the slaves and said, “Go down into town and pay a visit to Zeno the lawyer. Tell him what just transpired, and tell him to be prepared to file a libel suit if necessary, due to a false claim against me or my slave. Tell him I will come and lunch with him and explain in full, but for now tell him to explore the legal options carefully. Julius must not be allowed to run roughshod over ancient Greek law. This town is not a Roman colony city, and it is not run, at least according to tradition, on the basis of Roman law.”

As the slave departed, a smile came across Hector’s face. He thought to himself, One can’t be too careful these days. Give the Romans a stadion, and they take ten. Xanthia was right to warn us about a wolf among the sheep. I must tell Aristobolus to never invite that little sneak Julius to our worship again.