The accommodations along the way were well organized. At each stop we hired a new beast to carry us to the next—mostly mules and horses, but occasionally I was forced to ride a spiteful creature called a camel. At day’s end, there was always an inn waiting for us.
At last, at the ancient port of Gaza, we reached the sea, and reentered that part of the world where one may expect to hear Greek spoken, and even a bit of Latin. It was in Gaza that I first heard the alarming news of what was happening in Rome.
While Antipater and I had been off in Babylon, dreadful omens had been witnessed all over Italy. Mountains crashed together like Titans wrestling, sending shock waves that ruptured roads and caused buildings to collapse. The earth itself cracked open and spat flames into the sky. Domesticated animals turned feral; dogs behaved like wolves and even sheep turned vicious and attacked their owners. After so many awful omens, no one was surprised when war at last broke out between Rome and the subordinate cities of her restive Italian confederation. Now the entire peninsula was in tumult. Roman magistrates across Italy had been assassinated. In retaliation, and to quell the revolt, Rome’s armies had besieged and sacked rebellious cities and put entire regions to the torch.
Worried and homesick, I dispatched a letter to my father back in Rome, asking him to reassure me that he was well and to send his reply to a professional receiver of letters in Alexandria, the city that was to be our destination after we sailed up the Nile to see the Great Pyramid.
Antipater seemed to be far less agitated than I was by the news from Italy. Indeed, whenever a shopkeeper or a fellow traveler imparted the latest gossip about the situation in Rome, I thought I saw a fleeting smile on Antipater’s lips. He was a Greek, after all, proud of his heritage and, as I had learned in the course of our journey, suspicious and even disdainful of Roman power. Having now seen with my own eyes so many glorious achievements of Greek civilization, I understood the nostalgia felt by many Greeks for the days before Rome intruded on their world.
From Gaza, we journeyed due east along a flat, featureless stretch of sandy coast, until we came to that region of Egypt called the Delta, where the desert abruptly gives way to a land of lush greenery watered by the mouth of the Nile.
Before the Nile reaches the sea, it spreads out in many channels, like the fingers of a wide-open hand. On maps, this vast, watery region forms a triangular shape not unlike the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, inverted: Δ. Thus it acquired its name: the Delta.
In the coastal town of Pelusium we booked passage on a boat to take us up the Nile and all the way to Memphis, which lies a few miles south of the apex of the Delta, and from which we would make an excursion to see the fabled pyramids.
The heat was stifling as we sailed upriver on the crowded boat, passing quaint villages and ancient temples. The rank smell of Delta mud filled my nostrils. I spotted crocodiles in the shallows, heard the call of the ibis and the bellow of hippopotami, and felt very far from my father and the war that was raging in Italy.
Long before Romulus founded Rome, even before the heroes of Homer sacked Troy, the civilization of Egypt was already ancient. Some of the monuments we passed on the riverbank were unimaginably old, and they looked it. Weathered granite slabs depicted animal-headed gods in stiff poses alongside images of the Egyptian kings of old, called pharaohs, who wore bizarre headdresses and wielded crooks and flails.
While I gazed at Egypt passing by, Antipater kept his head down and read about it. During our stay with his cousin Bitto in Halicarnassus, Antipater had arranged to have several scrolls of The Histories of Herodotus copied from her library, including the chapters that described Egypt and its people.
Along a quiet stretch of the river, we passed a little boy who stood atop the steep bank. I smiled and waved to him. The boy waved back, then hitched up his long, loose garments and relieved himself in the water below. The stream glittered under the bright sunlight and the boy made a game of aiming it this way and that. He grinned and looked quite proud of himself.
Antipater, poring over a scroll, never looked up.
“According to Herodotus,” he said, “no one has yet determined the source of the Nile. Those who travel as far as possible upriver, a journey of many months, eventually arrive in a region of vast swamps and impassable forests where the people are all sorcerers; they are also extremely short and as black as ebony, and speak a language incomprehensible to outsiders. Farther than that, no traveler has ever ventured and come back alive. Nor, according to Herodotus, can anyone adequately explain why the Nile, unlike all other rivers, is at it lowest in the spring, then floods at the time of the summer solstice.”
“The solstice is still a few days away,” I said. “I suppose that means we’re seeing the Nile at its lowest. Will it actually rise high enough to flood the banks on either side?”
Antipater looked up, shading his eyes from the bright sunlight. “Hopefully, Gordianus, we shall witness this famous phenomenon for ourselves. The river is said to rise so dramatically that the banks are flooded for hundreds of miles, irrigating a vast amount of cultivated land and creating the most fertile region on earth. The inundation should begin any day now.”
He returned his attention to the scroll in his lap. “Herodotus goes on to say that, just as the Nile is different from all other rivers, so the people who live along its banks follow customs contrary to other people. The women go to market and carry on trade, while the men stay at home and weave. There are no priestesses, only priests, and while holy men in other lands grow beards and wear their hair long, in Egypt they shave their heads—and every other part of their bodies, as well. The Egyptians write from right to left, not left to right. They knead dough with their feet and clay with their hands. They invented the peculiar practice called circumcision. And listen to this: the women make water standing up, while the men do so crouching down!”
I frowned. “I have to wonder if that’s completely accurate. If you’d bothered to look up, you’d have seen that little boy—”
“I assure you, Gordianus, no historian was ever more scrupulous than Herodotus. He traveled extensively in Egypt, saw everything, and consulted all the best authorities.”
“Yes, but didn’t Herodotus write that book over three hundred years ago? The information might be a bit out of date.”
“My dear boy, there’s a reason Herodotus remains our best authority on all matters pertaining to Egypt. No other writer can match his insight and attention to detail. Now, where was I? Ah, yes—on the subject of worship, Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians are the most religious of all people. They can trace their practices back many thousands of years. Since the Egyptians were the first race of mortals, they built the first temples. It was from Egypt that we Greeks received our first knowledge of the gods, though we know them by other names. Thus the Egyptian god Ammon is our Zeus, their Osiris is our Dionysus, Anubis is the same as Hermes, and so on.”
I frowned. “Isn’t Anubis the one who has the head of dog? Whereas Hermes—or Mercury, as we Romans call him—is a handsome youth; at least that’s how the statues in Greek and Roman temples always show him. How can Anubis and Hermes be the same god?”
“You touch upon a problem that has puzzled even the wisest philosophers. What are we to make of the fact that the Egyptians worship animals, and give animal characteristics to certain gods in their statues and pictures? Some believe their use of such imagery is purely symbolic. Thus, Anubis doesn’t really have a dog’s head, but is only shown that way because he acts as the loyal guardian of the other gods—their watchdog, so to speak.”