Free Pandora by Anne Rice Page B

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 theNorthern 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 camelmerchants who brought fantastic wares from fabled lands—lands we know now to have been India and China—silk, carpet and jewels which never reached the markets of Rome.
    Countless other traders came and went to Antioch. Pine roads connected it in the East with the Euphrates River and the Parthian Empire beyond, and to the South you could go to Damascus and Judea, and to the North, of course, lay all the cities made by Alexander, which had flowered under Roman rule.
    Roman soldiers loved it mere. It was an easy and interesting life. And Antioch loved the Romans because the Romans protected the trade routes, and the caravans, and kept peace in the port.
    “You will find open places, arcades, Temples, all that you seek and such markets you would not believe. There are Romans everywhere. I hope to One Most High that you are not recognized by someone from your own background! That is one danger of which your Father had no time to plan.”
    I waved it away.
    “Does it have teachers now, and markets of books?”
    “From everywhere. You will find books which no one can read. And Greek is spoken by everyone. You have to go out in the country to find some poor farmer who does not understand Greek. Latin has now become common.
    “The philosophers never stop; they speak of Plato and Pythagoras, names that don’t mean much to me; they talk about Chaldean magic from Babylon. Of course there are Temples to every imaginable god.”
    He went on, reflecting as he spoke:
    “The Hebrews? I think personally they are too worldly—they want to hang around in short tunics with the Greeks and go to the public baths. They are too interested