A Positive Spin

A marketplace fable set in the Romano-Greco-Phoenician city of Tyre during the reign of the Emperor Nerva

The other day in the marketplace, who should I come across but Chromius the copyist. When I say “come across”, the truth is I knew I was going to meet him, and where: in the shade of the eastern portico, next to the slave-market. The place where we first met, and where he has spent so many of his most fateful hours, not least the other morning. But this is to anticipate. Here is the copyist’s story, from his first day in Tyre to his last.

First, though, a reflection. The more I get to know the marketplace, the more I marvel
at the capacity of those who make their living there—selling, dealing, doing business—to talk things up. Whatever the facts, they find words to place them in the most flattering light, to put a positive spin on them. No easy task when things are tough, as they often are in the marketplace. With that thought in mind, let’s begin.

The first time I met Chromius was on a summer’s morning thirty years ago. Then only a few years older than he was, just back from my studies in Athens and Rome, I was with my uncle, helping him to purchase a scribe.

Chromius impressed us from the outset. There he was in chains, in the shade to keep his skin fair and make him as saleable as possible, separated from his parents for the first time, yet he seemed undaunted. XIV years old, his neck-board said. Of average height for his age, his three chief features were his black curly hair, his big intelligent eyes, and his cheeriness.

“So you read and write?” my uncle said in Greek, pointing to the neck-board.

In good Greek the boy replied that he could do both. His father was from Ephesus, he said, his mother Phoenician. They were slaves also, and belonged to a camel-merchant in Gaza. He was a good master, but was selling a few slaves, him included, “because of a downturn in the camel trade”.

Pleased by his fluency and presence of mind, my uncle delved into his writing-scrip, took
out papyrus, ink and a reed-pen, sat the slave up against a column, put the scrip on his knees, and gave him a dictation test. As he recited some lines of Homer, the snowstorm in Iliad XII, the scribe wrote quickly and neatly, making no mistakes. My uncle haggled for a short time with the slave-monger, signed the deed, paid, and the boy was his.

For the next fifteen years, Chromius’s fortunes followed my uncle’s. He lived in Tyre for six years, my uncle being city record-keeper. Chromius recorded for him, eventually becoming his steward. Since my uncle dealt with the Roman authorities, he saw to it that the boy learnt Latin. When the Library in Alexandria invited my uncle to take charge of its Phoenician Department, Chromius went with him.

It was in Alexandria that the copyist had the two godsends which set him on his feet. First, my uncle made him Chief Scribe in the Phoenician Department. Chromius thus acquired experience of books, slave-management and the New Publishing. By the last I mean parchment books instead of papyrus-rolls, and the new inks and quills. Second, following my uncle’s death after nine years in Alexandria, Chromius gained his freedom thanks to the will.

Able for the first time to choose his destiny, he set up a publishing house near the Library. A small one, since his savings enabled him to buy only eight scribes. But his house innovated. It embraced the New Publishing, producing books on parchment. Stronger than papyrus, easier to read when written on both sides, more scholar-friendly when bound together than papyrus-rolls because a line or phrase could be found more quickly, they quickly attracted buyers. And Chromius did not hesitate to publish texts that begot controversy.

A two-edged sword, as he would learn.

His business grew steadily, but not as quickly as he wanted, so two years later he “delocalised” to Tyre. Here his chief costs—rent, slaves, parchment—were lower. His greatest saving was on parchment. Through a tanner in Gaza, a cousin of his old master, he obtained wagonloads of camelskin whose preparation as writing material he oversaw in Tyre.

Now, although Chromius’s competitors in the book-trade were struggling to keep up with him as they moved from papyrus to parchment, they were quick to remind their customers that camelskin parchment, even from young animals, is inferior to good sheepskin or goatskin. This did not deter Chromius. He aimed not to bring out the best books on the market but to make his books the best value for money. Such pride did he take in them that he hired one of Tyre’s leading artists to design a camel’s-head emblem. Stamped on the last page of each book in Tyrian purple, it soon became known throughout the empire.

For his books sold well. At the forefront of ideas, better value than papyrus, and two-thirds the cost of his competitors’ parchment books, how could they fail to? Within two years of coming to Tyre he had a sixth of the new book market in Alexandria. Within seven years, he estimated, one in five Greek books sold in the empire bore his camel’s-head.

Emboldened by their success, he set up a Latin department. More for the kudos than the money, I suspect, since the freight costs to Gaul, Britain and Spain lowered his profit margin. But his Latin books sold well at the eastern end, too, and soon yielded a third of his profit.

As sales grew, everyone noted that Chromius used more and more the euphuising and obfuscatory circumlocutiousness of modern marketing. That is, he gilded the truth, or at least always put the most positive spin on things. If he mentioned that he had missioned a taskforce to conduct a feasibility study of a new ink composition with a view to consolidating his leadership position in the customer relations field, you suspected readers had complained that his pages blackened their tunic sleeves. If he informed you that such and such a title was moving so fast in Phrygia that he’d had to rush in stocks from the surrounding provinces, you assumed it was a flop everywhere but Phrygia. If he told you he was reviewing his commercial strategy in Athens, you grasped he was trying to get rid of his agent there. If he said he was redefining the age-configuration of his production team, you understood he was selling off everyone over forty.

And as business thrived, so did he. He took for wife a daughter of the Alexandrian glassmaker who made the Library’s new windows. When he could afford it, he bought and freed his parents, who lived their last years with him. His fortune showed itself, he liked to say, in how many houses he had. When he started out he owned nothing but his business, he and his wife living in a disused storeroom at her father’s glassworks. The first house he owned was in Tyre, near the fishermen’s quarter. The second, larger, adjoined the marketplace. Letting these to tenants, he then moved to his third, one of Tyre’s grandest. To these he soon added a fourth at an upmarket address in Alexandria, where he negotiated most contracts. Then his fifth and last at the best address of all: the Palatine Hill in Rome.

The Palatine house delighted him. True, as it was badly laid-out and half-ruined, it needed a lot of work. But there was room to extend, and it had marble paving as old as that of any other house in the city. Paving which proclaimed his arrival in the highest stratum of the imperial pyramid—since his family now spent part of every winter on the Palatine, could anything stop his daughters marrying into the senatorial families nearby?—and which he vowed to keep. Not just keep but show off in the enlarged house whose plans he had talked through with Rome’s leading master-builder on his latest visit there. Almost his last act before the end was to send a letter to his Roman agent saying he was satisfied with the builder’s plans, authorising work to begin.

But the end came, and when it did it came out of the blue. Or should I say out of the purple? Anyway, it came as a consequence of one of last season’s titles, this way.

As Chromius planned it, the season was to be his best ever. It had to be, to pay the builder in Rome. He was bringing out more titles than ever before, seven in Greek, five in Latin. As usual, most were fillers to embellish his list. His real hopes lay in one title in each language.

I got these details from him the spring before last, when I ran into him one morning near the market-portico. He had just sold off two arthritic copyists.

Over a cup of Cypriot wine he rebuked me. “You haven’t been to see my new room, Tyrius.”

Seizing his offer, I accompanied him to his production site, which I had not seen since he put on his new Latin room. Such was Tyre’s confidence in Camelhead’s future, he said, that he had had no difficulty finding capital for its construction, although he had only just finished paying off the debt he had taken on to buy and adapt the premises. He now had two Latin copy-rooms and two larger Greek ones, more than a hundred scribes altogether. The new room was the first we walked into.

“Impressive,” I said. “Functional, but elegant. It’s like being in the Library.”

“Thanks. That’s what I was aiming for.”

High-pillared, and well lit through his father-in-law’s windows, it held twenty slaves or so facing the old room. The two communicated by an open door through which we could see twenty more. Seated in the doorway at a desk, a reader was dictating from a papyrus-roll. Reading verse, I heard. The lines were unfamiliar, and yet … those couplets, that sly humour … As he declaimed the last line, whose sting raised laughter all round, I twigged.

“Marcus Valerius Martialis?”

Chromius nodded. “His eleventh book. Best work for years.”

He pointed to the reader’s scroll. “That’s the only copy east of Athens. It should bring in as much as last year’s Latin list. But come and see the Greek Department.”

We walked across the courtyard, to the other double room where sixty or so slaves were at work. In a stiller atmosphere than the Latin rooms, presumably because they were hearing something less risqué than Martial.

“As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself …” the reader was dictating. The Greek sounded correct enough, but it had an unfamiliar, mystical tone. Curious to see what it was, I took a completed book from a basket, opened it and read:

“ACCORDING TO JOHN. In the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god. He was with god in the beginning …”

“Who’s this John? Sounds like one of those trendy Jewish mystics.”

He nodded again. “Christians, you mean. It’s another Good News text. Remember? Like the ones that came out ten or twelve years ago.”

“In Domitian’s time. How could I forget? I won’t compare Domitian to Nero, but like him he didn’t like Christians much.”

“Or their books,” he recalled. “You can’t have forgotten the bookseller he drowned in that ship-fight in the Coliseum, for stocking Good News writers. The one they call Mark, or was it Matthew? Poor bookman didn’t even believe in their Jesus. Talk about the bad old days!”

“Well, at least Nerva doesn’t drown booksellers,” I agreed. “How many are you doing?”

“Have a guess.” He looked pleased with himself.

“Five hundred?”

“Multiply by four.”

I looked at him in disbelief.

“Listen,” he said. “Every Christian in the world has been waiting for this for years. My
agents say I should be doing five thousand, not two. If anything I’m being too cautious …”

To cut a long story short, his money-makers were the new Martial, and John’s Good News (bizarre title, but that’s what the Christians call their books). Twelve hundred copies of the first, two thousand of the second. He had a few hundred of the fillers, but they were the titles he was investing his hopes in. Not just his hopes, either. The Martial parchment alone had set him back nine thousand Tyrian obols.

A few weeks later, when he had enough stocks, he launched his books. Down to the wharves they went, barrowload after barrowload, ribboned in purple. Tyre had never seen so many. As the barrow-pushers made their way through the marketplace, the city applauded.

Wheeled on board the waiting ships, the new titles sailed off towards the four corners of the empire. By midwinter Chromius’s agents were reporting that sales were booming, and sending orders for more copies.

Suddenly, as winter ended, he heard news of an unexpected kind from an unexpected source: the governor’s secretary. He turned up one morning at Camelhead with six legionaries and a warrant from the imperial chancery.

“Sequestrated?” Chromius hardly knew the word. “What do you mean, sequestrated?”

The secretary informed him that his only information was the warrant. By it the emperor ordered John’s Good News to be removed from sale because it threatened public order. Chromius looked on as the soldiers counted the copies on his premises. Then, commandeering half a dozen wheelbarrows, they took them off to the palace. At the same time—well, in the space of a month at most—the same thing was happening throughout the empire.

Why? That question has two answers. The official one is that the initiative for Nerva’s ban came from the army’s spies. Everywhere they observed Christian feverishness. Recalling the street-clashes of Nero’s time, the army pressed for the book to be banned. When the senate agreed, the emperor had to follow. The unofficial answer comes from Chromius. His enemies in the book trade plotted his downfall, he claims. They ghosted the army’s intelligence report, and put up enough money to buy enough senators to bring him down.

Like most Tyrians I believe the truth lies between the two versions. More to the point, whether his enemies in Alexandria plotted his downfall or not, he had enough of them there and in Tyre, and the Christians did too, to ensure that as the end neared no one moved to help him, for fear of sharing his fate.

Which was as follows. The chancery dug up a law from Nero’s reign whose object was to silence the emperor’s critics. Anyone who produced or distributed seditious writings was liable to a fine equivalent to sixty of our obols on each, it said. I’m not sure why, but John’s Good News was deemed to be seditious to Nerva. And for reasons too complex to outline here, Chromius’s contracts with his booksellers drew their fines as well as his, which doubled his to a hundred and twenty obols a book. Of the two thousand three hundred and seventy-six he had published, not all came into the hands of the authorities. But they had no trouble recognising those that did, through the camel’s-head. Whence the joke still doing the rounds of the taverns here, that “Chromius’s camels have finally come home to roost.”

All Good News copies that were found were burned. Plenty are still circulating, however, and many people question whether the crackdown will have lasting effect. And Chromius wasn’t the only publisher to suffer. Three or four others brought out copies at the same time, but at most a few dozen. In Chromius’s case, the chancery found that he had infringed the law one thousand four hundred and nineteen times. This meant, as the governor’s secretary informed him in mid-spring, that the total fine he had incurred was just over a hundred and seventy thousand obols, to be paid into the Tyre treasury within three months. Failing which, in the usual way, everything he owned would be forfeit, and he and his family exiled from the province and sold as slaves.

A hundred and seventy thousand obols! How could he put together such a sum? Unaided, since no one was allowed to pay on his behalf. For ten days his lawyers considered fighting the penalty on legal grounds. When they deemed that to be pointless, he turned his assets into obols. He sold his houses in Tyre, Alexandria and Rome. He sold his production-site (but had to repay the loan on the new room), his scribes, stock, and all his parchment. Household slaves, furniture, his wife’s jewellery, even their best clothes, he sold everything.

Alas! to no avail. The end came as I have said, ten days ago when I saw him being sold back into slavery, to a master who had to be from another province.

Mercifully, on this occasion as on the first, he was the only member of his family to be sold. If his friends could do nothing for him, we managed to save his wife and daughters. A group of Tyrians, of whom I was proud to be one, went to the governor to plead their case. His Excellency had no margin in Chromius’s case, but to the family he could show “administrative clemency”. Through “secretarial bungling”, the two girls and their mother escaped from Tyre the night before the authorities came for them, taking ship for a destination which for obvious reasons I cannot name, but where they will have no shortage of reading material.

As for Chromius, displayed for sale at dawn with eight others near the portico, at the seventh hour he was the only one unsold. Being managing director of a transnational business doesn’t skill you to milk ewes or mop the atrium! The group of friends I have mentioned earlier kept an eye on things through the day and arranged his purchase at the eighth hour. Each of us putting up enough obols to pay his keep for a year, we prevailed on the son of his old master in Gaza to buy him. Gaza seemed the least bad option available, being his native town, close to Tyre by ship, and not too far from Alexandria, but outside the province and far enough away to keep him out of the public eye. Chromius’s fingers are less nimble than they were, and the Gazan didn’t really need a new scribe, but he has kindly opened Gaza’s first camel-hire agency and put him in charge, on trial for six months.

So the fallen publishing magnate left Tyre as he arrived, belonging to a camel-merchant. As cheerful as ever, though. And like the marketing man he remains at heart, still talking things up, still putting a positive spin on things. Or so I hear from a friend who has family in Gaza and called in to see him three days ago. The shame of being sold again as a slave? “A golden opportunity to upgrade my knowledge of the commodities market.” The ordeal of being prodded, having his teeth inspected, and being priced aloud by prospective buyers? “An invaluable experience of being at the supply end of the recruitment process.” The dizzying fall from his marble-paved house on the Palatine, where he played quoits with senators and set the agenda for half the dinner-time conversations in the empire, to counting camels in and camels out in a dung-spattered courtyard in Gaza? “A short-term strategic redeployment.”