Selection Criteria

The other day in the marketplace who should I come across but Promachus the sapper.

The first I knew was someone tapping me on the shoulder as I waited in front of the inkmaker’s stall.

“Excuse me, sir. I believe you’re Tyrius the fable-teller.”

I turned around to see who it was.

“Good morning, centurion,” I greeted him.

Red cloak, mail breast-armour, silver scale-pieces, vine-staff … I knew at once that he was a legionary and officer. Presumably from the Eighteenth Phoenician, the legion here in Tyre. Even without the uniform, I would have picked him as a centurion. His hair was greying at the temples but he was sinewy and weather-tanned, and carried himself briskly.

“Chief Sapper Promachus, Eighteenth Phoenician. I was wondering if I could have a word with you, sir.”

I had no idea what he wanted, my dealings with the Legion being as rare as I can make them.

“Now?”

“If you’ve got a moment. Somewhere we can sit and talk.”

“The tavern,” I suggested, pointing to the one near the tax-gatherer’s office.

“Too noisy. I believe you live not far away. Would you mind if we go to your place?”

I nodded, sensing that what he had to say mattered, at least to him. He waited while I bought my ink, then walked with me to my house. There, seated in the courtyard a short time later, over a cup of Cypriot wine, he broached his subject. In good Greek, the language in which he had addressed me.

“I’ve read your stories, Tyrius. You know Roman literature as well as anyone in Tyre. Would you have the time to help me upgrade my Latin? The Legion will pay.”

I’ll say this much for the Eighteenth, the quartermaster pays on time, generously.

“I’ll need a lesson a day for a month.”

“Are you telling me you don’t speak Latin, Promachus?” I asked, incredulous, switching to that language.

I was incredulous on two counts. First, it is not every day that an officer in the Roman army asks a non-Roman to teach him Latin. I may have studied in Rome, but my first language is Phoenician. And second, because from his Greek I could tell he was a cultivated man. Not only did he have a pleasing accent—Antioch, I guessed—he spoke with a grace that I would not have expected in … well, a sapper. Why would an educated legionary be asking me to help him with a language he used every day?

“Up to a point,” he laughed, meeting my Latin with his, which I’ll come to shortly. “Let me put you in the picture with what’s happening in the army. You’ve heard of the O word, I presume?”

I had to think for a moment.

“Outsourcing?”

“That’s the word I meant. The army’s starting to outsource. It’ll be letting out some activities to external service-providers. My field is road-making. Bridge and aqueduct design, to be exact. The Senate is in the process of outsourcing all road-making operations in the empire, and the Syria-Phoenicia zone has come up for tender.”

“And you and your fellow sappers in the Eighteenth are in for the contract?” I surmised, putting II and II together.

“Exactly. We’ve set up a company, Tyrian Road-makers Incorporated, and put in our tender. I’m the chairman, being the most experienced. I imagine we’ll have to leave the army if we get the contract, although that point has yet to be clarified. If I say so myself, we’re the most professional operation in the zone.

“But that doesn’t mean we—TRI—will get the contract. The Senate has short-listed four tenderers. Two haven’t got a hope. One’s in Smyrna, has no base here, doesn’t know the zone. The second’s in Damascus, a consortium of merchants, too new to be taken seriously. Which leaves us and the other Damascenes.”

“The Twenty-Ninth?”

“Our old friends!”

As everyone in this part of the world knows, the rivalry between Tyre and Damascus extends to the army. Indeed, nowhere is it fiercer than between our legion and theirs.

“They call their company Roads Damascus. Objectively, the facts are in our favour. We’ve got a better portfolio of finished projects. Our team’s more skilled. We work faster. In a nutshell, TRI meets the Senate’s selection criteria better than Roads Damascus.”

He sighed. “The official criteria, that is. As always there are the official criteria …”

“And the unofficial criteria. The decisive ones, as often as not. In this case?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“The Latin language, would you believe. As spoken by Quintus Valerius Faverius, the Twenty-Ninth’s Chief Sapper. My counterpart. Roman born, Roman educated, well connected, well presented. A smooth-talking silvertail.”

I did not have to be a magician to grasp that the competition was as much personal as professional.

“So officially it’s tender versus tender, the Eighteenth versus the Twenty-Ninth. Unofficially it’s Chief Sapper Promachus …”

“Versus Chief Sapper Faverius, his powers of persuasion versus mine. Exactly. What it boils down to is a job interview. An interview where I have the official criteria on my side, but he has what counts, better presentation skills in Latin. In forty-six days we both have to be in Rome. The four tenderers have been called before the Senate’s Army Outsourcing Committee. Each of us has half a day to present his company’s case …”

“Who’s on the committee?” I thought it helpful to find out whom he had to convince.

As he listed the six senators from memory, I grasped why he had decided he needed Latin lessons. Only one committeeman had made his name in the provinces, and he had long since retired to the capital. The others had made their careers in Rome, and one happened to be Faverius’s wife’s uncle. All six came from old senatorial families, presumably held strong views on the benefits of Roman rule, and doubtless spoke the purest Latin, unlike the sapper.

“You want me to work on three things,” I said, having had time to listen to his speech. “Your accent, your turn of phrase, your fluency.”

None of which was frankly bad, although he spoke less well than I have had to show in my transcription of his words. But none was frankly good, either, for reasons he explained. He had had no schooling in Latin, which he learned to speak in the army. He seldom used it above the level of the parade-ground, where no one bothered to correct his Greekisms. Hence his Antioch accent (he later confirmed), so pleasing in his own tongue, came over in Latin as slurred and badly stressed, his phrasing as awkward. So much so that in Latin he came close to sounding like a stage Greek. Wouldn’t the senators deem him less rounded than his Roman rival? Less apt to carry out complex projects on the empire’s behalf?

“Those, yes. And the Aeneid,” he replied, with a knowing grin.

For a moment his meaning escaped me, then I laughed. No fool, the sapper! He had to convince the senators that TRI and he, an outsider from Antioch, were more useful to Rome’s interest than Roads Damascus under its Roman silvertail. What more efficient way to do this than by steeping himself in the greatest work of Rome’s greatest poet?

And what cannier way? As everyone in the Imperium Romanum knows, Virgil’s epic is a hymn to Rome’s civilising mission, its language the model for Latin-speakers. By steeping himself in the poet’s vocabulary and phrasing, in all aspects of his work, the sapper intended to make sure he spoke the same language as the senators. A line or two of the imperial poet quoted from memory, a phrase well placed, could enable him to outshine Faverius. The latter being, Promachus assured me, a clever speaker but with little substance.

We began our lessons that afternoon. Every day at the tenth hour we took our places in the courtyard, reciting and discussing Virgil’s verse. The Aeneid only, there being no time for his Eclogues or Georgics, which the sapper planned to study on the ship to Rome. He always came alone. Apart from my familiarity with Virgil’s writings, the main reason he had sought lessons from me was that I was not part of the army or Tyre’s Roman establishment. The two or three of his fellow sappers who knew of our lessons could be trusted to say nothing. In this way, on the military grapevine, word was unlikely to get through to Damascus of his strategy.

In practice what we did was straightforward. I would get him to recite twenty lines or so, perfecting his pronunciation. Then we would discuss them, using as much of Virgil’s wording as we could. Images, themes, allusions, resonances, the poet’s technique and purpose: we neglected nothing, taking the time to explore any worthwhile by-road. In this way, book by book, we worked our way through the Aeneid.

As intuition had told me, the sapper proved to be an industrious and engaging student. Of whom, needless to say, I learnt a great deal in our afternoons together, with the fountain tinkling beside us as we talked. He was the fifth of six children, his father, a cloth-dyer, having died when he was thirteen. Having no wish to be a cloth-dyer himself but no other means of livelihood, he had joined the army. He had become a sapper by accident, but his industry was such, and his ingenuity in designing arch-works, that for the past seven years he had been the Eighteenth’s Chief Sapper. By dint of talent and toil he had risen to the rank which Faverius held by birthright.

When he joined the army he could read and write Greek, his father having been prosperous enough to send him to school. Through his fellow-officers he had access to books, of which he often made copies. Since he spent much of his time overseeing worksites in outlying parts of the province, or travelling between them and Tyre, and had little to do in the evening, it was his habit at the end of the day to light a few oil-lamps and read one of his Greek books.

His passion was Homer, of whose verses he knew many by heart. Since we were studying the Aeneid, whose words as every schoolboy knows recall Homer’s in nearly every line, we had many occasions to draw parallels. Knowing his Odyssey and Iliad in a way that would have shamed most scholars, and being Greek, he naturally found Homer superior to Virgil, and did not hesitate to say so. Often I had to cut short his praise for the one or his dispraise for the other, reminding him of his forthcoming hearing with the Outsourcing Committee.

As an officer having the charge of his fellow sappers, often in perilous places and conditions, he had a particular admiration for Ulysses’s role as leader.

“You must have noticed …” he would begin, referring me to some episode in the Odyssey, “how Ulysses …” and off he would go, drawing out some aspect of the hero’s character.

For instance, taking me one day to the passage where Ulysses and his men are sailing towards the place where the Sirens live, he commented, “You must have noticed how it’s Ulysses who stops up his comrades’ ears with beeswax?”

“So?” I responded.

“He doesn’t have to. He could order one of his men to do it. But Homer tells us how he melts the wax in his own hands, then blocks their ears. One by one, for the whole crew, before they tie him to the mast and sail past the Sirens. Don’t you see …?”

And here as elsewhere he picked up some aspect of Ulysses’s character I had not noticed before, and I a man of letters. Ulysses’s concern for the well-being of his men and his leadership by example, or his cunning on their behalf, or his use of ritual to build community. On these subjects the sapper could speak endlessly, so much so that, as all teachers discover from their students, I often wondered who was learning and who was teaching.

But then, our lines for the day not being finished, I would take him back to Dido’s funeral or Anchises in the Elysian Fields or whatever, and on we would go with the Aeneid. Thus for thirty days I did my best to prepare him to face the senators, and he to practise wielding the weapons, Virgil’s words, images, themes, with which he craftily planned to win them over.

I noticed as I heard him speak that, with his forthcoming interview in mind, while making his Latin as Virgilian as possible, as timeless, he did not forget to show his up-to-dateness by sprinkling his speech with grains of the vocabulary you hear nowadays in the marketplace. Deftly placing the words, stressing them slightly, he would call Ulysses’s companions his “team members”, for example, or describe Aeneas’s valour in some battle as “setting a new personal best”, or Dido’s palace as “showcasing Carthaginian workmanship”, or Phoenician shipbuilding as displaying “world’s best practice”. Timeless Virgil, yes, but garnished with today’s salad-leaves, not yesterday’s.

Finally, his hearing with the Outsourcing Committee drawing near, he sailed for the capital. Knowing how hard he had worked and how Roman his Latin had become, I had faith in his ability to beat Faverius, all things being equal. But it was the senators who would fix the rules of the game he was to play, and he had no way of knowing what form it would take. So, after he had taken leave of his fellow sappers on the wharf, it was with misgiving that I stood at the top of the harbour stairs, watching his ship sail out of view of the marketplace.

But I need not have worried. Twenty-two days later Promachus was back, still elated by his victory. Not only had the senators thought TRI’s case the strongest of the four, they had found Promachus the most apt to command. The hearing had gone his way, he was eager to relate when his ship docked, but not as he had expected.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The senators insisted on speaking Greek! I did the first part in Latin, the folio-presentation”—we had worked on this towards the end—“and they asked a few questions. Enough for them to see my Latin was up to scratch.

“But then one of them switched to Greek and that was the end of the Latin. And of Virgil, and everything we studied. All of them had been to Athens or Alexandria, and spoke Greek quite well.”

The least one could expect from a senator …

“We spent an hour or so working through practical points, some of them wanting to learn the Greek equivalents for various technical terms. And then we got on to Homer.”

“You mean you did.”

“I was first, but only just. What happened was we spent a lot of time on the new Sidon bridge, talking about pier-resistance to spring floods. Some of the senators found it hard going. I suspect they were looking for a break. Without meaning to—I was rambling on about our subcontractors there and what good stone-carvers they are—I quoted from the Iliad, Homer’s praise for Sidonian workmanship. That was all they needed. For the last part of the hearing, a third of the morning, I’d say, we talked Homer. Or rather they listened, I talked.”

So in the end there were three sets of selection criteria: the official set, the unofficial set he had prepared for, and a third we had not foreseen. I had an inkling of the subject the cloth-dyer’s son might have lectured the senators on, but had to be sure. “Talked about what?”

“What do you think?” Promachus roared with laughter. “Ulysses’s leadership style!”

Frank Murphy is a linguist and teacher, formerly Head of Languages at Xavier College, Kew. He holds French and Australian citizenship, and lives in Melbourne. His previous stories in this series, “A Positive Spin” and “User Pays”, appeared in the July-August and October issues respectively.