The Boycott

The other day in the marketplace, who should I come across but Zaleucus the incense-merchant. The recently retired incense-merchant, that is.

Come across? It would be more accurate to say stumbled across. Not having seen one another, we were both browsing in that bookstall in the south-western corner of the marketplace. He was on his knees digging something out of the bottom shelf when I stepped back without looking. And before I knew it, found myself falling across his back.

“Zaleucus! My apologies!” I said, as we disentangled ourselves and recognised one another. “What’s new at the Archives?” The Dye-Works Archives, that is, where, since his retirement, he now spends the greater part of his day. Our Dye-Works being, as everyone knows, Tyre’s most celebrated industry.

“What’s new, what’s old, I wish I knew,” he replied, brushing the dust off his clothes. “Ask me in six months when I finish cataloguing. Then I’ll have some idea of what we’ve got.”

Then, seizing my arm, he pointed to the tavern on the corner of Weaver’s Lane, insisting that I join him for a cup of wine. “You do know what day it is, don’t you, Tyrius?”

“Day? Let me think.”

“There’s a clue,” he prompted, pointing to the bookshelves.

With that, and a quick think over Zaleucus’s life, I grasped his meaning. “The day the boycott started! The day you saw the banner!”

“Fourteen years ago this morning, almost to the hour.”

And with that, over a cup of Cypriot wine as soon as we were seated in the tavern, he was away, reliving as we Tyrians never tire of doing the most dramatic event in our recent history. He remembers it better than anyone, and not just because he knows the Archives so well. For much of the fourteen years he was in Alexandria, as Head of the Tyrian Trade Commission.

The morning in question, he was installed at his window-table on the first-floor of the TTC Building collating the beeswax figures for his quarterly report to the Merchants’ Council, when he heard a hubbub in the market-square below. Glancing down, he spotted clusters of buyers and stallholders shouting to one another, pointing away from where he was. Following their extended forearms, he turned his gaze to the Library on the far side of the square.

“Shit a brick!” he muttered to himself, seeing at once the cause of the excitement.

High up in the air, just above the middle of the Library’s columned facade, halfway between the lintel of the main door and the bottom of the fourth floor, two young men—students, by their clothing—were making their way down the two central columns. Dangling from ropes suspended from the roof, seated in leather harnesses, they dropped down gently, gently, each one every so often using his feet to kick himself away from the column in front of him. Below them at the base of both columns, and above them on the roof, four groups of fellow-students were working contrivances of pulleys and ropes too ingenious and intricate—in a word, too Alexandrian—to describe here. By means of these, the harnessed students were simultaneously hoisting the ropes encircling the columns from below, and lowering a long cylindrical object attached by cords to their harnesses. Dangerous and complex, the operation showed a great deal of preparation.

When they reached the middle of the facade, halfway down the columns, the pair stopped and half-tightened the column-ropes, ensuring they were horizontally aligned. Each then undid his end of the cylinder and tied it to his column, pulling the column-rope as tight as he could. This done, they unwound the cord around the cylinder, which slowly unfurled downwards, revealing itself to be a large sail-cloth banner. In the middle of which, from where he stood several hundred ells away, Zaleucus had no difficulty making out the black-lettered words BOYCOTT PURPLE.

“This time they’ve gone too far!” he said to himself. “Down it comes and straight away!”

Throwing his toga around him, to show that he was acting in his official capacity on behalf of the Merchants’ Council, he headed downstairs and across the square to the Library. In front of which, as well as the banner-team, he saw other students collecting petition signatures. Recognising him, both groups began to chant, “Purple is murder! Purple is murder!” They were quickly joined by their comrades above, who had just hauled up the two banner-placers and were in the process of dismantling their rope-and-pulley contrivances.

Knowing from previous encounters that arguing with the students would get him nowhere, and with “Purple is murder!” ringing in his ears, Zaleucus walked up the stairs as fast as he could without appearing to rush, through the Library doorway and into the atrium, then around the fountain and up the green marble staircase to the first-floor study of the Head Scholar. Who, Zaleucus knew, would submit his negotiating skills to their greatest test ever.

“Commissioner! What a pleasure!” murmured the Scholar, laying his reed-pen down in its alabaster tray, alongside the onyx inkwell, and rising to greet him. “The banner’s up, I take it. I assume that’s why you’re here.”

“That’s part of the reason, Excellency.”

“What else might there be, Commissioner?”

Does any Greek accent grate more on Tyrian ears than that of well-born Alexandrians? Or any speech grate more on Alexandrians than the vigorous consonants of Tyre’s Phoenician-flavoured Greek? As he listened to the head of the empire’s greatest seat of learning, Zaleucus could not fail to wince. Nor to respond in kind by exaggerating his Tyrian accent.

“To register a complaint on behalf of the Merchants’ Council and ask that it be taken down. This morning, Excellency, without delay.”

“The morning is well-advanced, Commissioner.” The Scholar indicated a seat and resumed his own. “As you know, these things take time.”

“Excellency, although I didn’t see the whole thing, the students must have met, shall we say, minimal resistance from the shelf-beadles when they took their pulleys and whatnot up to the roof. The banner went up in less time than it takes to transcribe a few dozen lines of Homer. Is there any reason why it should take longer to come down?”

The Scholar leaned back and twiddled his thumbs. “Do you see the banner as the problem, Commissioner?”

“If it isn’t, what is, Excellency?”

“Good question, Commissioner. How would you define it?”

“That’s what I’m asking you, Excellency.”

“Because your definition differs from mine, Commissioner?”

“How can I know, Excellency, if you refuse to tell me what yours is?”

“Why do you need mine? Haven’t you got one of your own?”

“I think we’re going around in circles, Excellency.”

“On that point I agree, Commissioner. The question isn’t do we differ, but where does the difference leave us?”

“A good question, Excellency, but is it the central one?”

“And what do you see as the central one, Commissioner?”

“For the moment, the banner, Excellency. All I ask—it’s a minimum—is that you indicate to me what time today it will come down.”

The Scholar sighed. “As I said at the outset, Commissioner, these things take time …”

When Zaleucus left the Head Scholar an hour later, their dialogue having made no progress from where we leave it, he was in no doubt on two points. First, the Scholar, the Library that is, refused to take the banner down. Second, that being the case, the Dye-Works, and hence Tyre, was at war with the Library. An economic war, but no less real for that.

How? Why? To answer those questions, and see how it came to an end, we need to retrace the boycott’s history from its inception. To do this, we must move from the Library’s city side, facing our Trade Commission, to the opposite side, facing the harbour. Specifically, to the fourth-floor Ebony Room. An unlikely spot to plan a war, but this is where it began.

Unlikely because the Ebony Room is such a serene place. Long and lofty, wainscotted in the wood from which it takes its name, lined with marble busts of the Head Scholars from the time of Zenodotus of Ephesus, with a commanding view over the harbour and lighthouse, it is the scholars’ common room, their usual meeting-place. Twice a month, in particular, it accommodates a discussion forum which calls itself the World Issues Group, or WIG.

Now, WIG is not without its critics, not just in Tyre but in Alexandria. This is because of its tendency to ramble on about world issues rather than doing anything about them. Indeed, many Alexandrians would say, to go on about anything and everything when it could more usefully tackle some of the ills besetting the city itself: open drains, false weights and measures, shoddy tenements, abduction and holding to ransom of public officials, coin-forgery, municipal corruption, brawling sailors, laneway thuggery, child-beggars, Ethiopian fortune-tellers, tax-gatherer demarcation disputes, temple prostitution, banditry, untethered camels in the marketplace, unlicensed cheesecake sellers on the esplanade, and so on. Closer to home, as a former student of the Library and still a regular visitor, I have often thought WIG would do well to devote a little time at one of its meetings to the Library’s cat problem.

 Ah, the cats of the Library of Alexandria! Eighth wonder of the world! Night and day, but especially after sunset when there are fewer beadles to chase them out, all the strays in the port seem to find their way through half-rotten trapdoors into the cellars and up into the Library itself. Their presence is not entirely unwelcome, of course, as they keep the mouse population down to manageable proportions. Although they roam freely through all sections, their preferred retreat is the northern end of the gallery outside the Ebony Room. Here, even when the cedarwood shutters are closed, the stench of cats’ piss inside the room is such that the WIG men have to burn three or four braziers of rose-scented incense while they debate world issues. Needless to say, in raising this subject I plead guilty to the charge of Tyrian bias. More to the point, doesn’t the scholars’ ability to ignore the cats in order to focus on world issues typify their infinite capacity to busy themselves with theoretical problems rather than tackling real ones? But enough of this catty digression, we must get on with our story.

Some fifteen years ago, about a year before the banner-unfurling outlined above, half a dozen WIG members, frustrated by their group’s incapacity to do anything about anything, set up Purpleplight. As the name suggests, this was a single-issue group concerned by the fate of the shellfish, of the murex genus, which yield purple-dye. This is not just Tyre’s best known, but its biggest-earning export.

Like WIG, Purpleplight was not an official emanation of the Library, even if that was its bastion. Not all its members were scholars or Alexandrian, nor all its supporters. But its office-bearers and chief spokesmen were Library scholars, as were its founders; it met in the Library and used its papyrus, reed-pens, oil-lamps, messenger service and other facilities; it profited from the Library’s renown. Not least, and this was the official reason why the Head Scholar refused to take down the boycott banner, it benefited from the Library’s tradition of upholding freedom of speech. A noble phrase, if you are an Alexandrian scholar, and preaching about freedom of speech makes you feel good inside but costs you nothing. Not so noble if you are a Tyrian dye-worker, and Alexandria’s boycott costs you your livelihood.

Lasting six years as it did, the boycott takes some time to relate even when summarised briefly. It broke down into four phases, the first of which need not concern us, although it greatly concerned Zaleucus. This was the one leading up to the banner’s unfurling, covering Purpleplight’s birth, the preparation of its campaign, and Zaleucus’s unsuccessful attempts to counter its growing success among the students.

The second phase began with the boycott launch, symbolised by the banner and the Library’s refusal to take it down. It centred on the Library whose scholars not only led the Alexandrian boycott but wrote dozens of letters, pamphlets, tracts and songs expounding it on moral grounds (“the sufferings of the shellfish”, “man’s contempt for his fellow-creatures”, “his unbridled lust for profit”). Circulating in thousands of copies, signed by some of the empire’s leading scholars, this led to …

The third phase, in which the boycott moved beyond Alexandria to the empire at large. From Britain to Cappadocia, from Dacia to Numidia, it became the fashion not only not to wear purple, but to have nothing to do with anyone who did. Even the Senate gave it up, the senators replacing the purple border on their toga with a red one dyed with a madder extract. Sales of purple-cloth slumped, the Dye-Works laid off hundreds of workers, Tyre found itself in an ever-worsening situation.

The fourth phase began a decade ago in the fourth year of the boycott, when we woke up one morning to find Tyre blockaded. Literally. Draped around the lighthouse, legible from the marketplace, an immense banner proclaimed PURPLE IS MURDER. A dozen ships manned by Purpleplight supporters from many countries—the “Peace Fleet”—sat at anchor across the harbour, “monitoring” all shipping out and in. Not only could no purple-cloth or dye leave Tyre, no undyed cloth could enter. At this point Purpleplight had us by the throat, and the end was not in doubt. Tyre would hold out for a month or so, three or four at most, it seemed, but sooner or later the Dye-Works would be no more. And thus would perish the world’s most famous dye, the purple which made Tyre’s name long before Rome sacked Carthage, or Homer wrote, or the Hebrews’ King Solomon used it to adorn his temple in Jerusalem …

But what could we do? The city needed, and needs, the purple-dye industry, and the only way we can make purple-dye is with the shellfish. We could not break the blockade by force, not because we did not have the means—we had the ships and men—but for a strategic reason. Namely, we could not afford to worsen the perception which other nations had of us, of being in the wrong. Wrong from the outset, the Purpleplight campaigners having at all times the advantage that they occupied the high moral ground.

Their advantage handicapped Tyre in two ways. On the one hand, it demoralised the dye-workers. Unlettered men for the most part, proud to exercise their ancient craft, and thereby to feed and clothe their families, even if their labour did not enrich them, they resented being cast as the villains of the play. All the more so since those who played the goodies were the play’s writers. I mean, of course, the Library’s gentlemen-scholars, men of delicate sensitivities, few of whom had ever set foot in the Dye-Works or any place where sweaty work is done. As one of the dye-workers once put it to me, “What really gets my back up about the scholars is not that they sit round all day sneering at us for slaughtering shellfish. It’s that when they knock off, they go home and eat grilled fish while we eat lentils!”

On the other hand, it meant Tyre was always on the defensive. How could it be otherwise? In strategic terms what we needed was to mount a counter-attack, but how? All through the boycott no question preoccupied Tyre more than this, and no one more than Zaleucus. Knowing Alexandria and Purpleplight better than anyone else, it was he who led Tyre’s negotiations with the scholars and most felt our inability to dislodge them from the high moral ground. He, too, who most tired himself in the search on the Tyrian side for the weapon, the argument, that would dislodge them. And which, when he found it, proved the turning point in the struggle.

Like everyone who was there—it happened in Tyre—I remember the moment well. Our negotiators had just come back by boat from a crucial meeting on the Purpleplight flagship. At the wharf, Zaleucus was giving a report to the joint committee of dye-workers and merchants. On the Tyrian side, morale had never been lower. From the Dye-Works loading-wharf where we sat on crates, twenty of us or so—I was advising on the negotiating phraseology—we could see the few dozen remaining piles of purple-cloth, half our trading-ships berthed, and at the harbour entrance the Peace Fleet waiting to move in for the kill.

Zaleucus gave his report in the usual way. That is, in Greek, with the phrasing he used with the Alexandrians. But first he gave a summary in Phoenician, for the dye-workers who knew no Greek. Of whom there are still many, unlike the merchants, most of whom are as much at ease in Greek as in Phoenician. Indeed many, including Zaleucus, are more fluent in Greek.

His briefing over, a few questions followed, mainly in Greek from his fellow-merchants on points of the negotiating language. After that came a silence, the merchants reflecting on Zaleucus’s replies, the dye-workers on the bleakness of his summary. A silence broken by a private joke among the dye-workers, one of whom wagged his forefinger and muttered to his workmates nearby. In Greek, with a convincing imitation of a genteel Alexandrian accent:

“You twoublesome T-T-T-Tywians! Why not admit we have you by the t-t-t-testicles?”

“By the knackers, you mean!” replied another in Phoenician slang. Loud enough to be heard by all, the exchange raised a welcome laugh from merchants and dye-workers alike.

As it died away, Zaleucus leapt to his feet and raised his hands for silence, shouting, in Greek, from habit, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

“Listen,” he said, putting his thoughts together as he spoke. “No, I’ll say it in Phoenician.” And switching to our native tongue, a little rustily I must confess, he pointed to the PURPLE IS MURDER banner on the lighthouse and explained.

“My friends, I have the response to their slogan. It’s so obvious. ‘Purple is murder,’ they say. Well, I say Greek is murder! Greek is murder, and we all know that because we see it every day. Greek is killing our language, just as it’s killing off all the others. Phoenician, Illyrian, Parthian, Lycian, Bithynian: who’ll speak those languages a hundred years from now? Who’ll remember they ever existed? They’ll be dead because Greek will have wiped them off the map. Latin’s doing the same thing at the western end of the empire, killing off Etruscan, Gaulish, and so forth, but at this end our problem’s with Greek. What does hellenisation mean, if not Greek killing off other languages? And unlike the shellfish, which aren’t in danger of extinction, Phoenician’s in real danger, and dozens of languages with it.

“And who’s behind this massacre? This cultural genocide? They are!” He pointed to the Purpleplight flagship. “The Alexandrians! The scholars! With their airs and graces, up there in their ebony tower, they’re perpetrating the greatest linguistic bloodbath in history.”

He paused for breath, giving his listeners time to absorb what they had just heard. Then, unexpectedly, he grinned as he continued: “So much for the bad news, my friends. The good news is they’re not invincible. Or if they are, if we go down, we can at least inflict some damage on them before we do. And maybe even beat them with the weapon they’ve chosen: economic boycott. Here’s how.”

The strategy he went on to outline took the following form. If the Library was more or less invincible, he said, its scholars were not. Marble gods as they might seem, they had clay feet in the form of their income base. Which was, he reminded us, the book-tithe. On every copy of every Greek-language book sold in the empire by a registered bookseller, and that was most books, the Library got a tenth of the price. If Tyre boycotted Greek books for long enough, and got enough of the hellenised nations to do the same, the scholars would sooner or later cave in. And just as they had forsaken reasoned debate for argument-throttling catchphrases, beating off with slogans Tyre’s attempts to argue, why shouldn’t we do the same? In short, what better answer to PURPLE IS MURDER than GREEK IS MURDER?

“Greek is murder! Greek is murder!” chanted Zaleucus’s listeners, in Phoenician, for the first time in years scenting the possibility of turning the tide. And with that the meeting set to planning Tyre’s much-longed-for counter-attack. Of which the first blow the same day was to send out a Purpleplight-style commando group to the lighthouse to take down the Alexandrians’ banner and put another in its place. A bilingual one in Latin and Phoenician, proclaiming GREEK IS MURDER.

It would take as much ink again to tell the story of Tyre’s boycott of Greek as it has taken to tell that of the scholars’ purple-boycott. Suffice it to say that it was slow to begin with, despite the widespread anti-hellenism that we were able to turn to our cause; that on the Tyrian side it was Zaleucus who masterminded the strategy, with dye-workers and merchants alike taking heart from being able to attack at last; that throughout the hellenised world thousands of readers took to buying books in their own tongues or Latin instead of Greek, which infuriated the Greeks and greatly reduced the Library’s income; that from the time we started the counter-attack it took us a year to lift the Purpleplight blockade, and another to force Purpleplight’s office-bearers, most by now laid off by the Library and living on lentils, to the negotiating table; that the peace-signing ceremony took place in Gaza, between Alexandria and Tyre; and that, in the display of documents from our past that he has arranged in the Dye-Works forecourt, Zaleucus has given pride of place to Tyre’s copies of the peace-treaty.

Of which there are two, one in Phoenician, the other in Latin. The Alexandrians likewise have two, one in Greek, one in Latin. In case of dispute, the Latin text has precedence over the others. At the signing ceremony, the Alexandrians signed first, then Zaleucus and the rest of Tyre’s officials. Each delegation supplied its own ink, the Alexandrians signing in black brought from the Library, the Tyrians in purple from our Dye-Works.

Frank Murphy, who lives in Melbourne, is a linguist and teacher, and was formerly Head of Languages at Xavier College, Kew. His three previous stories in this Tyrian series appeared in Quadrant in 2018.