On her return to Caesarea from the Feast of Tabernacles, Claudia learned from Sergius Paulus that Longinus had sailed for Rome. The message from the centurion to the commander of the Roman constabulary had been brought by a ship’s master who had sailed southward from the Antioch port of Seleucia shortly after Longinus had gone aboard a ship there for his voyage to the capital.
The message had been brief, the commander said; its purpose was to let him know that Longinus had been sent to Rome by the Legate Vitellius on what the legate must have considered an urgent mission, probably to the Prefect Sejanus.
“Longinus must have sailed from Seleucia on one of the last boats out,” Sergius observed. “From now until spring there’ll be few crossings; any ship attempting to make it will be braving the heavy winds.” He smiled wryly. “It must have been important business the legate was sending him on.”
Claudia suspected that Longinus was going to the capital to relay the legate’s report on the situation in Palestine. Particularly important, she knew, would be the question of whether or not King Aretas was planning to attack Herod and thereby involve the whole Palestinian region in war. But she had no direct message from the centurion.
Longinus was acting wisely, she realized, in sending her no written communication. He could hardly evolve any innocent appearing reason for writing her, and it would be impossible to send her such a message without Pilate’s learning about it, and possibly even the Prefect. And any message sent would of necessity be innocuous. But as the weeks pushed deeper and deeper into winter and no word of him came to her at all, she began to wonder if he would return to Palestine or if, the gods forbid, Sejanus might have sent him once more to Germania or Gaul or to some other post far remote from the now increasingly dreary Palestine.
Despite the fact that it was Herodias who had urged her to go up to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles, the two women had hardly seen one another during those days in Israel’s capital. Claudia recalled that even then the Tetrarchess had seemed somewhat reserved. And once when mention was made of the journey of Longinus to Antioch in response to the summons of the Legate Vitellius, Herodias had appeared to grow even more coldly formal. Perhaps the Tetrarchess suspected, Claudia thought at the time, that Longinus was reporting on Herod’s visit to Machaerus and the appearance there of the ambassadors from King Aretas, and even of her own bizarre conduct at the Tetrarch’s birthday banquet. Nor had Herodias, as they were preparing to leave Jerusalem, invited her to come to Tiberias.
And at the Feast neither she nor Pilate had seen Antipas. She wondered if perhaps he, too, might have suspected that Longinus was even then in Antioch reporting what he had seen and heard at Machaerus. But her failure to be honored by the Tetrarch in Jerusalem troubled her not at all. She had less respect for him, she confessed to herself, than she had for the Procurator. And she hoped that Longinus was finding opportunity for dropping some poisoned, if discreet, words into the ears of Sejanus concerning Pontius Pilate and his continuing difficulties with the Jews.
Nor was the Procurator’s administration of affairs in Judaea, as the winter advanced, serving to establish him in better favor with the people he was governing. Stubborn and unimaginative, he steadfastly refused either to learn anything or forget anything. Scorning his subordinate officials and refusing to give consideration to their counseling, fearful of his superiors, including the Legate Vitellius and particularly the Prefect Sejanus, Pilate provided no stable rule of Judaea; his administration vacillated from fierce oppression and arbitrary action to cowardly yielding to priestly demands. His tax gatherers, working through the despised publicans, those native hirelings of Rome whom the Israelites looked upon with loathing as traitors to Israel and Israel’s Yahweh, demanded and received exorbitant tribute in money and produce of the land; this did not add to the Procurator’s popularity among the Jews. Both the people and the Temple leaders were growing increasingly enraged.
The natural breach between the Procurator and the Tetrarch, too, was widening as the weeks went by; an incident at the Temple during one of the great festival occasions in which Pilate’s soldiers had slain a group of roistering Galileans had infuriated Herod Antipas. And Pilate’s effort to use Temple funds in the building of an aqueduct to bring water into Jerusalem had evoked the bitter animosity of the Temple leadership. On all sides, then, the Procurator, beginning with his flaunting of the Roman ensigns in Jerusalem shortly after his arrival in Judaea, had been strengthening rather than weakening the natural hostility the Israelites had for the representatives of conquering Rome.
All this Claudia had observed; she wondered how long this mounting burden of tension and hate could continue to build upon the broad shoulders of Pontius Pilate before inevitably it should topple him from the Procuratorship. The answer, she was confident, lay not in Judaea, but in Rome. Pilate would last only so long as he did not too greatly displease Sejanus. And from the moment the tribute from Judaea to Rome ... and Sejanus ... began to shrink, she reasoned, her spouse’s days as Procurator would be numbered.