A Line Left Out

by Isaak Heinemann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The rate was eight drachmas the thousand lines, the lines counted not as the copyist wrote them but by the standard line of the trade, sixteen syllables, so that a man with a cramped hand did not grow rich on it and a man with a generous one did not starve. Theodotos son of Dositheos wrote a middling hand and was paid the middling rate, and in the month of Mesore, in the nineteenth year of Tiberius, he had four rolls of the book On the Migration of Abraham to copy for the house of Alexander the alabarch, whose brother had written it.

He worked in the upper room of his father-in-law's house in the Delta quarter, at a table under the window that looked east over the roofs towards the lake. Below him, in the yard, Ptolemaios the lamp-maker sat at his wheel and his moulds, and the smell of wet clay came up the stair in the mornings and the smell of the kiln in the afternoons. On the third night of the month Sarra was brought to bed in the room under the stair, and before the lamps were trimmed a second time there was a boy.

Theodotos was allowed to see him once, by the light of one of his father-in-law's lamps, a plain one with a rosette on the shoulder that had come out of the kiln with a crack and been kept for the house. The child was red and creased and had a great deal of black hair, and his fists were closed. The midwife, a Jewess from the third block who had delivered half the quarter, counted the days aloud on her fingers before she went home, as though Theodotos could not count.

"The eighth falls on the second day of the week," she said. "Eleazar will want to know tonight. He is old and he likes to sleep on a thing."

Theodotos said that he would send in the morning. He did not send in the morning. He went up the stair and sat at the table, and in the grey before sunrise he ruled the next sheet with a lead disc and began again where he had left off, at the place where Abraham is told to go out from his country and his kindred and his father's house, which the author takes to mean the body, the senses and speech.

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He had been educated as his father had wished, which was more than his father had been. Dositheos had woven linen in the weavers' street and had sat with the weavers in the great synagogue every Sabbath of his life, and he had paid for his son to go to a grammarian in the Broucheion and afterwards to a rhetor, and had not once asked what was learned there. Theodotos could recite most of the second book of the Iliad and could parse anything in Plato. He could write a bill of sale in the form the notaries used and a letter of condolence in three registers. He wrestled three mornings a week at a private palaestra near the Canopic Street, where the subscription was paid by the month and nobody asked whose son anyone was.

It was there, on the fifth day of Mesore, that Herakleides found him.

Herakleides was a grain factor's son who had been at the grammarian's with him and was now a grain factor himself, broad, kind and sunburnt, with a habit of beginning his sentences in the middle. They wrestled two falls, and Herakleides took both, and afterwards they sat on the bench under the colonnade and scraped the oil and dust off their arms with their strigils, and Herakleides said: "— so you'll want him on the list, of course. My uncle can speak for him. Fourteen years is a long time but the lists are made long before."

The list was the list of boys to be enrolled as ephebes. It was not, as Herakleides understood it and as Theodotos understood it, a thing that could be had for wanting. There were petitions, and fathers who had been on the list themselves, and uncles who could speak.

"You're very good," Theodotos said.

"I'm not good, I'm practical. He'll want to run. Your boy will want to run. They all do." Herakleides worked the curved edge of the strigil down his shin and flicked the scrapings on to the paving. "Only he'll be in the baths with the others, you know. And the others are boys."

He did not say what boys were. He did not need to. Theodotos had been fifteen at the baths by the Gate of the Sun, and he had heard what was said there, and he had learned to keep a towel by him and to turn in a particular way. There were men in the city, Jews, who had paid a physician to draw the skin forward and bind it so that in a year nothing showed. He knew two of them. One had been at the rhetor's with him.

"I'm only saying," said Herakleides. "Eight days is a long time to think. Think." He put the strigil away in its ring with the oil flask and stood up. "My mother sends a present. It's at the house. Don't let your father-in-law tell you it's bad luck."

The present, when Theodotos got home, was a pair of jumping weights carved small in olive wood, each no longer than a finger. Ptolemaios turned them over at his wheel and said nothing, and put them on the shelf with the moulds.

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The exemplar had come from the alabarch's house in a wooden case lined with cedar shavings, and with it came the reader, Agathon, a freedman of the house, grey and exact, who would sit across the table at the end of each roll and read the master copy aloud while Theodotos followed his own. That was how it was done in the good houses. Nothing went on to the alabarch's shelves that had not been collated.

Theodotos did not like the book. He had heard its author speak in the great synagogue twice, a tall man in good linen who went on too long, and he had heard others speak who said the same things more briefly and drew the conclusions the author would not draw. One of them was Nikanor, a dealer in drugs and perfumes who had read more philosophy than Theodotos had, and who had explained one Sabbath afternoon, in the colonnade outside the great hall, with great clarity and no unkindness, that a man who understood what the commandments signified had no further need of the things that signified it. The Sabbath was the rest of the soul in God; let the soul rest. The cutting was the cutting away of pleasure and of the passions; let a man cut those away. To keep the sign after one possessed the thing was to keep the ladder after one had climbed on to the roof. Theodotos had walked home turning it over, and had found nothing wrong with it, and had not found anything wrong with it since.

Now, on the fifth day, the day before the Sabbath, he came to the place in the third roll where the author turned on precisely these men.

He wrote it as he wrote everything, a phrase held in the eye, carried across, set down, the eye going back for the next. There are some who, taking the written laws as symbols of intelligible things, have studied the one with too much exactness and neglected the other with too much ease. He did not admire the sentence. He thought it a little pleased with its own balance. He went on. The author granted everything Nikanor granted. The seventh day did teach the power of the Unbegotten and the rest of the creature; it did not follow that the laws laid down for it were to be dissolved. The feast was a symbol of the soul's gladness; it did not follow that the seasons of the year were to be given up. And then the clause about the cutting, and then a sentence about the body and the soul: that the plain observances were to the inner meanings as a body is to a soul, and that as a man takes thought for the body because it is the house of the soul, so he was to take thought for the letter of the laws.

It went quickly. The light moved across the table. Below, the wheel thumped and stopped and thumped. At one point Sarra called up the stair for him and he went down and held the child while she ate a little bread soaked in wine, and the child slept against his arm with its mouth open, and he gave it back and came up and dipped the reed and went on. By evening he had reached the end of the roll. He wrote the count of lines at the foot of the column in the trade's numerals, as was done, so that the alabarch's steward could pay on it, and he left the sheet to dry.

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Agathon came the next morning, which was the Sabbath, and Theodotos sent him away, and he came again on the first day of the week, the seventh of the child's life. He sat across the table with the exemplar on his knees and his finger under the line, and read, in a dry clear voice with all the quantities right, while Theodotos followed his own copy with a stylus held above the surface.

At the place in the third roll Agathon read: — nor, because circumcision signifies the excision of pleasure and of all the passions, and the destruction of the impious opinion by which the mind supposes itself able to beget by its own power, shall we on that account abolish the law laid down for circumcision.

Theodotos's stylus was on the line about the feasts, and then on the line about the body and the soul. The clause was not there.

Agathon looked up. He was a freedman and an old one and he had collated, Theodotos supposed, a great many thousand lines of copyists' work, and he had the professional patience of a man who knows that every copyist does this and that none of them believe they have done it until they see it.

"The eye jumps," he said. "On that account — and then on that account again, two lines down. You went from the one to the other." He turned the exemplar round on his knees so that Theodotos could see. "It happens with repeated words. It's not a fault of the hand."

"I know what it is," said Theodotos.

He knew exactly what it was. He had been taught the name of it at the grammarian's with a cane. He sat and looked at the gap where nothing was. The sheet was dry and the line could not be scraped in; there was no room between the lines. It would have to go in the lower margin, with the sign the trade used, a little anchor drawn at the place and drawn again by the inserted line, so that a reader would find his way down and back.

"Do you want me to go on?" said Agathon. "You can put it in after."

"No. Wait."

He cut a fresh reed, though the old one was good, and mixed a little ink, though there was ink in the pot. He held the exemplar open under his left hand and wrote, in the lower margin, under the column, slanting slightly upwards because the margin was not ruled: nor, because circumcision signifies the excision of pleasure and of all the passions, and the destruction of the impious opinion by which the mind supposes itself able to beget by its own power, shall we on that account abolish the law laid down for circumcision. He drew the anchor beside it and the anchor in the column. He read it back against the exemplar syllable by syllable, as he had been taught, and it was right.

He added, because the steward would pay on it, three lines to the count at the foot.

Agathon watched this with no expression and then went on reading, and they finished the third roll before noon, and he packed the exemplar in its cedar shavings and went away.

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That afternoon Theodotos went out, and walked, which he did not usually do in the heat. He went down through the Delta quarter to the harbour wall and along it, and came back by the Canopic Street past the door of the palaestra, which was shut, it being the hour when nobody wrestled. He went into the colonnade of the great synagogue, which was open and nearly empty, and sat for a while on the step where the weavers sat, his father's step, under the column with the weavers' mark cut in it. A boy was sweeping the hall inside. Far down at the other end the platform stood in the middle of the floor, the wooden one from which an attendant waved a cloth on the Sabbath when the reader's blessings were finished, because the hall was so long that the men at the back could not hear when to say Amen and would otherwise say it at the wrong time or not at all.

He had sat under that platform as a child on his father's knee and watched for the cloth. It had seemed to him then that the Amen was a thing made by the cloth, as the light was made by the lamp, and that if the attendant fell asleep there would be no Amen anywhere in Alexandria. When he was older he had learned better and had been a little ashamed of it. He sat on the step and looked at the platform for some time.

Nikanor's shop was in the next street. Theodotos did not go there.

He went home. In the yard Ptolemaios was packing a crate of lamps in straw for a ship that would sail for Rhodes when the wind came round, and did not look up, and Theodotos went past him and into the room under the stair. Sarra was asleep. The child was awake and lying on its back in the basket, looking at the ceiling with an entirely serious face, its fists opening and closing on nothing. Theodotos stood over it for a while. Then he went out again, without speaking to his father-in-law, and walked to the end of the street, and round two corners to the house of Eleazar the cutter, and knocked.

Eleazar's daughter-in-law came to the door. Eleazar was asleep. Theodotos said that the child of Theodotos son of Dositheos, in the house of Ptolemaios the lamp-maker, would be eight days old in the morning. The woman said, "We know," with a shade of reproach, and that the old man had had his knife out and ground since the day before yesterday, and would come at the second hour.

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He came at the second hour. He was very old and did not climb stairs and the thing was done in the yard, between the wheel and the kiln, which was cold, Ptolemaios having let it go out the night before without being asked. The neighbours came, and the midwife, and Sarra's sisters from the fourth block, and a cousin of Dositheos from the weavers' street whom Theodotos had not seen since the funeral. Ptolemaios held the child. Theodotos stood where the father stood and said what the father said. The child screamed, as they do, with its whole body, and then was given wine on a twist of linen and sucked it and stopped, and looked up at the sky over the yard with the same serious face, as if somebody had told it something it would need to think about. Its name was given. The women took it in.

There was food afterwards, in the yard, in the shade of the stair: bread, olives, a dish of lentils, wine cut with water, and a honey-cake that one of the sisters had made. Somebody had brought a fish. Eleazar ate a little and drank a little and was helped home by his grandson. The weavers' cousin told a long story about Dositheos and a broken loom that Theodotos had heard before and found he wanted to hear again. Herakleides did not come, as nobody had expected him to; but in the afternoon a slave came from his mother with a jar of good Chian and a message that the family rejoiced, and Theodotos sent back a lamp of his father-in-law's best, with a rosette on the shoulder, and no crack.

Late in the day, when the guests had gone and the yard was swept, he went up the stair to the upper room. The fourth roll lay where he had left it, ruled and blank, with the exemplar's case beside it. The third lay drying no longer, finished, rolled on its stick and tied, waiting for the steward.

He untied it and unrolled it to the place. The correction was there, in the lower margin, slanting upward a little, the anchor beside it and the anchor in the column above. In the evening light the newer ink was a shade blacker than the rest. It would be so for some years, Agathon had once told him, until the old ink darkened to meet it and nobody but a copyist could tell.

He rolled the book up again and tied it, and ruled the first column of the fourth roll before the light went, and went down to his supper.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Isaacō Heinemann per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Isaak Heinemann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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