The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus. David Price Williams
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brought down the river from up in the mountains, especially the huge pine trees with massive boles and long straight trunks used in the construction industry. Someone told me they built houses six and seven storeys high in Rome, tenements for the working classes they said; they needed endless wooden beams to hold the things up. I couldn’t imagine how people lived like that, all existing on top of one another. And the same man told me these rickety buildings burnt down regularly, catching light with embers falling from cooking stoves or fires lit to keep people warm in the frosty Roman winters. That’s why they needed so much timber I suppose, to rebuild the same pitiful apartments all over again.
I often saw bale after bale of animal hides too being stowed in ship’s holds, roped together and swung up over the gunwales. They always stank because they were generally untreated – raw ox hides, sheep skins and goat skins, the latter used for the manufacture of parchment, which incidentally made Asia Minor famous after its invention in the city of Pergamon some centuries ago. I was told that it was the deliberate restriction on the supply of papyrus from Egypt that caused the Pergamon library to create the wonder writing material and now it’s so widely used that Egypt has lost out.
Then there were the grain ships which carried wheat in huge quantities for the Roman army so that they could all have their daily bread in whatever far-flung outpost they had been billeted.
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It was always feared that if they didn’t get their ration of loaves every day, the legions would mutiny, especially since many of the soldiers had joined the army from foreign countries and were not necessarily loyal to the emperor. That was always a potential problem, in particular now when the empire was so weak and emperors arose and fell like skittles in an ale house.
Every June and July there would be a constant creaking of carts from the interior bringing the grain harvest down the roads on either side of the valley to the granaries near the harbour. They were massive buildings and by August they’d be full to overflowing with the threshed wheat ready for export. I knew many boys my own age whose fathers were involved in transporting the grain in bullock carts. They must have had innumerable mills and bakeries in Rome to process such a vast quantity.
The harbour and all its comings and goings were a source of endless fascination for me. I used to sit on the wall near the old bath-house and watch the ships being warped in from the outer roads in the bay. We had many slaves, mainly captured years ago from north of the Pontus, who would strain in long gangs on the ropes thrown to the shore, muscles stretched taut, as they pulled the heavy hulks around the breakwater and into their mooring positions alongside the harbour wall. The harbour inspectors and the gang masters would yell instructions to them, but they knew what they were doing and never made a mistake in their delicate manoeuvres. Each ship
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would be brought broadside on to the quay and then dragged sideways until it just touched the huge, roped-straw fenders hanging down to protect their hulls. The gangplanks would be pushed out and the unloading could begin.
We had military ships too calling at Patara, enormous galleys which carried legionaries from one part of the empire to another stopping for supplies or to fix some minor damage. We didn’t normally see many soldiers where we were. Most people were only too happy to live in peace with the imperial administration, especially since everyone was making so much money out of them! When the galleys were out at sea, they looked like huge centipedes with the oars moving to and fro in unison, but in the harbour the oars were taken in-board and they had to be warped in with ropes just like all the rest. They were heavy, these troop ships, especially when fully loaded and the dock gangs had to haul extra hard to bring their hulks into their appointed place, usually with some over-dressed centurion or another, in full armour, bawling superfluous orders at them from the deck railing. Once they’d come to rest, the officers in charge would shout more orders to the men on the dock-side and then disembark. Arrogantly, in full dress and with sword hilts bouncing on their thighs, they swaggered over to the harbour buildings to arrange the official documents before sloping off to one of the wine shops along the front, not the
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most salubrious at the best of times it has to be said, where they would slake their thirst after their days at sea.
You should have seen the great variety of smaller craft that weaved in and out of our bay too, the small ships carrying barrels of pitch from half way down the Euphrates to be used in ship repairs. The crew always looked as though they’d just been climbing a sooty chimney, their hands, arms and faces covered in the black oily tar. They never seemed to be able to get clean again and most of the shopkeepers in the city wouldn’t allow them to enter their premises in case they blackened the doors or counters. I always felt sorry for these poor malodourous souls whom no-one seemed to like. But I’m sure they wouldn’t have felt the same if they were in a ship sinking for want of a few denarius-worth of waterproofing.
And there were the wine ships, elegant craft from Greece which were laden with hundreds of amphorae, full of sweet red wine from the Island of Samos up near Ephesus or the deep ruby wines from Cnidus, much appreciated by our wealthier citizens. You could always tell where the wine came from because all the wine jars were different shapes, depending on where they were made. There were always hotly contested arguments about which of the wines we imported in Patara was the best, although I always wondered if maybe it was the source of the water with which they diluted their wines that made the difference. There were those who would swear this spring water would bring out
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the best aroma, whilst others vehemently argued that it was that one from further up the valley, or that the best flavour could be got by cooling the wine, adding ice brought down during the winter from the mountains and stored in one of our ice houses.
The shallower parts of the river mouth were crowded with other tiny craft, especially the fishing boats that would go out during the night and come back just after dawn to land their catch for our market before the sun was up. We had a plentiful supply of fish, from red and grey mullet to huge grouper with their big ugly mouths, long-snouted barracuda, silvery sea bass and colourful bronze headed bream, not to mention buckets of cuttlefish, octopus and hard-shelled flapping cray fish. They were whisked from the bottom of the rowing boats up to the fish market and, apart from a few buckets of sardines, they had usually all been sold before breakfast and the market washed down for the day.
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I must have been about seven or eight years old when my father Aquila engaged a tutor for me.
“What that boy needs is some discipline,” he ruled. “Let him learn something useful instead of spending so much time at the harbour all day long!”
So, much to my discomfort, for the next few years I had to spend every morning learning Latin irregular verbs, reading
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the plays of Aeschylus, the dialogues of Plato and Pliny’s ‘Naturalis Historia’, or reading Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis’ or Herodotus ‘Histories’.
“Discourse on the metaphysical nature of Socrates’ responses in ‘Crito’,” I would be asked.
I would usually mumble some nonsense or another; after all, what did I know about metaphysics. Then I would be rapped hard over the knuckles for being a dunce, or for not paying attention, or for gazing out of the open doorway at Irene the maid cleaning the courtyard outside. What did I care at my age about Greek philosophy? It was hundreds of years ago. I was often