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had deep-set hazel eyes and curly brown hair, tied back with a headband, and he spoke with a cultured accent. Herodias said he was from Alexandria, across the sea in Egypt, where he’d studied with some important philosopher. (This was one of Herodias’s examples of how Antipas was willing to spend money to get the best of everything. My father, in contrast, was so stingy that he didn’t even keep a scribe but hired one from the library at the public baths.)
    Now and then Antipas would call Leander to his side and order him to come up with a fitting quotation from a Greek philosopher or to note down some insightful remark that Antipas had just made. Leander waited courteously on his master, but I thought it must be hard on an educated man to work as a mere secretary. Antipas seemed to enjoy keeping a pet philosopher at his beck and call, like a hunting dog. Herodias laughingly called Leander “our Socrates.”
    One time we went to see a Greek tragedy, but hardly anyone liked it. Antipas dozed off, his attendants whiled away the time by eating bunches of grapes and spitting out the seeds, and Herodias sighed through the long speeches. Antipas, awakening to one of her sighs, patted her hand. “A bit tedious, hmm? At my theater in Tiberias, they perform nothing but comedies.”
    Only Leander seemed intent on the play, mouthing the words along with the actors. At the end, all the characters were either dead or wished they were dead.
    What I remembered most about that tragedy, long afterward, was the masks. After the play, the chief actor came out front to talk with Antipas, his patron. He took his mask off and set it on the edge of the stage, where it seemed to stare at me. The mouth was open, wrenched down at the corners. The eyes, too, were wide open in agony.

TWO
    AT THE JORDAN RIVER

    Far across the Mediterranean Sea from Rome, in the Jordan River Valley a few miles from Jericho, a different audience listened to a different speaker. The preacher’s brown hair and beard were long and wild. His tunic, stitched together from old grain sacks, was belted around his gaunt body with rawhide.
    “Brothers and sisters”—John’s voice rang out over the crowd—“I have lived in the wilderness long years, waiting for the Lord’s word to come to me. Now I bring you his message: Make a highway for the Lord!”
    Here, where a creek flowed into the Jordan, the riverbank formed a natural amphitheater. John’s listeners covered the slopes, crouching on the grass or leaning against sycamore trees. These people had little time to spare from scratching out a living, but still they were here. They were the women who hauled water from the village well to their homes every day, who might sell a few cheap clay cups in the market and then buy enough grain to feed their children one more week. They were the men who gathered at the city gates before dawn, hoping to be hired by a landowner for a day’s work in his vineyards.
    Pacing a flat boulder, his platform, John went on, “How do we make a highway? The prophet Isaiah says, ‘Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low.’ This is how we will make a highway—
for the Lord.
”
    “A highway for the Lord,” the crowd murmured. They understood exactly what John was
not
saying: a highway for the Lord instead of for the hated Romans. Most of these men had been grabbed by a Roman soldier at some time or other and forced to fill in a ravine or scrape off the top of a hill for one of the Empire’s fine level roads, graded, paved, and clearly marked with milestones. Most of these women had trudged through the brush alongside a Roman highway. Peasants had to labor on road crews, but they were not allowed to walk on the Imperial roads.
    At the sight of so many people drinking in his words, John’s heart swelled. He would have obeyed the Lord’s calling whether anyone listened to him or not, but it was a great joy to see how they listened. This was what he’d