Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 40

under an awning discussing the world for hours at a time. Now and again my father would come down to the warehouse and after a cursory look around would join Eurymachus and his friends in the shade, watching the general commerce of the harbour and the city pass up and down the quayside. I was paid very little at first, whilst I was ‘learning on the job,’ though I’m sure my father knew there was very little to learn.

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Politically, where we were on the south-west coast of Lycia very little really happened. Nominally we came under the Governor of Asia, but he rarely if ever deigned to visit our part of his province. He was mainly interested in the really wealthy cities like Ephesus and Miletus on the west coast. We were rather too far away, or perhaps it was because we were surrounded by high mountains, locked away in our own world. We heard about all kinds of goings on in Rome. We had plenty of ships passing through and sailors being what they were they’d make for the wine shops along the harbour front and after a few cups of the local vintage would soon open up and tell us what was happening in the rest of the empire. We heard endless scare-mongering stories of ordinary soldiers being made emperor by their own legions, taking the imperial purple, only to be assassinated a few months later by their officers, or at least imprisoned by the magistrates and never heard of again.

THE JOURNEY