Diocletian Antoninianus and Radiate Coinage: History and Story

Callista told Pelagia she could not leave the book, then heard her father coming down the stairs.

“He will say yes,” she whispered. “Ask him nothing.”

Pelagia stood in the doorway with her son against her hip. The child was too old to be carried comfortably. His sandal struck the doorpost each time she shifted him. Beneath her other arm was a bundle wrapped in a cloth Callista recognized: Pelagia had used it to cover bread when they took food down to the harbor.

Heliodorus reached the bottom step and stopped. He had not spoken to Pelagia for months. Once, when she came to the house, he used to complain that she argued before he had finished making his argument. Their quarrel over her religion had left him with nobody who interrupted him well.

“Come in,” he said.

Callista moved aside. She could refuse a bundle on the doorstep. She could not shut the door on a child who was asleep.

In the room Pelagia put her son on the bench. He curled toward the wall, taking her cloak with him. She did not try to retrieve it.

“I need to leave the city,” she said.

Outside, Nicomedia was beginning to close its shutters. Callista had been out that morning and had seen people gathering where scriptures were being burned. She had walked past without stopping. All afternoon she had remembered her own feet continuing along the street.

“Where will you go?” Heliodorus asked.

“To my sister. A man is taking us as far as the road below her village. He has room on his cart.”

“Good.”

Pelagia looked at the covered book. Callista looked at her father.

Callista had watched Pelagia copy pages for the book, bent over the table until the lamp smoked. Now Christian scriptures were being destroyed, and Pelagia was holding the bundle as carefully as she held her son.

“You can leave it,” he said.

“No,” Callista said.

He turned toward her. “It takes very little room.”

“So do we.”

She had inherited the house from her mother. The upper room held two beds and a leaking jar beneath the roof. Downstairs she worked and fed them. Her father’s pupils had dwindled, then stopped coming. Whenever she asked about them he said people no longer wanted their children to learn properly. She knew some of the parents could no longer pay.

He reached for the bundle. Pelagia drew it back.

“I didn’t come to make you quarrel.”

“Why not carry it?” Callista asked. “You’re taking a cart.”

“The man knows me. He will take me and the boy. I told him I would bring no books.”

“You could wrap it differently.”

“I gave him my word.”

Callista wanted to call that foolish. Instead she looked at the boy on the bench. If the carter found the book, Pelagia could be left beside the road with him. Callista could not promise she would have hidden it better.

“When would you come back?”

Pelagia adjusted the cloth around the corner of the book. “I don’t know.”

Heliodorus lifted his chin, preparing to speak. Callista held up a hand. She had never done that to him in front of another person.

“I am asking her.”

He closed his mouth.

“I would ask my sister to send someone,” Pelagia said. “If I could.”

The words left them with the room as it was: one sleeping child, one book, no date on which either fear or responsibility would end.

Someone knocked.

Pelagia stood so quickly her son woke. Heliodorus took the bundle from her. Callista caught his wrist before he could put it beneath the bench. They stayed like that for a breath, each making the other more conspicuous.

“It’s me,” a voice said. “You owe me for the oil.”

Callista released her father. She went to the door and opened it just far enough to speak to the seller. He had an empty basket and the weary expression of a man whose customers were always elsewhere when he wanted payment.

She fetched the money from the shelf. One coin showed Diocletian’s pointed crown. Her hand shook while she counted; the seller asked whether she wanted him to count for her. She said no so sharply he stepped back.

When he had gone, Heliodorus sat down. He held the book on his knees. Pelagia’s son was crying softly, refusing the water his mother offered.

“That was an oil seller,” Callista said.

“I know.”

“No, you thought—”

“I know what I thought.”

She stopped. His hands had begun shaking too.

Pelagia took the book from him and folded the cloth around it. “I will find another place.”

“There may not be another place,” Heliodorus said.

“Then I must decide what to do.”

She said it without anger. Callista found that harder to bear. Pelagia had asked, had listened, and was ready to take away what they could not agree to keep. Her father had offered generosity from a chair in a house where Callista would be the one answering the door.

“Until morning,” Callista said.

Both of them looked at her.

“Leave it tonight. Father, go with her when she meets the cart. Speak to the man. Ask whether he will carry the book if somebody else takes responsibility for it.”

Heliodorus looked toward the stairs. “He may refuse.”

“Then come back with it and we will decide the next thing. We. Don’t promise a week. Don’t promise until everything is different.”

He rubbed the side of his thumb. She thought he would say she did not trust him. Instead he asked Pelagia where the cart would be waiting.

“Near the lower road. Before sunrise.”

“I will be there.”

“With her,” Callista said.

“With her.”

Pelagia sat again, gathering her son into her lap. He had stopped crying and was trying to pull the string from the bundle. She moved his hand gently. Callista brought bread. Nobody was hungry until it was on the table.

Later, Pelagia and the boy went upstairs to Callista’s bed. Heliodorus laid his cloak beside the door. Callista cleared the table, leaving the covered book on the dry shelf above it.

“Wake me,” her father said.

“I always do.”

“I mean early.”

She looked at his cloak, already spread where he could reach it, and nodded. Upstairs the boy asked his mother whether they were still going to see his aunt. Pelagia told him yes. Heliodorus listened until she had finished speaking, then lowered himself onto the bench.