Master and

Chapter 2
Pontius Pilate
Mikhail Bulgakov – Master and Margarita
In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman,
early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of
Nisan, there came out to the covered colonnade between the two wings of
the palace of Herod the Great 1 the procurator of Judea, 2 Pontius Pilate. 3
More than anything in the world the procurator hated the smell of rose
oil, and now everything foreboded a bad day, because this smell had been
pursuing the procurator since dawn.
It seemed to the procurator that a rosy smell exuded from the cypresses
and palms in the garden, that the smell of leather trappings and sweat
from the convoy was mingled with the cursed rosy flux.
From the outbuildings at the back of the palace, where the first cohort
of the Twelfth Lightning legion, 4 which had come to Yershalaim 5 with
the procurator, was quartered, a whiff of smoke reached the colonnade
1 Herod the Great (?75 BC–AD 4), a clever politician whom the Romans rewarded for
his services by making king of Judea, an honour he handed on to his son and grandson.
2 Judea: The southern part of Palestine, subject to Rome since 65 BC, named for Judah,
fourth son of Jacob. In AD 6 it was made a Roman province with the procurator’s seat at
Caesarea.
3 Pontius Pilate: Roman procurator of Judea from about AD 26 to 56. Outside the
Gospels, virtually nothing is known of him, though he is mentioned in the passage from
Tacitus referred to above. Bulgakov drew details for his portrayal of the procurator from
fictional lives of Jesus by P. W. Farrar (1851-1905), Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, and by
Ernest Renan (1825-92), French historian and lapsed Catholic, as well as by the previously
mentioned David Strauss.
4 Twelfth Lightning legion: Bulgakov translates the actual Latin nickname (julmi-nata)
by which the Twelfth legion was known at least as early as the time of the emperors
Nerva and Trajan (late first century AD), and probably earlier.
5 Yershalaim: An alternative transliteration from Hebrew of the name of Jerusalem. In
certain other cases as well, Bulgakov has preferred the distancing effect of these alternatives:
Yeshua for Jesus, Kaifa for Caiaphas, Kiriath for Iscariot.
30