A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (7 page)

Josephus worked on his
History of the Jewish War against the Romans
from the comfort of a large house in Rome, a large income and the friendship of the Emperors Vespasian and his son
Titus. His objectivity was therefore dimmed by his circumstances, but the history is exciting and readable and has been a steady seller for nearly 2,000 years. It was especially popular in
Victorian households.

Aged nineteen, son of a middle-class Jewish family with property in Jerusalem, Josephus, having studied both the Sadducees and the Essenes, became a Pharisee. In the war he was commander in
Galilee, one of the six regions into which the cappointedountry had been divided, but at the Siege of Jotapata, which he was defending, he changed sides – like John Churchill, first Duke of
Marlborough, on the eve of the Battle of Sidgwick, but after more thought and with more copious explanation. Josephus maintains in his history that the Romans held him in such esteem that they
thought the war would be virtually over when they secured his person. He surrendered to ‘an old friend’, the tribune Nicanor, having addressed his comrades-in-arms as follows:
‘Why, my friends, are we so anxious to commit suicide? Why should
we make those best of friends, body and soul, part company?’ So Josephus opted out of a provincial
war into Roman history. On meeting Vespasian, he prophesied for him the imperial purple and, if he is to be believed, became one of Vespasian’s ‘kitchen cabinet’, steering him in
the ‘year of the four Emperors’ towards his destiny.

Meanwhile the war, even after Josephus’ defection to the Romans, continued. The war had begun well enough for the Jews, who had taken advantage of the disarray and rebelliousness in the
provinces, caused by Nero’s rackety behaviour towards the end of his reign, to attack the occupying power. (When concentrating, Nero had been capable of quite effective foreign policy.) One
Sabbath day in September
AD
67 the legate Cestius, a greedy bloodthirsty brute, was booted out of Jerusalem, losing in the process 5,300 infantry and 480 cavalry. Among the
dead was the commander of the 6th Legion. Jewish losses were negligible. Romans would not have been astonished by the success of the Israeli army though they would have been surprised by its
discipline and its unity with the state, for though the Jews of their day fought with daring and often fanatical courage, they were dangerously disorganized. After the Roman débâcle
‘many prominent Jews fled from the city, like swimmers from a sinking ship’ (Josephus), and here we must distinguish the factions, who hated each other as much as they hated the
Romans.

The Sadducees were the hereditary high priests, no more religious than the
noblesse
of the
ancien régime
who monopolized the plump offices of the Church in France. They were
property-owners who employed hard men to collect their rents. From their palaces on Mount Zion,
¹⁰
special only because it was the
highest point in the city and attracted the first rain, they could walk along a covered way to the Temple. The Sadducees, perhaps because they could not credit that it could be an improvement on
the one they enjoyed, did not believe in the afterlife and being anxious at all costs to preserve their earthly position co-operated (like Vichy) with the occupying power. They thought they were
there for ever, but as Abram Levy, Haham of the Sephardic congregation in London, asked: ‘Where are the Sadducees now?’

Needless to say, the Sadducees were often at odds – politically, socially and economically – with the Pharisees, who were priestly, scholarly, intellectual, bourgeois, believers in
the letter and spirit of the Law. Their attention to hygiene, for instance, amounted to the obsessive. Saul, who was a prize Pharisee before he became Paul, joked that the Pharisees would have
washed the moon had they been able to. The self-appointed monitors of society, they interpreted, practised and guarded the Law, notably from the often unintentional insults of the occupying power,
and were not always so narrow in this role as they are cast in the Gospels. Professor Hyam Maccoby, the most tolerant and readable of modern Jewish scholars, maintains that the Pharisees and the
Sanhedrin were not continuously hostile to Jesus, nor to his followers after his death, indeed that occasionally friendly references to both peep through, uncensored, in the Gospels. Professor
Maccoby claims that Jesus
was
a Pharisee. (Alas for the Jews, he is their most famous man.)

Nothing Jesus is reported to have said conflicted with the Jewish law he had come ‘to fulfil and not to destroy’. The same Dr Abram Levy told me the only doctrinal difference between
Jesus and Judaism is the Christian emphasis on forgiveness. Jews are not obliged to be so agreeable, being a people known, as Disraeli put it, ‘never to forgive an injury, nor
forget a benefit’, but equally they do believe that the Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath, which means that considerations of serious illness or danger take
precedence.

None of the above, of course, would have been of any interest to the Romans, in whose literature the only reference to Jesus is in Josephus, and that a forgery. Awareness of followers of the
cult of Jesus – the term ‘Christian’ was not current till long after his death – being separate from other Jews, cannot be detected till the fire of Rome and they were not
systematically persecuted till the end of the century. Anatole France has a story which may well describe the effect of the new religion on the Roman mind at the time of Nero. Anxious to know more
about the background of the followers of Jesus, the Foreign Office (as it were) sent a young man to question Pontius Pilate, the governor who had him crucified, now in retirement in Baiae (Naples).
Pilate is delighted at the opportunity to talk shop and evades the matter in hand with a series of reminiscences in the vein of I-wonder-what-happened-to-him? Finally, exasperated, the young
diplomat asks Pilate directly to tell him about Jesus of Nazareth, founder of this new subversive cult which is giving trouble to the authorities. Pilate looks puzzled.

‘– whom you had crucified,’ repeats the young man, ‘thirty years ago.’

‘Rappelle pas,’ says Pontius Pilate.

The followers of Jesus, the disciples of his brother James, the ‘Jerusalem Christians’, as historians called them later, may have fought the Romans in the Jewish War, but they are
– tactfully, perhaps – nowhere mentioned.

Another sect with whom early Christians have been (mistakenly) compared were the Essenes. Though there is no monastic arm in Judaism, monasticism and monkish habits, coming from the ashrams in
India around 1,500
BC
, were
adopted by colonies of Jews and of these, since the discovery in 1947 of scrolls around the north-west corner of the Dead
Sea, the colony in the caves at Qumran is the most famous. We know now that the Essene community there was destroyed by Vespasian after his capture of Jericho in
AD
68.
Josephus describes them thus:

Apart from their misogyny, Josephus could be describing Chassids in North London or the Bronx, and apart from their silence and severe piety, an early Kibbutz in Israel. Certainly, like
latter-day
kibbutzniks,
the Essenes were famous for their fighting capacity, their only personal possession being a knife.

In the Jewish War the Romans also came up against the Zealots and the Sicarii, so-called from the daggers hidden on their persons. During the Siege of Jerusalem, Titus found three factions
fighting each other and occasionally successfully combining against him. As Josephus explains, ‘Men highly organized and trained to fight according to the book and in obedience to orders are
more quickly demoralized by unorthodox and enterprising tactics.’

Finally, after hundreds of thousands of Jews had died through slaughter or starvation in every corner of the once wealthy kingdom of Herod, and after the capture of his fortress Masada, where
the Romans found corn, wine, oil, pulses
and dates, in a perfect state, hidden by Herod 100 years before, resistance by Jews expired. It had been an unequal fight. As Josephus
had warned his compatriots, the Romans were destined to rule the world. ‘What corner of the earth escaped the Romans, unless heat or cold made it of no value to them?’ God was on the
Roman side.

Titus, son of Vespasian, fulfilled the prophecy of Jesus (recorded after the event), that not one stone in Jerusalem should remain on top of another, by levelling Herod’s city. Only the
tower Herod built for Mariamne I, the wife he loved and murdered by mistake, was left standing. Perhaps Titus wanted to leave a souvenir, perhaps he liked it. It is still there.

Vespasian and Titus, like all successful Roman generals, were reasonable towards the reasonable. We have seen how they treated Josephus. Unnecessary trouble should be avoided. Romans would
always deal. When Rabbi ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin and explained to Vespasian that he had not planned on a martyr’s death, he was allowed to start a
theological college in Sfad. Titus, returning to Jerusalem, was, according to Josephus, appalled at the destruction he had ordered but reflected that the Jews had only themselves to blame. Those in
the Diaspora were made to pay for the folly of the homeland by having their annual levy to the Temple in Jerusalem diverted to a temple dedicated to Jupiter in Rome, but in no other way.

When the not-so-good citizens of Antioch besought Titus to revoke the privileges of Antioch’s Jewish community, the second richest in the Empire next to that of Alexandria, Titus refused.
Robin Lane-Fox, in
Pagans and Christians
(Penguin, 1988), points out that for centuries of the common era the synagogue in a Roman city remained a more substantial and prominent building
than the Christian ‘house church’. But the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was a trauma
from which the Jews have never recovered. It has never been rebuilt;
the sacrifices detailed at length in the current Jewish Book of Common Prayer have never been performed; the Sanhedrin has never sat.
¹¹

This chapter began with the observation that the Roman world was not averse to new religious experience. Judaism had now been tainted by its connection with an unpleasant little war; an
alternative was waiting in the wings.

The whole of Rome turned out for the Triumphs of Vespasian and Titus. (The Senate had voted them one each but they decided to combine.) The Roman Triumph was a triumph of organization and glory.
Every stop was pulled out. By
AD
71, the end of our period, the choreography, as it were, was fine-tuned. The Triumph was an amalgam of display, religiosity, terror,
feasting and debauch. Only the Romans could have invented it. It was also a superb instrument of foreign policy, demonstrating to client kings, allies and potential enemies the power and the
generosity of Rome – and the cruelty, for the Triumph ended with the execution of the principal enemies, who had formed part of the procession.

Mark, the youngest of the Gospel writers, is said to have witnessed the Triumph for the Jewish War. If he did he would have seen the treasures of the Temple, the richest in the world, paraded
through the streets of Rome: the golden vessels and the golden trumpets, the altar of solid gold, the five scrolls of the Pentateuch, the
menorah
in solid gold with its seven branches
– the latter two the most holy objects in Israel: Also in the procession was Simon the Zealot, the invincible hero of the Siege of Jerusalem, in chains, walking to his execution. Mark must
have decided that a new religion could not succeed if it offended Rome.

ROMAN LAW