Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (8 page)
Read Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) Online
Authors: Thomas Cahill
And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse [progenitor of the Davidic dynasty],
and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:
And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him
,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding
,
the spirit of counsel and might
,
the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord.
One of Isaiah’s most memorable passages is his vision of the
Peaceable Kingdom:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb
,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
and a little child shall lead them.…
And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp
,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.
They shall not hurt nor destroy
in all my holy mountain:
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
,
as the waters cover the sea.
So often these prophecies read like daydreams. A time is envisioned in which all wrongs shall be righted, the land once promised by God to his people shall know everlasting peace, and a second
David, anointed by God himself, will sit upon the throne of Israel. This figure, the Anointed One, is called
Messiah
in Hebrew,
Christos
in the Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures made for Jews living in cities throughout the Greek world who could no longer comprehend Hebrew.
This longing in the midst of present suffering for an impossibly happy outcome is a phenomenon by no means limited to Jews or even to the ancient world. Who hasn’t had such feelings? But beyond the Jews, such longings were almost always thought delusions. The
Sibyl of Cumae, a shadowy figure who lived in a cave near the Greek city of Neopolis (modern Naples) about 500
B.C.
, prophesied doom and death and the cyclical nature of all reality. “As time pursued its cyclic course,” she is made to say in Book 3 of the
Sibylline Oracles, “the kingdom of Egypt arose, then that of the Persians, Medes, and Ethiopians, and Assyrian Babylon, then that of the Macedonians, of Egypt again, then Rome.” The succession of empires is without end, all part of the turning of the wheel of time and the infinite procession of worlds (the thought of which made
young Alexander weep because he had not conquered one). The message of the Sibyl, who continued to reappear in later periods, haunting various shrines and caves throughout the Greco-Roman world, seems to have been that, though some times are better and some worse, there can be no permanent safety. Peace will be followed by war, prosperity by poverty, happiness by suffering, life by death. This was indeed the constant message of all ancient literature and its principal insight into human existence.
We actually have no unadulterated Sibylline Oracles left. The perspective of the fragment just quoted (with its two mentions of Egypt) gives indication of having been composed by a Greek-speaking Egyptian, and other portions of the book betray its provenance in Alexandrian Jewish circles of the second century
B.C.
The work is a pastiche of pagan and Jewish attitudes, alternating between cyclical cynicism and prophetic expectation. But whereas Greeks and Romans and all other ancient peoples tended to see history as an ultimately empty succession of triumphs and tragedies—and human beings as evanescent phenomena appearing briefly on the surface of historical events—the Jews believed that history had a beginning (in God’s act of Creation) and would have an end and that each human being, created by God, had an individual destiny to fulfill and was not merely a momentary glimmer on the ever-recurring waves of fate. And as in so much material written by Jews in the disappointing centuries after the
Babylonian Captivity, there is even in this peculiar collection of oracles the assertion of a promised Messiah, a king sent from God:
And then God will send a king from the sun
who will stop the entire earth from evil war …
and he will not do all these things by his private plans
but in obedience to the noble teachings of the great God.
For many readers in the late first century
B.C.
and early first century
A.D.
, verses like these brought Augustus to mind. The emperor had created peace without end, Pax Romana (which in fact would last a very long two hundred years). That he had done so by merciless policies would not have given ancient readers pause. After all, how else could you create peace save by unswerving military imposition?
The historian
Tacitus, describing the fall of Celtic Britain to Roman forces in
A.D.
60, would put this apostrophe to the Romans on the lips of a conquered Celt:
Harriers of the world, now that the earth [the continent of Eurasia] fails their all-devastating hands they probe even the sea [the Atlantic island of Britain]; if their enemy has wealth, they have greed; if he is poor, they are ambitious; East and West have glutted them; alone of mankind they behold with the same passion of concupiscence waste alike and want. To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname Empire; they make a desolation and call it peace. Children and kin are by the law of nature each man’s dearest possessions: they are swept away from us by conscription to be slaves in other lands; our wives and sisters, even when they escape a soldier’s lust, are debauched by self-styled friends and guests: our goods and chattels go for tribute, our lands and harvests in requisitions of grain; life and limb themselves are used up in leveling marsh and forest to the accompaniment of gibes
and blows. Slaves born to slavery are sold once for all and are fed by their masters free of charge; but Britain pays a daily price for her own enslavement, and feeds the slavers.
Seldom has an imperialist seen so clearly the cost of imperialism on “lesser breeds” as the mordant Tacitus does here. But even Tacitus, who aimed to write
sine ira et studio
(“without passion or partisanship”), thought conquest inevitable.
On his victorious return to Rome from his provinces of Spain and Gaul, Augustus personally dedicated the exquisite
Ara Pacis Augustae, the
Altar of Augustan Peace, on the
Campus Martius, the
Field of Mars, the Roman god of war. Peace grew out of war: that was how things were. That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans (who “make a desolation and call it peace”) at the expense of hapless conquered peoples, would also not have carried much weight with most readers. Hadn’t Philip of Macedon’s first conquest been the seizure of the Balkan gold mines? Hadn’t Alexander’s last planned campaign been for the sake of controlling the lucrative Arabian spice trade? How could anyone demur over such things? What would be the point of holding out against the nature of man and of the universe itself? Augustus set up in the midst of the Roman Forum a statue of himself that loomed eleven times the size of a normal man,
10
and similarly awesome statues were erected in central shrines throughout the empire. Augustus was not a normal man; he was a god, deserving of worship. And, like all gods, he was terrifying.
If the emperor had many apologists, none did him greater honor than
Virgil, who wrote the stirring national epic, the Aeneid, in Augustus’s honor, connecting the emperor (as did the reliefs that decorated the Ara Pacis) to Aeneas, Rome’s legendary founding hero. In the famous “Fourth Eclogue,” Virgil assumes the prophetic mantle and, giving the Sibylline prophecies a wildly optimistic interpretation, uses the old technique of pretending to anticipate what had already come to pass:
Now comes the time sung by Cumae’s Sibyl
,
when the wheel of the ages starts afresh.
Now is the Virgin herself made known
and the reign of Saturn on earth;
Now is a child engendered by heaven.
Smile, chaste Lucina, at the birth of this boy
who will put an end to our wretched age
,
from whom golden people shall spring.
Now does your own Apollo reign!
If Jews might be pardoned for thinking that Virgil was writing of their Messiah, or Christians their Christ (as was imagined to be the case throughout the Middle Ages), the educated pagan reader took Virgil’s
parve puer
, his “baby boy,” to be the young Augustus, who would go on to bring about a peace so extensive that it would affect even nature:
Without being called, the goats shall return
,
their udders swollen with milk.
The herds shall have no fear of lions.…
The serpent shall be no more
,
and the poison-plant shall perish
,
but Assyrian spice shall spring up everywhere.
Despite the remarkable affinity of these lines with
Isaiah’s prophecy of the
Peaceable Kingdom,
Virgil knew nothing of Isaiah or any of the Jewish holy books. How, then, explain the striking similarity of images—the response of nature, the favor of God that rests upon the child, the “gift of divine life”
(ille deum vitam accipiet)
, even the seeming allusion to a virgin birth? One may chalk it all up to coincidence. Or one may say that, beneath the surface differences of each culture—whether of cynical Romans, theoretical Greeks, fantasizing Jews, cyclical Orientals, or post-Christian Occidentals—there beats in human hearts a hope beyond all hoping, the hope of the hopeless, the hope of those who would disclaim any such longing, the hope of those who like the two tramps in
Waiting for Godot
seem to be waiting in vain, a hope—not for an emperor, not for an Exalted One—but for a Just One.
1
Demosthenes was for the Greeks what Cicero would be for the Romans, the consummate rhetorician. The elder contemporary of Alexander, he had vainly warned the Athenians of the growing power of Philip’s Macedon. He considered Philip’s son a contemptible parvenu and always referred to him as “the boy.” His supple orations, modulated expressions of opinion on political affairs no longer of consequence to us, are virtually unreadable today.
2
In “Under Ben Bulben,” W. B. Yeats, who beat his own son, imagines that “Aristotle played the taws / Upon the bottom of a king of kings,” but I doubt that even Aristotle was permitted much whacking of Alexander’s precious little bottom.
3
The Essenes may have risen out of an earlier movement, the Hasidim (or Saints), who were scrupulous about the Law, had already removed themselves to caves beyond the city in the time of Judas Maccabeus, and temporarily allied themselves with him in the early stages of the Maccabean-Hasmonean movement. Some scholars are of the opinion that the Hasidim were also forerunners of the Pharisees and even of the Sadducees. Such speculation lies outside our story. The Hasidim of our day, who first appeared in southeastern Poland in the mid-eighteenth century as followers of the Baal Shem Tov, have no direct connection, apart from their name, to the ancient Hasidim.
4
This rather chilling woman was hailed not only by unyielding Jews of late antiquity but by early Christians who took her as a model of martyrdom and built churches in memory of her and her sons. The legend of this mother and her sons is, in fact, our first recorded “martyrology” (or inspiring record of religious witness in the face of certain torture and death at the hands of a cruel public official) and provided the pattern that all subsequent examples of the genre would follow. The Greek word
martyr
means “witness.”
5
This passage has many translations, the most famous being “I know that my Redeemer liveth …” in the King James Version. But the Hebrew
goel
is not “redeemer” but a technical legal term meaning something like “public defender” or “ombudsman”—though with a more aggressive nuance. However one translates it, it appears to refer to God.
6
Tribunes were elected by the people to protect their interests. The office was one of several of the Roman Republic designed to achieve a careful balance of powers among competing forces and to keep political chaos at bay. The two consuls, elected to serve but one year’s term, were the executive pinnacle of government. There were two of them in order that they might keep each other honest, and they served but one year so that they could not amass undue power. The office of senator was either hereditary or bestowed for exceptional distinction (as in the British House of Lords). But all the rhetoric about “Republican” Rome hid the truth that Rome was an oligarchy, arranged to protect the interests of its wealthiest families. Once the empire was established, supposedly as a temporary measure during an emergency, there was no longer any need to uphold the fiction of the Republic (
ResPublica
, “the Common Good”), save as vestigial decoration.
7
The Holy Land, or Canaan, as it is called in Genesis, was gradually colonized by the Israelites under Joshua (and later), though it was never without other colonizers, such as the Philistines. Under Kings Saul and David, the federation of Israelite tribes united as the Kingdom of Israel. Under David’s knuckleheaded grandson Rehoboam, the kingdom was sundered in two: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Israel was subsequently destroyed as a separate political entity by the Assyrians, its principal families scattered and replaced by Aramaic-speaking colonizers, who intermarried with the remaining peasant stock to become the Samaritans of Samaria. The people of Judah, now the Jews, though they suffered the Babylonian Captivity, were allowed to return to their devastated country by the Edict of (the Persian king) Cyrus in 538
B.C.
Many remained abroad, creating the Jewish diaspora, but some returned. From this time on, the land was designated by the Greeks as “Palestine” (from “Philistine”). The reduced Jewish homeland of Judah would be called “Judea” by the Romans, who would sometimes use this name to refer to all of Palestine.
8
It is one of the ironies of calendrical history that Jesus was born between 6 and 4
B.C.
(before Christ). Dionysius Exiguus, or Denis the Short, the sixth-century monk who created our dating system of
B.C.
and
A.D.
(
anno Domini
, “in the year of the Lord”) on the basis of earlier rabbinical models, made a miscalculation.
9
In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was read throughout the ancient Jewish diaspora, the word
parthenos
, or “virgin,” is used. The Hebrew original has simply
alma
, or “young (unmarried) girl,” though, given the rigid sexual conventions of the age,
alma
pretty much shades into “virgin.” Hebrew does have a separate word,
betula
, for “virgin” in the technical sense.
10
Of this colossus only a finger remains, still to be seen in the Forum.
