God's Gold (17 page)

On a Friday morning in late April 2005 I left the buzz of Jerusalem and headed west toward the coast. I had a nagging suspicion that the final days of the siege were not quite as arbitrary as Josephus claimed. Did the freak throw of a burning firebrand really destroy the Temple; was it really lost by the saddest of accidents? Something didn't quite add up.

My destination was Caesarea, the primary port into ancient Israel between the late first century BC and the early seventh century AD. This was where I believed the Temple treasure was kept under very heavy guard until it was shipped to Rome from the city's majestic quays. With its ruined Roman aqueducts marching into town from the north and the submerged port lying thirty-three feet beneath the waves—a casualty of seismic subsidence—Caesarea is endlessly fascinating and romantic. Every year a little more of the city is excavated and another chapter in the port's sweeping history written.

Driving along the Sharon Plain, ancient Judea's roaming wheat lands, I imagined the lay of the land in AD 70. As far as the eye could see, a ragged exodus would have been under way. Long lines of Jews, impoverished and emaciated, shuffled across the horizon. The great Temple of Jerusalem was razed, families had been brutally torn apart, and now the people of Judea had been exiled from the walls of Jerusalem. To the thin hill air and fragrant fields of the Galilee the dispossessed made their way toward a new home, where spiritual wounds would be slowly healed over time. As the right hand of his father, Vespasian, Titus had
not only killed thousands of Zealots, he had wiped out one of the most learned and sophisticated cultures of antiquity—or so he believed.

I swung west off the Tel Aviv-to-Haifa highway and noted how great swaths of coastal sandbanks had been chewed up by urban development since my last visit. Caesarea is one of Israel's most buoyant playgrounds for the rich and famous, just as in antiquity, and each year its villa quarter encroaches ever closer to the ancient ruins.

This was the modern economic reality, but I wanted to explore the economics of ancient Roman Caesarea. Leaving my rental car by the Byzantine Esplanade, where headless statues of emperors preside over a fifth-century AD marketplace, I walked down to the beach through the Crusader gateway, past colossal columns and sprawling Roman warehouses.

Sebastos, the port of Caesarea, was the world's first artificial harbor, a state-of-the-art facility into which Herod poured much of his life's savings. She would certainly have been the largest and most reliable port city from which to dispatch spoils of war. Titus's reliance on Caesarea as his naval base in the battle for Israel is also implicit in Josephus: “On the return of Caesar [Titus] to Caesarea-on-sea, Simon was brought to him in chains, and he ordered the prisoner to be kept for the triumph which he was preparing to celebrate in Rome” (
JW
7.36). If the human cargo intended for the triumph was already in Caesarea, there is every reason to expect the Temple treasure to have passed through the city. Having just demolished Herod's Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, Rome was now using his port to ship the loot and symbols of a vanquished state west to the Eternal City.

Sitting on the end of the breakwater I stared out over the Mediterranean. Arab fishermen idled the day away in the forlorn hope of a little dinner. Fat chance: the fishing grounds here were overexploited before the 1960s and have never recovered. By contrast, in the first century AD Vespasian knew Israel to be ripe for the picking and must have made a pact with his son whereby the destruction of Jerusalem was inevitable. The burning of the Temple was regrettable to Rome, but the looting of its treasuries was coldly calculated and deliberate.

What started as misfortune ended in personal glory for Vespasian. Here was a man of relatively humble origins, a late developer and something of a country hick. Vespasian is alleged to have got the call to lead the Roman forces against Israel by bad luck. Having committed the ultimate sin of falling asleep during one of the emperor Nero's poetry readings, he was refused permission to pay his respects at the palace the following day. Soon after, he found himself shipped off to an uncertain future in the mosquito-infested backwaters of the eastern Mediterranean. Little could he have guessed how fate would unfold.

Vespasian was born in a small hamlet in the Sabine countryside, the hill country northeast of Rome renowned for olives, herbs, and cattle raising. His lineage was far from noble, and throughout his life he would be teased about his rural accent. Even though one of his forebears, Titus Flavius Petro of Reate, had fought as a centurion for the Republicans at Pharsalus in 48 BC, he had been reported for cowardice in fleeing the battlefield. At best, Vespasian's father, Titus Flavius Sabinus, may have achieved the post of leading centurion in a military legion. Sabinus was also something of an entrepreneur, a moneylender in the Helvetian region of Lake Geneva, into which Rome was fast expanding and where new opportunities were arising. Commercial awareness would later stand his son in good stead.

Vespasian was hardly an eager political player in his early years. His elder brother had long received the
latus clavus
(broad tunic stripe), a “badge” of membership to the senatorial order. But Vespasian was indifferent to politics, and only got his act into gear when his mother teased him about becoming his brother's footman.

During his early political career he served on the so-called Board of Twenty, probably in the unglamorous but practical position of head of street cleaning in Rome. At this stage of his career the emperor Gaius Caligula noticed thick mud in an alley and ordered it to be thrown over Vespasian's toga for failing to do his job properly. New ambitions started to burn in the face of such public humiliation.

At the age of twenty-four Vespasian stood for the senatorial office before being sent to Crete. By thirty-nine he was elected to the
praetorship, and now he had the right to command armies. Yet even as he was mastering the political ladder, money worries forced him home to work in the mundane mule business. His nickname, the “muleteer,” hardly gave any indications of his future imperial aspirations. In AD 41, Vespasian's career took him abroad to the Rhine and then Britain.

Despite an ever-swelling portfolio of experience, Vespasian continued to pull the short straw. On drawing lots in AD 62 for his proconsulship he landed the unpopular tenure of Africa, where turnips were thrown at him at Hadrumetum in Tunisia for failing to prevent food shortage. However, by the time he was commanding three legions in Judea, the Flavian dynasty was enjoying significant power and prestige. His brother was also Prefect of Rome.

When Vespasian went to command the complicated but winnable war in Israel, he was simply a servant of the empire; a few years later he would return as the most powerful man in the world. The end of the 60s AD were years of confusion and tyranny. After the dreaded Nero committed suicide, Servius Sulpicius Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis in Spain, was appointed his successor. But before Vespasian could even send his son, Titus, back to Rome to salute the new emperor, Galba was butchered in the Roman marketplace and Marius Salvius Otho, governor of Lusitania in Portugal, had seized power. Simultaneously, Aulus Vitellius Germanicus, commander of Germania Inferior, proclaimed himself emperor and the empire was at war in turmoil and disorder. After losing the battle of Betriacum, Otho committed suicide. Never before had Rome experienced anything like the Year of the Four Emperors in AD 68–69.

Not far south of where I sat by the sea at Caesarea stands the outer walls of a Roman amphitheater. Here the first-century Roman garrison took residence, and it was probably precisely here that Vespasian was declared emperor by his commanders and soldiers in AD 69. The empire was in chaos and needed a strong ruler to save the government. With his humble background Vespasian initially refused the offer. When his commanders drew their swords and threatened to kill him unless he agreed, Vespasian reluctantly accepted.

This startling turn of events may sound fortuitous, but imperial ambitions awoke in Vespasian soon after arriving in Judea. His accession was actually well planned and immaculately timed. In reality, he was first proclaimed emperor in Alexandria on July 1, AD 69, with the support of its governor, Tiberius Alexander, and his two legions. With its copious wheat fields, Egypt was crucial to Rome; control Egypt and you owned the breadbasket of the empire and the allegiance of its hungry mouths. It was really only days later that the supposed spontaneous proclamation was made at Caesarea, 330 miles north of Alexandria. By July 15 all of Syria hailed him as emperor. By the last week of December, AD 69, Vespasian was back in Rome on the imperial throne and Vitellius the pretender decapitated. The general of the First Jewish Revolt was now lord of the inhabited world.

Even though history packages these events as due merely to the throw of the dice, Vespasian and his cronies actually had harbored these ambitions for many months. How did this dramatic turn of the tide affect Israel and what instructions were left with Titus about mopping up Jerusalem? The two Flavians must have engaged in dialogue deep into the night, no doubt right here in Caesarea from where Vespasian then sailed to Rome and from where Titus marched to bring Jerusalem to its knees.

Vespasian and Titus placed two problems at the top of their list of pressing priorities: the need of the new dynasty for a propaganda coup and hard cash—loads of it. With no ancestral history to reinforce the Flavians' claim to the throne, a great military victory was essential. Vespasian had the support of the army and, with his humble, no-nonsense background, also of the people. But this would not be enough to establish a dynasty and to see his sons succeed to the throne in later years. Suddenly, events in Judea were crucial to the Flavians—the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple would legitimize their right to rule down the generations. Every leader has his own defining moment—31 BC and the battle of Actium for Octavian, the future emperor Augustus; General Jackson's victory in the battle of New Orleans that won America independence over Britain in 1815. The battle for Jerusalem would be Vespasian's ultimate claim to fame
.

The Roman historical commentator Tacitus described the times preceding the rise of Vespasian as “rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil struggles, horrible even in peace.” Once on the throne, however, he added that the new emperor “purged the whole world of evil.” Despite his slow start in life, and possibly because of the wealth of military and commercial experience accumulated on his journey, Vespasian was not only an accomplished military general, he was also a very smart politician.

Modern politicians consider themselves the masters of political spin, spending fortunes on advertising campaigns that spread subliminal messages and sound bites across the land into the front rooms of the electorate. Perhaps they might be humbled to learn that Vespasian cracked this art two thousand years earlier. Soon after being proclaimed emperor, the Flavian propaganda machine swung into action. Vespasian, and hence the Flavian dynasty, would be “branded” as the team that chained chaos and brought
pax
, peace, to the world.

Soon after July 1, AD 69, Vespasian ordered coins be struck worded
PACIS EVENTVS
(The Coming of Peace). The Roman Empire enjoyed a global economy, and the same coins used in London were common currency as far as the Jordanian port of Aqaba, gateway to the Red Sea. This was Vespasian's way of quickly spreading his message. By the middle of his reign, the emperor's coins simply stated
PAX
. Peace had arrived, and with a bust of Vespasian on the coin's reverse, the world knew who was responsible.

Throughout the first century AD, the Roman Empire had tackled several irritating insurrections in Britain, Germany, Gaul, and Syria. All were suppressed without any of the fanfare of the First Jewish Revolt. But the sack of Jerusalem would be the Flavians' eternal claim to fame, and the defeat had to be packaged as something much more than just a bare-knuckle fight. The destruction of the Jews had to be portrayed as a global event orchestrated by great leaders. Suetonius tells us that Vespasian famously boasted to the Roman Senate, “My sons will succeed me or no one will,” and the First Jewish Revolt would be the dominant argument for Flavian rule and succession.

This was bad luck for the Jews, who found themselves troublemakers in the wrong place at the wrong time. Vespasian pursued a sweeping set of measures to boost the Flavian image, not least ensuring that his accession was seen to be fated. Among the eleven supernatural explanations given by Suetonius for Vespasian's claim to power was a statue of Julius Caesar on Tiber Island in Rome that turned from west to east, pointing toward the region from where the new ruler and peace would come.

Yet, at least in the short term, the most effective piece of propaganda was the minting of a remarkable series of silver coins bearing a bound Jewish prisoner in front of a palm tree, symbol of Judea, his arms tied behind his back, and with a Jewess crying at his feet. Arms and armor of the defeated Jew lie abandoned in the background. Latin text inscribed around the scene reads
JUDAEA CAPTA
: Judea Captured. This popular piece of Flavian propaganda, minted continuously over a twelve-year period, left no member of the empire unaware of where peace originated and who created it.

Stage-managing propaganda was one matter, fulfilling a grand strategy quite another. Without a massive injection of cash to pay for the new image, the Flavian brand would remain hollow. Where could Vespasian get his hands on a king's ransom? The answer was obvious for the imperial schemers. Both knew from various government reports that the Temple of Jerusalem was loaded. It had to fall.

In his
Natural History,
Pliny the Elder, a contemporary of Vespasian, described Flavian Rome as a city enjoying