God's Gold (23 page)

What Josephus neglected to report, perhaps because the reality would have been so obvious to a Roman audience, is that the most important religious building of the Roman Empire stood next to the Temple of Isis. His reference to Isis was just an elementary act of signposting, whose importance has become overstated across the centuries. Vespasian and Titus did not choose this spot to purify themselves the night before their triumph; this location chose them. A gentle hill would have given a perfect view of proceedings for the multitude converging on the Field of Mars by the thousands. The open space would have comfortably accommodated the hundreds of soldiers shining their armor, not to mention fussy directors putting finishing touches to the triumph's elaborately designed floats. At the foot of the hill, today engulfed by vendors peddling handbags, sunglasses, leaning towers of Pisa, and plastic guns firing bubbles that float around the piazza like messages from the gods, stands one of the most magnificent and important architectural monuments of antiquity, the Pantheon.

The Pantheon has stood undisturbed by the destructive hand of man for almost 1,880 years. The building planted on the site today owes its survival to the temple's conversion into the Church of Saint Mary of the Martyrs in AD 608. The earliest incarnation was commissioned by Marcus Agrippa in 27–25 BC, only to be destroyed like much of ancient Rome by one of the great fires that consumed large swathes of the city in AD 80. Domitian's subsequent rebuild fared even worse, being struck by lightning thirty years later and, once again, burning to the ground. The current temple is the handiwork of the emperor Hadrian, who rededicated the building to the original founder, Marcus Agrippa.

The Pantheon consists of a front porch annexed to a rotunda, in combination 200 feet long. Its pedimented classical facade is supported by Corinthian columns with monolithic shafts of Egyptian granite and by bases and capitals of white Greek Pentelic marble. A set of holes cut into the pediment once formed an eagle and wreath design, the attributes of the supreme god Jupiter, crafted from gilded bronze. The porch, rest
ing beneath 6.5-foot-wide monster marble columns, originally housed statues of the emperors Augustus and Agrippa and of the god Mars. Another statue, of Venus, was famous for her earrings made from a pearl once owned by no less a celebrity than Cleopatra of Egypt.

Although no one really knows how the Pantheon functioned in antiquity, it may well have been the seat of all the gods, a Roman version of the Greeks' Mount Olympus. But more than this, Roman emperors also held court here, hearing petitions and handing out judgments. The Pantheon was thus a perfect symbolic choice from where to prepare for the triumph.

The majestic spectacle of that day emerged in narrow snapshots. The piazza is heavily built up, and the ancient view distorted in my mind by twenty-first-century hawkers crying “Uno euro” for their tacky goods. An androgynous Sicilian in black shades and a coffee-and-cream shirt buttoned up to his throat played surreal elevator Muzak on his electronic organ, while his wife and two toddlers looked on with bittersweet pride and hunger.

After offering sacrifices in the early morning sun, it is almost certain that on the great day itself it was from the Pantheon that Vespasian and Titus walked out in purple robes to the roar of the city. Tens of thousands of Roman citizens tightly packing the Field of Mars as far as the eye could see would have cheered on their heroes as the gods of war looked on in satisfaction. The stench of death on the streets of AD 70 Jerusalem seemed worlds away.

Once the pantheon of the gods and the ancestral dead had been respectfully appeased in the Field of Mars, a final formality awaited Vespasian and Titus before the spectacle could begin. Battles may have been won and lost through the strategic guile and bravery of these commanders in chief and the unconditional loyalty of their soldiers, but the business of war was the matter of the Senate, which was chief executive and treasury rolled into one. Naturally it had nervously followed the Jewish Revolt, voting for troop allocations and the supply of generous funds.

One false move and armies were known to turn against the Senate, and the city mob to grind more than just its teeth if excessive funds were wasted on war rather than more immediate tasks like cleaning stinking sewers. Vespasian had left Rome out of favor with Nero and returned an emperor. From humble beginnings the new imperial ruler was well aware of the Eternal City's political sensitivities.

Before the pageant of the triumph could start, Vespasian and Titus thus received the blessing of the Roman Senate and the congratulations of their “sponsors.” Josephus dwells on this morning meeting at some length, explaining how the commanders

The whereabouts of Octavian's Walks is not common knowledge, but can only have existed at one very special location. At the far west end of the Forum, just past the monumental triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus, stands a well-preserved rectangular building. Although the current incarnation dates to AD 283, the original building was devised as a Senate house (the curia) by Julius Caesar and completed by Augustus in 29 BC. Even though stylized images of the Senate on contemporary coins show a building more reminiscent of a Chinese pagoda than a Roman temple, this was one of the most powerful buildings of the empire. Inside its hallowed walls, lined with expensive Phrygian marble, three hundred senators would congregate and debate matters of state. Three statues perched on the top of the facade's pediment, including a Winged Victory on a globe, guarded its doors.

The Augustan building was decorated inside with marble balustrades depicting on one side an anonymous emperor burning the book of debt and, on the reverse, a sow, ram, and bull being led to sacrifice in the Forum and a scene of imperial benefaction. A similar
suovetaurilia
ceremony of animal sacrifice would have taken place on the morning of the triumph, but not in front of the Senate house. About 130 feet west of the curia is the symbolic heart of Rome, the Umbilicus
Urbis (Navel of the City) where, according to legend, Romulus dug a circular pit when he founded Rome. Here all new citizens arriving at the city traditionally threw in a handful of dirt from their place of origin, as well as the first fruits of the year as a sacrifice. The Navel of the City was also a gateway to the underworld, whose lid was prized open three times a year to liberate bottled-up evil spirits and stop them from brewing undue mischief for the empire.

Against this powerful political backdrop of symbolism and power, Vespasian and Titus would have been received at the
rostra,
a massive rectangular orator's platform that still stands today. The podium dominates the Forum of Julius Caesar and would have been unmissable in AD 71 with its colored paneling of pink-gray marble from Chios cut with vertical bands of black-red marble from Teos. Reinforcing the spectacle of power, the platform was decorated with bronze rams (
rostra
) ripped from vanquished enemy warships.

Once the “sponsors” had been appeased, Vespasian and Titus followed tradition by serving lunch to their troops as a sign of respect and as a morale booster. The entourage then moved into the suburbs of Rome to freshen up before the main event. According to Josephus:

This enigmatic passage offers little to go on. Our only clues are a Gate of the Pomp where Roman triumphs started, which must lie in proximity to a cluster of theaters. Fortunately, the route of the Triumphal Way can be reconstructed from dozens of ancient references given by different historians: starting at the Circus Flaminius in the Field of Mars, it then passed through the Porticus of Octavia and between the temples of Apollo and Bellona before heading for the ancient Vicus
Jugarius by way of the Triumphal Gate (Gate of the Pomp) in the Republican-period city walls.

How many of these landmarks still stood to illuminate the public display of the mighty Temple treasure of Jerusalem? Would I be able to find the ruins of the Circus Flaminius, the monument that symbolized the satisfactory completion of Rome's subjugation of the Jews?

The Circus Flaminius, laid out by Gaius Flaminius Nepos in 220 BC to the west of Rome, hugs the hips of the River Tiber close to Fabricius's Bridge. This Roman thoroughfare once led into the heart of the ancient city's foreigners' quarter, the Transtiberinum (Trastevere in modern Italian). The term
circus,
however, is really something of a misnomer. From time to time emperors such as Augustus held Egyptian crocodile fights here, and the Taurian Games were held here every five years.

But on an everyday basis the open communal space of the circus served as a lively venue for public meetings, markets, banking transactions, and funeral speeches. Here the state presented gifts and money to the army on special occasions—an emperor's birthday or after military victories—and enemy spoils of war went on public show. If the Forum was the administrative and political heart of the city, then the pulse of cosmopolitan Rome beat from the 850-foot-long by 325-foot-wide Circus Flaminius.

Making my way toward the main landmark of Rome's Region IX, I wondered what the mood around the circus was like that day in AD 71, as chained Jews were herded in preparation for humiliation. The area would have been abuzz for days with officials putting up decorations, painting over the odd bit of graffiti, and mounting security operations. The Circus Flaminius marked the edge of the city's great foreigners' quarter, which sprawled across both sides of the Tiber. Its residents included 40,000 Jews, who considered themselves both sons and daughters
of Israel, yet also Romans. On the day when the Temple treasure was paraded across the city, would their loyalties have been divided? Would the Jewish community living along the riverside ghetto have been in mourning behind closed shutters? Before closing in on the final resting place of God's gold in Rome, I decided to investigate the foreigners' quarter and try to find out just how far the local Jews' sympathies stretched.

Trastevere remains fiercely independent today and there is no better place to mull over these questions than from the far side of the river. I crossed the fast-flowing Tiber by the Pons Fabricius, the stone bridge thrown across the river in 62 BC by Lucius Fabricius, commissioner of roads, and passed over Tiber Island, a no-man's-land in the middle of the water once graced by a temple dedicated to the healing god Asclepius and by shrines to Jupiter Jurarius (guarantor of oaths), Gaia, and Tiberinus (god of the river). Although peaceful today, covered with lush vegetation and evergreens, this part of downtown Rome would have been a hive of activity and babbling tongues in the first century AD. Here foreigners begged for menial jobs down by the docks and heaved sacks of North African grain and amphorae filled with Spanish oils into the city center.

Today the Trastevere region is tranquil and bohemian, none too different from the laid-back atmosphere of Paris's Rive Gauche. Students picnicked on the sloping stone revetment under the setting sun and a gentle red glow cast across the water. As they chugged local red wine and picked at salami, they animatedly discussed Nietzsche, Prime Minister Berlusconi, and the latest crisis with the AS Roma football team.

Within the narrow streets of Trastevere, the city's insane traffic quietens. Extensive graffiti covers the walls declaring
MORTE IL FASCIO
(Death to the Fascists). The rickety stone houses have a medieval feel, while the piazzas emit a sense of great energy, warmth, and intellectual endeavor, as if this district has given birth to major works of philosophy, art, and literature over the centuries. Small stalls peddle local crafts of leather and glass, turning their backs on the trite tourist goods sold outside the Pantheon.

To be a foreigner trying to scrape a living in imperial Rome could have been daunting. The babble of Latin, the overpowering fascist ar
chitecture, and the marble masterpieces adorning almost all street corners can only have increased the sense of inferiority. Even today, when I rode the elevator to my hotel room by the Terminali railway station, the conspicuously framed Codified Text on the Sojourn of Foreigners in Italy (June 1931) still reminded visitors of their legal obligations under Articles 142–144:

Xenophobia and class prejudice were without doubt rampant in ancient Rome, like any great cosmopolitan city past and present, but the extent to which it was institutionalized within society depends on which ancient voices you trust most. Certainly the Jewish community must have felt deeply vulnerable peering through closed shutters at their brethren being dragged in triumph through the streets in AD 71. But did such oppression of “others” really typify everyday life? Would Rome have considered its own city Jews to be part of the same problem they had overcome in Israel and thus decided that this was an opportune moment to liquidate local Judaism?

Certain lines of inquiry undeniably expose Rome's Jews as troublemakers who flaunted the law and needed suppressing from time to time. The earliest rumblings of disquiet date to 139 BC, when Gnaeus Cornelius Hispanus, the
praetor peregrinus
in charge of foreigners, expelled the Chaldeans and astrologers and “also compelled the Jews, who attempted to contaminate the morals of the Romans with the worship of Jupiter Sabazius, to go back to their own homes.” Even though Valerius Maximus, author of the
Memorable Deeds and Sayings
in which this reference appears, undoubtedly got his religious wires crossed (Jupiter
Sabazius was Phrygian, not Semitic), this event probably reflects a more general clampdown on non-Roman religious activity. Valerius Maximus almost certainly also confuses Sabazius with observance of the Sabbath. Nevertheless, the cry of “foreigners go home” was just as familiar on the streets of the Eternal City as in the West today.

Several emperors seem to have had it in for the Jews and their ghetto of 40,000 people amid an overall urban population of some 1.2 million people (substantially larger than the modern community of 27,000 Jews). In AD 41, the mentally impaired Claudius forbade them the right of assembly, excluded them from the welfare state's free wheat dole, and eight years later “expelled from Rome the Jews who persisted in rioting at the instigation of Chrestus,” according to Suetonius's biography of the emperor. The reason for this clampdown seems to have been a wave of missionary activity across the Mediterranean stirred up by the Jews of Alexandria, to whom Claudius penned a letter warning them not to “stir up a general plague throughout the world.” Hadrian (AD 117–138) is acknowledged as one of the ablest and most enlightened of all Roman rulers, yet even he forbade circumcision and desecrated the site of the Temple in Jerusalem with a pagan sanctuary dedicated to Venus, the goddess of love.

Judaism crops up fairly regularly in literary circles of post-Augustan Rome, painting a picture distorted by misinformation and prejudice. The prevailing attitude was generally one of amused contempt at the exotic and seemingly absurd Jewish customs. A far harder line, however, was taken in a speech delivered by the great orator Cicero in 59 BC, in which he stated:

The philosopher Seneca objected to the Jews' observance of the Sabbath because they lost one-seventh of their lives to idleness, while the satirist Persius scorned the awed prayer of silently moving lips on the “circumcised Sabbath.” Jewish abstinence from pork—a staple foodstuff reared on government farms—also puzzled the Romans; the satirical writer Petronius explained this behavior as due to the Jews' veneration of the pig. Martial, the witty epigrammatist of the time of the emperor Domitian (AD 81–96), included in a catalog of the unpleasant smells of Rome the odorous breath of the fasting Jew and, among the unendurable noisemakers of the city, the Jewish mendicant “taught to beg by his mother.”

Incredibly uninformed and inaccurate commentary about the history of the Jews and their customs was evidently institutionalized, a reality reinforced by perhaps Rome's greatest historian, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, who also misunderstood their origins. One of his legends portrayed the Jews as fugitives from the island of Crete, where the mountain of Ida and the neighboring tribe, the Idaei, came to be called Judaei “by a barbarous lengthening of the national name.” Tacitus's take on Jewish origins, I suspect, should largely be ignored as little more than political propaganda geared toward discrediting the rich legacy of this people. The far younger history of mighty Rome, based largely on a dense forest of myth, was not to be eclipsed.

The hostile stories swirling around the origins of Rome's Jews would resonate down the centuries. From his great fascist residence at the Villa Torlonia in Rome, Benito Mussolini typically denounced the Jews as strangers lacking any ancestry in the Eternal City. Yet 30 feet below his own villa and rolling gardens stretched the grave-lined chambers of an ancient Jewish cemetery haunted by the bones of the very people whose forebears he denied.

 

I
n reality, much of the Jew-bating that oozed off the quills of Roman writers was wishful thinking, a desire to keep foreigners at bay. Actually, many of the Jews of Rome enjoyed a special relationship with the political heavyweights of the empire that relegated the “Jews as slaves”
image to the garbage can of history. They may have been sons and daughters of Israel, but they were nonetheless valued by the Eternal City.

With his “Magna Carta of the Jews,” Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) bestowed special privileges that prevailed, on and off, for three centuries until the advent of Christianity. These decrees granted full freedom of worship and permission to raise money for communal purposes and to send the Temple tax to Jerusalem.

Caesar similarly permitted Rome's Jewish community to try its own cases under a Jewish tribunal instead of the regular Roman courts. Modern Israel's exemption of its most observant Jewish population from compulsory military service is also nothing new. Surprisingly, this policy dates back to the reign of Julius Caesar and was initiated as a result of the impossibility of enforcing a compromise between enrollment, keeping the Sabbath, and observing Jewish dietary laws. Little wonder Rome's Jews wept openly at Caesar's grave following his death at the hands of Brutus.

Religious toleration was especially relaxed during the reign of Augustus (27 BC–AD 14), when the greatest of emperors enhanced the Jews' privileges even further. In Jerusalem he donated costly gifts to the Temple and commanded that a burned offering be made there daily in perpetuity at his expense as a token of his homage to the supreme God of the Jews.

Beyond the personal grief and deep empathy that must have consumed the Jewish community of Rome in AD 71, the outbreak of the First Jewish Revolt in Israel and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem triggered no political repercussion among the Jewish residents of Rome itself. Even though Israel had been wiped off the map, Jews' privileges in Rome and throughout the rest of the empire remained unchanged. As far as we know, no race riots ensued. Vespasian's tolerance toward the local Jews underlines just how extreme was the annihilation of Israel and burning of Jerusalem in September AD 70.

Imperial politics were complicated two thousand years ago and, in reality, Rome needed the Jews. The historical sources leave the im
pression that, as a collective, the Jews of Rome were a powerful group whom emperors, ready to commit mass genocide elsewhere, would actively court. In 59 BC, the Roman aristocrat Lucius Valerius Flaccus was charged with extortion and misappropriation of the “Jewish gold” (the Temple tax) collected in Asia Minor and destined for Jerusalem. During his trial and in reference to the Jewish community Cicero confirmed, “You know how large a mob they are, how unanimously they stick together, how influential they are in politics” (
Pro Flacco
66). The Jewish “mob” permeated society.

Between the first and fifth centuries AD a flourishing middle-and upper-class Jewish community owned as many as thirteen synagogues, from where at times it pursued an aggressive policy of securing converts, possibly including Nero's second wife, Poppaea, as well as the distinguished writer Caecilius of Calacte, one of the top rhetors and literary critics of the Augustan age. Hard work and diligence also created deep-rooted respect among Roman society, which no doubt was the real reason for satirists' wrath.

The basic tenets of Judaism even touched everyday life, with the Sabbath judged to be a sacred day, unfavorable for starting a journey but an opportune time to court a girl, according to the poet Ovid. This is the real background behind the spiteful sneers of the likes of Seneca, who complained that Judaism had become so widespread that “the practices of this damnable race have already prevailed in every land. The vanquished have given laws to the victors.” The empire's divided attitude toward the death of Israel, the survival of God's gold, and tolerance of Rome's Jewish community is a humbling tale that reflects the complexity and flexibility of Roman politics.