A Jew Among Romans Read online

  Seneca was a man haunted by dark possibilities. There was a tunnel, some seven hundred yards long, between Pozzuoli—where Joseph happened to have made landfall—and Naples. That dark passageway reminded Seneca of mortality whenever he made himself go through it.2 His greatest apprehension was of looking foolish or cowardly. Never at home in Rome or in his own skin, he was forever trying to get out of things at the same time as getting into them. Although long resident in Córdoba, in southern Spain, Seneca’s family was of old Roman stock. In one of his many letters to Lucilius, he alluded to the siege by Scipio Africanus, during the First Punic War, of Numantia, near Soria in old Castille. When the defenders saw that their situation was hopeless, as Joseph’s companions would at Jotapata, they all killed themselves rather than be captured. Seneca praises both sides, but especially the Spaniards who chose to “die in liberty.” At the same time, he did not doubt (or did not confess that he doubted) that the conquest of Numantia was legitimate. Since human knowledge did not equal that of the gods, the Spaniards had fought a futile battle both gallantly and, in their own eyes, rightly. Josephus would say the same of the defenders of Jotapata.

  By writing plays with elaborate rhetoric and sanguinary plots,h Seneca sublimated fears and vanities in an entertaining advertisement for his divided self. Creative schizophrenia is a useful affliction for playwrights. The theater would prove attractive to Jewish writers in the twentieth-century Diaspora: it offered an arena where a man might make an art of splitting himself into a spectrum of characters. His personality could be reflected in their fractured mirror.i

  In Seneca’s view of Stoicism, a man could trump Tyche—the “contingency” of modern existentialism—by resigning from the world. He made a spiritual exercise of rehearsing death without dying. In this, he prefigures Julien Benda’s Exercice d’un enterré vif (Juin 1940–Août 1944). There was no single Latin word for suicide; suicida is medieval Latin, not attested until 1179. To kill oneself was no crime in ancient Rome. It was more the conclusive proof of a free man’s self-determination, uncomely only if he flinched when the moment came. Arria, the loyal wife of Caecina Paetus, a Roman senator unjustly ordered by the emperor Claudius to kill himself, took the dagger from her husband’s hesitant hand and plunged it into her own breast. Her last breath promised him, “It doesn’t hurt.”j

  Seneca was fascinated by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. When, during a violent storm in the Bay of Naples, the captain of the ferry told him that it would be unwise to sail, the great man insisted on putting to sea, to test his composure.k While still the richest man in Rome, Seneca took covert pleasure in being transported in a peasant’s cart. Like Nero when he went out in disguise for a night on the town, Seneca relished roughing it incognito. However, when a grander conveyance overtook the cart he was riding in, he blushed to think that he might have been recognized and looked foolish in passing patrician eyes. Death offered an emergency exit from a world of pain and from the ordeal of human society, which he described as “a reunion of wild beasts.” He had volunteered to renounce his fortune more as a premium to abate Nero’s resentment than because he had no appetite for money and its comforts.l

  Seneca told Lucilius that if reduced to beggary, he would kill himself. He advised a friend dying of a wasting disease to commit suicide by starvation. It offered the parting gift of a kind of exhilaration, Seneca told him, like fainting. In his seventieth letter to Lucilius, he says “I intend to choose for myself which vessel I travel on and which house I live in, and I shall do the same with death when the time comes to be gone from this life.” He must have known the cruelly apposite line of the playwright Publilius Syrus, “Bis emori est alterius arbitrio mori” (He dies twice who does so at another’s command). Writing itself was, and remains, a way of abstracting oneself from society. Yet living on the edge leads to chronic vertigo; fear and vanity can engender impatience for dignified quietus.m

  In the Roman world, killing oneself was never an expression of existential despair. It was either a response, given in one’s own time, to an irresistible command or, as Tacitus recommended, a relatively painless escape from shame or torture. In 65 C.E., Petronius Arbiter, who had been Nero’s intimate friend and arbiter elegantiae, a dandy and fashion consultant, elected to die, when ordered to do so by the petulant emperor, in a parody of Stoicism. He opened his veins, bled into a warm bath for a while, then bound his wounds and had a drink and a joke with his friends before resuming the process. In deliberate slow motion, he theatricalized (and ridiculed) what men such as Brutus and Cassius had done in noble earnest, when they fell on their swords. Disdaining to take his own death tragically, Petronius lampooned the unsmiling Seneca, whose death concided with his own.

  Cicero had said, in his De Finibus, that when being alive ceases to please us, “tanquam e theatro exeamus”: we can always leave it as we might a theater. Both Petronius and Seneca contrived to make such an exit, one in a tragic, the other in a satirical mode. By way of an envoi, Petronius made public a list of all the refinements and perversions in which Nero’s sexual partners, of both sexes, had been involved. Did Joseph ben Mattathias’s benefactor Aliturus figure in this pornographic dramatis personae? Did Josephus not say that the young actor was katathymios, close to the heart of the emperor? Since Nero’s affections were rarely entirely sublime, Aliturus could have been among those who sated his appetites and then paid the price for the intimacy he had enjoyed. The virtues of suicide, if it was ever mentioned in Joseph ben Mattathias’s presence, must have seemed entirely irrelevant to a young Jew whose ability to swim all night, before capping his first visit to Italy with a diplomatic and social triumph, indicated a powerful determination to stay alive. Only a mordant wit, such as Constantine Cavafy, might imagine Joseph ben Mattathias debating, at some sophisticated Roman dinner party, whether it was better to live in compromise or die as a hero, quite as if it were a purely philosophical question.

  a Shaye Cohen (Josephus in Galilee and Rome) believes that the priests were, in fact, “significant rebels.” This would make the eventual success of Joseph’s mission all the more creditable when he returned home. By the time he came to write the Vita, it was politic to underplay the priests’ rebelliousness in order not to be tarred with the same brush. There is, however, little in his record to suggest that Felix needed serious evidence before bringing serious charges. The wish that Jews should somehow deserve whatever happened to them runs through Western thought; even Jews can be infected by it. George Steiner has devised the noblest réquisitoire, which includes the invention of conscience, for which Steiner’s maître-à-penser, Martin Heidegger, following Nietzsche, put the blame on Socrates.

  b Roman notables from Cato the Censor to the deified Julius, were practiced swimmers. Caesar needed to be when, cornered by a band of assassins, he dodged them by diving into the waters off Alexandria. The young Octavian had a similar escape (Suetonius, Augustus 8.1.). Herod the Great, another great escaper, built swimming pools in Jerusalem and Herodium; Tiberius had his on Capri, across the water from Naples.

  c As Nero’s “epithymios” (heartthrob), Aliturus, though of Judaic origins, need not have observed Jewish dietary or other restrictive laws.

  d The Oxford Latin Dictionary lists alitura as meaning “feeding, nurture”; at a camp stretch, this might be said to imply personal dishiness. The modern Greek alitirios is used as an adjectival noun by Cavafy in No. 13 of his unfinished poems, “The Salvation of Julian,” where it means a rascal, which also has a tasty element. To Joseph’s alien ear, the pronunciation (if at all like that of modern Greek) of both Aliturus and alitirios would have sounded much the same.

  e As early as fifth-century B.C.E. Athens, Nikias, as choregus (producer), gave his freedom to a slave, who had played the part of Dionysus to popular acclaim and thus advanced his master’s social and political prospects. (See Plutarch 3.3.)

  f Josephus terms her “theosebes,” god-fearing/worshipping; when it came to Judaism, she was what another era might call
a fellow-traveler.

  g In Reciprocity and Ritual, Richard Seaford remarks that in the archaic Mediterranean “giving and counter-giving.… may be a highly competitive means of acquiring prestige and power.” Under the Roman Empire, it might be very dangerous to seem to be in a position to reciprocate the favors of the master of the world. When he sought to retire from public life, Seneca tried to give his huge fortune to Nero, which did nothing to allay the emperor’s resentment of his ex-tutor’s presuming, as it seemed, to patronize him.

  h Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is as good as a parody of Senecan Grand Guignol.

  i From Arthur Schnitzler to Clifford Odets to Harold Pinter, Jews could be both themselves and other people in the play of dialogue and on the expressive rack of silence. The exile of language lies in what was not said; Pinter’s pauses were famously eloquent. Isaac Babel said that, under Stalin, he had made silence his art form. It is no surprise that Stanislavsky called the theater “a second home.” Like games, it socializes alienation by melding individuals into a factitious team (Bertolt Brecht made alienation itself into a device that allowed his company to tease the audience with purposeful playfulness).

  j A seventeenth-century sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Théodon, commemorating Arria’s courage, finished by Pierre Lepautre, stands in the Louvre museum.

  k In a similar spirit, the nonswimmer Shelley would sit, arms crossed, in a storm-tossed boat on Lake Geneva, contemplating “le grand peut-être.” Byron, who prided himself on his swimming, promised to save him. Shelley, who echoed Keats (and Seneca) in being “half in love with easeful death,” told Byron he would do better to concentrate on saving himself. On that occasion, their boat came safely to shore. Shelley’s survival, tinged maybe with disappointment, may have encouraged him to put to sea, a few years later, in his top-heavy yacht Ariel, in which he was drowned on July 8, 1822.

  l By contrast, in the 1920s, Ludwig Wittgenstein gave away something close to £1 million, because money was an encumbrance to thought. The most luxurious item of furniture in his professorial rooms in Whewell’s Court, Trinity College, Cambridge, was a deck chair.

  m Henry James, the loftiest of displaced persons, called death “the distinguished thing.” In 1944, Albert Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus, which began by stating that there was only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide. The key question was whether life, with its contingent absurdities, was worth living. Also a displaced person, Camus would later face a dilemma somewhat like the one that confronted Joseph ben Mattathias: born in Algeria, educated in France, Camus was torn between backing the Algerian revolt, as his socialist friends did (Jean-Paul Sartre en tête), and sympathy with those who wanted to keep Algeria French. By conviction a socialist, viscerally a pied-noir (a French Algerian), the author of L’étranger (The Outsider) dealt with his contradictions by taking refuge in reticence. Many “liberal” Jews have found themselves in Camus’s quandary: reluctant to denounce Israel, yet unable to endorse its policies. Silence, however, is not their common resort.

  IV

  WHILE JOSEPH BEN MATTATHIAS was probably still on his travels, in early 66, the arbitary exactions of the local procurator, Gessius Florus, provoked rowdy demonstrations in Jerusalem. He had regularly demanded money from local Jewish communities and, more scandalously, from the Temple treasury. When the governor of Syria, Florus’s superior, Cestius Gallus, came from Antioch just before Passover, in the spring of 66, a huge crowd—said by Josephus to have been “three million”—shrieked at him to remove the embezzler. Florus shrugged away the natives’ indignation as laughable; he told his superior that his unpopularity proved only how well he must be doing his job. After the governor had returned to Antioch without taking action, Florus seized his chance to incite further trouble. The more unruly the natives, the more plausibly his depredations could be reported as disciplinary measures.

  When the Judaeans continued to accuse him of bribery and looting, he declared that he was, in truth, a poor man. Their response was to take up an ostentatious public collection to save him from penury.a It was one of the few Jewish jokes recorded in old Jerusalem; but Florus was not amused. The Pax Romana was generally maintained with a big stick. Seven years before, at the other end of the empire, Britain had erupted in a bloody revolt, led by Boudicca, queen of the Iceni. In 61, it cost the local governor much time and many casualties to bring her and her people to heel. Eighty thousand Iceni are said to have been slaughtered. Their queen committed suicide. By mounting a prompt repressive operation in Judaea, Gallus proposed to avoid anything similar happening on his watch.

  Studious in her Judaism, Agrippa II’s de facto queen Berenice went, in the autumn of 66 C.E., on a pilgrimage from her palace in Antioch to Jerusalem. Attended by an escort suited to her rank and equal to the dangers of the bandit-ridden road from Antioch, she traveled through Galilee and Samaria, down to the holy city. Her visit coincided with a typical display of high-handedness on the part of Gessius Florus. Claiming that “Caesar needed it,” he had sent a detachment of soldiers to requisition seventeen talents of gold from the Temple treasury. Whether or not Nero did, in fact, commission the heist, it was a credible excuse: the spendthrift emperor needed all the cash he could command in order to rebuild Rome after the great fire of 64.

  Berenice sent officers from her official escort to beg Gessius Florus to restrain his men. Neither charmb nor her putative royal standing made any impression. The soldiers remained obediently out of control. Some of them were incited to teach Berenice a bloody lesson by torturing and killing prisoners in front of her eyes. She fled, with her bodyguards, into Herod’s enormous palace, adjacent to the Temple. Later, she had the courage to present herself to Florus again, as a barefoot penitent. He gestured for his soldiers to bundle her away. She was fortunate not to be killed.

  Angry young men, led by Eleazar, the son of the High Priest Ananias, demanded that the now customary sacrifices in honor of the Roman emperor be suspended at once. Such action would amount to a declaration of independence. The Temple hierarchy and the prosperous citizens, conscious of the Romans’ superior force, preached caution. They feared for their property and their privileges if “the street” took charge of the city. The mob shouted back that they should rely on Yahweh to intervene on behalf of the righteous. The Jewish War was yet another war between Jews, and between generations. The division between ultras and compromisers modernized the ancient breach between the prophets and the kings.

  As Florus’s reinforcements approached the city, the chief priests tore their clothes in ritual self-abasement. Josephus’s account insists that they pleaded with the citizens to keep their tempers. The worst might yet be avoided if they would greet the approaching Romans in a friendly manner. Some did; but their smiles were not returned. The legionaries had instructions to be implacable. In the consequent riots, citizens were suffocated or trampled to death as they panicked through the tight streets. Young rebels climbed onto the rooftops and pelted the Romans with stones and tiles. While dodging the brickbats, units became separated from each other. Gangs of angry militants managed to smash a gap in the colonnade that connected the Temple precinct to the Antonia Tower, the roomy bastion (named after the mother of the emperor Claudius) where a Gentile garrison of up to a thousand men was usually quartered.

  The breach in the causeway prevented Florus from getting his loot into a safe place. On the verge of losing control of the city, the procurator summoned the chief priests and their council, the Sanhedrin, to a parley. In an abrupt change of tactics, he told them that he was pulling out of Jerusalem. He would leave behind whatever force they reckoned necessary to restore order. It was at once a climbdown and a threat: the Sanhedrin was going to be held responsible for restraining the mob. The elders would have liked nothing better than to do so; but the same mob looked to them to stand up to the Romans and would hold them to account if they made servile concessions.c

  In most of the ancient world, success in war was the likeliest a
gent of social change. In fifth-century Athens, for instance, the Athenian hoplites, and later the sailors, demanded and received the vote in return for risking their lives against the invading Persians. In Joseph ben Mattathias’s Jerusalem, by contrast, social life had an exclusively civilian and religious basis. There was no forum for legitimate politics outside the Temple. Competitive zealotry was the sole means for those outside the ruling circle to exert influence.

  The Jerusalem elders assured Gessius Florus that one cohort (five platoons of a hundred men) would be sufficient backup. It was as numerous an alien presence as they could dare to impose on the city without infuriating the mob. The High Priest had the sense, and the nerve, to insist that the Roman contingent not include any of the troops who had just run riot in the city. The procurator must have been badly shaken: he agreed. When Florus led the main body of his men back toward Caesarea, it seemed that the crisis had been defused. However, in his report to the governor in Antioch, he blamed the Jews for the violence he had visited on them. He had to get his word in before the seductive Berenice offered Cestius Gallus a different view.

  Since the royal palace and the governor’s mansion were not far from each other in Antioch, she and top Roman officials were on the same diplomatic circuit. Berenice had already interceded with the governor, earlier in 66, on behalf of the Jews of Jamnia, a town on the Mediterranean coast, who had been accused of causing riots of which they had been the victims. She had guessed then that Florus had primed the disorder. He could cream off a percentage from those whom he incited to despoil the Jews, less because they were Jews than because they were a plump and vulnerable minority.

  Once Gessius Florus’s main force had withdrawn from Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin was able to claim that the modesty of the Roman contingent left in the Antonia Tower proved that their leadership had saved the day. Nevertheless, Eleazar’s Zealots continued to accuse the elders of betraying the covenant by sanctioning the intrusion of aliens on sacred ground. The charge was both true and unfair: compromise was the only way to persuade the Romans to leave the city undefiled by a more numerous garrison. The Zealots elected to raise the stakes. They blocked the payment of taxes and again destroyed the colonnade that the Romans had repaired to give access to the Antonia Tower.