A Jew Among Romans Page 9

  In alarm, the Temple hierarchy sent a deputation to Antioch. King Agrippa met with it in private and expressed sympathy, quietly. More Jew than Roman, but more royal than pious, Agrippa too was between a rock and a hard place. To keep his throne, and to remain able to exercise discreet leverage on the imperial power, he had to reproach the Jews publicly for their reaction to what he acknowledged, in secret, had been designed to provoke them. Perhaps at Agrippa’s suggestion, Cestius sent an amiable junior officer, Neapolitanus, to Jerusalem to assess the situation.

  Neapolitanus’s report was honest enough—or generously enough subsidized—to conclude that the Jews were not hostile to the Romans in general, but solely to Gessius Florus. It would have been nice if only it were true. The unrest grew so menacing that Agrippa II decided to make a royal progress from Antioch to Jerusalem in the hope of dissuading the citizens from the folly of open rebellion. With Berenice at his side, he began by saying that he would not have come if he thought that everyone in the city favored war. Joseph ben Mattathias and his father must have been among those on whose moderation the king hoped to rely when he said that he was aware of the seduction of “liberty” but insisted that the “trifling mistakes” of the occupying power did not warrant a rebellion that was almost certain to be fatal.

  Too elegantly composed for a transcript, the king’s speech clearly spells out what Josephus thinks he could, or should, have said.d He has Agrippa begin by declaring that he would never have come to Jerusalem if he hadn’t known that “the most honest and sincere of our people” wanted to live in peace. According to The Jewish War, the king then delivered a long history lesson to the listening masses. He enumerated the many instances of Roman invincibility and the spread of their empire. Even the Athenians, he told them, who had defeated the Persians at Salamis, were now subject to Rome. It was the same story all over the known world: The Gauls, with their huge population, had had to agree to become the “milch cow” of their conquerors. The Germans too, he insisted, had been tamed.e How could there be any shame in a much less numerous people accepting Rome’s universal authority? Some officials might be insolent or rapacious, but Rome itself was benign and irresistible, just as Alexander the Great had been in earlier times. Submission was no shame when resistance was folly. Josephus’s model, Thucydides, has the domineering Athenians say the same thing to the islanders of Melos in 416 B.C.E.f

  Agrippa’s harangue ended with a warning of what would happen if the Jews went too far. The Romans did not make a practice of forgiveness once they had drawn their swords: “To make sure that you serve as an example to other peoples,” he cautioned,

  they will reduce your holy city to ashes and they will exterminate your race. Even the survivors will find nowhere to hide. Everyone bows down to the Romans, or fears that he will have to. The danger isn’t only to the Jews here, but also for those who live elsewhere. There isn’t a city in the world that doesn’t have a Jewish minority. If you go to war, their enemies will cut all of their throats. The fatal decision of a few will mean that not a single city will not run with Jewish blood.…. Have pity, if not on your wives and children, on your mother country and its sacred shrine. Spare the Temple and save the Sanctuary and the Tabernacle for your own sakes.…. As far as I am concerned, as the Tabernacle bears witness, and the holy angels of God and the country to which we all belong, I’ve done everything I can to procure your well-being. I ask you now to take the decisions which have to be taken and let us together enjoy the pleasures of peace. If you abandon yourselves to your passions, you will have to face the dangers to come without me.

  At this point, Agrippa burst into tears, as did Berenice, who stood inconspicuous public view, a surrogate queen, on the adjacent roof of apalace first constructed by the Maccabees. Her earlier courage had made her a popular figure, her good looks an attractive one. The people yelled that they didn’t want to fight the Romans, only Gessius Florus. Agrippa told them that by withholding tribute, as the Zealots had demanded, and by continuing to cut off access to the cohort in the Antonia Tower, which overlooked the Temple (its shadow alone seemed to the Zealots to pollute the sacred enclosure), the Jews were already in a state of war with Rome.

  Josephus heightens the dramatic irony by stating that many applauded Agrippa’s view that they ought to make amends. Since Josephus was “reporting” long after the war, and since there is no other contemporary record, it is impossible to gauge how far he embellished the king’s speech with flourishes that both proved his own rhetorical elegance and, as if incidentally, excused Roman ruthlessness by coining a lengthy warning of what would, and did, follow. The crowd is unlikely to have been unanimous in its repentance. According to Josephus, however, Agrippa’s officials were able to collect the arrears in taxes with remarkable promptness.

  With access to the Antonia Tower restored, everything seemed on course for peace. Like a bad advocate, however, Agrippa failed to keep quiet after he looked to have won his case. He returned to the rostrum to say that, pending the replacement of Florus, the people should do whatever the procurator asked of them. The Zealots had a second chance. They threw stones at the king and yelled at him to get out of the city. It may be that the less militant citizens had already dispersed. Agrippa and Berenice were shouted down and withdrew, in a hurry, to Antioch.

  After the royal couple had gone, Eleazar and his Zealots surrounded the Antonia Tower. The diminished Roman garrison was penned inside. The demonstration was probably intended primarily as a show of defiance to the Sanhedrin. Its size and menace broke the nerve of the beleaguered Roman commander, Metilius. He asked for terms under which he and his men could leave the city unharmed. Eleazar promised them safe passage, if they laid down their arms. A bloodless victory would undermine the authority of his father, Ananias, but might not excite the merciless reprisals of which Agrippa had warned. However, no sooner had the Romans given up their weapons than they were set on and cut to pieces.

  If Metilius was still in Eleazar’s company when things got out of control, it would explain how, when he saw his disarmed soldiers being slaughtered, he had time to beg for mercy for himself. The crowd must have yelled that only Jews should be allowed to stay alive in Jerusalem. Metilius immediately offered to become one. He was circumcised—carnal proof that there was no going back on his conversion—and dubbed with a Jewish name. Josephus says no more about him. The forcibly Judaized Metilius nevertheless has a signal role in the narrative: he was not to be the only man in the war to save his life at the price of becoming what he had never been before.

  Did Eleazar deliberately trick the Romans, and then have them killed, or did his men refuse to honor the deal he had struck? Josephus declares that the incident seemed a “great portent” for the Jews, although no more than a bloody misfortune for the imperial power. That it took place on the Sabbath was especially scandalous: decent citizens were horrified that blood had been shed on a day when even righteous actions were forbidden. On the same day, Josephus adds, and at the same time, “as if as a result of divine providence,” some twenty thousand Jews in Caesarea were massacred by the Gentile majority.1

  The two incidents were not causally related, but Gessius Florus was implicated in both. The procurator’s name sounds like that of a genuine Roman. In fact, although his patron was Poppaea Sabina, he was a Levantine careerist from the Greek city of Clazomenae, on the eastern coast of Asia Minor, near Smyrna. Until 44, the procurators of Judaea had been sent out from Italy and so had no affinities with the Greek population. After 50, however, these officials tended to be of local Greco-Roman extraction.

  Whether or not Florus had promised the Greeks in Caesarea carte blanche before their onslaught against the Jews, it was instinctive, as well as profitable, that he should favor them. He had already done so in an earlier dispute when some Greeks baited the local Jews by siting a new factory directly next to their synagogue. In a parody of proper sacrifice, they fouled the tight access with the blood of a chicken slaughtered on a chamber pot. T
he blasphemy was calculated to outrage and provoke the outnumbered Jews.

  News of the pogrom in Caesarea inflamed the whole region. Jews in mixed communities all the way to Syria reacted by attacking their Gentile neighbors and setting fire to their property. Not all Jews responded with ethnic solidarity. In prosperous Scythopolis (the modern Beth Shean), south of the Sea of Galilee, close to the west bank of the Jordan, Jewish residents announced that they were making common cause with their Gentile neighbors.

  When an army of Jewish insurgents advanced on the city, the Scythopolitan Jews made a valiant contribution to the ensuing repulse of the outsiders. Their unexpected courage more alarmed than reassured their fellow citizens. Fearing that the Jews, having proved their mettle, would turn against them under cover of night, the Gentiles asked them to prove their good faith by taking themselves and their families into the local Sacred Wood. Suspecting nothing, they did so. For two days, they were left there in peace. On the third night, when all were asleep, the Gentiles crept in and cut their throats. The Jewish War holds that thirteen thousand died.2 Their property and belongings were appropriated by their murderers.

  Josephus makes use of details, such as the surrender of Metilius, to vivify his narrative, much as close-ups add intensity to a movie. At Scythopolis, he zooms in on a certain Simon ben Saul, who was among those who went out to fight beside his Gentile neighbors against the Jews advancing on the city. He killed a good number and, it is said, put others to flight, single-handedly. When the Scythopolitan Jews were attacked as they slept in the Sacred Wood, Simon woke and grabbed his sword, but saw that he was powerless against so many. Josephus says that Simon cried out that he was being justly punished, by God, for having killed so many of his own people in battle. He should have known better than to show loyalty to men who were now proving their perfidy. “But no one,” he said, “is going to be able to boast that he killed me.” Glaring with pity and rage at his family, he grabbed his father by his white hair and ran him through. Then came his mother, who offered no resistance; after her, his wife and their children. He climbed onto their corpses and lifted his sword high in the air and plunged it into his own neck. This, we are told, was the consequence of a Jew putting his trust in strangers.

  Like the surrender and “conversion” of Metilius, Simon’s suicide became pertinent to the historian’s own story. It also recalls an incident in Jewish Antiquities when the Galilean cave dwellers, near a place called Arbel, were resisting Herod the Great’s attempts to coerce them into accepting his sovereignty. One old man was cornered by Herod’s special forces who had been lowered in baskets to the mouth of his cave. His wife and seven children begged to be allowed to surrender. As Herod watched, and called on him to yield and be safe, the old man stood in the mouth of his cave and killed every member of his family, one after the other, and threw their bodies down the precipice. He raged at the greed and aggression of the king, scorned renewed offers of clemency, and threw himself down the cliff. Demonstrative self-destruction was a feature of Jewish pride.

  In Damascus too, Josephus reminds his readers, the citizens turned on the large, unaggressive Jewish minority, even though “almost all of the women of the town were Jews,” killed them, and appropriated their belongings. The Romans were rarely alarmed by the mutual slaughter of subject peoples. “Divide and rule” was an old axiom of imperial management. The opportunism that led the Damascenes and others to attack Jewish minorities, under the pretense of eradicating disloyalty to Rome, strengthened the Zealots’ argument for outright secession.

  a Martin Goodman speculates that the collection was made by the sons of rich men, led perhaps by the aggressively anti-Roman Eleazar, the son of the High Priest Ananias, whose status (and utility to the occupying power) protected them against any reprisal from Gessius.

  b Her considerable beauty was said to be outshone by that of her sister Drusilla, whom she hated. The teenage Drusilla was forcibly taken from her first husband by the same Felix who arrested the priests for whose freedom Joseph went to plead. Drusilla’s son and and his wife died in an earthquake in Pompeii in 63 C.E.

  c Somewhat similar situations recurred, in more vexed forms, during the Diaspora. In Remembering Survival, Christopher R. Browning reports that, in Nazi-occupied Poland, “The councils relieved the Germans of much of the burden of managing the Jewish communities.…. And they served as lightning rods, attracting much of the hostility and resentment of the downtrodden Jews.” The difference was, of course, that it was possible for the subject peoples, if they paid their taxes, to negotiate with the Romans in the interest of a quiet life. The Germans always meant to eliminate the Jews and duped some Jewish leaders into involuntary complicity with their plans.

  d Thucydides established the fashion for including “set piece” speeches by leading historical figures, for instance Perikles’s “funeral oration” of 430 B.C.E. These compositions were, so Thucydides claimed, as close as possible to what was actually said, but there was an unmistakable measure of confection. If Josephus made Agrippa’s sentiments track his own, it does not follow that the words he put in Agrippa’s mouth were false to the king’s actual opinions. We depend almost exclusively on Josephus for what we know of the events he describes. As is proved by his account of his own sometimes admittedly deceitful words and actions, it does not follow that his purpose was entirely self-serving.

  e Tacitus’s Germania makes it clear that this was true only in the sense that they had been penned, undefeated, behind the fairly stable borders of the Rhine and the Danube. See Christopher Krebs’s A Most Dangerous Book (New York: Norton, 2011) for the glossy afterlife of Tacitus’s text.

  f The Athenians’ pitiless treatment of Melos has been taken as the definitive instance of hubris. It followed, in accordance with tragic morality, that Athens deserved to lose the Peloponnesian War. In fact, the vaunted Spartan general Brasidas offered the same ultimatum to the city of Acanthus, near Mount Athos. The Acanthians were pliable enough to yield. (See also my Some Talk of Alexander, p. 131.)

  V

  AFTER GESSIUS FLORUS’S MALICE had detonated even more violent anti-Roman demonstrations in Jerusalem, Cestius Gallus decided to lead the Twelfth Legion, with a full complement of Levantine auxiliaries, into Judaea from Antioch. Agrippa II, like his late father, had to strike a balance between conserving local credibility and not exciting the current emperor’s displeasure. To be useful to Nero was Agrippa’s best hope of keeping his throne. He had no choice but to supply auxiliary contingents of archers and cavalry to bring his own supposed subjects to order. Agrippa was the head of a formally Jewish royal family that suited the Romans since it was, as Arnaldo Momigliano put it, “alien in its attitude and institutions.”1 The king was authorized to mint only bronze coins; he was part of the small change of empire.

  On the way from Syria, Gallus gave notice of his punitive purposes by burning the town of Lydda and killing the few inhabitants who had not left to go to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles. He and his men met serious resistance only when they reached Beth-Horon, in the Judaean hills. The site had historical echoes. More than two hundred years earlier, in 166 B.C.E., Judas Maccabaeus and a thousand of his freedom fighters had ambushed and defeated a phalanx of four times as many Seleucid Greek soldiers and killed its commander, Seron. He too had been on the way from Antioch to put down a Jewish rebellion. In mythology, Moses’s successor, the militant Joshua, was said to have defeated the Canaanites on the same site.a The Judaeans chose to stage their show of defiance in a place of good omen.

  The surprising fury and weight of the Zealots’ attack punched through the center of Gallus’s force. The Jews killed a good number and might have annihilated the infantry, if the Roman cavalry had not charged and scattered them. The Jewish fighters retreated behind the fortifications of the nearby town. As the Romans moved after them, they were attacked from the rear. While they were taking more casualties, many of their pack animals were rustled by an opportunist called Simon ben Gioras,
who made for Jerusalem with his winnings.b

  The Roman commander elected to dig in behind a defensive perimeter. He was enclosed for three days in a natural pen, which he dared not leave. The surrounding hills were dangerous, with bands of Jews ready to pounce on the Romans if they scattered or straggled. Agrippa II sent envoys, Borcius and Phoebus, to tell the Jewish militants that he might be able to negotiate a truce, and an amnesty, if they would lay down their arms. Many of the local people called out in favor of accepting the offer. This incensed the Zealots. Phoebus was killed before he could say a word; Borcius fled for his life.

  Insurgents and residents then began to squabble furiously and at such length that, Josephus reports, Cestius Gallus had time to get his men together and launch a full-scale counterattack.2 The deflated and disorganized resistance fighters broke and ran. The legion was clear to advance to the closed gates of Jerusalem. Herod’s thickened walls looked to be a formidable obstacle, but the Romans must have had word about that unstrengthened section on the north side. An immediate assault would almost certainly have succeeded. Perhaps because his men were exhausted, Gallus stood off for three days. He may have hoped for, or received, placatory overtures from the Sanhedrin.

  On the fourth day, he did move on the city. Perhaps some proposed deal had not been realized. To prove that they meant business, the Romans set fire to the timberyard and market, outside the massive battlements of the Temple. Meanwhile, Gallus established his command post facing Herod’s palace. Josephus insists that if he had pressed forward, the governor could have taken the town and prevented a full-scale war. What stopped him? Josephus claims that Gessius Florus bribed the Roman cavalry commanders to advise him to back away. If so, Florus’s likeliest motive was fear that his superior officer would take evidence from the Sanhedrin of how he had primed the crisis and, more important, embezzled Temple treasure in Caesar’s name. It may be that, after the close shave at Beth-Horon, Gallus’s cavalry officers warned him that they could not be expected to come to the infantry’s aid in the narrow streets.