Joined by a group led by a priest named Isidorus – described as ‘the bravest of them all’ – the rising gathered momentum. The Romans responded in the usual way and attacked, but the force sent against the rebels was defeated. By this time Egypt was garrisoned by a single legion, supported by at most a dozen auxiliary units. Some of these troops were stationed on the province’s southern frontier, guarding the Upper Nile, and others patrolled the roads to the Red Sea ports or were dispersed in small detachments, guarding quarries or granaries, and acting as policemen and administrators. Such a deployment makes it unlikely that the column sent to deal with the rising was either large or consisted of the best-trained and motivated troops in Egypt, making the defeat less surprising.2
Success encouraged the rebels to advance on the great city of Alexandria, although clearly this was some months later, for they were blocked by forces sent from Syria and led by the legate of that province, Caius Avidius Cassius. Senators were forbidden from visiting Egypt, and this intervention must have been ordered by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, requiring a report to reach him, an order to be sent to Syria, and time for a force to be mustered and then moved to Egypt. Cassius avoided a major battle and instead wore the rebels down, fighting many smaller actions and defeating each of the rebel groups separately. This suggests that they had either dispersed as raiding bands or each settled down to defend their own homes.3
Many important details of the episode elude us. For instance, the attack on the centurion suggests that Roman levies were resented, but it is not clear whether this was the main cause of the revolt. A gruesome human sacrifice and the mention of the priest Isidorus both hint at religious fervour, whether simply as a unifying force and reminder that they were ruled by foreigners of a different culture, or as a promise of divine aid like that Mariccus offered to his followers among the Boii. Yet we should be cautious, given so brief an account. Greeks and Romans alike saw the people of Egypt as excessively superstitious and alleged that they practised strange and savage rituals, and so were inclined to depict their behaviour in this way. The Boukoloi also appear in ancient fiction, turned into a caricature of wild barbarians given to human sacrifice and cannibalism, and this fictional imagery may well have seeped into historical narratives.4
For all our doubts about the rebellion, some aspects are revealing. As was often the case, it appears to have taken the Romans by surprise, in the long as well as the short term, for the gradual reduction in size of the garrison of Egypt in the later first and second centuries AD suggests that no major trouble was anticipated. Whoever the Boukoloi really were, and whether or not they were truly as savage as the sources claim, they were just one group within the wider population of rural Egypt. Others joined them, but the revolt was not by a unified people with a common sense of identity, and instead consisted of multiple communities loosely banded together. If the scale of the revolt is unclear, there is no hint that it involved anything more than a small minority of the provincial population, and while the rebels were clearly hostile to Rome, the move on Alexandria suggests little sympathy for other subjects of the empire. That city was always described as Alexandria ‘near Egypt’ rather than ‘in Egypt’ and was a metropolis with a population of several hundred thousand. Founded by Alexander the Great, its inhabitants were mixed, but the dominant group was legally and culturally – if not necessarily ethnically – Greek. Groups like the Boukoloi and the rural population in general had little affection for this ‘foreign’ city, any more than the Alexandrians had any liking for them.5
The mix of populations within a province was one of the main reasons why even the major rebellions struggled to unite the entire population of a single province against the imperial power. Lesser rebellions tended to focus on small regions or groups, and found it difficult to spread, because other provincial communities were antipathetic or openly hostile to them. Few of the areas in the empire had experienced peace and stability before the Romans arrived, and memories of past feuds remained strong. The experience of conquest reinforced some divisions among the indigenous population, as did any subsequent real or perceived favouring of particular leaders and sections of the population. In the eastern Mediterranean, where the Romans were merely the latest in a succession of conquerors, their arrival did not remove every long-standing division created or exacerbated by earlier empires. Even if the Alexandrians and the Egyptians from the countryside both felt alienated by Roman rule at the same time and rebelled, there was no prospect of them joining together. In fact, throwing off Roman rule was likely to make them eager to revive far older quarrels.
During the civil war after the death of Nero, the hatred between Lugdunum and Viennensis (modern Vienne) in Gaul flared into new life, and led to skirmishes ‘too savage and frequent for anyone to believe that they fought on behalf of Nero or Galba’. Later, the leaders of Lugdunum tried to persuade an army on its way from the Rhine frontier and fighting for another claimant to the throne to sack Viennensis as a place ‘foreign and hostile’ and also rich in plunder. The people there managed to placate the soldiers by a dramatic display of submission and by handing over money and weapons to them. Later during the same power struggle, the cities of Oea and Lepcis Magna in North Africa went from disputes between peasants stealing each other’s cattle and crops to ‘proper weapons and pitched battles’. Oea enlisted the aid of some of the Garamantes to the south, ‘an ungovernable people well practised in raiding their neighbours’, and so gained the upper hand. Eventually a force of auxiliaries arrived and drove off the Garamantes, recapturing the plunder they had taken, apart from the goods already sold off to distant communities, and peace was restored.6
Even Italy was not free of rivalries between its cities. During some fighting in this same civil war, the ‘most splendid’ amphitheatre outside the city walls of Placentia (modern Piacenza) was burned down. No one was quite sure whether the blaze was started by the besiegers or by the defenders hurling burning missiles at them, but afterwards the ‘common folk of the town’ alleged that the building had been packed with combustible material by unknown agents of other Italian cities who envied Placentia its magnificent monument. The games were a great opportunity to parade civic pride, both in the grandeur of the venue and the scale and style of the gladiatorial fights and other shows. In AD 59 this exploded into violence between Pompeii and its neighbour and rival Nuceria at a show staged in the amphitheatre at Pompeii. A few bits of graffiti from the city hint at long-standing hostility – ‘Good luck to the Nucerians and the hook for Pompeians and Pitheucusans’. At first there was simply chanting and mutual abuse of the type common enough between rival fans at many sporting events, but Tacitus then says that this was followed by ‘stones, and finally cold steel’. A famous wall painting from a house in Pompeii showing gladiators fighting in the arena while other figures battle it out on the streets outside surely depicts the disturbances that followed. The visiting Nucerians were heavily outnumbered and soon had the worst of it, with many being killed or wounded. Some of the injured were taken to Rome, and the matter was brought to the attention of Nero, who ordered the Senate to hold an enquiry into the whole incident. They found against the Pompeians and banned the city from holding games for ten years.7
Fighting on this scale was unusual anywhere in the empire and especially in Italy, and we know too little of the background to identify what sparked the trouble. The Senate exiled several leading culprits, including the man who staged the games, who had been expelled in disgrace from their own ranks before this incident. Although competition between cities was common throughout the empire it was mainly peaceful, if only because there were few occasions when large crowds of hostile communities would meet. More common was bickering over the boundaries of their jurisdiction, where the risk was of small-scale violence and theft. An inscription from Sardinia records the formal end of hostility between two villages after 185 years, the peace deal being imposed by the Roman authorities in AD 69, centuries after the region became a province.
This only occurred because the Romans threatened to use heavy force against one of the rivals. For many provincials Rome was a distant presence, resented rather less than the ongoing annoyance of living close to old enemies.8
KINGS AND BAD NEIGHBOURS
The fullest evidence for local enmities and the violence springing from them comes from Judaea and from Jewish communities in neighbouring provinces. The Jews were different, monotheists in a polytheistic world, followed unusual customs and kept themselves apart from the rest of the population, observing forms of ritual purity which made it hard for them to mix. Yet the hostility was more than simple anti-Semitism, or fear and suspicion of a group so obviously different. The Hasmonean dynasty, established when the Maccabees threw off Seleucid rule, was highly aggressive, conquering Galilee to the north and Idumaea to the south and forcibly converting its inhabitants to Judaism. In Samaria, much of the population was descended from marriages between Jews and others, and came to follow a religion that had developed out of Judaism but was now seen as distinct. The Hasmoneans were hostile to them and destroyed the Samaritans’ great temple on Mount Gezerim, the centre of their cult, just as the Temple at Jerusalem was for the Jews. Mutual loathing between Samaritans and Jews became proverbial and underlay Jesus’ story of the Jewish man robbed and beaten, who was ‘passed by on the other side’ by a priest and a Levite, only to be helped by a Samaritan.9
Adding to the mix were various Gentile communities, survivors of earlier populations or from more recent colonies established by Alexander the Great and his successors, and at various times many of these were subjected to the rule of the Jewish kings or lay on their borders. Other monarchs and some of the great cities were just as eager to expand their own territory, so that control of some regions changed hands several times, and the fortunes of individual communities rose and fell depending on how much they were favoured by the currently dominant power. Mark Antony took land from Herod the Great and from the king of Nabataea to the south to give to Cleopatra when all were allies of Rome, but did not give her all that she requested – in earlier times the Ptolemies had sometimes held sway over much of this territory. Under Augustus Herod regained all that he had lost and was rewarded with additional territory.10
Herod was an Idumaean, considered not fully a Jew by the Jerusalem elite, and he had also a deep interest in Hellenic culture. Caesarea Maritima on the coast and Sebaste in Samaria – both names honouring Caesar Augustus, for Sebastos was the Greek equivalent of Augustus – were overtly Gentile cities, filled by the king with statues and temples built on a grand scale. There and in the other Gentile areas he did his best to appear as a tolerant, benevolent and Hellenised ruler, and he also made generous donations to famous Greek communities further afield and to the Olympic Games. There were Thracian, Germanic and Gallic soldiers in his army, and their veterans were given land on discharge. Jews who had fled from Babylon also served him in a military capacity, and were granted their own colony. Judaean or Galilean Jews did not serve in the army, which over time took on a foreign and increasingly Gentile character. Yet for all this, Herod took care to obey Jewish law, and he and his descendants insisted that any marriage of his family into another royal dynasty would only occur if the person involved converted to Judaism. For all his benefactions to Gentiles, Herod lavished as much money or more on monuments in Jerusalem, and in particular the completion of the Great Temple.11
Kingdoms with such varied populations made it difficult for a ruler to keep each separate community content with – let alone enthusiastic about – his rule, for each was suspicious of any honours or favours paid to others. To make this even harder, most of these communities were themselves divided into factions – something best attested with the Jews, but likely to have been the case with most others as well. At the very least there were rival leaders vying for power and influence with the higher authorities and the wider population. Herod the Great tried with little success to balance all these demands, and his successors rarely did much better, even though they were granted smaller, less heterogeneous kingdoms. Herod Archelaus was removed from his kingdom by Augustus and Judaea turned into a province in AD 6, passing the problems of controlling its volatile population to an equestrian governor. Galilee remained under a king, and from AD 41 to 44 much of Herod the Great’s kingdom, including Judaea and Samaria, were reunited under the rule of his grandson, Herod Agrippa I. Jewish opinion of him was mixed, but some of his Gentile subjects believed that he was pro-Jewish and loathed him accordingly. When he died, mobs in Caesarea and Sebaste publicly rejoiced in the news, and some of his own soldiers – men until recently auxiliaries in the Roman army but recruited mainly from these cities – joined them in feasts of celebration. Statues of the king’s daughters, which were in themselves distinctly Hellenic and contrary to Jewish custom, were ‘carried . . . to the brothels, where they set them up on the roofs and offered them every possible sort of insult, doing things too indecent to be reported’.12
Allied kings depended on Roman support, something subject to the whims of emperors and their advisors, but ultimately resting on their ability to keep their subjects under control. Imperial decisions gave and took away territories and thrones themselves – Agrippa I was a close associate of Caligula and Claudius and benefited from their affection. There were risks and opportunities, and on a day-today basis the Romans paid even less attention to what went on in the kingdoms than what happened in the provinces. Domestic squabbles and power struggles within royal households continued, and there were acts of public opposition to the rule of many allied kings. Under Herod the Great real or suspected plots at court resulted in many murders and executions of family members and aristocrats – Augustus joked that he would ‘rather be Herod’s pig than his son’ – and if this was extreme, it was far from unique.13
Relations between neighbouring rulers were often poor and occasionally led to open warfare, even when both were allies of Rome. Herod the Great fought a war against the king of Nabataea and won, but then nearly lost the battle over how the matter was reported to Augustus in Rome. The emperor was the ultimate arbiter and his decision could confirm or reverse military victory. Herod Antipas also fought the Nabataeans and this time lost. The legate of Syria was about to lead an expedition to Nabataea to impose a peace when news arrived of the death of the Emperor Tiberius and he withdrew to await further instructions. Two years later Caligula deposed Antipas and replaced him with Agrippa I. Both conflicts began with raiding across the borders between the kingdoms, each side accusing the other of harbouring and perhaps directing these activities.14
Herod the Great was often engaged in military operations against leaders characterised as bandits, although in several cases these men were dynastic rivals with connections to the Hasmoneans. Most of the Roman prefects and procurators also suppressed bandits, and several had troubled relationships with the wider population and especially its leaders. Pontius Pilate – prefect from AD 26–c.36/7 – caused offence when he brought a cohort of auxiliaries up to garrison Jerusalem and had them carry the imagines (images of the emperor) along with their other standards. This was probably ignorance of local sensibilities rather than deliberate provocation, although since the unit marched into the city during the night it was seen as suspicious. Perhaps they were simply late or he wished to avoid a formal entrance which might disrupt the life of the city. By the time the news spread, the prefect had returned to Caesarea, where he spent much of his time in the more comfortable surroundings of this Gentile city by the sea. A deputation of senior figures from Jerusalem went to see the governor, prostrating themselves around his tribunal for five days and nights when he refused to order the removal of the standards. Pilate surrounded the crowd with a line of soldiers, who drew their swords at his signal. The Jewish deputation remained peaceful and offered their necks to the blades, saying that they would rather die than permit their religious laws to be broken. Pilate relented and ordered the standards to be removed.15
This was not t
he only successful use of passive resistance. In AD 41 Caligula ordered that his statue and other imperial symbols should be erected in the Temple at Jerusalem, reversing a long-established Roman policy of respecting Jewish sensibilities. The emperor was clearly aware that this was highly provocative, but was not acting solely out of deranged vanity. He had received a report that Jews had destroyed an altar erected by some Greeks in a predominantly Jewish community near the coast. The altar was makeshift, and had been set up as a deliberate insult, but the official informing him of the incident presented the Jews in the poorest light, a stance reinforced by several of the emperor’s advisors, including a man from Alexandria and another from Ascalon, one of the main Philistine cities in the Old Testament era. The legate of Syria was sent with his army to ensure that the statue was installed but was met by crowds of protestors, who again said that they were willing to be killed rather than permit this desecration of their most sacred site. To his credit, the legate hesitated and wrote to the emperor asking that he reverse his decision. Caligula ordered the man’s execution, but was murdered shortly afterwards. Fortunately the ship carrying the order was delayed until after another letter had arrived from Claudius, cancelling the execution and the original instructions about the statue.16
Such peaceful and determined protests were rare, as was the restraint shown by the Romans. Pilate made use of Temple funds to construct an aqueduct improving the water supply of Jerusalem. It was the sort of amenity generally considered good for the whole community, but at some point the source or the way the money was being used provoked angry demonstrations. The prefect disguised parties of soldiers as civilians and let them mingle with the crowd, before unleashing them at a given signal. They attacked using clubs rather than proper weapons, but in spite of this attempt to avoid lethal force some of the protestors died from the blows and others were trampled to death in the ensuing panic. Pilate’s actions were deliberately aggressive, but we should not forget the problems in controlling and dispersing crowds. Even with such modern inventions as water cannon and tear gas, the response of the authorities can often seem heavy-handed.17
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