If, as Josephus also says, the Jerusalem elders had promised the Roman commander that they would open the gates, provided that the attackers advanced in force, they must have been hoping that shock and awe would bring the mob to its senses. For whatever motive, practical or characteristic, Gallus showed himself to be in two minds, as he had been on his previous visit to the city. His hesitation gave Eleazar and the Zealots time to throw Ananias and his “traitor” friends out of the Temple precinct. The city mob pelted them with stones as they fled into their houses.
For the next five days, Gallus made repeated, if lame, attempts to pierce the citadel. On the sixth, he lined up a substantial force, with covering fire from Agrippa’s archers, on the north side of the precinct. For protection against missiles hurled from the ramparts, the Romans locked their shields together over their heads, in the well-rehearsed maneuver known as the testudo (tortoise). Despite everything thrown at them, they were able to work at undermining the walls. Under their makeshift roof, they were soon ready to set fire to the Temple gates.
The Jews were again in two minds. There was a standoff between those who wanted to resist to the death and those who regarded Gallus’s arrival as a divine deliverance. Echoing Homer’s Iliad, in which the gods abort a truce between the Trojans and the Achaeans, Josephus attributes to Yahweh Himself the decision that the moderates should be frustrated. Where Homer is whimsical, Josephus moralizes: the Zealots had polluted the sacred stones with the blood of Metilius’s soldiers, and on the Sabbath day; that transgression alone justified Yahweh’s withdrawal of His protection even from his own Tabernacle.
With the city at his mercy, Cestius Gallus backed away. As soon as the legions retreated from the gates, the Zealots counterattacked. In the scramble of the Roman retreat, they picked off a number of soldiers and horsemen. Gallus regrouped on the adjacent Mount Scopus, and camped there. The Zealots must have been audible, all night, yelling defiance and promising holy war. On the following day, the Roman commander chose to march away. He may have calculated—or been assured—that Ananias and his circle, in which Joseph ben Mattathias’s father was an influential member, would gain popular credit for persuading him to spare the city. Traditional order restored, and by an economy of means, the governor could then resume the standard practice of saddling the Sanhedrin with the double task of controlling their compatriots and paying reparations. Throughout the empire, by bestowing rank and privileges on native notables, the Romans fashioned groups of collaborators whose interests could be elided with their own.c
Mimetic opportunism may help to explain why, coincident with Cestius Gallus’s punitive expedition to Jerusalem, there were murderous riots in the Levant’s greatest city, Alexandria. Jews were assaulted (three were said to have been burned alive) by the Greek mob. Rumor served in the office of the media in the ancient world. The news that the Romans were out to punish the Jerusalem Jews may have been enough, in a volatile city such as Alexandria, to prime the Greek “Egyptians” to despoil their fellow citizens. Why would the Romans not applaud them for doing in one place what Cestius Gallus was bent on doing in another? The Gentile violence provoked a vigorous response from the long-established Alexandrian Jewish community. The city’s Jews had no habit of humility. The experienced local Roman governor, Tiberius Julius Alexander, an apostate Jew, tried to calm things, but when the street battles continued, he brought in two legions and some off-duty soldiers who happened to be in from the desert and were hot for loot. The Jewish quarter was sacked and many Jews killed, despite strong resistance.
Hindsight makes Gallus’s withdrawal the action of either a fool or a villain, but he had reason to settle for a draw. His lines of communication were stretched, his numbers insufficient to deal with a mass uprising. In the event, the Zealots were less relieved than frustrated by the Romans’ failure to mount an assault on the city. Exalted by sacred texts and messianic convictions, they could believe that the Roman general had pulled back because he was unnerved by the righteousness of their cause. Since the Jews were, at this stage, only lightly armed, Gallus’s sudden retreat was similarly read as the Lord’s work. For the Zealots, it proved that this was no time to stay passive. They had the will, the means and the Lord’s manifest license to go after the Romans.
The Jews were held together not by military discipline, or political will, but by faith in the covenant; it made them fighters for the Lord. Those uncontaminated by Roman connections believed that they would enjoy Yahweh’s favor, as long as they did everything He required. Scriptural precedents proved how often the prophets had been right when the kings were wrong. The disappearance of the Romans could only be God’s work. Everyone remembered that something similar, and even more dramatic, had happened when Sennacherib and his Assyrians descended, as Byron was to put it, “like the wolf on the fold,” only to melt away in the night and never threaten Israel again.
Since the Assyrian invasion had taken place more than seven hundred years earlier, what the Jews remembered was the account of it in the Second Book of Kings. Zedekiah, an early separatist monarch, fortified old Jerusalem against a siege by the vengeful Sennacherib. Zedekiah took the practical precaution of drilling a duct more than five hundred yards long through solid rock, so that the water from the spring Gihon could flow into the city in case of a siege. When the Assyrians actually marched in, Zedekiah was pinned in Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage.” He sent his representative to negotiate with Sennacherib’s legates. During the parley, the Assyrians were requested to speak Aramaic, rather than Hebrew.d Zedekiah feared that excitable Jews on the walls of the city would overhear, and denounce, whatever deal might be in the making. Even in the eighth century B.C.E., the Jews were divided between extremists and compromisers. Sennacherib’s legates declined to be diplomatically secretive. By proclaiming their harsh terms in loud, clear Hebrew, they hoped to terrify the listening citizens into surrender. In fact, they determined them to resist. Even the prophet Isaiah, rarely belligerent, advised Zedekiah to defy the enemy. He seemed inspired by knowledge that salvation was at hand; and so it was: “That night an angel of the Lord went out and struck down one hundred and eighty thousand dead in the Assyrian camp.… the following morning, they were all corpses.”
Cestius Gallus’s troops had come a long way for nothing. Footsore retreat turned into dejected scramble. Harassed all the way back to the defile of Beth-Horon, the trudging legionaries were sniped at by archers who scampered along the hillsides. The Roman commander abandoned his heavy baggage, killed all mules not carrying essential kit, and made camp. That night, he devised his only successful ruse: having ordered a battalion-strength rear guard to exchange passwords all night, as if the whole brigade were still inside the palisade, he slipped out with the main force.
At first light, the Jews saw that they had been tricked, raced after the enemy, outflanked them and started to pick them off. In their panic, the legionaries dumped the rest of their siege equipment and other heavy matériel; but nothing could save them. Six thousand are said to have been killed. The Zealots helped themselves to all the munitions dumped on the ground and whatever they found on the soldiers’ bodies. The previously illustrious Twelfth Legion never recovered from the shame; it was disbanded.
The Jewish fighters had negligible losses. Their triumph was taken by the Zealots to be proof that the End of Days was indeed at hand. Victory over Gallus was evidence of Yahweh’s renewed willingness to intervene on His people’s behalf, as long as they went the whole way with His wishes. If the High Priest did not endorse what he could hardly fail to hear, he dared not say so. Meanwhile, back in his palace in Antioch, immune to the threats of the Jerusalem mob, Agrippa must have seen the survivors from Gallus’s legions straggling into the city. He knew that if he wished to keep his throne, and his head, he had to be seen to be engaged on the Roman side. Yet if he was going to retain influence over his Judaean subjects, he had to work for a negotiated settlement. However much he wished for peace, he had to prepare ostentatiou
sly for war against the rebellious Jews.
When the Zealots came back to Jerusalem in triumph, with few losses and flourishing Roman weapons, Eleazar and his friends were well-placed to convince the urban masses that they were the new Maccabees. The happy blood on their hands had to be a portent from heaven that the messianic age was dawning. While the Zealots exulted, the Sanhedrin was forked. It could not afford to show dismay at a Jewish victory; yet the elders knew that the Romans were more powerful than the celebrants in the streets cared to acknowledge. Only by seeming to move with the people could the High Priest have any prospect of putting the brakes on them. His situation resembled that of the nineteenth-century French politician Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, when he said of a militant mob on the march, “I am their leader, I must follow them.”
Not a few of the Zealots were prone to apocalyptic rhetoric of the kind to be found in the Books of Enoch and Daniel (which was among the last to be added to the Authorized Version of the Bible). Daniel hears the angel Michael tell him, “I have come to explain to you what will happen to your people in days to come.” The End of Time would be marked by the tearing up of the temporal calendar. There would be “a period of distress such as has never been,” but after it, “Your people will be delivered.” Isaiah himself had spoken of a miraculous transformation of the natural order: “Wolves and lambs together shall crop grass upon the mountains and leopards shall feed with kids.… for He shall make the beasts upon the earth incapable of harm.” That would be The Day. Jews who embraced these predictions had so enthusiastic a vision of the moment when Yahweh would spring his people from subjection that political compromise and rational diplomacy were taken to be the disgraceful mark of those with little faith.
Talk of an apocalyptic shift in the world’s prospects was not limited to Jews. Despite fundamentalist attempts to keep Judaism ideologically pure, Greek philosophy had seeped into it. Platonists held that our present, fugitive world was only one form of the Ideal World which had yet to be realized, but must supersede it. Hellenized Jewish sophisticates, such as Philo of Alexandria (30 B.C.E.–45 C.E.), syncretized the Jewish creation myth into a hybrid parable: each day of divine activity corresponded to an earthly epoch. The Sabbath was seen as a weekly trailer for the culminating One Day, when a perfect and unchanging world would emerge.
In the late fifth century B.C.E., Thucydides had discounted the possibility that anything that happened in the Peloponnesian War could be attributed to heavenly activity or divine partisanship. According to Thucydides, the course of human fortunes was driven by anagke, the impersonal force of necessity. Although Josephus cloaked his narrative in the Thucydidean style, the war he describes can never be understood in a wholly Greek light. No historian could render a full account of what happened if he ignored the mystique that led the Judaeans to disdain mundane reasoning. The Athenians and Spartans had fought the Persians (and later each other), under the banner of “Liberty.” Josephus never pretends that the war in Judaea had anything to do with democratic institutions or military supremacy. To the Romans, the Jewish uprising was one more provincial problem; for most of the Jews, it had to be the Lord’s work.
For any High Priest to question the possibility of divine intervention would be heresy. However they might wish, in secret, that the victory over Cestius Gallus had never happened, in public the hierarchy had somewhat to applaud it. The folk memory of the triumphant revolt of the Maccabees, just over two hundred years earlier, remained unquenched. The courage and endurance of the five Maccabee brothers had led to the ousting of the supposedly invincible (in truth, decadent and militarily overextended) Seleucid Greeks from the soil of Israel. The precedent armed Eleazar’s fighters with aggressive conviction, although they were not above tactical accommodation with anti-Roman Levantine “Greeks.”
The disaster that had overtaken Cestius Gallus might be momentous news in Jerusalem. It was less significant to Nero, who was on a tour of arts festivals in Greece. If the fracas in Judaea would have to be avenged, with the obligatory heavy hand, it was never going to be Nero’s own. The emperor’s self-esteem was built on applause and awards, which he affected not to realize had been rigged in his favor. He was the first ruler for whom the X factor of showbiz trumped statesmanship or martial prizes.e Unlike his predecessors, Nero never campaigned with, and rarely even inspected, the legions whose vigilance maintained his empire and whose muscle secured its revenues. He relied on hireling “publicans” to collect the tribute that he rejoiced in spending on showy schemes, such as his impending Golden House in Rome. He was not merely a maverick spendthrift: great projects were the enduring mark of great emperors. Nero’s current scheme was to drive a canal through the isthmus of Corinth.f Although the canal would not be completed until modern times, work had started on cutting through the neck of land between central Greece and the Peloponnese.
Nero’s self-indulgence and paranoia have tagged him with the reputation of a murderous narcissist; but he did try to enlarge the cultural horizons of the empire. His desire to rival Orpheus as a musician and singer is said to have shocked sterner spirits among what was left of the Roman upper classes. In fact, not a few patricians were given to amateur dramatics; some even liked to work out with gladiators (for whom, so gossip alleged, Roman matrons often had an itch).
Since Judaea and its troubles failed to divert him, Nero delegated a reliable, never brilliant general, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, as a proxy to put his imperial foot down. Now in late middle age, Vespasian seemed no more than another of the modest workhorses on whom emperors, good or bad, could depend to pull their weight in Rome’s service. He was not among the fans of the Muses. Neither patrician nor playboy, Vespasian was a professional soldier who had first been promoted thanks to his connections with the emperor Claudius’s powerful freedman and private secretary, Narcissus. As a result, he was given a command in the invasion of Britain. Success in combined operations (for which Claudius took triumphal credit) procured him consular rank. If Vespasian lacked brilliance, he was shrewd enough, when Nero came to the throne, to keep his head down while others, including his own patron Narcissus, were losing theirs. He resumed public life, as proconsul in the placid province of Africa, only after Nero’s domineering mother, Agrippina, was done to death at her son’s command.g
Once back on the ladder that led to high places, Vespasian performed wearisome duties competently and never encroached on the emperor’s spotlight. Stolid, without charm or eloquence, he looked to be the last man of whom any highflier needed to be wary. The great Seneca—who had been the young Nero’s tutor and then became his prime adviser—lacked Vespasian’s reticence. As a writer, Seneca alternated between cogitation on the meaning of life and death and the composition of melodramatic stage plays. If they seem immoderately gory, so too was the imperial court of which he was, for a long while, the intellectual ornament. Roman literature and life shared an obsession with blood; gladiatorial shows at once diverted the people and familiarized them with slaughter. The amphitheater offered its public an education in callousness.
While Nero preferred music, in the Greek sense of the performing arts, especially his own, he was not slow to shed blood when it was other people’s. His Hellenism was a genuine affectation. He was more certain of applause in Greece than in Rome, especially after the great fire of 64. In case the fastidious sat on their hands, Nero had been quick to recruit his own band of five thousand fans, known as the Augustiani. They followed him from gig to gig and rose to cheer his performances in the contrapuntal Alexandrian style, which somewhat resembled the modern “Mexican wave.” In Rome itself, however, not even Nero’s claque could be guaranteed to immunize him against outbursts of plebeian resentment over unfair taxation or the high price of corn. His Byronic curtain speech to the Greeks, at the Isthmian Games at Corinth in November 67, told them that they were again to be free, at least of greedy tax collectors.h Not many years after Nero had done his crowd-pleasing number, the Greeks would have their taxes reimposed, by the
same Vespasian who, it is said, had once found the emperor’s bel canto so soporific that he fell asleep during one of Nero’s concerts. For a non-singing non-patrician autocrat, with a reputation for what Tacitus called domestica parsimonia (tight housekeeping), balancing the books counted for more than provincial encores.
Had Nero’s gigs included venues in Judaea, he might have reprised his magnanimity. There were, however, no festivals with prizes sufficiently glittering to seduce the imperial vanity. It is unlikely that he would have found the Jews a receptive audience: back in the eighth century B.C.E., the prophet Amos had spoken for the faithful when he said, “I hate the sound of your harps, which make you despise justice.” Plato’s distrust of the alluring “Lydian mode” is of a piece with Amos’s revulsion from the socially disruptive effects of popular music. It continues to be anathematized in strict versions of Islam.i
If its echo ever reached Jerusalem, the emperor’s declaration of fiscal independence for the Hellenes might have been taken by the young Zealots as a sign that the Romans were losing their appetite for global domination. The Jews were mistaken, however, if they thought that they were going to get away with murder. The military response to the bloody humiliation of Cestius Gallus (which he can have been in no hurry to report in any detail) took longer to organize than a more martial Caesar would have required. Once in train, however, it was in substantial strength.
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