A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  Titus Flavius Vespasianus carried a big stick more easily than a tune. If the commission to pacify Judaea was not intended as a punishment, it was certainly not designed to set him on the path to glory. Of Sabine origin, born in 9 in Falacrinae, in the Apennines high above Rieti, Vespasian was a workhorse, never a thoroughbred. Persons of Sabine descent were regarded by the Romans as Scots have been by the English: frugal to the point of meanness, but usefully competent and courageous. Like Joseph ben Mattathias, the Roman commander was his parents’ second son (his brother, Sabinus, was as eloquent as Vespasian was dour). His father had fought for Pompey against Julius Caesar. Vespasian’s aristocratic mother, Vespasia, had married beneath her. After the death of her husband, she made a home to which her younger son was always happy to return; as emperor, he preserved it as it had been when he was a child. Sabinus headed promptly for the lower rungs of the cursus honorum, but Vespasia had to taunt Vespasian with being no more than “his brother’s footman” before she could kindle his ambition. No orator, he favored action over the law or politics and became a professional soldier.

  His first posting was in Thrace, but he returned to Rome in the last, sour years of the emperor Tiberius. He there fell in love with a clever freed slave, Caenis, to whom he remained devoted, even after his marriage. As secretary to Antonia (the sister-in-law of Tiberius and daughter of Mark Antony), Caenis had carried a secret message from her mistress to the emperor, a recluse on Capri, to tell him that his trusted deputy in Rome, Sejanus, was plotting treason. She survived to be Vespasian’s right hand as he picked his way through the political minefield of Roman politics.

  In 38 C.E., soon after Caligula succeeded Claudius as emperor, Vespasian was elected aedile, but only just: he ranked at the bottom of the list of successful candidates. As the man now responsible for keeping the Roman streets clean of refuse and slops, he had the bad luck to meet the new emperor on a particularly filthy stretch of road. Fortunately, on this occasion, Caligula was more playful than—as he soon became—murderous: he had his bodyguard shovel the shit into the folds of the aedile’s toga and passed on by. On another occasion, when Vespasian was at dinner, a stray dog appeared and made him a present of something it had found in the street: a human hand.

  To live in Rome was to have a public life or no life worth talking about. Married to Flavia Domitilla, a woman without impressive connections, Vespasian was impelled to crave imperial favor. When Caligula made him praetor (he ranked first on the list this time), he was embarrassed to have to make a series of servile, life-preserving speeches. His great desire was to command a legion. It was granted when Antonia’s son Claudius was elevated to the purple and—perhaps prompted by Caenis—dispatched Vespasian to Argentoratum, the modern French city of Strasbourg, whence he and his legion (the Second Augustan) and his brother, Sabinus, accompanied Claudius on the expedition to conquer Britain. The brothers fought side by side, gallantly, and went on, under the overall command of Claudius, to defeat the son of Cymbeline and capture Colchester. Vespasian was recommended to the Senate by the emperor himself for triumphal honors.

  In 51, he became consul, but three years later Claudius was dead, allegedly poisoned by his wife, Agrippina. Her son, the seventeen-year-old Nero, became emperor. Vespasian’s previous connections were abruptly useless, if not dangerous. He went into provincial retreat for a full ten years. His brother, Sabinus, continued in public service; he was prefect of Rome when half the city was burned down, in 64. Meanwhile, Vespasian was in Africa as proconsul. His stewardship of the province was rigorous, honest and unpopular; the locals on one occasion pelted him with turnips. His Roman house went up in flames in the fire. On his return from Africa, he paid the penalty for failing to enrich himself as corrupt governors regularly did: he had to go into business, trading mules, to retrieve his fortunes. The haulage trade was a good market. Peter Wiseman reports that Nero traveled with a mule-drawn cavalcade of “anything up to a thousand carriages, richly caparisoned and shod in silver.”3

  Nero’s desire to make the arts the paramount public activity of the Romans showed innovative flair. Since the business of Rome had always been war, its principal communal pleasures—gladiatorial contests—served to accustom audiences to bloodshed. If Nero had to pander to the gross appetites of the public, he also made it his Orphic mission to refine them. Other emperors marched; he preferred to prance.

  a Joshua’s insistence, in Joshua 24, on making a “fixed rule” after the people had voted for “undivided loyalty” to the covenant suggests that divisions threatened the cohesion of the Israelites soon after their conquest of Canaan.

  b This exploit gave Simon ben Gioras enough kudos to become “toparch” (local commander) of Acrabata. When the High Priest Ananias deposed him from that role, he threw his hand in with the “bandits” who had occupied the Roman base at Masada. Josephus’s account of his exploits (Jewish War 4: 493 and following) shows how quickly success could double and redouble a man’s claim to a leading role. By 69 C.E., Simon would be in effective command of Jerusalem.

  c The British followed their example, particularly in India, where princes and maharajahs were incited to send their sons to school with those of their imperial overlords. The Ottoman Turks did something similar by promoting the so-called Phanariots, a Greek Orthodox elite, to supervise their compatriots and to take responsibility for any dissidence on their part.

  d By Joseph ben Mattathias’s time, the vast majority of Jews spoke and understood only Aramaic. Hebrew was no longer their vernacular.

  e He was not the last: in the 1990s, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, at once head of state of Cambodia and, in his own view, a filmmaker, founded an annual film festival at Phnom Penh, at which he received the Grand Prix every year and was hailed by the media as the best writer and journalist. He also wrote songs and had them sung to the peasants.

  f In 146 B.C.E., as a result of a rebellion against Roman occupation, Corinth had been looted and, legend has it, leveled to the ground (archaeological evidence suggests that nothing so drastic ever took place) at the end of a punitive campaign led by Lucius Mummius. The position of the desolated city, at the gateway to the Peloponnese, soon attracted Roman colonists, as had the site of Carthage. Eventually, both ruined cities became prosperous again. As time went by, their mostly imported citizens took pride in the fame and antiquity of “ancestors” with whom, in truth, they had no blood connection. None of the Roman colonists who, after the war, came to occupy Jerusalem are known to have boasted of similar links with the evicted Jews. The city did not even keep its name: after Hadrian’s definitive pacification of the province, in the wake of the rebellion led by Bar-Kochba in 135 C.E., Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina (when first captured by Israelites under the command of Joab around 1010 B.C.E., it was called “the city of David”). For almost two millennia, no community around the Mediterranean chose deliberately to identify with the Jews. In the 1930s, however, a group of very poor, previously Roman Catholic Italian peasants elected, under the leadership of Donato Manduzio, a visionary veteran of the First World War, to convert to Judaism. The Jews of San Nicandro, from Gargano, one of the poorest areas in the Mezzogiorno, persisted in what seemed to the Vatican, to the Fascist authorities and even to the rabbinate to be a misguided conversion. After 1945, the young people made aliyah to Palestine, where their descendants still live. See The Jews of San Nicandro, by John A. Davis.

  g She was supposed to be drowned, apparently by accident, in a collapsible boat, but managed to swim ashore and had to be stabbed instead. An oracle had warned her that her son would be the death of her. When her killer came for her, she ordered him to strike at her womb, as Aeschylus’s Klytemnestra did, after her son, Orestes, returned to Argos to avenge his father. All the Roman world was a stage. The publicity following Agrippina’s clumsy murder was cardinal in turning upper-class opinion against Nero. The earlier prompt murder of his half brother, Britannicus, a potential rival for the throne, had been excused, by that elastic mor
alist Seneca, as necessary to the stability of the succession.

  h His speech earned something like the relieved, ambiguous applause that greeted Mikhail Gorbachev when he granted autonomy to the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. In both cases, the cheers were meant to hold the speaker to his word; and in both, unsmiling conservatives at home regarded the liberator as little more than a weakling who was giving away what braver men had won.

  i As rock music was by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1987).

  VI

  NERO’S DILETTANTISM allowed time for the rebellion in Judaea to organize itself into what the Zealots could claim was a divinely warranted national resurgence: anyone who was not on their side was an enemy of the God who had granted them their victory. It was dangerous for anyone in Jerusalem openly to deprecate the enthusiasm of the victorious Jews. The Zealots’ challenge to the Temple hierarchy was as outspoken as their calls for full independence from Rome. The elders of the Jerusalem aristocracy, composed of Mattathias, the father of Joseph, and his peers, may have reacted with private dismay at the triumphalism of the insurgents; in public they had to greet it with polite, and politic, applause. Was Joseph a bad Jew if, on his return to Jerusalem, he tried to persuade anyone who would listen that the consequences of all-out war with Rome would be disastrous?

  Since he had succeeded in securing the release of the captive priests, his standing, at least among the hierarchy, had been enhanced. Who was more plausible when arguing against a reckless uprising than a young man who had just proved that the Romans were not impervious to diplomacy? Joseph’s recipe for caution was not wasted on the Pharisees, nor on those of his father’s class and age. The measure of his new prestige is that his views infuriated the popular leader, Menahem, the Zealot son of Judas, the Galilean bandit and hero. Menahem had recently led an expedition to capture Herod’s armory at Masada. He and his men had massacred the small Roman garrison and helped themselves to weaponry, which enabled them to return to Jerusalem and back their leader’s claim to command.

  Menahem’s henchmen soon forced Joseph to take refuge in the inner court of the Temple, where he was quarantined among those of his equivocal opinion. The Zealots were parading a bristling version of faith that brooked no argument. How could there be any question about dying in obedience to the laws that, it was said, were inherent in the Torah? No Jew, they insisted, could make compromises without breaching the covenant. Their introversion was aggressive and dogmatic. In the areas of the city under their control, anyone who stole “holy articles,” swore improper oaths, married out or “made an Aramaean their concubine” was treated as a criminal.

  Menahem’s bid for absolute power had led him and his men to murder the High Priest Ananias and his brother Hezekiah. Ananias’s son, Eleazar, had been among the prime fomenters of the rebellion, but family loyalty or personal ambition turned him against Menahem. Outraged by the latter’s presumption in dressing in royal robes, he chased his father’s murderer as far as the town of Ophel, where Menahem was captured, tortured and killed. Josephus reports that it was hoped in Jerusalem that Menahem’s death would bring the insurrection to an end. It did not: Eleazar had returned to continue the siege of Metilius and his men in the Antonia Tower to its bloody end.

  Joseph insisted that the tenets of Judaism in no way required that he and the best people in Jerusalem should sacrifice their lives rather than endure patiently. Like the Temple hierarchy, he hoped that time and diplomacy could defuse the crisis. Instead, it escalated. Josephus gives no account of precisely how the old guard and the Zealots came together in what affected to be a government of national unity. In fact, it was never united in trust or purpose. The Zealots were not disposed to moderation, even if they were, for the present, compelled to public reconcilation with the traditional priestly leadership. The hierarchy, on the other hand, could not exercise an appeasing influence on the young fundamentalists unless it seemed to agree to endorse their policy of national liberation. None of the elements in Jerusalem had reason, or any long intention, to abide by the solidarity they sought to impose on the whole of Palestine. Neither The Jewish War nor the Vita offers a reliable account of the process by which Joseph ben Mattathias was appointed governor-general of Galilee, but his selection must have been part of a compromise, of no reliable duration, between the elders and the Zealots.a

  Judaeans at large had their grievances, but they were against the Jerusalem hierarchy as well as the Romans. If it was questionable whether the population had any appetite for all-out war, there was no “democratic” arena in which such a question could even be raised. Can Joseph be blamed if he took the same view which Philo of Alexandria had, two decades earlier, when he recommended that the Egyptian Jews put patient trust in the Holy One? It was wise, and pious, the Alexandrian elder had said, to rely on the antique slogan Saint Paul would rehearse, for alien motives, in his epistle to the Romans: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.” The moral was: leave it to Him.

  Josephus’s mixture, in The Jewish War, of the pragmatic and the supernatural provides a parallax view of what happened in Judaea. His tour of the riches and pleasures of Rome must have altered his younger self’s vision of Judaea’s future, and perhaps of his own. He had come back with no furious commitment to Jewish exclusivity. Eclectic before, he was now cosmopolitan; the man with an extra eye is a menace to those who cannot see things his way. Josephus depicts himself as dispassionate and humane. As a rich young man, he was not concerned with personal aggrandizement; if he enjoyed his priestly and aristocratic status, he advertised no political or religious zeal. Once on the ground as governor of Galilee in the spring of 67 C.E., he devoted himself to keeping the command of local cities in what he, his father, and their friends regarded as responsible hands. Damage limitation was central to his mission.

  Josephus does not even summarize the process by which he came to be appointed. It is unlikely that the Zealots voted for him (if they ever did, they were prompt to go back on their word), but in the early stages, before Vespasian had even landed at Caesarea, they lacked the power to put one of their own people in the post. They must have guessed how difficult Joseph’s task was. Whatever happened, his mission would remove a charismatic opponent from Jerusalem. If he succeeded in rallying the Galileans, the Zealots could hope to supplant him; if—as was more likely—he failed, it would tarnish his reputation and reflect badly on whoever had sponsored him.

  As far as the Sanhedrin was concerned, Joseph’s lack of fanaticism must have contributed to his eligibility as commander in Galilee. By securing the appointment of a quick-witted, diplomatically experienced and well-connected governor-general, the Jerusalem elders left the door ajar for negotiation, even if they dared not declare as much to the people at large. It would be no evidence of their treason if the elders briefed Joseph to combine a show of belligerent purpose with a covert policy of wait and see. He soon found that the Zealots were much more eager for war than the Judaeans at large. Outlying towns and cities, along the Mediterranean coast and especially around the Sea of Galilee, had populations including Arabs, Greeks (or Levantine Greek speakers) and Samaritans,b as well as many Jews who were content to be Hellenized. These disparate communities had little sense of “national” unity, still less any loyalty to the Jerusalem junta that had nominated Joseph as commander-in-chief. Any attempt to recruit and station a large force in their region could only alarm the rural population. An army’s need for forage is bound to trump even the most amiable intentions.c

  It was crucial to Joseph ben Mattathias’s strategy to bring the biggest communities on the shore of the Sea of Galilee under his command. Principal among them was Tiberias, the provincial capital, which had a mixed population of Jews and Hellenized Levantines, and the adjacent, mainly Jewish, town of Tarichaeae. Joseph was faced with the task of trying to reconcile as many of them as possible into a common front. On his own account, it required him to play the trickster and th
e action hero at the same time. But then, this is what the Greek god Hermes, Homer’s Odysseus and, on occasion, King David himself had done.

  Before full-scale hostilities began, young hotheads from a township called Dabarittha (the modern Deburieh, at the foot of Mount Tabor) ambushed a convoy of wagons, under armed escort, containing baggage, clothing, jewelry and six hundred gold coins, the property of Agrippa II and Berenice. Surprised by the value of their haul, the thieves realized that they could not keep all of it without attracting punitive attention either from the king’s men or from other highwaymen stronger than themselves. They decided to hand their booty over to Joseph ben Mattathias, who happened to be in Tarichaeae.

  He scolded them for the affront to the royal family and then deposited their takings with the leading man in the city, Annaeus. Josephus says that his intention was to return the belongings to their royal owners, as soon as he had a chance, in order to retain their goodwill. His overt displeasure with the brigands was untypical and unsubtle; hence, it was probably sincere. They had expected congratulations and, no doubt, a percentage of the loot. When they heard that Joseph ben Mattathias meant to restore their stolen belongings to the royal couple, whom they regarded as collaborators with the Romans, the young adventurers went “running by night,” Josephus says, through the region, denouncing the governor as a traitor.1

  By dawn, a hundred thousand men in arms were reported to be crowding into Tarichaeae, bent on doing him bodily harm. Assembled in the hippodrome, they were not all of one mind: some wanted Joseph stoned to death, others to burn him alive. John of Gischalad and Jesus, the son of Sapphias, the chief magistrate of Tiberias, latched on to the highwaymen’s grievance. They chose to elevate an opportunistic heist into a revolutionary exploit. Joseph’s supposedly craven intentions became central to the indictment of his leadership, of which John was eager to relieve him. When the crowd proclaimed Joseph a public enemy, all but four of his bodyguards deserted him. The first he knew of the commotion was after a mob set fire to the house where he was sleeping. His four loyal guards begged him to get out while he could. He refused. Instead of panicking, he chose to tear his clothes (he was dressed in black) and then—another dramatic gesture—leapt out of the house, having covered himself with cinders. His hands were behind his back, he says, and his sword hung around his neck. This penitential apparition aroused the pity of supporters and friends in Tarichaeae. It also infuriated those who had crowded into the city from outside. They yelled for him to produce the treasure, which “belonged to the people,” and to admit that he had made a treacherous deal with Agrippa II.