A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  On Vespasian’s orders, the Romans conducted an urgent search for the Jewish general. As the legionaries had surged in, Joseph had been able, “by some divine providence,” to jump into a deep pit that communicated with a cave invisible at ground level. The local notables must have alerted him to this privileged hiding place. Some fifty of them took refuge in it with him. They remained in undetected seclusion for two days. Then a woman of their company was captured as she tried to slink away from the town. She revealed the inaccessible cavern where Joseph and the others were hiding.

  Unable to lay hands on him, Vespasian sent two tribunes, Paulinus and Gallicanus, to Joseph with a promise of safe conduct. The offer did not extend to the Jotapatans in the cave. Joseph replied that he was staying where he was. How could he know what fate was being reserved for him? His decision not to surrender was endorsed, forcibly, by his companions: they promised to kill him if he made any move to get out. The two tribunes went away. Another, called Nicanor, returned to try again. Said to have been “personally known” to Joseph, he was probably a Levantine Greek member of Agrippa’s staff. He was authorized to say how much Vespasian admired his opponent’s tactics and that the general would like to talk to Joseph. The message was as civil as it appeared sporting: the Roman commander had himself been wounded by an arrow during the assault. Given his routine ruthlessness, Vespasian’s insistence must have had a motive more purposeful than chivalry, unless it was uglier.

  Joseph was literally in a hole. The Jotapatans were obdurate that he remain in it with them; the legionaries outside were yelling for the whole gang to be “roasted out of the cave.” The Roman rank and file had not forgotten, and lacked diplomatic reason to forgive, how Joseph and his crew had basted their comrades with boiling oil. At this point, we are told, Joseph happened to remember some dreams in which “God had warned him of the calamities coming to the Jews and of the fortunes of the Roman emperors.” Since he was both a priest and the descendant of priests, he could pass as a plausible recipient of divine messages. He found the nerve to claim that their proper interpretation had only just revealed itself to him. With the Jotapatan elite huddled around him, he spelled it out in a loud prayer to Yahweh; this procured a moment of solemnity that no pious Jew would choose to interrupt.

  Joseph’s becomingly sanctimonius exegesis was that God was “visiting his wrath on the Jewish people” and that “all prosperity” had passed to the Roman camp. Because Yahweh had selected him personally to “make known the things to come,” Joseph had the authority, and the gall, to announce to his companions that he was bound by a transcendental obligation to deliver himself to the Romans, “that I may live, though I solemnly declare that I go, not as a traitor, but as the servant of the Lord.”

  This portentous reading of his divine duty, in which he mimicked the vatic style of the prophets, was not endorsed by the Jotapatans. They jostled around him, crying that the laws of their fathers, decreed by God Himself, had endowed their race with contempt for death. “Are you so in love with life, Joseph, that you can bear to live as a slave? How quickly you’ve forgotten yourself! How many did you persuade to lay down their lives for liberty! False, totally false, was the reputation you won for courage and cleverness, if you expect to be let go by those you have hit so hard. Even if their offer is genuine, how can you stoop to accept it? If you have been enchanted by the Roman success, we shall have to be responsible for our people’s good name. We’ll lend you a sword and a hand to wield it. Die willingly and you die as the commander of the Jews; if not, you die as a traitor.”

  Their language may be elaborated; its fury rings true. It is also a testimony to Josephus’s willingness, as a historian, to spell out the case against his own conduct. Honesty and evasiveness were not incompatible. Somehow he managed to abate the communal anger sufficiently to institute a discussion of whether suicide was incumbent, not only on him, but also on his companions. By a show of erudition, he contrived yet again to pull rank on his provincial audience. However exasperated they were, they listened to him long enough to be bemused, perhaps impressed, by his sophistry. “Why,” he asked them, “are we in such a hurry to commit suicide? Why should we make those best of friends, body and soul, part company? I am told that it is a glorious thing to die in battle. Maybe, when it is decreed by the laws of war and we die at the hands of the victors. If I shrink from Roman swords, I deserve to die; but if they are prepared to spare an enemy, how are we not entitled to spare ourselves? It would be absurd to do to ourselves what we have fought to prevent them doing to us. You say that it is glorious to die for freedom. I agree; when it’s on the battlefield and at the hands of those who are trying to take freedom from us. But now they are coming neither to do battle nor to kill us.”

  What fear, Joseph wanted to know, keeps “us” from going up to the Romans? Fear of death? In that case, must Jews, because they fear death at the hands of the enemy, inflict it on themselves? “ ‘It is a brave act to kill oneself,’ another will suggest. No! It’s a thoroughly craven act,” he said. “I consider that a pilot would be an arrant coward if, through fear of bad weather, he did not wait for the storm to break, but scuttled his own ship instead.” After this schoolmasterly, quasi-Platonic analogy, Joseph resumed the sacerdotal mantle. He reminded his rustic congregation of Yahweh’s disapproval of suicide: “Of all living things, there is not one that dies on purpose or by its own act; it is an irresistible natural law that all should wish to live.…. Do you suppose that God is not angry when a man treats His gift with contempt? It is from Him that we have received our existence and it is to Him that we must leave the right to remove it.”

  By generalizing the question of what “we” should do, if given a chance to stay alive, Joseph diverted attention, and indignation, from the fact that Vespasian’s offer of salvation was to him alone. As if everyone in the hiding place had the same choice between life and death, he encouraged the Jotapatan notables to speculate on possibilities not available to them: “If we choose to die, isn’t it better that we do so at the hands of our conquerors? I shall not go over to the Romans in order to be a traitor to myself; if I did, I should be even more foolish than those who desert; for such people, desertion means life, but for me it means only death, my own. I pray that the Romans may prove traitors; if after giving me their word, they put me to death, I shall die happy, because I shall find in the broken word of such liars a consolation greater than victory itself.”

  This pharisaic reversion to self-importance was more than his companions could tolerate. No sooner had Joseph switched back from the plural “we” to his own first-person case than the Jotapatans rushed at him with their swords, crying, “Coward! Coward!” He retained the mental agility and physical poise to box clever. Later, he described the scene using the third person: “He called one by name, glared like a general at another, shook hands with a third, pleaded with a fourth till he was ashamed.… turning like an animal at bay to face each assailant in turn. At his last gasp, they still respected their commander; their arms lacked energy, their blades glanced off him and many, while thrusting at him with their swords spontaneously lowered their points.”

  Joseph had obtained another truce, but he was never going to be allowed to get away from them on his own. He claimed later that he put his trust in divine protection. He was too modest to mention any element of cunning in what he now proposed: “Staking his life on one last throw,” he informed his companions that, since they were resolved on mass suicide, he agreed to share their fate. He asked only that they accept an orderly and decorous procession to death rather than involve themselves in scenes of clumsy, uncontrolled carnage. It would be more seemly if they all drew lots and then killed each other in numerical order: the first and the second striking each other, and so on down the line as the luck of the draw had determined. “In this way,” he said, “no one will have to die by his own hand.” Otherwise, he told them, it would be unfair, when the rest were dead, if one man were to change his mind and save his life.<
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  To be accepted, as it was, without suspicion, his proposal must have accorded with tradition. Five years later, the defenders of Masada would adopt a similar rota when they killed each other, to the last man, woman and child. Josephus reports that his companions “swallowed the bait” and allowed him to draw lots with the rest of them. “Life was sweet, but not so sweet as death,” they told each other—especially when their commander was going to die with them.

  Whatever the precise method by which lots were drawn, Joseph evidently presided over the procedure. Whether by “divine providence,” as The Jewish War puts it, or by dexterous manipulation, he himself just happened to draw a number that would leave him alive with only one other man, after all the rest of the party had honored the rites of mutual extinction. Joseph ben Mattathias watched as, when their numbers came up, one after another of the pairs of Jotapatan notables, men and women, stabbed each other. The serial killing must have taken some time. The blood and stench and the cries and groans of the dying filled the bunker.

  The tight pit was thick with corpses until it was the last pair’s turn to follow their companions in mutual slaughter. The Romans were clustered above them. Joseph now suggested to the single other survivor that they should spare each other. He remained a captain who saw little virtue in going down with his ship. He also had the pious nerve to claim that he did not wish to “stain his hand with the blood of a fellow Jew.”e Joseph’s proposal was accepted gladly by his fellow survivor. A short time later, “having come safely through two wars—one with the Romans and one with his own people”—Joseph ben Mattathias was being escorted through the Roman lines by his friend Nicanor.

  a The city, previously known as Strato’s Tower, was renovated as a major port by Herod the Great, who dedicated it to the Roman emperor. Until the outbreak of hostilities, its population was a mixture of Jews and Syrians. On the outbreak of war, Josephus says (Jewish War II: 447 and following), the Syrians massacred Caesarea’s twenty thousand Jews, thus rendering it a safe haven for Vespasian’s headquarters.

  b Martin Goodman (The Ruling Class of Judaea) maintains that the revolt “was led from the start by the ruling class”—of which Joseph’s father was clearly a member—“to keep their prominence in Judaean society after the Roman backing, on which they had.… relied, was withdrawn.” This implies that they hoped to have things both ways, but hardly makes it plausible that they should have instigated what put their position at risk and, in the event, led to their own destruction. The argument that “previous incidents” had never led to a serious revolt is thin evidence that it was only the sponsorship of the “ruling class” that caused the events of 66 to escalate. Goodman’s account requires Josephus consistently to falsify the situation. Yet no one can deny that the Zealots were far more enthusiastic for war than the Sanhedrin. Men such as Simon ben Gioras and John of Gischala were clearly out of sympathy with Joseph ben Mattathias and, we may infer, with his “ruling” social echelon, which the Zealots had always suspected of facing both ways. Goodman remarks that Jesus ben Gamala had assumed strategic command although he had no “military competence.” Many figures in ancient warfare had done the same. As Thucydides recounts, one of the greatest victories over the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War was contrived by the demagogic Cleon, a civilian who had previously done nothing, in the military line, except criticize the tactics of Athens’ generals.

  c Skeptics who take Josephus’s whole narrative to be tendentious camouflage for his preconceived duplicity argue that the Roman commander’s excursion to Jotapata has to be explained by his wish to make contact with the traitor. Is it plausible to suppose that Vespasian would have taken time out to stage a bloody charade, which lasted several weeks, in order to validate a cover story that served no diplomatic or military purpose?

  d Almost two millennia later, in 1776, the soldiers of Charleston, South Carolina, followed his example when they defended their walls against British cannonballs by filling sacks with palmetto branches. Hence the privileged place of the palmetto on the state flag.

  e It may be that a Pharisaic priest could be trusted to come up with a timely taboo, but it would be undue cynicism to accuse Joseph of insincerity in recoiling from shedding the blood of his kin. His reluctance to kill himself is of a piece with this: self-killing can also be seen as a form of pollution. Jewish and Greek ideas are compatible on this topic. Richard Seaford points out that in Plato’s Laws (873c), “suicide is discussed immediately after kin-killing, as it kills the nearest and dearest of all.” If there is one undeniable consistency in Joseph ben Mattathias’s personal history, it is that he never actually killed another Jew, although he certainly manhandled quite a few of them with tactical ferocity. There is no reason to doubt that he was genuinely appalled by the Zealots’ eagerness to slaughter other Jews. Few Romans ever showed an equivalent reluctance.

  VIII

  LEGIONARIES HURRIED TO SEE the barbarian captive. Was his beard fair or dark? Was he tall or short? What was he wearing? The common soldiers were more than curious: they were hot for revenge. Josephus implies that their officers were less vindictive than impressed by the prisoner’s bearing; but then they had taken no part in the testudo. Was he defiant or was he careful to avoid his enemies’ eyes? His walk required a calculated performance, the head held just so. To seem calm and otherworldly was a literally vital cosmetic. Exemplary execution was still his likeliest fate, probably by crucifixion, but only after he had been tortured, at length. The emperor Caligula cannot have been the only Roman to tell the carnifices whose profession it was to torture the condemned, “Make him feel he is dying.”a

  How could Joseph not imagine jeers and cheers as the lead-loaded lash flayed him before the nails were hammered in? There was no natural, no casual way of living his situation. He must have wondered whether the notables of Jotapata had not taken the easier course. The claim that he was doing the Lord’s work had been a plausible excuse for his breach of faith with the Jotapatans; with the Romans, it would be a necessity, if only he could work it. Was he a hypocrite? In Greek, hypokrites meant “actor.”b In that sense, he had to be one. What role suited the venue better than that of the messenger of Yahweh, the singular god of the Jews? Joseph ben Mattathias was born for the part of the robed and bearded priest with a divine annunciation to deliver. Truth and imposture dwelt on the same page.

  Vespasian’s son Titus was a young man in his early twenties, an apprentice in the butchery business. He is reported to have admired Joseph’s “courageous attitude” and to have been filled with sympathy for his “youth.” A good actor can attract admiration by inducing others to imagine themselves in his place. However, the original order to take the enemy commander alive has to have been Vespasian’s. “Clemency” had become the characteristic attribute of Roman leaders, if a prisoner was important enough to merit its exercise. Julius Caesar had been the first to vaunt his willingness to show mercy to vanquished opponents. He was less quick to advertise that he did so in a civil war that he himself had started. In 46 B.C.E., Marcus Porcius Cato,c when besieged in the city of Utica, in North Africa, chose to fall on his sword rather than to accept a patronizing offer of mercy from the dictatorial Julius.

  A century after Cato’s suicide, when Nero came to the throne, Seneca—first his tutor and now his prime counselor—presented him with an essay in which clementia was recommended as the most desirable form of princely grace. There was much to be said (a speciality of Seneca’s) for encouraging the new prince not to wallow in blood. During the course of his reign, however, Nero’s pleasures soon included the extinction of those irksome to him. His only vestige of clemency came in the suggestion that his erstwhile friends kill themselves before things got really nasty. Mercy did, however, remain the emperor’s unique prerogative. When Josephus attributed his own survival to the clementia of Titus and Vespasian, he was implying that each of them was—in the words of the sardonic Tacitus—“capax imperii,” capable of being an emperor. The ascription of clem
ency to the young Titus may have been a retrospective grace. Josephus’s descriptions of Titus’s behavior during the campaign suggest that moderation came to him late, if at all.

  In the Roman camp, in chains among angry enemies, Joseph had something in common with another isolated Jew almost two millennia later. The French Jewish soldier, Alfred Dreyfus, after he had been falsely accused of treason, was described by the gloating Catholic writer Maurice Barrès as “alone in the universe.” At the moment of his public disgrace, when his sword was broken and his captain’s epaulets ripped off, Dreyfus adopted an air of stoic resignation. In private he raved and banged his head against his cell wall. Yet he was determined to endure. So was Joseph; but he was no falsely accused scapegoat. He might be somewhat admired by his enemies; he was sure to be condemned by his friends.

  By his decision not to die in that cavern in Jotapata, Joseph made himself exceptional. He was now alone as no Jew had ever been before, not even the shorn and captive Samson, “eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.” In Roman custody, committed to continual improvisation, Joseph could not afford to seem either afraid or arrogant. He had to maintain the aura of a sacrosanct prize. His account says nothing of his private feelings. He could scarcely afford them. He was now like a poker player; his concentration had to be on the play of the next card. The odds were still stacked against him. He was kept in irons, under tight guard. Did some of the legionaries hold out their arms and loll their heads in mimic crucifixion? There is no proof that they did; small likelihood that they did not. Not smiling, not wincing, not pleading, not provoking, and ignoring provocation, Joseph had to endure. Baiting the Jew general might be one more spectator sport; but the fate of an enemy commander was a matter only for the emperor. In the same monopolizing spirit, no matter which of his generals had actually won the victory, by Nero’s time only the emperor himself could enjoy a triumph and ride in glory through the streets of Rome. The sole national hero in imperial Rome had to be Caesar himself. Vespasian was too seasoned a campaigner not to be aware that under a jealous autocrat, nothing failed like conspicuous success.d