A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  The author of The Jewish War gives the impression that Joseph ben Mattathias was at first saved from immediate death so that Vespasian might send him as a present to the emperor. Since the Roman commander had gone out of his way to pluck him alive from the ruins of Jotapata, it remains possible that he had been advised both of Joseph’s intelligence and of his utility as a go-between. But if Vespasian was keen to meet and talk to him, why was the prisoner kept incommunicado and in chains for several days? Joseph may have been hoping, or even have been promised, that a ransom would be offered for his release. His father was a rich man in Jerusalem. In any case, calm reserve was his best line. Collaboration would seem more valuable if not promptly volunteered.

  On the other hand, if the general was keen for Joseph’s cooperation, and Joseph reluctant to offer it, Vespasian may have had it relayed to him that rendition to Nero was imminent. Such a threat would explain Joseph’s next reported move: a request for a private word with his principal captor. The way in which it was pitched, and received, hints that Vespasian may have been hoping for some kind of confidential disclosure. As soon as Joseph had been escorted into his quarters, the general ordered everyone except his son Titus and two other officers to leave.

  Whatever the Romans expected, it cannot have been what their captive now chose to say: “You imagine that, by capturing me, you have merely secured a prisoner.”1 If he was as calculating as he needed and knew how to be, Joseph spoke softly, but with unhurried clarity. A quiet voice impels even important listeners to lean forward, attentively. Sacerdotal solemnity and theatrical flaire surely modulated Joseph’s diction. The only version we have of his words is in the Greek of The Jewish War. There is no evidence that he ever spoke or wrote fluent Latin. The Romans are unlikely to have understood Aramaic. So the Jew probably spoke to them in Koine. Both sides were playing away from home.

  As he describes things, Joseph was bold enough to contradict his conqueror before, it seems, he had spoken a word. “No, sir,” he said. “No, I come as a messenger of the greatness that awaits you.” Was he looking directly at Vespasian and Titus or did he stare blankly, a man entranced, with the divine afflatus upon him? Either way, his good news held their attention. He had no need to gabble. The Romans were waiting on his words. He had managed, in a few seconds, to become less a suppliant than a dispenser of supernatural favors. “Had I not been sent by God Himself,” he told them, “I should have known the Jewish law and how a general ought to die.”

  The implication was that angelic duty alone had forced him to transcend a soldier’s obligation to suicide. Who in the tent could have guessed how desperately he had argued to the contrary when in that pit in Jotapata? Once out of it, Joseph ben Mattathias had to become an improvised man: someone who expected to be watched and listened to, by himself not least. From the moment when he crossed the lines, he had committed himself to being a performer. No longer a Jew among Jews, he was conditioned by his alien audience: it played with him; he played to it. He was, in a literal and a theatrical sense, cast among strangers.

  The egotist has to be his own writer and his own producer. Like Sir Walter Raleigh,f when he was living on his nerves, at daily risk of disgrace and execution, Joseph had to tack according to every circumstance, and yet be lucid enough to steer through the rough water. Closeted with Vespasian, Joseph assumed the lineaments of a sacred herald. As if on the tragic stage, he played the seer, a makeshift Tiresias, whose oracular magic the general would be well advised to reserve for himself. It is too modern a cynicism to assume that Joseph never believed that the divine grace was on him; as with a method actor, reaching into his own experience to flesh his imposture, a tincture of that belief would lend conviction to his performance. Romans, however hardheaded, were rarely immune to dread of the supernatural content of dreams.g

  The most pressing thing on Joseph ben Mattathias’s mind must have been the fear of rendition. He confronted the threat immediately. Taking the issue out of his captor’s hands, he added it to his own armory: “Do you mean to send me to Nero? What for? How long will Nero and those who succeed him remain on the throne before your turn comes?” Josephus’s narrative implies a pause. The reader can imagine a close-up of Vespasian’s tough face: those heavily lidded eyes and that tight mouth. When he failed to stop Joseph at that point, the general’s silence promised more than curiosity. Did he recall the story of how Seneca—when confident of his position—had had the nerve and wit to tell the young Nero that, however many people a prince might kill, there was always one man he could never kill: his successor? And did Joseph ben Mattathias see himself as his mythical namesake, the son of Jacob whose interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream put him on the way to being the Egyptian ruler’s privy counselor?

  Joseph staked everything on the insolence of his last question. In that silent second, during which Vespasian could, and should, have forbidden his prisoner even to suggest the possibility of anyone succeeding Nero, the general became complicit with what followed: “You, Vespasian, are Caesar and emperor, you and your son here. Load me with your heaviest chains and keep me for yourself. You are master not only of me, Caesar, but of land and sea and the whole human race.”

  Now what? Joseph’s next words conveyed both a captive’s deference and the sanctity of a divine herald. “I ask only to be held in closer confinement if I am taking the name of God in vain.” The corollary was that if they believed him, he should be well treated. Whether or not Joseph truly thought that he was divinely inspired, he had bet his life on seeming that he did. Whatever its source, his prediction was calculated to spring an ambition which, Joseph ben Mattathias had the wit to guess, was latent in Vespasian’s thoughts. Playing the part of the Jewish priest, he was to the victorious proconsul what Macbeth’s witches were to the thane of Cawdor. Yet Jerusalem was not yet captured. Although he had taken a brave part in Claudius’s conquest of Britain, Vespasian had no great pedigree or military genius. Joseph’s oracular prediction was based on a small victory in a petty province. Its precision about the timing of Vespasian’s accession may be the historian’s later embellishment,h but what other than its appealing plausibility can explain how he came to be recruited to the general’s personal circle? Joseph had contrived to become an instant lucky charm.

  In the good old days of the republic, Vespasian might have been content with the steady rewards of a routine military career, but in Nero’s reign, Joseph ben Mattathias and Titus Flavius Vespasianus had one vital thing in common: neither could safely play safe. Rome had been the scene of an extensive conspiracy just over a year before. The aristocratic Calpurnius Piso was a worthy candidate for the purple, but lacked the steel to grasp it. When detected, Piso committed suicide to avoid execution and his family’s loss of their property; but the extent of the conspiracy convinced Nero of the innate treachery of the senatorial establishment.i

  Vespasian’s willingness even to listen to his prisoner’s words was tantamount to treason. As soon as Joseph’s divination was not greeted with outrage, his all-or-nothing gamble had paid off. He now had something over his conqueror: what Vespasian had not said and not done. Whatever happened, Joseph was never going to be sent alive to Nero. It was vital that the Judaean priest be given no chance to transmit to Nero his divinely sourced prediction that Vespasian was destined for the purple. Nothing would be more certain to render it void. Vespasian had become his captive’s captive.

  The twentieth-century Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy wrote an ironic poem in which Nero is warned by the Delphic oracle, “Beware the age of seventy-three.” Since Nero was thirty years old (of an age with Joseph ben Mattathias), he concluded that he still had plenty of time. But, as Cavafy is pleased to recall, Nero’s immediate successor, Servius Sulpicius Galba, was an old man of seventy-three. Another of Cavafy’s poems tells of how “the gods abandoned Antony” at the time of his great love affair with Cleopatra (it advises Antony not to complain but to accept that his lease is up). This myth has an echo in Josephus: he says tha
t, months before the destruction of the Temple, strange voices were heard saying, “We are departing from here.” The tendentious Alexandrian Origen is quick to interpret them to be those of the angels who supervised Temple worship. As a Christian he took their departure to be a symptom of Yahweh’s abandonment of the Jews and Judaism.

  The Holy One’s writing on the wall had been less ambiguous when it presaged the doom of Belshazzar. In the Book of Daniel, as Josephus would remember, Nebuchadnezzar saw a statue with a golden head, a torso of silver and brass, iron legs and feet partly of iron, partly of clay. When the statue was struck by a rock, its anatomy was quartered. The rock itself became a mountain. Daniel had interpreted this as meaning that there would be four successive earthly powers before the coming of the eternal kingdom. During these convulsions, whatever mayhem was in store, the centrality of the Jews in the divine scheme was not in question.

  In the dream Josephus reported to Vespasian, Yahweh announced that He intended to bestow dominion on a Gentile conqueror. Vespasian might have shrugged if Joseph had threatened him with Yahweh’s anger, but the news of divine backing was easy to take.j Joseph’s version of events was, at a stretch, consistent with his ancestral faith: God favored Jews when they honored His Commandments, but chastened them when they did not. Perhaps because he wrote a secular account of the war, and in an alien language, Josephus’s work represented Yahweh in world-historical costume, the emperor’s emperor. After due adjustment, the cap of a universal and eternal God would fit neatly on the head of the single, august sovereign of the temporal world. The notion of translatio imperii—the passage of power by God’s will—and hence of the divine right of kings became an axiom of Western thoughtk until, in the Enlightenment, the people’s will displaced that of a personal god or monarch.

  Josephus was the first Jew to offer an overview of the world’s history and evolution that was not Judeocentric. In his wake, Yahweh would be deconstructed, through the centuries, by a series of Jewish intellectuals, some religious, many not. A suite of competitive analyses generated schemes of redemption,l in this world if not in the next. Visions of universal truth, culminating in Marxism, divinized History itself, which became a godless theodicy in which logic or “the dialectic” held inexorable, impersonal sway. Aristotle and Hegel supplied accelerant additives to the mixture that fueled History’s course. The desire for an overarching logic that applies to everything is often said to be the legacy of Greek “science”; but the appetite for universal rules, and the belief that they can be divined by human intelligence, is an aspect of the Judaism that Joseph never abandoned.

  One of the two Roman officers at the meeting did show himself skeptical of Josephus’s capacity to read the future. If the prisoner had prophetic powers, why had he not warned the men of Jotapata that the town would be taken or foreseen that he himself would be captured? Might he not have saved them all a lot of trouble? Joseph replied that he had, in fact, predicted the fall of the town after forty-seven days, and also that he himself would be taken alive (which conveyed the sly suggestion that his surrender honored the will of a Higher Being). Vespasian is said to have questioned other prisoners, who confirmed the prediction. If one of them was Joseph’s surviving companion, seconding his savior was the least he could do.

  Joseph’s assertion that he had fought on although he knew that Jotapata was doomed was less out of keeping with ancient logic than the Roman officer had implied. Stoics such as Seneca took the view that individuals supplied their own lives with meaning by their capacity to endure reversals of fortune with equanimity. Knowledge of coming disaster did not absolve an individual from the need to do his duty; even if the future was inevitable, no human being could be sure what it was. Therefore men should act in accordance with reason, not truth, which only the gods know. Heidegger’s notion of “living toward death” modernized Seneca’s glum resignation. Seneca had argued, at length, that life was a test with no prizes other than a man’s capacity to endure it with dignity. In his Letters to Lucilius, he repeated that suicide was the one freedom that no tyranny could deny him. The elaboration of Seneca’s arguments suggests that he wished that he found them more of a comfort. Suicide was an emergency exit that Joseph, unlike the philosopher, did not elect to take.m

  a The Nazis were to be adept in that department. In 1941, in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, a band of Dutch Jews attacked a German security police detachment. In Hannah Arendt’s words, from Eichmann in Jerusalem, “Four hundred and thirty Jews were arrested in reprisal and they were literally tortured to death, first in Buchenwald and then in.… Mauthausen. For months on end they died a thousand deaths.…. There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the SS saw to it that none of them was ever very far from their victims’ minds and imaginations.”

  b One of its primary meanings is “interpreter,” which chimes sweetly with Joseph’s performance both with his fellow Jews and, in due time, with the Romans.

  c Some Romans regarded the younger Cato as a martyr; others, as a prig. Dante made him a sentinel in Purgatory. As Erich Auerbach put it in Mimesis, Cato “stands for the guardian of the eternal freedom of the elect in a place where we are astonished to find a pagan.” Nero’s brightest poetic protégé, the precocious Lucan, portrayed Cato as the hero of his unfinished epic, Pharsalia. The tagline “Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni” (The Gods favored a winning cause, but Cato a lost one) was a taut obituary on the man whose noble suicide Lucan himself was required to emulate, in 65, at the age of twenty-five, at the command of his onetime friend the emperor.

  d In recent years, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, a veteran commander of genius, had accumulated more victories than Nero cared to applaud. Corbulo had already faced a similar problem in 47 C.E., when the emperor Claudius felt upstaged by his successes in Germany. Even then Corbulo was rumored to have commented, “Roman generals were lucky in the old days” (when glory had led to fame and fortune). In October 66, the great general was summoned to the emperor’s presence at Cenchreae, in Greece. He was greeted by Nero as “benefactor” and “father.” Soon afterward, his master invited him to commit suicide. Vespasian’s younger son, Domitian, later married Corbulo’s daughter Domitia.

  e The 1920s Broadway producer-director Jed Harris, whose original name was Jacob Hirsch Horowitz, always gave “notes” to his cast in an oracular whisper, the better to concentrate their attention.

  f Raleigh also became a striker of attitudes, playing the madman and the courtier, the advocate and the gambler, as occasion required; and at the last he too became a historian, surveying mankind from a lonely, doomed eminence. As he put his head on the block, his last words to the executioner with the axe—“Strike, man, what do you fear?”—remain unrivaled among exit lines.

  g In the reign of Claudius, the ex-consul Appius Junius Silanus was sentenced to death after the emperor’s third (but not last) wife, Messalina, and his powerful freedman Narcissus both reported dreams that he was plotting against the emperor. In 60, Nero had been alarmed by a comet that, it was thought, signified a change of regime. Vespasian is said by Tacitus to be “not untouched by superstition.” The stars in their courses were commonly assumed to have breaking news for great men.

  h As reported by himself, Joseph was so exact in his prophecy that he warned Vespasian that he would not be Nero’s immediate successor. In the event, three other brief reigns—those of Galba, Otho and Vitellius—would indeed precede Vespasian’s, in what came to be known as the Year of the Four Emperors. If that detail is not an a posteriori addition by Josephus, it must have been happy news for the general to be told that he would be the last of the quartet.

  i His suspicions were also aroused against the three greatest writers of his court: Lucan, Seneca and Petronius Arbiter. For Petronius, aristocrat, satirist and dilettante, living well was not so much the best revenge as a form of disdain; nothing surprised him. Only Lucan was directly, and proudly, involved with Piso; but all three littérateurs were candidates f
or Nero’s jealousy. A talent to amuse or instruct might be a way into imperial favor, but too quick a wit or too aloof a philosophy could lead to abrupt exits. Seneca may have known of Piso’s conspiracy but played no active part. A dramatist no less than a Stoic, he took the opportunity to lower his own curtain with theatrical solemnity. His brother, L. Julnius Gallio Annaeus, was the governor of Greece (Saint Paul had appeared before him) and had warmed up the audience while Nero was doing his gigs there. He too was invited to kill himself, as a precaution against fraternal loyalty. Roman political tactics were close to those of the Mafia. The domestic scene was littered with excellent cadavers. For the ruling prince, the world was cosa nostra.

  j According to romantic legend, Alexander the Great had been similarly gratified when the priests of Ammon at Siwah, an oasis in the remote Egyptian desert that he visited in disguise, “recognized” him as the son of the god whom Alexander identified with Zeus. Maurice Sartre reports, in D’Alexandre à Zénobie, that while Alexander was passing through Palestine, he became affronted when the Jewish High Priest Yaddous denied him the tribute that had been paid to Darius III. However, he was placated after Yaddous came out of Jerusalem to meet him. The conquering king prostrated himself (deference and condescension often use the same currency) and was rewarded with the promise that he would remain the lord of Asia. Alexander then sponsored sacrifices in Yaddous’s name and enrolled a body of Jewish soldiers. Some were later disciplined for refusing to build a temple to Marduk, in Babylon, but Alexander reprieved them.