In the decade during which he acted as Vespasian’s deputy, Titus’s generalship earned him a reputation for saevitia (savagery). Suetonius says that even the Roman people, who had never witnessed its fury, feared his accession (rumor and gossip were the only ancient mass media). Josephus knew much more than he could ever write, if he hoped to survive. Steve Mason points out that Josephus’s effort to absolve Titus from direct involvement in Temple destruction “fits ill both with the Flavians’ celebration of it (on the arch) and with the account—quoted, probably from Tacitus, by Sulpicius Severus—that Titus himself decided that the Temple should be destroyed,” for pragmatic not pious reasons.6
Mason maintains that Josephus said as much as he dared to depict Titus as a callous conqueror; like a literary sicarius, his knife was concealed in the folds of his style.7 Later Jewish legend has it that Titus died an agonising death, only two years after his accession to the throne, in retribution for the desecration of the Temple. For those who choose to read history as a plot, death is seen as the secret agent of divine justice. In his Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius reports only that, on his deathbed, Titus said, “I have made just one mistake.” It is less likely to have been the sack of Jerusalem or the abandonment of Berenice than dying so young that his brother was left in sole charge of Rome. The unstable Domitian instituted a fifteen-year reign of terror, which Josephus had the wit and agility to survive.
Josephus’s only society comprised people whom he could never wholly trust. If he was not quite like the man Tacitus describes as “running the gauntlet of the staring streets,” shunned by everyone, he seems to have led an unobtrusive life. He is said to have lodged in what is now the Via delle Quattro Fontane, far enough away from Trastevere to suggest a fear that he might not be safe in the area where most Roman Jews chose to live. If he lacked friends, he was not short of enemies. Not long after the war was over, a certain Jonathan, alleged to be a fugitive Sicarius, fomented sedition in Cyrene. When he was captured by Catullus, the local procurator of Libya, he was said to have implicated three thousand of the “wealthier Jews” of the region, whose goods Catullus appropriated “for Caesar.” The procurator (possibly a descendant of the poet’s family) dispatched his captive in chains to Rome. In the emperor’s presence, the prisoner alleged that Josephus had sent him weapons and supplies.8 It is not improbable that Jonathan wanted to implicate the hated collaborator in a plot with which he had no connection. His evidence, extracted under torture or in fear of it, failed to convince Vespasian. Jonathan was executed and Josephus confirmed as the owner of “considerable land” in Judaea. This was taken by Josephus to prove “the providence of God, who delivers judgment on the wicked”; in pragmatic terms, it indicates that he was still professionally useful to the emperor.
Josephus mentions that he took a new wife (his fourth) but offers small account of the people he knew in Rome or of the attitude to him, or to Jews in general, in the aftermath of the repression in Judaea. Malicious rumors dogged him through the reigns of the three Flavian emperors. The sadistic Domitian was his unlikely champion against his detractors; he is said to have punished Josephus’s eunuch slave when he reported his master’s supposed machinations. Josephus’s ability to charm Roman women may again have served him well: he says that Domitian’s wife, Domitia Augusta, “never ceased showering him with favors.”9 Josephus’s last wife, “of good lineage,” bore him two sons, Justus and Simonides (surnamed Agrippa). Their Greco-Roman names—either oddly or deliberately chosen to flatter a rival historian and a source common to both—suggest that he expected his children to be assimilated into Gentile society. The Hasmonaean connection no longer had any residual luster.
The only patron to whom Josephus offers direct, brief thanks was a certain Epaphroditus, whose identity is uncertain. If he was the freedman Marcus Mettius Epaphroditus, he was a renowned teacher of grammar and a former tutor to the son of the Egyptian prefect Marcus Mettius Modestus.h A specialist in Homer, Hesiod and Callimachus, he had a big library that would have been useful to Josephus. Another Epaphroditus was Nero’s former secretary for petitions (amanuensis a libellis) who helped expose Piso’s plot against Nero in 66. Just over a year afterward, when everyone else had deserted the court, he was asked by the tremulous emperor to steady his hand while he committed suicide. This second Epaphroditus survived into Domitian’s reign but was then executed, less because he had done anything wicked than as a warning to anyone else who might care to help hasten an emperor on his way to oblivion. Tyrannies breed duplicity; the courtier often doubles with the assassin.
Josephus remarks of his benefactor that “he himself has been associated with great events and diverse vicissitudes.” This inclines Steve Mason to favor the second Epaphroditus as his patron. Hannah Cotton and Werner Eck take a contrary view.10 Learned conflict proves only how little can be proved about Josephus’s Roman fortunes. First-century Rome has been described by Vasily Rudich as “an uncanny world of illusion and delusion, ambivalences and ambiguities on all levels of social interaction.”11 Even though Nero had been blacklisted, criticism of the dead emperor was taken personally by Domitian, since it was, in the younger Pliny’s words “de similissimo”: about a bird of very similar feather. Perhaps the paranoid emperor knew that his nickname was “the bald Nero.” It remained prudent not to boast of favors received, however indirectly, from Nero’s circle. This may explain the brevity of Josephus’s account of his connection with Nero’s empress, Poppaea Sabina. (Had he been more of a Suetonian gossip, he might have mentioned that she kept a stable of five hundred she-asses to provide milk for her bathtub.)
a Damascus, the capital of modern Syria, was the locus of the blood libel that, in 1840, was seconded by the French consul in the city.
b Unlike Nero’s Golden House, which was intended to occupy the same ground and which was going to be paid for only by exacting taxes.
c Osip Mandelstam’s 1933 poem deriding Stalin’s “cockroach whiskers” was enough to lead to his long persecution. When Stalin telephoned Boris Pasternak and asked his opinion of Mandelstam, Pasternak was famously frightened. After he had finished equivocating, Stalin is said to have remarked, “Is that the best you can do for your friend?” Pasternak survived. Mandelstam did not. Stalin did not execute Mandelstam, but he made it clear that his minions should do nothing officious to keep him alive. It is impossible to present a clear picture of Stalin’s vexed relations with writers without acknowledging how many of those he murdered were Jews. One was the short-story writer Isaac Babel, who said, early in Stalin’s reign, that he had discovered a new art form: silence. It proved too loud for the tyrant. In 1940, he was accused of being a Trotskyite, tortured and then shot.
d As a species, historians play with inquisitive skill on the reminiscential vanity of those with privileged access to great places (and great beds).
e “Queen Berenice, whom it is said he had promised to marry, was immediately sent away from the city by a Titus as reluctant to expel her as she was to go.”
f Racine’s tragic heroine had an afterlife in the French brothels of the belle époque, which often featured a raven-haired beauty known as la juive whose exotic favors were particularly desirable. A conspicuous literary example is “Rachel when from the Lord” in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, another work in the Josephan tradition of redemptive recollection. In the Faubourg St.-Honoré, Jewish women of rich provenance had a greater exchange value than males. Two Rothschild sisters, both friends of Proust’s, became the Duchesse de Gramont and the Princesse de Wagram. Proust’s fictional Swann—based on a blend of Charles Haas and Charles Ephrussi—epitomizes the exquisite flâneur who, by his idiosyncratic assimilation and wealth, detaches himself from the mass of Jews, but never quite denies his Jewishness. It is suggested only obliquely that Proust’s narrator has any “Israelite” connection. The desire to conceal Jewish origins is ridiculed in the character of Bloch, a Jew so reluctant to speak his name that he changes it to Jacques du Rozier. The
young Bloch’s pseudo-Homeric vocabulary is an early fuite en avant, a run for clever camouflage. His later assumption of a particule, the signal of aristocracy, conveys the sarcasm the snobbish Proust displayed for snobs less stylish than himself.
g Hadrian was a more vindictive enemy of the Jews than Vespasian or Titus, whose repression lacked the “racial” animus of the later emperor. It prompted Tacitus to say, “In their treatment of Judaea, the Romans made a desert and called it peace.” If only for the sake of an epigram, he afforded himself a thin measure of pity for the victims of the war.
h Lucian’s sardonic article “On Salaried Posts in Great Houses” suggests that erudition like that of this Epaphroditus was no passport to an easy life or to social eminence when dining out in Rome. Lucian makes it clear that alien intellectuals who provided great families with their academic house pets were always in danger of humiliation or ejection. That men such as Josephus’s patron were themselves liable to be patronized indicates Josephus’s own nervous standing on the social ladder.
XIII
THE EMPEROR DOMITIAN’S ATTITUDE to the Jews was never benevolent, but benevolence was not his first quality in any regard. The historian Cassius Dio says that in 95 “Domitian slew, along with many others, Flavius Clemens the consul, although he was a cousin and had to wife Flavia Domitilla, a relative of the emperor. Both were accused of atheism, a charge on which many who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned. Some of them were put to death, the rest were at least deprived of their property. Domitilla was merely banished to Pandateria. But Glabrio, who had been Trajan’s colleague in the consulship, was put to death.”
Martin Goodman claims that this purge proves that the “concern of the state” was the rise of “atheism.”1 Is it likely that such an abstract delinquency, for which there is not even a specific Roman word, was of importance to a paranoid and sadistic emperor? It is more plausible to suppose that the usual mercenary motives, not “anti-Semitism” or the imposition of some kind of pagan propriety, were behind the killings. It is an anachronism to presume that the rebellion in Judaea must have engendered widespread hostility to Jews in Flavian Rome. There were no religious wars or pogroms in Europe until after the triumph of Christianity. Nor were any media available to turn news into a form of incendiarism. The distant losers of the Jewish War were known merely as Judaeans. Daniel R. Schwartz maintains that, despite Agrippa II’s menacing words during his speech in Jerusalem, Jews elsewhere were not identified with them and did not suffer their fate.2
Josephus’s contemporary Epictetus of Hierapolis, in Phrygia—a freedman of the same Epaphroditus, Nero’s secretary, who may have been Josephus’s benefactor—also compares Jews to Epicureans and Stoics: members of a philosophical rather than a “national” category. The fall of Jerusalem had no theological deposit for the Romans, simply because they had no theology; the crushing of the Judaeans had only administrative consequences. It is, however, true that in Domitian’s reign, the fiscus Judaicus was extended to tax all those who adopted “the Jewish way of life.”3 This was less a dogmatic sanction against Jews than a way of raising revenue. If Domitian had been an ideological anti-Semite, he would have been capable of decreeing that he had “forbidden them to exist,” as—according to Cassius Dio—he did with the tiresome Nasamones (whom Lucan called “gens dura,” tough guys) in Libya.
Some historians argue that Judaism has to have been very unpopular after the Jewish War; but if the tax (first imposed by Titus) was worth levying, a large number of people must have been liable to it. Conversion to Judaism is also said to have become a “plague”—in other words, fashionable. It supplied a new band of taxpayers, some of them wealthy Romans who, as had Poppaea Sabina, flirted with the exotic. The supplementary charge of “failure to sacrifice to the common gods” also entailed the confiscation of property by the emperor, which suited his exchequer but had little to do with his morals.
Those deputed to enforce (and take commission from) these exactions are unlikely to have made a scrupulous distinction between Jews and Christians. Both, being monotheists, seemed equally addled. Suetonius does, however, say that the tax on Jews was “levied very keenly.” Judaizers were prosecuted for evasion along with those who concealed their origins. “I recall being around,” Suetonius says, “as a young man, when a ninety-year-old man was inspected, in front of the magistrate and a very crowded gallery, in case he was circumcised.” The degradation of suspected Jews has rarely lacked a cheerful, prurient audience. In Rome, an added humiliation was that the revenue was diverted to the treasury of Jupiter Capitolinus.
The main motive of imperial actions was economic. Vespasian put a tax on urinals, the contents of which were used by tanners as a source of ammonia. When his son Titus made the prim objection that it was unworthy to get revenue from piss, his father replied “Pecunia non olet” (Nothing smelly about money). Peter Wiseman has pointed out that when pissotiers were invented, in 1834 by the prefect of Paris, Comte Rambuteau, they became known as vespasiennes.4 Among other, grander places, Vespasian’s name has been found stamped on lead ingots from the mines in the Mendip Hills, in southwestern England. “A pig of lead,” Wiseman concludes, “is no bad memorial for Titus Flavius Vespasianus.”
Tacitus wished that the destruction of Jerusalem had put an end to Jews and Christians alike.a Tacitus’s stylish snobbery was not animated by any spiritual investment in Mars or Venus; he deplored the infiltration into Rome of people who had exclusive and alien habits. Jewish unwillingness to eat with Gentiles was not seen as a mere dietetic foible. Ovid’s versified almanac, the Fasti, makes it clear that Romans at table believed themselves adesse deos: in the presence of the gods.b Hence not to sit with them implied shunning their divinities. In the time of the Maccabees, the Greek citizens of Ptolemais, which was outside the Hasmonaean realm, instigated a general ordinance requiring local Jews to take part in a ritual feast to celebrate the Seleucid king’s birthday. Those treasonous enough to lack Greek appetites were to be put to death and lose their property.
Soon after Domitian was assassinated (and his name formally blackened), the new emperor, Nerva, rehabilitated Flavius Clemens and announced on his coinage that the abusive tax on Jews had been canceled.5 The new motif replaced the slogan Judaea capta, which had figured on Domitian’s coinage fifteen years after the event. The last of the Flavians had needed all the kudos he could mint. Nerva had played no part in the Jewish War, but in November 97 he was forced by the Praetorian Guard to adopt Trajan (the commander of the legions in Germany) as his successor. Trajan bore the same name as his father, the Marcus Ulpius Trajanus whose fame derived from the ruthlessness he had shown in the Jewish War. Renewed advertisement of the subjection of Judaea would fortify the new emperor’s legitimacy.
Josephus’s literary life was solitary and retrospective; his topic was the world he had left behind in Judaea. In the Vita, the first thing he declared in propria persona, when looking back some twenty years after his arrival in Rome, was that his Jerusalem family was “not unremarkable.” His priestly forebears are said to have belonged to the grandest of the twenty-four levels into which the traditional priesthood had been divided. Their status entitled them to the highest percentage of the tithes paid by the laity. Late in his life, Josephus rehearses his ancestors’ eminence in order to promote his authority with an alien readership. The exile’s narrow freedom depended on the skill with which he could present himself as the kind of upper-class man Gentiles would respect if he had been of their number. The impersonation of what the Romans wanted him to be led Joseph ben Mattathias to play first the seer, then the go-between and finally the ex–military man turned aristocratic scribe.
The greatest tribute aliens paid to the Roman way of life was to crave access to it and, once admitted, to assimilate its protocols. In literature, established metrical maquettes, taken from the Greeks, allowed poets such as Horace, Martial and Lucan to emulate their metropolitan peers. As the empire widened, previously alien peoples—first Ita
lians, then Gauls and Iberians, followed by others, such as Britons, from more uncouth parts—were recruited to citizenship with calculated generosity. The emperor Claudius wanted to exclude those ignorant of Latin, but bribery or indifference often breached his pedantic fence. Less than two hundred years later, Caracalla decreed formally that every free-born person living within the boundaries of the empire should be regarded as a citizen. Caracalla is said to have been “mentally unstable,” but he cannot have been all bad, unless tolerance is a vice: Saint Jerome records that the emperor had a grudge against his own father because he had witnessed a playmate of his being “seriously punished because of his Jewish religion.” There is little record of similar indignation on the part of any Christian, however virtuous.
For centuries, provincial grandees and artists converged on Rome. Seneca listed the worldly reasons that pulled citizens from all over the Mediterranean onto the roads to Rome: ambition, the call of public office, diplomacy, luxury, desire for a liberal education, the theater, networking, manliness, and the prospect of classy ways of getting rich and famous. In Rome, the right style carried no traces of a provincial accent.c Outsiders were, by definition, contemptible or absurd. Aristotle had lent logic to vanity when he said that “barbarians” were natural slaves. His views licensed the self-righteous imperialism of his pupil Alexander the Great. “Prejudice” and civility were indistinguishable. John G. Gager claims that Tacitus pandered to the “anti-Semitism of conservative senatorial groups,”6 but Tacitus was at least as keen to amuse himself as to crave applause from what had become, by his day, an upper class without the grace and gravitas that nostalgia attributed to the great figures of the republic. How many senators deigned even to know what Jews were exactly?
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