The Provinces of the Roman Empire 28

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 28

If the Roman government had under the first two regents, taken on the

whole, skilfully and patiently sufficed for the task of repressing,

as far as possible, these explosive elements, the next change on the

throne brought matters close to the catastrophe. The change was saluted

with rejoicing, as in the whole empire, so specially by the Jews in

Jerusalem and Alexandria; and, after the unsociable and unloved old

man, the new youthful ruler Gaius was extravagantly extolled in both

quarters. But speedily out of trifling occasions there was developed a

formidable quarrel. A grandson of the first Herod and of the beautiful

Mariamne, named after the protector and friend of his grandfather

Herod Agrippa, about the most worthless and abandoned of the numerous

Oriental princes’ sons living in Rome, but nevertheless or on that very

account the favourite and youthful friend of the new emperor, hitherto

known solely by his dissoluteness and his debts, had obtained from his

protector, to whom he had been the first to convey the news of the

death of Tiberius, one of the vacant Jewish petty principalities as a

gift, and the title of king along with it. This prince in the year 38,

on the way to his new kingdom, came to the city of Alexandria, where

he a few months previously had attempted as a runaway bill-debtor

to borrow among the Jewish bankers. When he showed himself there in

public in his regal dress with his splendidly equipped halberdiers,

this naturally stirred up the non-Jewish inhabitants of the great

city--fond as it was of ridicule and of scandal--who bore anything but

good will to the Jews, to a corresponding parody; nor did the matter

stop there. It culminated in a furious hunting-out of the Jews. The

Jewish houses which lay detached were plundered and burnt; the Jewish

ships lying in the harbour were pillaged; the Jews that were met with

in the non-Jewish quarters were maltreated and slain. But against the

purely Jewish quarters they could effect nothing by violence. Then the

leaders lighted on the idea of consecrating the synagogues, which were

the object of their marked attentions, so far as these still stood,

collectively as temples of the new ruler, and of setting up statues of

him in all of them--in the chief synagogue a statue on a _quadriga_.

That the emperor Gaius deemed himself, as seriously as his confused

mind could do so, a real and corporeal god, everybody knew--the Jews

and the governor as well. The latter, Avillius Flaccus, an able man,

and, under Tiberius, an excellent administrator, but now hampered by

the disfavour in which he stood with the new emperor, and expecting

every moment recall and impeachment, did not disdain to use the

opportunity for his rehabilitation.[172] He not merely gave orders by

edict to put no hindrance in the way of setting up the statues in the

synagogues, but he entered directly into the Jew-hunting. He ordained

the abolition of the Sabbath. He declared further in his edicts that

these tolerated foreigners had possessed themselves unallowably of the

best part of the town; they were restricted to a single one of the five

wards, and all the other Jewish houses were abandoned to the rabble,

while masses of the ejected inhabitants lay without shelter on the

shore. No remonstrance was even listened to; eight and thirty members

of the council of the elders, which then presided over the Jews instead

of the Ethnarch,[173] were scourged in the open circus before all the

people. Four hundred houses lay in ruins; trade and commerce were

suspended; the factories stood still. There was no help left except

with the emperor. Before him appeared the two Alexandrian deputations,

that of the Jews led by the formerly (p. 170) mentioned Philo, a

scholar of Neojudaic leanings, and of a heart more gentle than brave,

but who withal faithfully took the part of his people in this distress;

that of the enemies of the Jews, led by Apion, also an Alexandrian

scholar and author, the “world’s clapper” [_cymbalum mundi_], as the

emperor Tiberius called him, full of big words and still bigger lies,

of the most assured omniscience[174] and unlimited faith in himself,

conversant, if not with men, at any rate with their worthlessness, a

celebrated master of discourse as of the art of misleading, ready for

action, witty, unabashed, and unconditionally loyal. The result of

the discussion was settled from the outset; the emperor received the

deputies while he was inspecting the works designed in his gardens, but

instead of giving a hearing to the suppliants, he put to them sarcastic

questions, which the enemies of the Jews in defiance of all etiquette

accompanied with loud laughter, and, as he was in good humour, he

confined himself to expressing his regret that these otherwise good

people should be so unhappily constituted as not to be able to

understand his innate divine nature--as to which he was beyond doubt

in earnest. Apion thus gained his case, and, wherever it pleased the

adversaries of the Jews, the synagogues were changed into temples of

Gaius.

 

[Sidenote: The statue of the emperor in the temple of Jerusalem.]

 

But the matter was not confined to these dedications introduced by

the street-youth of Alexandria. In the year 39 the governor of Syria,

Publius Petronius, received orders from the emperor to march with

his legions into Jerusalem, and to set up in the temple the statue

of the emperor. The governor, an honourable official of the school

of Tiberius, was alarmed; Jews from all the land, men and women,

gray-haired and children, flocked to him, first to Ptolemais in Syria,

then to Tiberias in Galilee, to entreat his mediation that the outrage

might not take place; the fields throughout the country were not

tilled, and the desperate multitudes declared that they would rather

suffer death by the sword or famine than be willing to look on at this

abomination. In reality the governor ventured to delay the execution

of the orders and to make counter-representations, although he knew

that his head was at stake. At the same time the king Agrippa, lately

mentioned, went in person to Rome to procure from his friend the

recall of the orders. The emperor in fact desisted from his desire, in

consequence, it is said, of his good humour when under the influence

of wine being adroitly turned to account by the Jewish prince. But at

the same time he restricted the concession to the single temple of

Jerusalem, and sent nevertheless to the governor on account of his

disobedience a sentence of death, which indeed, accidentally delayed,

was not carried into execution. Gaius now resolved to break the

resistance of the Jews; the enjoined march of the legions shows that he

had this time weighed beforehand the consequences of his order. Since

those occurrences the Egyptians, ready to believe in his divinity,

had his full affection just as the obstinate and simple-minded Jews

had his corresponding hatred; secretive as he was and accustomed to

grant favours in order afterwards to revoke them, the worst could not

but appear merely postponed. He was on the point of departing for

Alexandria in order there to receive in person the incense of his

altars; and the statue, which he thought of erecting to himself in

Jerusalem, was--it is said--quietly in preparation, when, in January

41, the dagger of Chaerea delivered, among other things, the temple of

Jehovah from the monster.

 

[Sidenote: Jewish dispositions.]

 

[Sidenote: The Apocalypse of John.]

 

The short season of suffering left behind it no outward consequences;

with the god his altars fell. But yet the traces of it remained on

both sides. The history, which is here being told, is that of an

increasing hatred between Jews and non-Jews, and in it the three years’

persecution of the Jews under Gaius marks a section and an advance.

The hatred of Jews and the Jew-hunts were as old as the Diaspora

itself; these privileged and autonomous Oriental communities within

the Hellenic could not but develop them as necessarily as the marsh

generates the malaria. But such a Jew-hunt as the Alexandrian of

the year 38, instigated by defective Hellenism and directed at once

by the supreme authority and by the low rabble, the older Greek and

Roman history has not to show. The far way from the evil desire of the

individual to the evil deed of the collective body was thus traversed,

and it was shown what those so disposed had to will and to do, and were

under circumstances also able to do. That this revelation was felt

also on the Jewish side, is not to be doubted, although we are not in

a position to adduce documentary evidence in support of it.[175] But

a far deeper impression than that of the Jew-hunt at Alexandria was

graven on the minds of the Jews by the statue of the god Gaius in the

Holy of Holies. The thing had been done once already; a like proceeding

of the king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, had been followed by the

rising of the Maccabees and the victorious restoration of the free

national state (iii. 64) {iii. 61.}. That Epiphanes--the Anti-Messiah

who ushers in the Messiah, as the prophet Daniel had, certainly after

the event, delineated him--was thenceforth to every Jew the prototype

of abomination; it was no matter of indifference, that the same

conception came to be with equal warrant attached to a Roman emperor,

or rather to the image of the Roman ruler in general. Since that

fateful edict the Jews never ceased to dread that another emperor might

issue a like command; and so far certainly with reason, as according to

the organisation of the Roman polity such an enactment depended solely

on the momentary pleasure of the ruler for the time. This Jewish hatred

of the worship of the emperor and of imperialism itself, is depicted

with glowing colours in the Apocalypse of John, for which, chiefly

on that account, Rome is the harlot of Babylon and the common enemy

of mankind.[176] Still less matter of indifference was the parallel,

which naturally suggested itself, of the consequences. Mattathias of

Modein had not been more than Judas the Galilean; the insurrection of

the patriots against the Syrian king was almost as hopeless as the

insurrection against the monster beyond the sea. Historical parallels

in practical application are dangerous elements of opposition; only too

rapidly does the structure of long years of wise government come to be

shaken.

 

[Sidenote: Claudius and the Jews.]

 

[Sidenote: Agrippa.]

 

The government of Claudius turned back on both sides into the paths

of Tiberius. In Italy there was repeated, not indeed precisely the

ejection of the Jews, since there could not but arise a conviction that

this course was impracticable, but at any rate a prohibition of the

exercise of their worship[177] in common, which, it is true, amounted

nearly to the same thing and probably came as little into execution.

Alongside of this edict of intolerance and in an opposite sense, by an

ordinance embracing the whole empire the Jews were freed from those

public obligations which were not compatible with their religious

convictions; whereby, as respected service in war particularly, there

was doubtless conceded only what hitherto it had not been possible

to compel. The exhortation, expressed at the close of this edict, to

the Jews to exercise now on their part also greater moderation, and

to refrain from the insulting of persons of another faith, shows that

there had not been wanting transgressions also on the Jewish side.

In Egypt as in Palestine the religious arrangements were, at least

on the whole, re-established as they had subsisted before Gaius,

although in Alexandria the Jews hardly obtained back all that they had

possessed;[178] the insurrectionary movements, which had broken out,

or were on the point of breaking out, in the one case as in the other,

thereupon disappeared of themselves. In Palestine Claudius even went

beyond the system of Tiberius and committed the whole former territory

of Herod to a native prince, that same Agrippa who accidentally had

come to be friendly with Claudius and useful to him in the crises of

his accession. It was certainly the design of Claudius to resume the

system followed at the time of Herod and to obviate the dangers of the

immediate contact between the Romans and Jews. But Agrippa, leading an

easy life and even as a prince in constant financial embarrassment,

good-humoured, moreover, and more disposed to be on good terms with

his subjects than with the distant protector, gave offence in various

ways to the government, for example, by the strengthening the walls

of Jerusalem, which he was forbidden to carry further; and the towns

that adhered to the Romans, Caesarea and Sebaste, as well as the

troops organised in the Roman fashion, were disinclined to him. When

he died early and suddenly in the year 44, it appeared hazardous to

entrust the position, important in a political as in a military

point of view, to his only son of seventeen years of age, and those

who wielded power in the cabinet were reluctant to let out of their

hands the lucrative procuratorships. The Claudian government had here,

as elsewhere, lighted on the right course, but had not the energy to

carry it out irrespective of accessory considerations. A Jewish prince

with Jewish soldiers might exercise the government in Judaea for the

Romans; the Roman magistrate and the Roman soldiers offended probably

still more frequently through ignorance of Jewish views than through

intentional action in opposition to them, and whatever they might

undertake was on their part in the eyes of believers an offence, and the most indifferent occurrence a religious outrage.