The Provinces of the Roman Empire 60

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 60

[167] This title, which primarily denotes the collegiate tetrarchate,

such as was usual among the Galatians, was then more generally

employed for the rule of all together, nay, even for the rule of one,

but always as in rank inferior to that of king. In this way, besides

Galatia, it appears also in Syria, perhaps from the time of Pompeius,

certainly from that of Augustus. The juxtaposition of an ethnarch and

two tetrarchs, as it was arranged in the year 713 {41 B.C.} for

Judaea, according to Josephus (_Arch._ xiv. 13, 1; _Bell. Jud._ i. 12,

5), is not again met with elsewhere; Pherores tetrarch of Peraea under

his brother Herodes (_Bell. Jud._ i. 24, 5) is analogous.

 

[168] The statement of Josephus that Judaea was attached to the

province of Syria and placed under its governor (_Arch._ xvii _fin._:

τοῦ δὲ Ἀρχελάου χώρας ὑποτελοῦς προσνεμηθείσης τῇ Σύρων; xviii. 1, 1:

εἰς τὴν Ἰουδαίων προσθήκην τῆς Συρίας γενομένην; c. 4, 6) appears to

be incorrect; on the contrary, Judaea probably formed thenceforth a

procuratorial province of itself. An exact distinction between the _de

iure_ and _de facto_ interference of the Syrian governor may not be

expected in the case of Josephus. The fact that he organised the new

province and conducted the first census does not decide the question

what arrangement was assigned to it. Where the Jews complain of their

procurator to the governor of Syria and the latter interferes against

him, the procurator is certainly dependent on the legate; but, when

L. Vitellius did this (Josephus, _Arch._ xviii. 4, 2), his power

extended in quite an extraordinary way over the province (Tacitus,

_Ann._ vi. 32; _Staatsrecht_, ii. 822), and in the other case the

words of Tacitus, _Ann._ xii. 54: _quia Claudius ius statuendi etiam

de procuratoribus dederat_, show that the governor of Syria could not

have pronounced such a judgment in virtue of his general jurisdiction.

Both the _ius gladii_ of these procurators (Josephus, _Bell. Jud._ ii.

8, 1: μέχρι τοῦ κτείνειν λαβὼν παρὰ τοῦ Καίσαρος ἐξουσίαν, _Arch._

xviii. 1, 1; ἡγησόμενος Ἰουδαίων τῇ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἐξουσίᾳ) and their whole

demeanour show that they did not belong to those who, placed under an

imperial legate, attended only to financial affairs, but rather, like

the procurators of Noricum and Raetia, formed the supreme authority for

the administration of law and the command of the army. Thus the legates

of Syria had there only the position which those of Pannonia had in

Noricum and the upper German legate in Raetia. This corresponds also

to the general development of matters; all the larger kingdoms were on

their annexation not attached to the neighbouring large governorships,

whose plenitude of power it was not the tendency of this epoch to

enlarge, but were made into independent governorships, mostly at first

equestrian.

 

[169] According to Josephus (_Arch._ xx. 8, 7, more exact than _Bell.

Jud._ ii. 13, 7) the greatest part of the Roman troops in Palestine

consisted of Caesareans and Sebastenes. The _ala Sebastenorum_ fought

in the Jewish war under Vespasian (Josephus, _Bell. Jud._ ii. 12,

5). Comp. _Eph. epigr._ v. 194. There are no _alae_ and _cohortes

Iudaeorum_.

 

[170] The revenues of Herod amounted, according to Josephus, _Arch._

xvii. 11, 4, to about 1200 talents, whereof about 100 fell to Batanaea

with the adjoining lands, 200 to Galilee and Peraea, the rest to the

share of Archelaus; in this doubtless the older Hebrew talent (of about

£390) is meant, not, as Hultsch (Metrol. ^2, p. 605) assumes, the

denarial talent (of about £260), as the revenues of the same territory

under Claudius are estimated in the same Josephus (_Arch._ xix. 8, 2),

at 12,000,000 denarii (about £500,000). The chief item in it was formed

by the land-tax, the amount of which we do not know; in the Syrian

time it amounted at least for a time to the third part of corn and

the half of wine and oil (1 Maccab. x. 30), in Caesar’s time for Joppa

a fourth of the fruit (p. 175, note), besides which at that time the

temple-tenth still existed. To this was added a number of other taxes

and customs, auction-charges, salt-tax, road and bridge moneys, and the

like; it is to these that the publicans of the Gospels have reference.

 

[171] On the marble screen (δρύφακτος), which marked off the inner

court of the temple, were placed for that reason tablets of warning

in the Latin and Greek language (Josephus, _Bell. Jud._ v. 5, 2; vi.

2, 4; _Arch._ xv. 11, 5). One of the latter, which has recently been

found (_Revue Archéologique_, xxiii. 1872, p. 220), and is now in the

public museum of Constantinople, is to this effect: μήθ’ ἕνα ἀλλογενῆ

εἰσπορεύεσθαι ἐντὸς τοῦ περὶ τὸ ἱερὸν τρυφάκτου καὶ περιβόλου. ὃς

δ’ ἂν ληφθῆ, ἑαυτῷ αἴτιος ἔσται διὰ τὸ ἐξακολουθεῖν θάνατον. The iota

in the dative is present, and the writing good and suitable for the

early imperial period. These tablets were hardly set up by the Jewish

kings, who would scarcely have added a Latin text, and had no cause to

threaten the penalty of death with this singular anonymity. If they

were set up by the Roman government, both are explained; Titus also

says (in Josephus, _Bell. Jud._ vi. 2, 4), in an appeal to the Jews:

οὐχ ἡμεῖς τοὺς ὑπερβάντας ὑμῖν ἀναιρεῖν ἐπετρέψαμεν, κἂν Ῥωμαῖός τις

ᾖ;--If the tablet really bears traces of axe-cuts, these came from the

soldiers of Titus.

 

[172] The special hatred of Gaius against the Jews (Philo, _Leg._ 20)

was not the cause, but the consequence, of the Alexandrian Jew-hunt.

Since therefore the understanding of the leaders of the Jew-hunt

with the governor (Philo, _in Flacc._ 4) cannot have subsisted on

the footing that the Jews imagined, because the governor could not

reasonably believe that he would recommend himself to the new emperor

by abandoning the Jews, the question certainly arises, why the leaders

of those hostile to the Jews chose this very moment for the Jew-hunt,

and above all, why the governor, whose excellence Philo so emphatically

acknowledges, allowed it, and, at least in its further course, took

personal part in it. Probably things occurred as they are narrated

above: hatred and envy towards the Jews had long been fermenting in

Alexandria (Josephus, _Bell. Jud._ ii. 18, 9; Philo, _Leg._ 18); the

abeyance of the old stern government, and the evident disfavour in

which the prefect stood with Gaius, gave room for the tumult; the

arrival of Agrippa furnished the occasion; the adroit conversion of the

synagogues into temples of Gaius stamped the Jews as enemies of the

emperor, and, after this was done, Flaccus must certainly have seized

on the persecution to rehabilitate himself thereby with the emperor.

 

[173] When Strabo was in Egypt in the earlier Augustan period the Jews

in Alexandria were under an Ethnarch (_Geogr._ xvii. 1, 13, p. 798,

and in Josephus, _Arch._ xiv. 7, 2). Thereupon, when under Augustus

the Ethnarchos or Genarchos, as he was called, died, a council of the

elders took his place (Philo, _Leg._ 10); yet Augustus, as Claudius

states (Josephus, _Arch._ xix. 5, 2), “did not prohibit the Jews from

appointing an Ethnarch,” which probably is meant to signify that the

choice of a single president was only omitted for this time, not

abolished once for all. Under Gaius there were evidently only elders of

the Jewish body; and also under Vespasian these are met with (Josephus,

_Bell._ vii. 10, 1). An archon of the Jews in Antioch is named in

Josephus, _Bell._ vii. 3, 3.

 

[174] Apion spoke and wrote on all and sundry matters, upon the

metals and the Roman letters, on magic and concerning the Hetaerae,

on the early history of Egypt and the cookery receipts of Apicius;

but above all he made his fortune by his discourses upon Homer, which

acquired for him honorary citizenship in numerous Greek cities. He had

discovered that Homer had begun his Iliad with the unsuitable word

μῆνις for the reason that the first two letters, as numerals, exhibit

the number of the books of the two epics which he was to write; he

named the guest-friend in Ithaca, with whom he had made inquiries as

to the draught-board of the suitors; indeed he affirmed that he had

conjured up Homer himself from the nether world to question him about

his native country, and that Homer had come and had told it to him, but

had bound him not to betray it to others.

 

[175] The writings of Philo, which bring before us this whole

catastrophe with incomparable reality, nowhere strike this chord; but,

apart even from the fact that this rich and aged man had in him more of

the good man than of the good hater, it is obvious of itself that these

consequences of the occurrences on the Jewish side were not publicly

set forth. What the Jews thought and felt may not be judged of by what

they found it convenient to say, particularly in their works written

in Greek. If the Book of Wisdom and the third book of Maccabees are

in reality directed against the Alexandrian persecution of the Jews

(Hausrath, _Neutestam. Zeitgesch._ ii. 259 ff.)--which we may add is

anything but certain--they are, if possible, couched in a still tamer

tone than the writings of Philo.

 

[176] This is perhaps the right way of apprehending the Jewish

conceptions, in which the positive facts regularly run away into

generalities. In the accounts of the Anti-Messias and of the Antichrist

no positive elements are found to suit the emperor Gaius; the view

that would explain the name Armillus, which the Talmud assigns to

the former, by the circumstance that the emperor Gaius sometimes

wore women’s bracelets (_armillae_, Suetonius, _Gai._ 52), cannot

be seriously maintained. In the Apocalypse of John--the classical

revelation of Jewish self-esteem and of hatred towards the Romans--the

picture of the Anti-Messias is associated rather with Nero, who did not

cause his image to be set up in the Holy of Holies. This composition

belongs, as is well known, to a time and a tendency, which still viewed

Christianity as essentially a Jewish sect; those elected and marked

by the angel are all Jews, 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes, and

have precedence over the “great multitude of other righteous ones,”

_i.e._ of proselytes (ch. vii.; comp. ch. xii. 1). It was written,

demonstrably, after Nero’s fall, and when his return from the East was

expected. Now it is true that a pseudo-Nero appeared immediately after

the death of the real one, and was executed at the beginning of the

following year (Tacitus, _Hist._ ii. 8, 9); but it is not of this one

that John is thinking, for the very exact account makes no mention,

as John does, of the Parthians in the matter, and for John there is

a considerable interval between the fall of Nero and his return, the

latter even still lying in the future. His Nero is the person who,

under Vespasian, found adherents in the region of the Euphrates, whom

king Artabanus acknowledged under Titus and prepared to reinstate in

Rome by military force, and whom at length the Parthians surrendered,

after prolonged negotiations, about the year 88, to Domitian. To these

events the Apocalypse corresponds quite exactly.

 

On the other hand, in a writing of this character no inference as to

the state of the siege at the time can possibly be drawn, from the

circumstance that, according to xi. 1, 2, only the outer court, and

not the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Jerusalem was given into the

power of the heathen; here everything in the details is imaginary, and

this trait is certainly either invented at pleasure or, if the view

be preferred, possibly based on orders given to the Roman soldiers,

who were encamped in Jerusalem after its destruction, not to set

foot in what was formerly the Holy of Holies. The foundation of the

Apocalypse is indisputably the destruction of the earthly Jerusalem,

and the prospect thereby for the first time opened up of its future

ideal restoration; in place of the razing of the city which had taken

place there cannot possibly be put the mere expectation of its capture.

If, then, it is said of the seven heads of the dragon: βασιλεῖς ἑπτά

εἰσιν· οἱ πέντε ἔπεσαν, ὁ εἷς ἔστιν, ὁ ἄλλος οὔπω ἦλθεν, καὶ ὅταν

ἔλθῃ ὀλίγον αὐτὸν δεῖ μεῖναι (xvii. 10), the five, presumably, are

Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, Nero, the sixth Vespasian, the

seventh undefined; “the beast which was, and is not, and is itself the

eighth, but of the seven,” is, of course, Nero. The undefined seventh

is incongruous, like so much in this gorgeous, but contradictory and

often tangled imagery; and it is added, not because the number seven

was employed, which was easily to be got at by including Caesar, but

because the writer hesitated to predicate immediately of the reigning

emperor the short government of the last ruler and his overthrow by

the returning Nero. But one cannot possibly--as is done after others

by Renan--by including Caesar in the reckoning, recognise in the sixth

emperor, “who is,” Nero, who immediately afterward is designated as he

who “was and is not,” and in the seventh, who “has not yet come and

will not rule long,” even the aged Galba, who, according to Renan’s

view, was ruling at the time. It is clear that the latter does not belong at all to such a series, any more than Otho and Vitellius.