A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors by Anthony Blond Read Free Book Online Page A

Josephus describes them thus:
    The Essenes profess a severe discipline . . . They eschew pleasure-seeking as a vice and regard temperance and mastery of the passions as a virtue. Scorning wedlock, they
     select other men’s children and fashion them after their own pattern . . . contemptuous of wealth, they are communists to perfection . . . each man’s possessions go into the pool . .
     . Men to supervise the community’s affairs are elected by a show of hands, chosen for their tasks by universal suffrage.
    Apart from their misogyny, Josephus could be describing Chassids in North London or the Bronx, and apart from their silence and severe piety, an early Kibbutz in Israel. Certainly, like
latter-day
kibbutzniks,
the Essenes were famous for their fighting capacity, their only personal possession being a knife.
    In the Jewish War the Romans also came up against the Zealots and the Sicarii, so-called from the daggers hidden on their persons. During the Siege of Jerusalem, Titus found three factions
fighting each other and occasionally successfully combining against him. As Josephus explains, ‘Men highly organized and trained to fight according to the book and in obedience to orders are
more quickly demoralized by unorthodox and enterprising tactics.’
    Finally, after hundreds of thousands of Jews had died through slaughter or starvation in every corner of the once wealthy kingdom of Herod, and after the capture of his fortress Masada, where
the Romans found corn, wine, oil, pulsesand dates, in a perfect state, hidden by Herod 100 years before, resistance by Jews expired. It had been an unequal fight. As Josephus
had warned his compatriots, the Romans were destined to rule the world. ‘What corner of the earth escaped the Romans, unless heat or cold made it of no value to them?’ God was on the
Roman side.
    Titus, son of Vespasian, fulfilled the prophecy of Jesus (recorded after the event), that not one stone in Jerusalem should remain on top of another, by levelling Herod’s city. Only the
tower Herod built for Mariamne I, the wife he loved and murdered by mistake, was left standing. Perhaps Titus wanted to leave a souvenir, perhaps he liked it. It is still there.
    Vespasian and Titus, like all successful Roman generals, were reasonable towards the reasonable. We have seen how they treated Josephus. Unnecessary trouble should be avoided. Romans would
always deal. When Rabbi ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin and explained to Vespasian that he had not planned on a martyr’s death, he was allowed to start a
theological college in Sfad. Titus, returning to Jerusalem, was, according to Josephus, appalled at the destruction he had ordered but reflected that the Jews had only themselves to blame. Those in
the Diaspora were made to pay for the folly of the homeland by having their annual levy to the Temple in Jerusalem diverted to a temple dedicated to Jupiter in Rome, but in no other way.
    When the not-so-good citizens of Antioch besought Titus to revoke the privileges of Antioch’s Jewish community, the second richest in the Empire next to that of Alexandria, Titus refused.
Robin Lane-Fox, in
Pagans and Christians
(Penguin, 1988), points out that for centuries of the common era the synagogue in a Roman city remained a more substantial and prominent building
than the Christian ‘house church’. But the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was a traumafrom which the Jews have never recovered. It has never been rebuilt;
the sacrifices detailed at length in the current Jewish Book of Common Prayer have never been performed; the Sanhedrin has never sat. 11
    This chapter began with the observation that the Roman world was not averse to new religious experience. Judaism had now been tainted by its connection with an unpleasant little war; an
alternative was waiting in the wings.
    The whole of Rome turned out for the Triumphs of Vespasian and Titus. (The Senate had voted them