Chapter 5

It is not certain whether he accompanied "the gentle Titus" through Syria after the fall of the city and the razing of its walls. The victor's progress was marked at each stopping-place by the celebration of games, where thousands of young Jewish captives were made to kill each other, "butchered to make a Roman holiday" and feast the eyes of the conqueror and the Herodian ally and his spouse. But he certainly witnessed at Rome the triumph of the Flavii, father and son, and gazed on the shame of his country, when its most holy monuments were carried by the noblest of the captives through the streets amid the applause and ribald jeers of a Roman crowd. Josephus enlarges with apparent apathy on the procession, which is commemorated and made vivid down to our own day by the arch in the Roman Forum, through which no Jew in the Middle Ages would pass. He records, too, that Vespasian built a Temple of Peace, in which he stored the golden vessels taken from the Jewish sanctuary, and put up the whole of Judea for sale as his private property.[1] Josephus himself was housed in the royal palace, and it does not appear that he ever returned to Palestine. The tenth legion had been left on the site of Jerusalem as a permanent Roman garrison, and a fortified camp was built for it on the northern hill. "The legions swallowed her up and idolaters possessed her." _A chacun selon ses oeuvres_ is the comment of Salvador, the Franco-Jewish historian (fl. 1850), comparing the gilded servitude of Josephus with the fate of the patriots of Jerusalem; and another recent historian, Graetz, has contrasted the picture of Jeremiah uttering his touching laments over the ruins at the fall of the first Temple with the position of Josephus pouring out his fulsome adulation of the destroyer at the fall of the second.

[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. vi. 6.]

Henceforth Josephus lived, an exile from his country and his countrymen, in the retinue of the Caesars, and entered on his career as his people's historian. But he was never allowed to forget his dependence. His first work was an account of the Roman war, in which he vilified the patriots to extenuate his own surrender and his master's cruelty. It is true that he afterwards composed an elaborate apology for his people in the form of a history in twenty volumes, which may be considered as a kind of palliation for the evil he had done them in action. It was more possible to refute the Roman prejudices based on utter ignorance of Jewish history, than the prejudices based on their narrowness of mind. But even here the writer has often to accommodate himself to a pagan standpoint, which could not appreciate Hebrew sublimity. When he wrote the _Antiquities_, his mind was already molded in Greco-Roman form, and where he seeks to glorify, he not seldom contrives to degrade. His works are a striking example of inward slavery in outward freedom, for by dint of breathing the foreign atmosphere and imbibing foreign notions he had become incapable of presenting his people's history in its true light. He had been granted full Roman citizenship, and received a literary pension. Still he was not loved by other courtiers as worthy as himself, and he had frequently to defend himself against the charges of his enemies. In the reign of Vespasian, after the Zealot rising in Cyrene had been put down, the leader, Jonathan, who was brought as a prisoner to Rome, charged Josephus before the Emperor with having sent him both weapons and money. The story was not believed, and the informer was put to death. After that, Josephus relates, "when they that envied my good fortune did frequently bring censure against me, by God's Providence I escaped them all."

He remained in favor under Titus and Domitian, who in turn succeeded their father in the purple. Domitian indeed, though he persecuted the Jews, and laid new fiscal burdens upon them, punished the accusers of Josephus, and made his estate in Judea tax-free, and the Emperor's wife, Domitia, also showed him kindness. But perhaps the amazing and pathetic servility of the _Life_ is to be explained by fear of the vainglorious despot, whose hand was heavy on all intellectual work. Historical writers suffered most under his oppression, and it may have been necessary to Josephus to make out that he had been a traitor. It may appear more to his credit as a courtier than as a Jew that the enemy of his people was friendly towards him. But his position must have been perilous during the black reign of the tyrant, who rivaled Nero for maniac cruelty. His chief patron was one Epaphroditus, by his name a Greek, perhaps to be identified with a celebrated librarian and scholar, to whom he dedicated his _Antiquities_ and the books _Against Apion_. He lived on probably[1] till the beginning of the second century, through the short but tranquil rule of Nerva, when there was a brief interlude of tolerance and intellectual freedom, into the reign of Trajan, who was to deal his people injuries as deep as those Titus had inflicted. It is uncertain whether he survived to witness the horrors of the desperate rising of the Jews, which sealed their national doom throughout the Diaspora. At least he did not survive to describe it. His last work that has come down to us is the _Life_, which is an apologetic pamphlet, perversely self-vilifying, in which he sought to refute the accusation of his rival Justus of Tiberias, that he had taken a commanding part in the war against the Romans in Galilee, and had been the guiding spirit of the Rebellion.

[Footnote 1: It has, however, been suggested that the date of Agrippa's death, which is recorded in the _Life_, was really 95 C.E., instead of 103 C.E., as is usually accepted; if that is so, Josephus may not have outlived the black reign of Domitian, which lasted till 97 C.E. See J.H. Hart, s.v. Josephus, in Encycl. Brit. 11th ed.]

The _Life_ is the least creditable of Josephus' works; but, as we have seen, it was wrung from him under duress, and cannot be taken as a genuine revelation of his mind. It is not a full autobiography; save for a short Prologue and a short Epilogue, it deals exclusively with the author's conduct in Galilee prior to the campaign of Vespasian, and it differs materially in political color as well as in the narrative of facts from the account of the same period in the _Wars_. In the earlier work his object had been to excuse his countrymen for their revolt, and at the same time to show the ability with which he had served their true interests, as the representative of the party that sought to preserve the nation at the sacrifice of its independence. But in the later work he is writing not a partisan but a personal apology, composed when his life was in danger, and when he no longer was anxious to save appearances with his countrymen. And he devoted his ingenuity to showing that throughout the events in Galilee he was the friend of Rome, seeking under the guise of resistance to smooth the way for the invaders and deliver the gates of Palestine into their hands. That he had so to demean himself is the most pathetic commentary on the bitter position which he was called on to endure after twenty years of servile life. The work was published or reissued after the death of King Agrippa, which took place in 103 C.E., and is recorded in it.[1] Agrippa was the last of the Herodians to rule, and with his death the last part of Palestine that had the outward show of independence was absorbed into the Roman Empire. But though the whole of the Jewish temporal sovereignty was shattered before his last days, Josephus may have consoled himself with the progressive march of Judaism in the capital city of the conqueror.

[Footnote 1: See note above, p. 73.]

It may be put down to the credit of Josephus that amid the court society at Rome he to the end professed loyalty to his religion, and that he did not complete his political desertion by religious apostasy. His loyalty indeed is less meritorious than might seem at first sight. The Romans generally were tolerant of creeds and cults, and the ceremonial of Judaism, especially its Sabbath, appealed to many of them. Within the _pomoerium_ (limits), of the ancient city none but the city gods might be worshiped, but in Greater Rome there were numerous synagogues. In the time of Pompey, an important Jewish community existed in the cosmopolitan capital of the Empire, and later we have records of a number of congregations. Philo expressly mentions the religious privileges his brethren enjoyed at the heart of the Empire,[1] and save for an occasional expulsion the Jews appear to have been unmolested. The Flavian Emperors, satisfied with the destruction of the sanctuary and the razing of Jerusalem, did not attempt to persecute the communities of the Diaspora. For the old offering by all Jews to the Temple, they substituted a tax of two drachmas (the equivalent of the shekel voluntarily given hitherto to Jerusalem), which went towards the maintenance of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Later the fiscus Judaicus, to which every Jew and proselyte had to pay, became an instrument of oppression, but in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus it was not harshly administered. Domitian indeed vented his indignation on the people which he had not had the honor of conquering, and instituted a kind of inquisition, to ferret out the early Maranos, who dissembled their Judaism and sought to evade the tax. But his gentle successor Nerva (96-98) restored the habit of tolerance, and struck special coins, with the legend calumnia Judaica sublata (on the abolition of information against the Jews), in order to mark his clemency. Save, therefore, for the short persecution under Domitian, Judaism remained a _licita religio_ (legalized denomination) at Rome. More than that, it became a powerful missionary faith among the lower classes, and in small doses almost fashionable at the court. A near relative of the Emperor, Flavius Clemens, outraged Roman opinion by adopting its tenets.[2] It has been suggested, and it is likely, that the chief historical work of Josephus was written primarily for a group of fashionable proselytes to Judaism, to whom he ministered. He mentions members of the royal house that commended his work.[3] Some scholars have sought to associate him with the philosopher at Rome that was visited by the four rabbis of the Sanhedrin, the Patriarch Rabban Gamaliel, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Eleazar ben Arach, and Rabbi Akiba, when they came to Rome in the reign of Domitian.[4] But apart from the fact that he would hardly be described as a philosopher--a term usually reserved in the Talmud for a pagan scholar--it is as unlikely that the leaders of the Pharisaic national party would have had interviews with the renegade, as that the renegade would have befriended them. At Jotapata he deserted his people, and he passed thenceforth out of their life. It is significant that, while the history of the war was originally written in Aramaic for the benefit of the Eastern Jews, none of his later works was either written in his native language or translated into it, nor were they designed to be read by Jews.

[Footnote 1: De Leg, 82.]

[Footnote 2: It is interesting that the wife of the first Roman governor of Britain was accused, in 57 C.E., of "foreign superstition," and is said to have lived a melancholy life (Tac. Ann. xiii. 32), which may mean that she had adopted Jewish practices.]

[Footnote 3: C. Ap. i. 5.]

[Footnote 4: Sukkah, 22, quoted in Vogelstein and Rieger, Geschichte der Juden in Rom, pp. 28 and 29.]

In the palace of the Caesars Josephus became a reputable Greco-Roman chronicler, deliberately accommodating himself to the tastes of the conquerors of his people, and deliberately seeking, as Renan said, "to Hellenize his compatriots," i.e. to describe them from a Hellenized point of view. He achieved his ambition, if such it was, to be the classical authority upon the early history of the Jews. His record of his people survived through the ages, and his works were included in the public libraries of Rome, while among the Christians they had for centuries a place next the Bible.

As a writer, Josephus has, by the side of some glaring defects, considerable merits: immense industry, power of vivid narrative, an ability for using authorities, and at times a certain eloquence. But as a man he has few qualities to attract and nothing of the heroic. He was mediocre in character and mind, and for such there is no admiration. It may be admitted that he lived in hard times, when it required great strength of character for a Jew born, as he was, in the aristocratic Romanizing section of the nation, to stand true to the Jewish people and devote his energies to their desperate cause. He may have honestly believed that submission to Rome was the truest wisdom; but he placed himself in a false position by associating himself with the insurrection. And while his national feeling led him later to attempt to defend his people against calumny and ignorance, the conditions under which he labored made against the production of a true and spirited history. Yet if he does not appear worthy of admiration, we must beware of judging him harshly; and there is deep pathos in the fact that he was compelled in writing to be his own worst detractor. The combination, which the autobiographical account reveals, of egoism and self-seeking, of cowardice and vanity, of pious profession and cringing obsequiousness, of vaunted magnanimity and spiteful malice to his foes, of religious scruples and selfish cunning, points to a meanness of conduct which he was forced to assume by circumstances, but which, it is suggested, was not an expression of his true character. The document of shame was wrung from him by his past. He might have been a reliable historian had he not been called on to play a part in action. But the part he played was ignoble in itself, and it blasted the whole of his future life and his literary credit. It made his work take the form of apology, and part of it bear the stamp of deliberate falsehood. His besetting weakness of egoism led him as a general to betray his countrymen; as historian of their struggle with Rome, to misrepresent their patriotism and give a false picture of their ideals. Yet, though to the Jews of his own day he was a traitor in life and a traducer in letters, to the Jews of later generations he appears rather as a tragic figure, struggling to repair his fault of perfidy, and a victim to the forces of a hostile civilization, which in every age assail his people intellectually, and which in his day assailed them with crushing might physically as well as intellectually.

IV

THE WORKS OF JOSEPHUS AND HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS

The Jews, though they are the most historical of peoples, and though they have always regarded history as the surest revelation of God's work, have produced remarkably few historians. It is true that a large part of their sacred literature consists of the national annals, from the earliest time to the restoration of the nation after its first destruction, i.e. a period of more than two thousand years. The Book of Chronicles, as its name suggests, is a systematic summary of the whole of that period and proves the existence of the historical spirit. But their very engrossment with the story of their ancestors checked in later generations the impulse to write about their own times. They saw contemporary affairs always in the light of the past, and they were more concerned with revealing the hand of God in events than in depicting the events themselves. Thus, during the whole Persian period, which extended over two hundred years, we have but one historical document, the Book of Esther, to acquaint us with the conditions of the main body of the Jewish people. The fortunate find, a few years back, of a hoard of Aramaic papyri at Elephantine has given us an unexpected acquaintance with the conditions of the Jewish colony in Upper Egypt during the fifth and fourth centuries, and furnished a new chapter in the history of the Diaspora. But this is an archeological substitute for literary history.

The conquest of the East by Alexander the Great and the consequent interchange of Hellenic and Oriental culture gave a great impulse to historical writing among all peoples. Moved by a cosmopolitan enthusiasm, each nation was anxious to make its past known to the others, to assert its antiquity, and to prove that, if its present was not very glorious, it had at one time played a brilliant part in civilization. The Greek people, too, with their intense love of knowledge, were eager to learn the ideas and experiences of the various nations and races who had now come into their ken.

Hence, on the one hand, there appeared works on universal history by Greek polymaths, such as Hecataeus of Abdera, Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, and Ptolemy, the comrade of Alexander; and, on the other hand, a number of national histories were written, also in Greek, but by Hellenized natives, such as the Chaldaica of Berosus, the Aegyptiaca of Manetho, and the Phoenician chronicles of Dius and Menander. The people of Israel figured incidentally in several of these works, and Manetho went out of his way to include in the history of his country a lying account of the Exodus, which was designed to hold up the ancestors of the Jews to opprobrium. From the Hellenic and philosophical writers they received more justice. Their remarkable loyalty to their religion and their exalted conception of the Deity moved partly the admiration, partly the amazement of these early encyclopedists, who regarded them as a philosophical people devoted to a higher life. The Hellenistic Jews were led later by the sympathetic attitude of Hecataeus to add to his history spurious chapters, in which he was made to deal more eulogistically with their beliefs and history, and they circulated oracles and poems in the names of fabled seers of prehistoric times--Orpheus and the Sibyl--which conveyed some of the religious and moral teachings of Judaism. Nor were they slow to adapt their own chronicles for the Greek world or to take their part in the literary movement of the time. In Palestine, indeed, the Jews remained devoted to religious thought, and never made history a serious interest. But in Alexandria, after translating the Scriptures into Greek in the middle of the third century, they began, in imitation of their neighbors, to embellish their antiquities in the Greek style, and present them more thoroughly according to Greek standards of history.

A collection of extracts from the works of the Hellenistic Jews was made by a Gentile compiler of the first century B.C.E., Alexander, surnamed Polyhistor. Though his book has perished, portions of it with fragments of these extracts have been preserved in the chronicles of the ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, who wrote in the fourth century C.E. They prove the existence of a very considerable array of historical writers, who would seem to have been poor scholars of Greek, but ingenious chronologists and apologists. The earliest of the adapters, of whose work fragments have been thus preserved to us, is one Demetrius, who, in the reign of Ptolemy II, at the end of the third century B.C.E., wrote a book on the Jewish kings. It was rather a chronology than a connected narrative, and Demetrius amended the dates given in the Bible according to a system of his own. This does not appear to have been very exact, but such as it was it appealed to Josephus, who in places follows it without question. Chronology was a matter of deep import in that epoch, because it was one of the most galling and frequent charges against the Jews that their boasted antiquity was fictitious. To rebut this attack, the Jewish chroniclers elaborated the chronological indications of their long history, and brought them into relation with the annals of their neighbors.

Demetrius is followed by Eupolemus and Artapanus, who treated the Bible in a different fashion. They freely handled the Scripture narrative, and methodically embellished it with fictitious additions, for the greater glory, as they intended, of their people. They imitated the ways of their opponents, and as these sought to decry their ancestors by malicious invention, so they contrived to invest them with fictitious greatness. Eupolemus represents Abraham as the discoverer of Chaldean astrology, and identifies Enoch with the Greek hero Atlas, to whom the angel of God revealed the celestial lore. Elsewhere he inserts into the paraphrase of the Book of Kings a correspondence between Solomon and Hiram (king of Tyre), in order to show the Jewish hegemony over the Phoenicians. Artapanus, professing to be a pagan writer, shows how the Egyptians were indebted to the founders of Israel for their scientific knowledge and their most prized institutions: Abraham instructed King Pharethothis in astrology; Joseph taught the Egyptian priests hieroglyphics, and built the Pyramids; Moses (who is identified with the Greek seer Musaeus) not only conquered the Ethiopians, and invented ship-building and philosophy, but taught the Egyptian priests their deeper wisdom, and was called by them Hermes, because of his skill in interpreting ([Greek: Hermaeneia]) the holy documents. Fiction fostered fiction, and the inventions of pagan foes stimulated the exaggerations of Jewish apologists. The fictitious was mixed with the true, and the legendary material which Artapanus added to his history passed into the common stock of Jewish apologetics.

The great national revival that followed on the Maccabean victories induced both within and without Palestine the composition of works of contemporary national history. For a period the Jews were as proud of their present as of their past. It was not only that their princes, like the kings of other countries, desired to have their great deeds celebrated, but the whole people was conscious of another God-sent deliverance and of a clear manifestation of the Divine Power in their affairs, which must be recorded for the benefit of posterity. The First Book of the Maccabees, which was originally written in Hebrew, and the Chronicles of King John Hyrcanus[1] bear witness to this outburst of patriotic self-consciousness in Palestine; and the Talmud[2] contains a few fragments of history about the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, which may have formed part of a larger chronicle. The story of the Maccabean wars was recorded also at great length by a Hellenistic Jew, Jason of Cyrene, and it is generally assumed that an abridgment of it has come down to us in the Second Book of the Maccabees.

[Footnote 1: They are referred to at the end of the book. Comp. I Macc. xvi. 23f.]

[Footnote 2: Kiddushin, 66a.]

In Palestine, however, the historical spirit did not flourish for long. The interest in the universal lesson prevailed over that in the particular fact, and the tradition that was treasured was not of political events but of ethical and legal teachings. Moral rather than objective truth was the study of the schools, and when contemporary events are described, it is in a poetical, rhapsodical form, such as we find in the Psalms of Solomon, which recount Pompey's invasion of Jerusalem.[1] The only historical records that appear to have been regularly kept are the lists of the priests and their genealogy, and a calendar of fasts and of days on which fasting was prohibited because of some happy event to be commemorated.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 14.]