Josephus Part 2

[Footnote 2: A charitable explanation of this self-debasing account of Josephus is that he was driven to invent some story to extenuate his resistance to the Romans, and had to blacken his reputation as a patriot to save his skin. The fact that he was kept prisoner some time by Vespasian suggests that he was not so big a traitor as he pretends.]

The Talmud relates that Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, the head of the Pharisees, was carried in a coffin outside the walls of Jerusalem by his disciples, and was brought to the Roman camp, where he hailed Vespasian as Emperor and Caesar, and thereby gained his favor. If not apocryphal, the event must have happened in 69 C.E., when the Roman commander was generally expected to aim at the Imperial throne, then the object of strife between rival commanders. The rabbi belonged to the peace party, and from the beginning had opposed the war. And though his action was disapproved by the later generations, it was justified by his subsequent conduct; for it was he who, by founding the famous college at Jabneh, kept alive the Jewish spirit after the fall of the nation. For him surrender was a valid means to the preservation of the nation. The action of Josephus hardly bears the same justification. His desire for self-preservation was natural enough, but his manner of effecting it was not honorable. He was a general who, having taken a lead in the struggle for independence, had seen all his men fall, and had at the end invited the last of his comrades to kill each other, and he saved his life by sacrificing his honor. His mind was from the beginning of the struggle subjugated to Rome, but unhappily he accepted the most responsible post in the national defense and betrayed it. His address to Vespasian was mere flattery, designed to impose on a superst.i.tious man's credulity; for the ear of Vespasian, says Merivale, "was always open to pretenders to supernatural knowledge." Lastly Josephus used his safety, not for the purpose of preserving the Jewish heritage, but for personal ends. He became a flunkey of the Flavian house, and straightway started on the transformation from a Jewish priest and soldier into a Roman courtier and literary hireling. Hard circ.u.mstances compelled him to choose between a n.o.ble and an ign.o.ble part, between heroic action and weak submission. He was a mediocre man, and chose the way that was not heroic and glorious. Posterity gained something by his choice; his own reputation was fatally marred by it.

III

THE LIFE OF JOSEPHUS FROM THE TIME OF HIS SURRENDER

Josephus was little more than thirty years old at the time of his surrender. At an age when men usually begin to realize their ambition and ideal, his whole life's course was changed: he had to abandon all his old a.s.sociations, and accommodate himself to a different and indeed a hostile society. Henceforth he was a liege of the Roman conqueror, and had to submit to be Romanized not only in name but in spirit. His condition was indeed a thinly-disguised servitude. The Romans were an imperious as well as an Imperial people, and though in some circ.u.mstances they were ready to spare the lives of those who yielded, they required of them a surrender of opinion and an abas.e.m.e.nt of soul.

For the rest of his years, which comprehended the whole of his literary activity, Josephus was not therefore a free man. He acted, spoke, and wrote to order, compelled, whenever called upon, to do the will of his masters. His legal condition was first that of a _libertus_ (a freedman) of Vespasian, and as such he owed by law certain definite obligations to his patron's family. But the moral subservience of the favored prisoner of a subjugated people must have been a far profounder thing than the legal obligation arising from his status; and this enforced moral and mental subservience is a cardinal point to be remembered in forming a judgment upon Josephus. His expressed opinions are often not the revelation of his own mind, but the galling tribute which he was compelled to pay for his life. And apart from the involuntary and undeliberate adoption of Roman standards, which, living isolated from Jewish life in Rome, he could not escape, he had in writing, and no doubt in conversation, deliberately and consciously to a.s.sume the deepest-seated of the Roman prejudices towards his own people. Liberty has been defined as the power of a man to call his soul his own. And in that sense Josephus emphatically did not possess liberty. We must be on our guard, therefore, against regarding him as an independent historian, much less as writing from an independent Jewish point of view. From the time of his surrender till his death he lived and wrote as the client of the Flavian house, and all his works had to pa.s.s the Imperial censorship.

His domestic life is characteristic of his subservience. At the bidding of Vespasian, when in the Roman camp at Caesarea, he divorced his first wife, who was locked up in Jerusalem during the siege. Though by Jewish law it was forbidden to a priest to marry a captive woman, he took as his second wife a Jewess that had been brought into the Roman camp.

Having no children by her, he divorced her after a year, and married again at Alexandria. By his third wife he had three sons, but with a Roman's carelessness of the marriage bond he divorced her late in life, and married finally a n.o.ble Jewess of Crete, by whom he had two more sons, Justus and Simon Agrippa. His last two wives, be it noted, came from h.e.l.lenistic-Jewish communities, and were doubtless able to a.s.sist him in acquiring Greek.

The public as well as the domestic life of Josephus was controlled by the Roman commander. Till the end of the Jewish struggle it followed the progress of the Roman arms. He continued to play an active part in the war, not, however, as a leader of the Jews, but as the adviser of their enemies. He was attached to the staff of t.i.tus, and after witnessing the fall of the two fortresses of Galilee, Gamala and Gischala, which held out bravely under John after the capture of Jotapata, he accompanied the Roman at the end of the year 68 to Alexandria. There he spent a year, till a change of fortune came to him.

During the year 68, Vespasian captured the two chief cities which the Jewish national party held to the east side of the Jordan, Gadara and Gerasa. He then prepared to lay siege to Jerusalem. But hearing of the death of Nero and of the chaos at Rome that followed it, he stayed operations to await events in Italy. In the following year, largely by the aid of the Jewish apostate Tiberius Alexander, he secured the allegiance of all the Eastern legions, and was proclaimed Emperor. Three other generals laid claim to the same dignity, under the same t.i.tle of armed force, but in the end Vespasian's friends in Italy made themselves masters of Rome, and he repaired himself to the capital and donned the purple. Josephus was rewarded with his complete freedom, and a.s.sumed henceforth the family name of his Imperial patrons. When, at the end of the year 69, t.i.tus was appointed by his father to finish the war, he accompanied him back to Palestine. In the eighteen months' respite that had been vouchsafed to them, the Jews had spent their energy and undermined their powers of resistance by internecine strife. According to the account in the _Wars_, which unfortunately is the only full record we have of events, John of Gischala, fleeing to Jerusalem after the fall of the Galilean fortresses, roused the Zealots against the high priest Ananias, who was directing the Jewish policy towards submission to Rome. Ananias, who was of the same party as Josephus, seems to have come to the conclusion that resistance was hopeless, and he was anxious to make terms. John called in to his aid the half-savage Idumeans, who had joined the Jewish rebellion against Rome. They entered the city, and, possessing themselves of the Temple mount, spread havoc. The Temple itself ran with blood, and 8500 dead bodies, among them that of the high priest, defiled its precincts.[1] Josephus, who, to suit the Roman taste, identifies religion and ritual, declares that the fall of the city and the ruin of the nation are to be dated from that day, and upon Ananias he pa.s.ses a eulogy that is likewise written with an eye to Roman predilections:

"He was a prodigious lover of liberty and of democracy; he ever preferred the public welfare before his own advantage, and he was thoroughly sensible that the Romans were invincible. And I cannot but think that it was because G.o.d had doomed the city to destruction on account of its pollution, and was resolved to purge His sanctuary with fire, that He cut off thus its great protector."

[Footnote 1: B.J. IV. vi. 1.]

For the better part of a year, according to our historian, the Zealots maintained a reign of terror, and the various parties fought against one another in the Holy City as fiercely as the Girondists and Jacobins of the French Revolution. But on the approach of t.i.tus they abandoned their strife and united to resist the foe. The Roman general brought with him four legions, the fifth, tenth, twelfth, and fifteenth, besides a large following of auxiliaries, and his whole force amounted to 80,000 men. As head of his staff came Tiberius Alexander, the renegade nephew of Philo and formerly procurator of Judea. Josephus also was on the besieger's staff--possibly he was an officer of the body-guard (_praefectus praetorio_)--and was employed to bring his countrymen to reason. Himself convinced, almost from the moment when he took up arms, of the certainty of Rome's ultimate victory, and doubly convinced now, partly from superst.i.tious fatalism, partly from a need for extenuating his own submission, he wasted his eloquence in efforts to make them surrender.

He knew that within the besieged city there was a considerable Romanizing faction (including his own father), and either he believed, or he had to pretend to believe, that he could bring over the ma.s.s to their way of thinking. On various occasions during the siege he was sent to the walls to summon the defenders to lay down their arms. He enlarged each time on the invincible power of Rome, on the hopelessness of resistance, on the clemency of t.i.tus if they would yield, and on the terrible fate which would befall them and the Temple if they fought to the bitter end. What must have specially aroused the fury of the Zealots was his insistence that the Divine Providence was now on the side of the Romans, and that in resisting they were sinning against G.o.d. It is little wonder that on one occasion when making these harangues he was struck by a dart, and that his father was placed in prison by the Zealots. Indeed it says much for the tolerance of those whom he constantly reviles as the most abandoned scoundrels and the most cruel tyrants that they did not do him and his family greater hurt.

t.i.tus, after beating back desperate attacks by the Jews, fixed his camp on Mount Scopas, by the side of the Mount of Olives, to the north of the city, and, abandoning the idea of taking the city fortress by storm, prepared to beleaguer it in regular form. The Jews were not prepared for a siege. Josephus and the Rabbis[1] agree that the supplies of corn had been burnt by the Zealots during the civil disturbances; and as the arrival of t.i.tus coincided with the Pa.s.sover, myriads of people, who had come up from all parts of the country and the Diaspora to celebrate the festival, were crowded within its walls. It is estimated that their number exceeded two and a half million. The capital was a hard place to capture. Josephus, following probably a Roman authority, gives an account of the fortifications of Jerusalem from the point of view of the besieger, which is confirmed in large part by modern research.[2] On the southeast and west the city was unapproachable by reason of the sheer ravines of Kedron and Hinnom, overlooked by almost perpendicular precipices, which surrounded it. It was vulnerable therefore only on the north, where the two heights on which it was built were connected with the main ridge of the Judean hills; and here it was fortified with three walls. The outermost, which was built by Agrippa I, encompa.s.sed the new quarter of Bezetha, which lay outside the Temple mount to the northeast.

The second wall encompa.s.sed the part of the city on the Temple Mount and reached as far as the Tower of Antonia, which overlooked and protected the Temple. The third or innermost wall was the oldest, and encompa.s.sed the whole of the ancient city where it was open, including the hill Acra or Zion on the southeast, which was divided from Mount Moriah by the cleft known as the Tyropoeon, or cheese-market. Beyond this hill there was another eminence sloping gradually to the north, till it dropped into the valley of Jehoshaphat with an escarpment of two hundred feet.

[Footnote 1: Comp. Abot de Rabbi Nathan, vi., ed. Schechter, p. 32.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. V. iv. 1.]

Thus the rampart surrounded the two hills with a continuous line of defense, and the three quarters of the city were separated from each other by distinct walls, so that each could hold out when the other had fallen. The walls were strengthened with several towers, of which the most important were Psephinus, on the third wall at the northwest corner, Hippicus, on the old wall, which was opposite Phasaelus, and Mariamne. But the strongest, largest, and most beautiful fortress in Jerusalem was the Temple itself. It was not merely the visible center of Judaism, it was the citadel of Judea. As each successive court rose higher than the last, the "Mountain of the House" itself stood on the highest point of the inclosure. The Temple was guarded by the tower of Antonia, situated at the corner of the two cloisters, upon a rock fifty cubits high, overlooking a precipice. Like the other towers, Antonia was built by Herod, and manifested his love of largeness and strength.

Within these fortifications there were eleven thousand men under Simon, and not more than thirty thousand trained soldiers under John, to pit against eighty thousand Roman veterans; but of the two and a half million people who, it is calculated, were shut up in the city, thousands were ready at any moment to sally upon the besiegers and lay down their lives for their beloved sanctuary.

Within the city, however, there were also a number of persons wavering in their desire for resistance and anxious to find a favorable opportunity of going over to the Romans. The leaders of the high-priestly party had been killed by the Zealots, but their followers remained to hamper the defense of the city. If Josephus is to be believed, during the respite of the Pa.s.sover festival at the beginning of the siege, while the Romans were preparing their approaches and siege works, the party strife again broke out. Eleazar opened the gates of the Temple to admit the people for the festival, but John, taking treacherous advantage of the opportunity, led his men in with arms concealed beneath their garments, put his opponents to the sword, and seized the sanctuary. Josephus further represents that throughout the siege Simon and John, while resisting the Romans and defending different parts of the walls, were still engaged in their internecine strife, "and did everything that the besiegers could desire them to do."[1]

[Footnote 1: B.J. V. vi.]

The story has not the stamp of probability, and it is more likely that Josephus is distorting the jealousies of the two commanders into the dimensions of civil strife. Anyhow, the resistance which the Jews offered to the Romans showed the stubbornness of despair, or what the historian calls "their natural endurance in misfortune." At every step the legionaries were checked; in pitching their camp, in making their earthworks, in bringing up their machines; and frequently desperate sallies were made by the defenders upon the Roman entrenchments.

Nevertheless, after fifteen days the first wall was captured, and in five days more the second was taken. By a desperate sally the besieged recovered it for a little, but were again driven back by superior numbers and force. Josephus is fond of contrasting the different tempers of the two armies: on the one side power and skill, on the other boldness and the courage born of despair; here the habit of conquering, there intense national ardor.

After the capture of the second wall, he was sent to parley with the besieged, and urged, as he had done before, the invincible power of his masters.[1] "And evident it is," he added with his renegade's theology, "that fortune is on all hands gone over to them, and that G.o.d, who has shifted dominion from nation to nation, is now settled in Italy."[2]

When his address was received with scorn, he proceeded, according to his account, to lecture the people from their ancient history, in order to prove that they had never been successful in aggressive warfare. "Arms were never given to our nation, but we are always given up to be fought against and taken." The Zealots' desecration of the Temple deprived them of Divine help, and it was madness to suppose that G.o.d would be well-disposed to the wicked. Had He not shown favor to t.i.tus and performed miracles in his aid? Did not the springs of Siloam run more plentifully for the Roman general? All his appeals had no effect, and though some faint-hearted persons deserted, the mult.i.tude held firm, and the siege was pressed on more vigorously than ever. A wall of circ.u.mvallation was built round the city, and the horrors of starvation increased daily. Between the months of Nisan and Tammuz one hundred and fifty thousand corpses were carried out of the town.[3] Josephus expatiates on the terrible suffering, and again and again he denounces the iniquity of the Zealots, who continued the resistance. "No age had a generation more fruitful in wickedness; they confessed that they were the slaves, the sc.u.m, the spurious and abortive offspring of our nation." John committed the heinous sacrilege of using the oil preserved in the Temple vessels for the starving soldiers. "I suppose," says the ex-priest writing in the Roman palace, "that had the Romans made any longer delay in attacking these abandoned men, the city would either have been swallowed up by the ground opening on them, or been swept away by a deluge, or destroyed as Sodom was destroyed, since it had brought forth a generation even more G.o.dless than those that suffered such punishments."[4]

[Footnote 1: B.J. V. ix. 3.]

[Footnote 2: We are reminded of the saying of Rabbi Akiba some half-century later. When asked where G.o.d was to be sought now that the Temple was destroyed, he replied, "In the great city of Rome" (Yer.

Taanit, 69a). But the Rabbinical utterance had a very different meaning from the plea of Josephus.]

[Footnote 3: B.J. V. xiii. 7.]

[Footnote 4: B.J. V. x. and xiii.]

Famine and weariness were breaking down the strength of the Jews, and, after fierce resistance, the tower of Antonia was captured and razed to the ground. Josephus adds another chapter to detail the horrors of the famine, in which he recounts the story of the mother eating her child, which occurs also in the Midrash.[1] The Romans, he tells us, were filled with a religious loathing of their foes on account of their sins in violating the Temple and eating forbidden food, and t.i.tus excused himself for the sufferings he caused, on the ground that, as he had given the Jews the chance of securing peace and liberty, they had brought the evil on themselves. Slowly but surely the Romans gained a footing within the Temple precinct; inch by inch John was driven back, and on the Ninth of Ab the sanctuary was stormed. A torch, hurled probably by the hand of t.i.tus (see below, p. 128), set the cloisters alight, and the fire spread till the whole house was involved. The crowning catastrophe, the burning of the Holy of Holies, happened on the following day.

[Footnote 1: Ekah R. 65a.]

Josephus remained in the Roman camp throughout the siege, advising t.i.tus at each step how he might proceed. After the fall of the Temple he witnessed the last desperate struggle, when a half-starved remnant of the defenders "looked straight into death without flinching." A great modern writer sees in this unquenchable pa.s.sion of the Zealots for liberty a sublime type of steadfastness[1]; but Josephus, who after the fall of the Temple had made another unavailing effort to persuade them to lay down their arms, again pours forth his abuse upon those who fought against the sacred might of Rome. Over a million had perished in the siege, and less than one hundred thousand were captured, of whom only forty thousand were preserved. His favor with t.i.tus enabled him to redeem from captivity his brother and a large number of his friends and acquaintances and one hundred and ninety women and children.[2] His own estates near Jerusalem having been taken for a military colony, he received liberal compensation in another part of Judea. From the victor he also obtained a scroll of the law.

[Footnote 1: George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such.]

[Footnote 2: Vita, 75.]

It is not certain whether he accompanied "the gentle t.i.tus" 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 n.o.blest 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 pa.s.s. 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 G.o.d's Providence I escaped them all."

He remained in favor under t.i.tus 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 t.i.tus 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 G.o.ds 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 subst.i.tuted 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 t.i.tus it was not harshly administered. Domitian indeed vented his indignation on the people which he had not had the honor of conquering, and inst.i.tuted 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 cla.s.ses, 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 a.s.sociate 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 pa.s.sed 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 superst.i.tion," 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 h.e.l.lenize his compatriots," i.e. to describe them from a h.e.l.lenized point of view. He achieved his ambition, if such it was, to be the cla.s.sical 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 a.s.sociating 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 a.s.sume by circ.u.mstances, but which, it is suggested, was not an expression of his true character. The doc.u.ment 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 ign.o.ble 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 a.s.sail his people intellectually, and which in his day a.s.sailed them with crushing might physically as well as intellectually.