3
“Poppaea, Nero’s wife, who was a worshipper of God . . .”
JOSEPHUS, JEWISH ANTIQUITIES, 20, 195
“WHILE FELIX WAS procurator of Judea some priests whom I happened to know, [both] thoroughly decent men, were sent by him to Rome in chains on the flimsiest of charges, supposedly to explain themselves to Caesar,” Josephus tells us. “I wanted to find a way of freeing them, one reason being that I had heard how even in prison they never for a moment stopped practicing their religion, surviving on figs and nuts [in the absence of properly prepared, kosher food].” Despite Felix’s recall in disgrace in the year 60 CE, they were left to rot in jail, with their case still unheard. Finally, Josephus decided to go and plead for their release. He says that he set out shortly after his twenty-sixth birthday—possibly in 63, certainly before March 64.1
We do not know what the original incident was that had led to the men’s imprisonment. Felix may perhaps have sent them to be tried by the emperor for taking part in the fighting between factions that was by now making life in Jerusalem so unpleasant, but it is just as likely to have been a brazen attempt by the venal procurator to get the pair out of the way because they were key witnesses to one of his shabby crimes.
Josephus’s motive was not just compassion, however. He always had too much of an eye for the main chance. If successful, he would make a name for himself and impress the Sanhedrin, who may have sent him on the mission because of his fluent koine Greek, although he does not make any mention of this—perhaps to claim more credit for himself. Certainly, there could be no better way of advancing his career. His visit to imperial Rome was going to be one of the most formative experiences of his entire life.
He knew exactly whom to approach when he got there. During the brief procuratorship of Felix’s successor, Porcius Festus, from 60 to 62, King Agrippa II had a new dining room constructed on the east side of the royal palace, from where he could watch in comfort all that was going on inside the Temple. Outraged, the priests responded by building a high wall to block his view. Festus thought it wise to maintain good relations with Agrippa, who had important contacts at Rome, so he immediately demolished the wall, not realizing that it was within the Temple precincts. The Jews then asked the procurator for permission to send an embassy of ten leading citizens to Rome and seek justice from the emperor, although they were far from sure that they would get it. Festus made no objection. The ten were led by the current high priest, Ishmael ben Phiabi. Somewhat to their surprise they obtained everything they wanted after the Empress Poppaea intervened—either the wall was rebuilt or the dining room pulled down—although Ishmael and the Temple treasurer were made to stay in Rome as hostages for their people’s behavior. This gave Agrippa the chance to depose Ishmael and appoint a more pliable high priest. Reports of the empress’s friendly attitude must have circulated all over Jerusalem.2
Big ships sailed regularly to Rome from the great port of Caesarea, with its long mole and seawall, and carried a large complement of passengers. After going up the coast they would steer for Crete, then for Greece, and finally for Italy, putting in almost daily at harbors en route to take on fresh food and water and new passengers.
“I reached Rome only after an exceptionally dangerous sea voyage during which our vessel foundered in the Adriatic, leaving six hundred of us to swim throughout the entire night,” he recalls. “Towards daybreak, however, by the mercy of God we spotted a ship from Cyrene, and I and about eighty others succeeded in outswimming the rest and were allowed to come on board.” There was no room on the boat for the remainder of the passengers and crew, who were presumably left to drown, but Josephus was always philosophical about other people’s misfortunes. Eventually he landed at Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli) near Naples and made his way to Rome.3
However beautiful and imposing Jerusalem may have been, it cannot have compared with the glittering megalopolis that Josephus found when he arrived. In today’s terms it was a combination of Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago with London, Paris, and every other European capital thrown in, since it was not just the center of the Roman Empire but the political, economic, and cultural center of the civilized world. There was something monstrous about the scale of this vast urban conglomeration, which a Jew might be forgiven for comparing to Babylon of unhappy memory. Undeniably, it was magnificent, full of huge and wonderful buildings—the Capitol, the Forum, the Pantheon, and the Temple of Mars being only the best known. Their walls were covered in marble, their roofs in gilded tiles, while everywhere there were statues of marble, bronze, or even gold. Yet at the same time, the city was overcrowded and dirty, a rabbit warren of filthy lanes lying behind these marvels.
There were open air theaters for the miming companies whose spectacles and dancing, frequently obscene, drew audiences of thousands, together with amphitheaters for gladiatorial “games.” There were also “circuses,” long circuits for the hugely popular chariot races. However, it is unlikely that many Jews went to entertainments of this sort, which they considered impious. On the other hand, they must have enjoyed the numerous public gardens.
Josephus found plenty of his own people in Rome. Fifty years before, the geographer Strabo had complained that Jews were taking over every city in the world. In Josephus’s own words, “there is not a single city, whether Greek or barbarian, not a single nation, which our custom of doing no work on the seventh day has not reached, where our fasts, lamp lighting and food rituals go unobserved.”4 Rome had become a center of the “Diaspora,” the Jewish expatriate communities, with a Hebrew population numbering tens of thousands, who inhabited districts all over the city, each group living near a synagogue and with their own extensive cemeteries. Mainly merchants, many specialized in luxuries from the eastern parts of the Roman Empire—slaves and exotic animals, jewels and precious metals, silks and furs, ivory and perfume.
Roman traditionalists, who despised all foreigners except a few Greeks, looked down on them. Cicero had sneered at their “superstitions that deny all that Rome stands for,”5 and Seneca condemned “this evil race’s customs.” The Emperor Tiberius had even started to banish them from Italy, although he changed his mind, and the Emperor Claudius had threatened them with expulsion as troublemakers—most likely due to the uproar caused in the synagogues by Christian missionaries.6
Today, it is hard for us to understand just how much the monotheism of Jews and Christians, interlopers from the alien East, affronted the innate polytheism of the ancient Romans. There were also those who found Jewish taboos not so much austere as ridiculous. Philo of Alexandria records that when he led an embassy to the Emperor Caligula, the entire court burst out laughing when Caligula asked him why Hebrews never touched pork.7
Hostility toward Jews during this time should not be exaggerated, however. Julius Caesar had introduced legislation to guarantee their religious liberty, a law that had been confirmed by Augustus, who exempted them from military service. Racial antipathy was far from widespread in a city whose population was so mixed, with a never ending flood of immigrants, and on the whole they found no trouble in fitting into Roman life. Although they did not make sacrifices to the gods of Rome, they had no objection to praying for the well-being of her government in their synagogues. It was a privilege granted to no other group.
Moreover, as in every other city where the Diaspora had settled, the Roman Jews, while retaining their faith, were strongly influenced by Philhellenism. At their services, they used the Septuagint, a translation of the Jewish scriptures into Greek, and the better educated read the classics of Greek literature, from Homer to the great philosophers and fashionable poets. The widely respected Philo of Alexandria, who died in about 50 CE, was himself a distinguished philosopher who employed Platonism to prove the existence of the Jewish God.
As a young man with a very good mind, Josephus could not have been uninfluenced by the Diaspora’s intellectual climate. His stay at Rome was a period of intense intellectual development, the equivalent of a university education. Surely it was now that he began to read Greek authors, acquiring the foundations of the learning that would make him a great scholar. We know from his writings that by the time he was middle-aged he had read not only Homer but Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, together with Sophocles, Euripides, Demosthenes, and Epicurus.
On the other hand, he would have noticed approvingly how Roman Jews never for a moment forgot that Jerusalem was their true home, scrupulously observing the Law. Although they read the Torah in Greek (the Pentateuch) and spoke the koine instead of Aramaic, very few apostatized to further their careers. (No practicing Jew could become an imperial official as it meant worshipping pagan gods.) Their staunch monotheism impressed their neighbors, making converts. To some extent they proselytized, activities the poet Horace laughed at good-naturedly in the Satires.8 Many Romans who were interested but did not convert—to the extent of undergoing circumcision or taking ritual baths—remained fascinated by these extraordinary people.
It is likely that during his stay in Rome Josephus lived in one of the ramshackle tenements that housed most citizens; six, seven, or even ten stories high, jerry-built of rubble and the cheapest timber, these were apt to collapse without warning. Only the very rich could afford their own dwellings. The endless streets, many of which were soon to be demolished by the great fire of 64 CE, appear to have been as filthy as they were narrow. Belonging to a race noted for its cleanliness, he would have made a point of avoiding such amenities as the communal baths or the public lavatories, since Jews had their own, more fastidious arrangements.
He was able to go anywhere because there were Jews everywhere. His mission and background ensured a welcome, while among Romans as well as Jews he was helped by his fluent koine Greek. Educated by Greek tutors, upper-class Romans were bilingual, and instead of speaking Latin to each other, they spoke a polished version of the koine, in much the same way that eighteenth-century Europeans preferred to speak French. It was not only the language of intellectuals but the polite language. (Pace Shakespeare, when Julius Caesar was stabbed, he had cried, “Kai su, teknon!” not “Et tu, Brute!”) Most useful of all, it was used in court circles.
It is quite likely that he went at least once to the games; although they were considered impious by Jews, the games were unquestionably the most popular entertainment in Rome. In the arena, watched by thousands, gladiators recruited from the large numbers of jailed prisoners of war and criminals fought each other to the death or were pitted against bears, wolves, and lions crazed with hunger; others were burned alive or fed to ravenous animals. These ghastly spectacles appealed to all classes. Even Cicero praised them as an admirable means of teaching young men to fear neither death nor physical suffering, although he felt sorry for the animals. Writing four centuries later, Augustine of Hippo describes in his Confessions how a gentle philosopher friend who had been dragged along against his will to see the same sort of games (they must have changed very little since Nero’s time) succumbed to their dreadful fascination, despite having tried to keep his eyes shut:
A sudden shouting made him open them . . . and as soon as he saw all the blood running it was as though he had swallowed some fiercely intoxicating magic potion. Instead of looking away, he now watched greedily, drinking in every detail of the scene. He reveled in the sheer horror, suddenly overwhelmed by a murderous thirst for killing. No longer the same person who had come to the arena, he was just the same as everybody else in that baying crowd . . . He gazed besottedly, cheering and cheering, feverish with savage excitement. When at last he left the arena, his mind had become so hopelessly diseased that he could think of nothing but the next games.9
If Josephus did go, he never could have guessed that before too long thousands of his fellow countrymen were going to be slaughtered methodically in games just like these, all over the empire. It is possible, however, that he made a point of staying away. The inspiration behind such spectacles was paganism at its most evil, utterly repugnant to a devout Jew. Yet he knew at least one coreligionist who had adopted a profession still more pagan than that of a gladiator—even if it was not quite as short-lived.
“I made friends with Alliturus who, besides being a Jew, was in favor with Nero because he was an actor,” he tells us.10 It has been suggested that the word he uses for actor, mimologos, implies that Alliturus was a mime actor of the sort who entertained the guests at court banquets, which would explain why Alliturus was in the emperor’s good books. If so, it was a curious profession for a Jew, since the mimes that were staged must have included a considerable amount of bawdiness and pornographic tableaux, especially when celebrating pagan festivals: gods and goddesses copulated, satyrs raped nymphs.
Alliturus took the young Pharisee to the imperial court, in the hope of securing the priests’ release. Some idea of what he saw can be obtained from the Satyricon of Petronius, which was probably written in 65—during Josephus’s stay at Rome. If anyone knew Nero’s court, it was the author whom the emperor made his “arbiter of elegance.” He relied on Petronius’s advice on sensual enjoyment taken to the extreme, on the ultimate refinements of debauchery, though later he forced him to commit suicide. Sardonic and pornographic, in exquisite prose the novel depicts a world in which money’s only rival is sexual pleasure, whether heterosexual or homosexual. (At one point the narrator says he feels the entire population of Rome has been swallowing aphrodisiacs.) The most memorable section is the banquet given by the multimillionaire ex-slave Trimalchio—to some extent modeled on Nero—where the food includes dormice dipped in honey, sows’ udders, and peahens’ eggs, accompanied by acrobatic displays in which the acrobats know that a bad performance will be punished by death. That is what meals must have been like at court. No doubt Josephus had encountered luxury in the great houses of Jerusalem, but never on so obscene a scale.
The two people who presided over the court and set what might be called its tone were, of course, Nero and his wife, Poppaea. A practitioner of almost every known vice, horribly cruel, and responsible for many murders, the emperor was a neurotic hedonist who, not content with absolute power, wanted to be regarded as a great artist. Nonetheless, in his own way he did not lack intelligence. The empress was even more of an enigma.
“Through [Alliturus] I got an introduction to Poppaea, Caesar’s consort,” he explains. The loveliest woman of her time, whose legendary beauty is confirmed by one or two portrait busts, according to Tacitus, Poppaea Sabina “had every gift save an unpolluted mind,” inspiring lasting devotion among the men who were her lovers.11 Rich, high born, intelligent, and amusing, she was at the same time a byword for promiscuity and ruthlessness. Largely responsible for Nero’s murder of his wife and of his mother, she had married him as her third husband after a carefully planned seduction. She also played a part in destroying his minister and former tutor, the disapproving Seneca.
Yet, surprisingly, this sinister termagant may have been a believer in the Jewish faith—despite her taste for astrology. Significantly, she took ritual baths and enrolled a large number of Jews among her entourage. Describing how Poppaea had helped Rabbi Ishmael’s delegation, Josephus comments mysteriously and without elaboration that she was “a worshipper of God.”12
On being presented to her—if we can accept Tacitus’s description of Poppaea—Josephus found himself confronted by not a ferocious slut but a dignified, surprisingly prudish-looking young lady who, as far as he could make out, was staggeringly beautiful, although it was difficult to be sure because in public she hid her face behind a veil. She gave him a gracious welcome. “As soon as I could, I begged her to help me in getting the priests released from prison,” he writes in his autobiography.13 Poppaea took a strong liking to this eloquent, intelligent, and no doubt charming young Jewish nobleman. Not only did she obtain the priests’ release, but she loaded him with expensive gifts.
If a fine first-century portrait bust really is that of Josephus, then it may well have been commissioned by Poppaea, which indicates a certain affection on her part. Handsome, sensitive, and a little melancholy, this is the face of someone who in time could have developed considerable force of character. The fact that it is indistinguishable from that of a young Roman patrician shows how quickly he had adapted to life at Nero’s court.
However, if he developed any hopes of a career as one of the empress’s courtiers, they came to an abrupt end at some date in 65 CE when her bad-tempered husband killed her with a kick when she was pregnant—“for scolding him for coming home late from the races.”14 There were rumors of poison, but in reality Nero was heartbroken. He had Poppaea embalmed instead of cremated and gave her a state funeral at which he praised her beauty and good qualities.15
Josephus spent from two to two and a half years at Rome. He must have been there during the firestorm that broke out on 18 July 64 and raged for ten days, destroying most of the city. The emperor himself was widely believed to have ordered his secret agents to start the fire, prompted by the whim that he could rebuild it more beautifully. “To get rid of the rumours, he falsely blamed the people popularly known as Christians, who were hated for their crimes, and punished them with exquisite tortures,” says Tacitus, explaining that anybody who admitted to being one was wrapped in animal skins and fed to savage dogs, nailed to a cross or “set alight at dusk to illuminate the night.”16 Even the Roman mob felt sorry for them. Nero placed these human torches in his own gardens, which he opened to the public, so it is possible that Josephus saw them burning.
Although Josephus does not mention it—he was writing for the later Flavian emperors at the time—he may have actually met Nero, aside from simply seeing him on one of his frequent public appearances. “Of about average height, his body was pockmarked and smelly, while he had light yellow hair, good but not handsome features, blue, rather weak eyes, too thick a neck, a big belly and spindly legs,” is Suetonius’s feline description of the last of the Julian dynasty. “He was ridiculously fussy about his person and his clothes, having his hair done in rows of curls.”17 However, suggestions that the emperor personally recruited Josephus as a secret agent and gave him specific orders for undercover activities in Judea can be dismissed as melodramatic speculation.18
From talking to people in the street, he learned that the Romans were never going to forgive Nero for his murders, let alone for the fire. Jewish friends must have been worried by the regime’s growing instability. Yet he may have received other favors from the emperor besides the release of the priests. His account of him, written years after, is remarkable for what it leaves out. While describing how Nero poisoned his brother, had his own mother murdered, and killed his wife Octavia, he condemns other historians for what they write about Nero: “they rave against him impertinently, telling all sorts of lies . . . with no respect for truth.”19 Perhaps such uncharacteristic restraint conceals some sort of gratitude.
He must have been received by Poppaea at Nero’s colossal new palace, built after the fire, which reached from the Palatine Hill to the Esquiline and had a triple colonnade in front that was a mile wide. The entrance hall contained a statue of the Emperor Nero calculated to overawe the most hard-boiled; Suetonius says it stood one hundred and twenty feet tall. The palace’s interior was covered in gold, inlaid with gems and mother-of-pearl. The ceilings in its dining rooms were made of carved ivory, with panels that opened to shower the guests with flower petals as pipes sprinkled them with perfume. The main banquet hall was circular and revolved. The baths were constantly filled with seawater or sulfur water.20 But the “Golden House” was just one among the innumerable marvels of this amazing city.
Friends would point out the leading courtiers. Among them were three future rulers of Rome. The most distinguished was a bald, grim-faced septuagenarian, Servius Sulpicius Galba, an old-fashioned Roman aristocrat of whom Tacitus observed in a famous epigram, “had he never become Emperor, no one would have doubted his ability to reign.”21 Short and bandy-legged, Salvius Otho, who wore a wig, was more dangerous than he looked; the former husband of Poppaea, he had been forced to divorce her although he was wildly in love with her. The third, the perpetually drunken Aulus Vitellius, with his huge stomach and obsequious manner, was altogether lacking in dignity. Every courtier took care to flatter Nero, but Vitellius literally groveled in his presence. He was the cheerleader of the claque that shamelessly applauded whenever the emperor gave one of his stage performances.
Someone else who fawned on Nero was King Agrippa II. Born in 27 CE, the last of the Herodian dynasty, he was king of only a scrappy domain that included Gaulonitis, Batanea, and Trachonitis—east of the Sea of Tiberias—together with the Galilean cities of Tiberias and Taricheae. Constantly commuting between Caesarea and Italy, Agrippa frequented Nero’s court in the vain hope of being created King of Judea. Despite his ancestors’ Idumean blood, and although he had been brought up in Rome where he felt thoroughly at home, he regarded himself as totally Jewish and sometimes occupied his family palace at Jerusalem.
We know from what he wrote how much Josephus admired the soldiers of Rome. He must have watched the crack legionaries who regularly paraded on the Campus Martius with highly polished weapons and armor, led by eagle-bearers in lion skins, performing meticulous drill movements at the order of red-cloaked centurions—each in command of a century of eighty men. He would also have encountered the superb Praetorian guards at the gates of the imperial palaces. Here is a summary of his impressions after he had seen the legions in action.
What they undergo when training is in no way different from fighting, since each soldier is trained every day as if on campaign, with the utmost thoroughness, which is why they always stand up so well to the rigors of war. No setback affects their discipline, they are incapable of panic and cannot be frightened, while nothing tires them, with the result that they invariably defeat untrained opponents. It is no exaggeration to say that their drilling is a bloodless battle and their battles are blood-stained drilling. The enemy never has a chance of catching them off guard because as soon as they march into his territory they refuse to go into action until they have fortified their camp . . . Nothing is done without a command. At first light, the legionaries report to their centurions and the centurions go to salute their tribunes, every senior officer then going to their general, who gives them the watchword for the day together with his orders. . . .
Foot-soldiers wear breastplate and helmet, with a sword on each side, the longer on the left while that on the right is only nine inches long. The picked troops around the general are armed with a half-pike and small shield, but most of the infantry are equipped with a javelin and a long shield, a saw, a [hod-like] basket and a pick, together with an axe, a strap and a sickle, besides enough provisions for three days—so there is not much difference between an infantry man and a packhorse. A cavalryman has a long sword at his right side and carries a lance, protected by a shield slanted to cover his horse’s flank, while he also has a quiver holding three broad-bladed javelins that are not much smaller than spears. Like the foot-soldiers, he wears breastplate and helmet.22
This account needs qualification. Although they had metal helmets, legionaries wore armor made from hardened leather straps and metal studs and carried oblong leather shields that were strengthened with iron. Officers (including centurions) were distinguished by cuirasses of scale, chain, or plate armor, red horsehair crests, and colored cloaks. The sword—worn on the right side and not on the left, as Josephus says—was the gladius, a short, straight weapon with a blade two feet long and two inches wide. The javelin was the pilum, with a slender wooden shaft four and half feet long with a barbed iron head of the same length—its neck made of soft metal, which bent and hung down after piercing an enemy’s shield, so as to hamper him. The stirrup had not yet been invented, and a charge by mounted troops did not have the impact it would have in later centuries. Nor does Josephus appreciate that the tools carried by the legionaries made them sappers as well as frontline troops. Disciplined until teamwork became second nature, trained not only to fight but as skilled siege engineers, they were capable of building or demolishing elaborate fortifications.
What he did not see on parade on the Campus Martius was the auxiliary cavalry recruited locally wherever the army was operating, light horse who were armed with bows, lances, and javelins. In addition there were swarms of auxiliary foot soldiers, such as archers and slingers.
“Because they always agree on a carefully thought out plan before going into action, and since the plan is implemented by such a formidable army, it is scarcely surprising that in the east the Euphrates, in the west the ocean, in the south the rich part of Africa, and in the north the Danube and the Rhine have become the frontiers of their empire,” he tells us. He adds that “my reason for giving this description is not to praise the Romans, but simply to console all the people they have conquered, besides warning anybody who has any foolish ideas about trying to resist them.”23
Most soldiers seen by Josephus in Judea had been recruited locally and were of poor quality, if good enough for tracking down bandits.24 Even regular troops ran to seed in the East. “Legionaries brought in from Syria had been demoralized by not being on active service for a long time, and as a result the majority proved incapable of doing the job of a Roman soldier properly,” says Tacitus, writing of a campaign against the Parthians about 60 CE. “There were veterans in their ranks who had never mounted guard or done sentry duty, and found any fortification totally impregnable, men who refused to wear helmets or body armour, a useless bunch of swaggering bullies whose sole concern was loot.”25 Now, however, Josephus saw the best troops of a regular army numbering a quarter of a million men. It must have dawned on him that nobody could hope to defeat them.
Having made a success of a difficult mission, Josephus went home to Judea. After Poppaea’s death there was no point in staying at Rome. Yet his time there had begun his transformation into a Diaspora Jew who took a keen interest in Greek literature, while his visits to the imperial court had given him a firsthand knowledge of Roman politics and how to deal with Rome’s ruling class. At the same time, his encounters with the Hebrew community had shown him that one could be both a Jew and a loyal Roman. Above all, he had seen the irresistible might of the legions.