Chapter 7

The Role of the Rising Sirius in Ancient Apocalyptic Tradition Concerning the Terrorist Background of the ‘Neronian Fire’ on 19 July AD 64

Gerhard Baudy Translated and Edited by Christopher Matthew

Introduction: ‘The Way’

After Jesus’ death on the cross, his followers wisely avoided confessing themselves openly. This would have criminalized them. Instead of calling themselves Christiani, followers of an anointed king (Christ), they simply called their organization ‘The Way’.¹ This revealed little to outsiders. On the other hand, the title conveyed a clear message to all those familiar with Jewish tradition: those who joined the Jesus movement saw themselves on their way to a goal that had not yet been attained, that of the God-state expected in the near future. In this new Israel, the resurrected Jesus was to occupy the post of a Davidic king. In the Gospels, however, Jesus carries not only the features of David, but also of other figures of Jewish salvation history, whose work was a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of a sovereign kingdom. These were firstly Moses, who had led the twelve tribes of Israel out of Egypt and thus redeemed them from foreign rule, and secondly his successor Joshua, under whom the Israelites crossed the River Jordan and conquered the Promised Land.²

Both events – exodus and conquest – were associated with the Passover. This festival was celebrated just before the exodus from Egypt and was repeated symmetrically after passing through the Jordan.³ This myth of history ensured that every Pascha sacrifice reminded the Jews that the desert migration of their ancestors had begun and ended on this date. This gave the festival a dangerous appeal when Judea sought to regain a lost political sovereignty, animating the people to shake off foreign rule in order to bring the country into its god-desired state.⁴ The Roman occupation forces feared unrest every year among those flowing into Jerusalem for the feast and, as a precaution, increased the preparedness of their troops at this time. To prevent potential uprisings was also the concern of the priestly aristocracy, who collaborated with the Romans when they imprisoned the troublemaker Jesus before a Passover feast and delivered him to the Roman governor. Jesus’ name in itself indicates why he was considered politically problematic, as the Gospels follow the linguistic usage of the Septuagint, according to which Joshua, the commander of earlier Israel, was called Jesus. So Jesus could appear as someone in whose person the mythical hero of the conquest returned. As he had not only conquered the Promised Land, but distributed it among all the Israelites, his new namesake declared he would proclaim a Jubilee to liberate and reorganize a country in bondage.⁵ The utopian construction of the Jobel Year saw Israel periodically restored to the ideal state it had earlier acquired through Joshua. To this end, all debts should be waived and prisoners released to recover the expropriated lands that Joshua had once assigned to their ancestors as inalienable possessions.⁶

The image of Joshua defined the figure of leading revolutionaries who wanted to redeem the country from foreign rule and reform it socially. Until the outbreak of the Jewish War of Liberation in AD 66, prophets staged their performances in such a way that they required people to see a new Moses or Joshua in themselves.⁷ All these troublemakers, who appeared after Jesus of Nazareth, seem to have been inspired by his example, but because they failed the Church could of course not accept that they were members of its movement. Therefore, Jesus warns about them in the Gospels, foretelling the future coming of false prophets who would act in his name and wish to be identified with him. But in fact, they wanted to pursue his mission and to finish the way that had been interrupted before the Passover feast of AD 30.⁸ Jesus was executed by the Romans because he was expected to exploit the impending Passover for a coup attempt. Nevertheless, his followers decided to remain faithful to the dead. Instead of admitting that the crucifixion of their leader had proved him a failed Messiah, they continued his Kingdom’s propaganda. Instead of regarding his prophecies as falsified, they placed the predicament of suffering in his mouth, as if he had followed a divine direction and gone to his death with a seeing eye. Instead of even acknowledging that he had died, they denied that the Roman execution had been successful. For this purpose, they expressed themselves as members of the body of Christ.⁹ This suggested that he lived in them collectively and could pursue his old plans in the body of the Church. This fiction was flanked by the myth that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead and then taken to heaven.¹⁰ From there, however, he would return to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth.

To be sure, this theocracy was already present in the Church, the ‘body of Christ’, but in a preliminary form. Only with Jesus’ parousia could the Kingdom of God be completed. To express this, the early Church called itself a ‘Way’ because it repeated the desert migration of the twelve tribes of Israel. At that time, God had preceded the Israelites on their way to the Promised Land, in the form of a pillar of fire that destroyed all the peoples who opposed them:¹¹ Divine Fire gave victory to the Chosen of God. Correspondingly, as the Acts of the Apostles put it, the messengers of God carried in them a fire fallen from heaven.¹² They approached an ultimate goal that was achievable only when the fire that filled them removed all resistance. For the desired restoration of the state there was only one preventing factor, namely the Roman occupying power. The burning of Rome on 19 July AD 64 can be explained against this background: it did not accidentally break out, but was started by people who, by a terrorist attack on the centre of the Roman Empire, attempted to provoke a provincial war of liberation. It can be surmised that these arsonists followed a calendar-determined apocalyptic instruction.¹³

The apocalyptic significance of 19 July

The argument here is based on the symbolic significance of this date. In Neronian Rome, the disastrous fire of that time brought back spontaneous memories of a similar event from centuries past: in 390 BC, the Gauls are said to have set fire to the city after defeating the Romans on the Allia. The day of this defeat, 18 July, was anchored in the collective memory of the Romans. The Augustan historiography dated the so-called ‘Gallic fire’ on the immediately following day, 19 July.¹⁴ According to the then generally accepted Egypto-centric astronomy, the brightest star, Sirius (in Egypt called Sothis), heliacally rose on that day in the old royal city of Memphis.¹⁵ Sirius’ appearance in the hottest time of the year marked the beginning of the so-called ‘Dog Days’, because Sirius was the heavenly ‘dog’ on which the country’s goddess Isis-Sothis rode, as is commonly shown in iconography.¹⁶

Sirius’ annual rising in the morning sky repeated and anticipated the beginning and end of a 1,461-year-old ‘Great Year’ when periodically coinciding with the civil New Year’s Day, which shifted one day every four years.¹⁷ This day had a cosmogonic and anthropogonic significance, because at the dawn of the Dog Star, both the world and humanity originated. Sirius was considered to be their midwife, having caused souls to settle in material bodies.¹⁸ This explains why in ancient astrology, when Sirius rises, and at the same time the sun enters the constellation of the ‘lion’, periodically recurring cosmic catastrophes, world conflagration and deluge set in motion the beginning of a new cycle.¹⁹ Both are projections of an annually recurring experience: the opening of the Nile dams, which until then held back the dammed-up water, and ended a period of drought, as soon as Sirius appeared in the morning sky.²⁰ In mythical perspective, this was the victory of Horus, the son and secretly raised heir of the murdered Osiris over the usurper Seth (in Greek, Typhon), an ‘anti-god’ associated with sterility. Ritualistic expression was achieved by sacrificing animals: reddish cattle, donkeys, antelopes or hippopotamuses, all of which embodied Typhon.²¹ Allegedly, people had once even been burned alive at the beginning of the Dog Days,²² a transparent fiction based on a widespread politicization of the myth-ritual scheme. Seth was considered the god of foreign invaders who had temporarily taken Egypt into his power and plunged it into chaos. Horus, on the other hand, was the mythical representation of the reigning pharaoh, who was in charge of restraining usurpers and restoring order.²³

In anti-Judaic versions of the Exodus myth, the ancestors of the Jews were said to worship Seth as their god.²⁴ They were banished from Egypt because they burned towns and villages, plundered temples, destroyed idols, burned sacred animals and maltreated the priests.²⁵ The shape of a donkey was attributed to their god.²⁶ Roman satirists made the Christians who had come out of Judaism also worshippers of a donkey-like god, and Christians were executed for arson, too, in Neronian Rome. Showcased as living torches, they represented a hostile god who had once revealed himself in a fire and had later sent his son into the world to set it on fire. Therefore, in a Roman caricature, Jesus hangs in the shape of a donkey on the cross.²⁷ This makes him the likeness of the Egyptian antagonist Seth, a revolutionary whose followers had acted as arsonists. As punishment for that act, the Egyptians let him be killed by fire, and later recreated this event at an annual sacrifice festival, which was held in the early Dog Days.

Every propaganda evokes a mirrored counter-propaganda. That is how it is here. The anti-Judaic literature had claimed that in the Temple of Jerusalem was the image of a donkey rider representing Moses because a donkey had carried him through the desert to Palestine.²⁸ The Gospels thus made the Seth-associated donkey, in an act of provocative self-stigmatization,²⁹ into a mount of Jesus, the new Moses. Sitting on a donkey, Jesus had gone into Jerusalem before the Passover. This raised the messianic hopes of the onlookers and made them suspect that the goal was a revolt. Modern theologians see it differently. The majority of them want to depoliticize Jesus. For them, the scene rather proves that Jesus had peaceful intentions as he had not ridden on a horse, but on a donkey which was unsuitable for war.³⁰ His notion of harmlessness also seems to be confirmed by the Zechariah prophecy, by which Jesus was guided, for this referred to a peaceful king carried by a donkey.³¹

Such exegesis fails, however, because of a shortened perception of the model text, which competent readers could readily supplement.³² The peace brought by the eschatological king is preceded by a bloody war of liberation in which God himself uses entire nations as weapons:

‘For I stretch Judah as a bow, and lay Ephraim on it as an arrow. I call your sons, Zion, to fight the sons of Javan, I make you the sword of a hero. The Lord Himself will appear above them. His arrow shoots like lightning. God the Lord blows the horn, he comes in the storms of the South. The Lord of the armies protects his own. The sling stones eat and crush. [His warriors] drink and murmur as with wine; they are full of blood like a sacrificial bowl, like the corners of an altar.’³³

The literary template calls on an oppressed people to join a royal donkey rider and thus become the instrument of a militant god. Demonstrative riding on a donkey seems to have been part of the initiation ritual of the heir to the throne. Previously, David had put his son Solomon on a donkey.³⁴ David himself is said to have received donkeys for the royal family after he had fled from his other son Absalom, and – as Jesus later did – had cried and prayed on the Mount of Olives.³⁵ The rebel Absalom died when he passed, riding on a mule, under an oak tree and his hair was caught in its branches.³⁶ This Davidic dynastic founding myth bestowed a clear character value on a donkey: it characterized the rider as someone who wanted to qualify himself for a monarchical leadership role that he either did not own or had wrongly lost.

The Romans’ attempt, however, to stifle insurrection in the bud by the crucifixion of the pretender failed. His devotees transformed the humiliating cross into a selfproclaiming sign, lifting Jesus to heaven, and used it on their missionary campaign in the function of a victory-promising standard. In the end, it was supposed to show that the Son of God, slain by the Romans as a Typhonic-style revolutionary, was the only legitimate king. This could inspire enemies of Rome to turn the tables, i.e., to perform a symbolic act evoking that none other than the emperor, the Antichrist, was a Typhon to be fought; especially as Nero’s opponents called him a serpent or a dragon.³⁷ In a contemporary tragedy, Octavia implores Jupiter to fling his lightning at Nero, whose tyranny outranks Typhon’s ominous regime.³⁸ This may be the tradition of propaganda preceding the burning of Rome in AD 64. When Rome was on fire on 19 July, Typhon’s fiery death seemed to have been repeated on the correct day of the calendar. It goes without saying that both Jewish and Christian apocalyptic notions bestialized Rome and its rulers, assigning them the role of a monster to be destroyed in a fire.³⁹

The ideological instrumentalization of Sirius in ancient East-West conflicts

An analogous reversal also characterizes the star symbolism used by ancient oracle literature to express East-West conflict.⁴⁰ A star falling down from heaven on Italy will set fire to Rome, proclaimed the Sibyl. This was a polemical reaction to Roman panegyrics, which called the city the ‘common star of the inhabited world’.⁴¹ That Tyche (Fortuna) had helped the Romans would be shown by the death of Alexander the Great: like a star, he would have fallen from east to west, throwing the rays of his weapons at Italy.⁴² The Romans seized this self-understanding as a right of domination in the Hellenistic East. The star of Alexander was now none other than Sirius, so his birth was fictitiously dated back to a day that corresponded in the Julian calendar, 19 or 20 July.⁴³ Apparently this implied reference to Sirius, the date of Alexander’s birth, should prove to be the fate of the East, because Alexander identified himself with the Homeric Achilles,⁴⁴ and Achilles’ armour shone before his duel with the Eastern prince Hector like the fiery Dog Star.⁴⁵ In the epic tradition, the comparison with the rising Sirius served to characterize the respective heroes as invincible opponents. Thus, the Iliad first lets the deputy of Achilles, Diomedes, shine in the fire of the Dog Star,⁴⁶ before he dominates on the battlefield. When Hector later gains the upper hand, Sirius temporarily changes side. Now it is the Trojan opponent whose armour blazes like the fire of the heavenly dog,⁴⁷ but only until Achilles finally intervenes in the combat and returns the Sirius-fire to the Greek camp.⁴⁸

Alexander’s campaign against the Persians gave this stellar symbolism a new relevance. Because Sirius was, in the Iranian tradition, the king of the stars,⁴⁹ it was also the celestial analogue not only of Zarathustra, but of the Persian Great King whose position Alexander the Great successfully usurped. In an Avestan text, Sirius (Tishtrya) fights in the shape of a white horse against a black horse, the demon of drought, at the time of its summer rising. After he has overcome his evil opponent, the star dives into a mythical lake, which brings its water to a boil. Rain clouds form, making the land fertile again.⁵⁰ Since then, pretenders to the throne had been trying in vain to acquire the fire of Sirius hidden in the water, but only legitimate rulers could obtain it. It gave them a regal power, the Chvarnah.⁵¹ Since the time of Alexander the Great, it was opportune for Hellenistic monarchs to claim it. They were depicted on coins together with a star, a sign legitimizing their rule.⁵²

This symbolism reached the Roman Empire via Alexander the Great. It was reflected in Augustan literature, according to which Rome had, in 396 BC, been at the end of a ten-year war against the Etruscan town of Veii. Lake Albano is said to have swelled up mysteriously at the hottest time of the year, when all other waters were dying down. An oracle was seized upon which promised the destruction of Rome, if it were not possible to drain off the water. The Romans dug channels there and thus gained control over this disastrous natural event.⁵³ It is obvious that the motif is due to an Egyptian tradition, the opening of the Nile dams at the early rise of Sirius.⁵⁴ The oracle text refers to the taming of the water as ‘extinguishing’ (aquam extinguere), a formulation that suggests that it is the fire of Sirius which is hidden in the flood and threatens to destroy Rome.⁵⁵ The Roman historiography here follows the epic tradition that transmits the Troy myth to Italy. Veii took over the role of the besieged city of Troy. Hence the enemy city falls in the tenth year of the war; therefore, in both wars, a seer is captured who must reveal how the besiegers can prevent the impending defeat. The kidnapping of a city goddess (Athena or Juno) is also a precondition for the imminent conquest.⁵⁶ Similarly, as the sinister fire of Sirius in the Iliad crosses over to his opponent Achilles at the death of Hector, so in the war against Veii the Romans pull the power of Sirius onto their side.

Why did the Romans, although alleged descendants of the Trojans, take on the role of the Greek urban conquerors, reversing the Trojan myth for their own purposes? The only reason for this could have been their wars against the Hellenistic Diadochi, who staged their struggle against the Roman Empire as a repetition of mythical precedents. Thus, the enemy of Rome, Pyrrhus, looked on as the descendant of Achilles and his son of the same name, Pyrrhus-Neoptolemos.⁵⁷ Due to such typology, Achilles’ victory over Hector promised not only the subsequent fall of Troy, but at the same time the ultimate destruction of Rome by a Pyrrhus redivivus, Pyrrhus returned. In retrospect, the Romans responded by reversing the Pyrrhos propaganda and, as part of a mythical history of the city, inventing an example that the fire of Sirius does not destroy their town but Rome’s enemies.

Another reflex of anti-Roman Sirius apocalypticism is found in the Macedonian tradition. It is known only in a polemically distorted manner, a legend derived from Polybius, which Livy reports.⁵⁸ The Macedonian King Philip V intended to wage war against the Romans, for which purpose he gathered his troops in 182 BC. His army, at the foot of the Thracian Haimos mountains, marched between the two halves of a sacrificed dog. This was the usual Macedonian rite of lustration. At least in this case, however, the two-part dog seems to have held a symbolic relationship to the Dog Star because its rise took place exactly at this time.⁵⁹ After the military parade, Philip rode with his son Perseus, whom he wanted to make his heir, under great hardship to the summit of Haimos, ostensibly to spy out routes for marching against the Roman troops. On the top of the mountain they erected an altar, which was consecrated to Zeus and Helios, and made a sacrifice.

According to Livy, the futility of this endeavour,⁶⁰ and the toil of the dangerous descent, was a bad omen for the coming war, a forerunner of the Macedonian defeat. In retrospect, the winners mocked their enemies, to whom the foundation of the cult had, of course, conveyed an opposite message: prince Perseus was to be presented to the soldiers in a rite of initiation as the future conqueror of the enemy power of Rome. This explains the choice of the calendar date, for at the rise of Sirius feasts with ritual mountain ascents were organized in many places in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the top of the mountains, meteorological conditions were observed, and events were forecast for the coming year: rain or drought, good harvests or crop failures, healthy climate or disease, peace or war, victory or defeat. In addition, changes of power were prophesied at the rising of Sirius.⁶¹

This is what occurred on the Haimos ridge. Philip climbed the mountain with Perseus to await the rise of the Dog Star, because Sirius decided who was the coming ruler, being itself the star that ruled the world,⁶² and whoever became king received his power from its shining light. For this reason, Philip then excluded his eldest son Demetrios from the succession and sent him away before he climbed alone with his younger son Perseus to the mountain peak. Demetrios had fallen out of favour because he had grown up as a hostage in Rome, and had become a friend of the Romans. Later, Philip had him murdered to ensure that he would not thwart his political plans. Perseus, on the other hand, had been known to all Macedonians as the official heir to the throne since the Sirius event, and was predestined to lead an army against Rome. For this purpose, the warriors at the foot of the Haimos had passed between the body parts of a dog. The two-part sacrificial animal apparently symbolized the heavenly ‘dog’. Soldiers passing this body would feel called upon to regard themselves as Sirius-born and as such enter the service as men who were about to be blessed by the rising star. This was also ensured by the mythical elevation of the scene: on the Haimos ridge, Zeus is said to have once downed his adversary Typhon.

The mountain owes its name, ‘blood mountain’, to the blood of the killed dragon.⁶³ This suggested that the planned war should repeat a divine example. The Romans were intended to play the role of a monster to be conquered. Later, when the Romans won the victory over Perseus at Pydna and became masters of the known world, they did not neglect to taunt the Sirius propaganda of their Macedonian challengers with a legend. Before his campaign against Perseus, the general Aemilius Paullus had learned that the little dog of his daughter had just died. This dog was called Persa, which the father had immediately considered an ominous sign for the future defeat of Perseus.⁶⁴ The anecdote taunts a ruler, who – as the Romans knew – had appeared before his subjects as the incarnation of the Dog Star.

The culmination of this East-West conflict was stellar apocalypticism in Augustan times. As Caesar prepared in Rome for a campaign against the Parthians in 44 BC, a Sibylline oracle circulated in Rome announcing that only a king could defeat the Parthians.⁶⁵ It supported the request of Antonius, who in February had attempted to confer royal authority on Caesar by offering a laurel wreath around which a diadem was wound.⁶⁶ After Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March because of his monarchical ambitions, he was deified by his supporters. The sign of his apotheosis was a star replacing the royal diadem,⁶⁷ which adorned the forehead of his statues and was widely depicted in numismatic propaganda.⁶⁸ This legitimized the leadership claims of two rivals who both wanted to assume Caesar’s role. On the one hand, the star made Octavian the son of a god, who was predestined to rule as Caesar.⁶⁹ On the other hand, Mark Antony appeared as a priest of the divine Caesar⁷⁰ and intended to realize his planned Parthian campaign.⁷¹ Later, Octavian, who had become Augustus, reclaimed this victory because he had, through a peace treaty, forced the Parthians to return captured Roman standards.⁷² The historical context reveals which single value Caesar’s star, the so-called sidus Iulium, must have had for his contemporaries: it promised victory over Eastern enemies. As the helmet of Achilles had shone in the splendour of Sirius when he defeated the Eastern prince Hector, and Alexander the Great had conquered the Persians with his sign, Caesar’s portrayed sidus Iulium suggested that the Parthians would not stand up to the Roman invaders.⁷³ In addition, it fits that the Romans sometimes referred to the Parthians as Persians.⁷⁴ Thus, they mentally retreated in their oriental campaigns to the time of Alexander the Great.

When the alliance between Antony and Octavian broke down, there was a civil war between two rivals, both utilizing the sidus Iulium.⁷⁵ Antony fought on the side of Cleopatra against an adversary who pretended to be somebody to whom the alleged appearance of the star in 44 BC had virtually helped to give him birth.⁷⁶ Once again, a new East–West conflict was expressed in traditional language games: Antony saw himself as an incarnation of the Egyptian god Dionysos-Osiris, while his wife, Cleopatra, represented Aphrodite-Isis.⁷⁷ As such, she was associated with not only the brightest planet, Venus, but also with the Sirius goddess Isis-Sothis. When Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, it proved in the eyes of the Romans that the celestial fire was not his enemies’, but rather legitimized himself monarchically. Therefore, in Vergil’s state epic, Aeneas wears a shield prophetically depicting the Battle of Actium. For this, Vergil employs a stellar symbolism: above the head of Octavian shines the sidus Iulium (Julian star),⁷⁸ similar to the helmet in which the figure of Aeneas shines, in a fire that is compared by the poet both to a sparkling ominous comet and with the fateful fire of Sirius.⁷⁹ In Augustan propaganda, Cleopatra was a dragon killed by Octavian.⁸⁰ This implicitly assigned to Octavian the role of the dragonslayer Horus, whom the Greeks and Romans called Apollo. Just as Horus, by his victory over Typhon, had become the legitimate successor of his father Osiris, so Octavian transformed himself after Actium into Augustus, to whom now, as the sole heir of Caesar, rule had fallen not only over Egypt, but over the entire Roman Empire. Since then he was the sole bearer of gloria Caesaris, manifested through the sidus Iulium, which made him a new Caesar, the first emperor.⁸¹

In 46 BC, Caesar had brought Cleopatra to Rome, where she was introduced at a newly institutionalized midsummer Venus festival. In the Temple of Venus, Caesar had a statue of Cleopatra set up next to the goddess’ statue.⁸² During this feast, Caesar proclaimed a calendar reform, following hereby the advice of the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes: the new calendar correlated with a certain Egyptian model.⁸³ The Republican calendar was now replaced with a 365-day solar year. Because this is longer by a quarter of a day, an additional day was intercalated every four years so that the regular calendar did not shift from the solar year. This ‘Julian calendar’ copied the Sothis period in a small format: instead of the great year of 1,461 solar years, the four-year Roman switching cycle consisted of 1,461 calendar days.⁸⁴

The Egyptocentric construction of the new calendar makes us understand the appointed date for the Venus Festival. According to the Roman authors, the Republican calendar was out of balance at that time. To correct this, Caesar had allegedly inserted sixty-seven additional days, so that the months fell back into their intended season.⁸⁵ If one were to trust these indications, the day of the feast of Venus, 26 September 46 BC, would have coincided with the desired date in the regular year which, according to the calendar reform, was 25 July,⁸⁶ and thus focused precisely on the day on which Sirius rose heliacally on the latitude of Rome.⁸⁷ There are reasons, however, to doubt that. After all, why was the festival since then celebrated not on 25 July, but on 20 July?⁸⁸ It seems that the Roman authors did not refer to the number of intercalated days from a tradition that was available to them, but based it on the feast day of 20 July, under an anachronistic presupposition of the Julian calendar. If one calculates back sixty-seven days from 26 September, one arrives at 20 July. If the Venus festival, however, was already celebrated by Caesar on a day that coincided with 20 July of the Julian calendar, then there can only have been one reason for it: Caesar had consulted the calendar expert Sosigenes, who came from Alexandria, the then capital of Egypt, where the rise of Sirius took place on 20 July, a day later than in a more southerly latitude such as in the old royal city of Memphis.⁸⁹

Augustus later propagandistically transfigured this calendar day in his account of the Venus festival of 44 BC: at the ludi victoriae Caesaris, games organized to honour his murdered father, a miraculous star allegedly appeared in the sky, which the people regarded as the soul of Caesar, who had ascended to heaven.⁹⁰ Of course, this was the mysterious dawn of a new blessed era and the proclaiming star was no longer identified as Sirius, which had already existed in folklore and which appeared every year around the same time. The star had to be made unique for the sake of Augustus’ salvation-historical rhetoric. In his memoirs, Augustus transformed the sidus Iulium into a comet that attracted and outshone the dog’s character: while Sirius stood invisibly up in the sky during the day, the comet substituting it beamed even brighter than the sun. Only since then was the sidus Iulium iconographically provided with a comet’s tail, although the word sidus never referred to comets, but always what were called fixed stars. Nor is there any contemporary testimony that proves the reality of the comet.

Nevertheless, research usually takes the Augustan fiction at face value. Many find it difficult to believe that, in his memoirs, only about twenty years later, Augustus had been able to influence the minds of the Romans, as if there were no eyewitnesses.⁹¹ Such scepticism, however, underestimates the people’s willingness to engage with imperial myths when they serve to historicize apocalyptic language games. Each ruler was expected to accept and promote legends that increased his charisma. This was the generally accepted social consensus. It would therefore have occurred to none of the contemporaries to debunk such fictions ideologically. On the other hand, a modern historian should not accept these. But this is exactly what happens through an attempt to authenticate the historicism of the Augustan comet from Chinese annals.⁹² Although the annals testify to a comet for 44 BC, it appeared in another season, the Romans knew nothing about it and the Chinese tradition in turn knows of no comet in July for that year. Nonetheless, the potential identity of both celestial phenomena was attempted through the speculative computation of a cometary orbit, which influenced recent research.

Real proof of the existence of the July comet is not obtained by this method. Astronomical theories, which ignore the symbolic content of the July date, are obviously misleading. Instead, Augustus used a mythical process by reversing cause and effect: he did not place a star on the statue of Caesar because it had shown up in the sky, but he invented a miracle star to strengthen the prophetic sign of the sidus Iulium on Caesar’s head, unfolding a narrative through legends circulating about it. Among them was the story of a haruspex (seer) named Vulcanius, who announced that the comet indicated the end of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth era.⁹³

In constructing the celestial sign, Augustus followed a Hellenistic precedent: both at the birth and during the enthronement of the Pontic king Mithridates, a comet appeared whose light outshone the sun and set the sky on fire.⁹⁴ This was considered a sign for the future length of the oriental ruler’s reign, making him an alleged descendant of the kings Cyrus, Darius and Alexander the Great,⁹⁵ and a new bearer of shining monarchical power. This heavenly fire legitimized his campaign against the Roman Empire and promised him victory over a Western enemy. Augustus reversed this propaganda: the fire of Sirius, or of the comet replacing it, now vouched in return for the dominance of the West over the East.

Mithridates had followed in the footsteps of earlier challengers of Rome. He wanted to be a new Hannibal and a new Pyrrhus. To his Gallic auxiliaries, he presented the example of their ancestors, who had burned down Rome.⁹⁶ What they once had done only imperfectly, they should now complete: the final annihilation of the Roman capital. Already Hannibal, allied with Pyrrhus, used Gallic auxiliary troops in his campaign against Rome, and vigour was presumably instilled in the Gauls by reminding them of their ancestors’ example. It seems likely that this ‘Gallic conflagration’, along with its fixation on the day of the rising Sirius, was a historiographical fiction generated in Hellenistic times, because Pyrrhus instrumentalized the Trojan myth with its Dog Star typology for propaganda purposes. Augustan historiography took this into account by dating the ‘Gallic fire’ on 19 July. But Rome is said to have risen from its ashes like a phoenix, being reborn by a baptism of fire. Its re-establishment allegedly took place exactly 365 years after its first foundation, the end and new beginning of a ‘Great Year’, which copied the solar year.⁹⁷

This reads like an aetiological myth of the Julian calendar reform, which had indeed adapted the solar year. In addition, Camillus, who expelled the Gauls and rebuilt Rome, prefigured Augustus, who, after the end of the Civil War, was celebrated as the new founder of Rome, ordained by the sidus Iulium⁹⁸ About the figure of Camillus, the rising of Sirius was entered in the fictitious city history twice: the fire of the Dog Star threatened the existence of Rome, as Camillus’ army besieged Veii. But the Romans managed to avert the danger, so that they could conquer Veii and burn it down. Here, the hostile Etruscan city takes over the role of the destroyed Troy, and few years later, Rome itself, on 19 July, goes down in a fictitious fire disaster. At that time, Camillus – like the Homeric Achilles – withdrew from combat. And as Achilles’ armour shone like the fire of the Dog Star when he resumed the fight against his Trojan adversary, the fire of 19 July enabled Camillus to re-establish the city after acquiring military leadership again and defeating the Gauls. Upon his succession, Augustus constructed a stellar omen, which promised a worldwide historic turn caused by him. In his eyes, the miracle star not only helped him to his own symbolic birth, but also renewed the world as a whole. The sidus Iulium created by him was a sign of Rome’s resurrection, reversing an anti-Roman Sirius propaganda that used to foretell the city’s downfall in the fire of the Dog Star.

Vergil repeatedly took up this motif in his works. In his Eclogues, Caesar’s new star replaces the old constellations and makes the seeds fertile in their place.⁹⁹ In the Georgics, the beekeeper Aristaeus acts as the mythical example of Augustus: a plague has killed his bee colony; then, at the rising of Sirius, a spell is revealed to him that gives rise to a new bee colony, a narrative metaphor for Rome reborn under Augustus.¹⁰⁰ In the Aeneid, the fire of Sirius, in which Aeneas’ armour glares, evokes the fact that the hero is destined to win over his opponent Turnus,¹⁰¹ whose death metaphorically recounts the defeat of Antony. The Aeneid expands the typological series by another example. Once before, the Trojan ancestors of Rome had mastered a crisis emanating from Sirius: fleeing from their burning hometown, the Trojans land on Crete and found a new Troy there, but the embers of the rising Dog Star destroy the harvest and deprive the settlers of their livelihood. The Trojans move on and end up in Italy, where the ruined Troy would then be permanently resurrected in the guise of Rome.¹⁰² Instead of eradicating Troy or Rome from the Earth, the Sirius fire always causes the city to regenerate itself more splendidly. Significantly, Varro, probably inspired by an epic of Ennius, had the Trojans seeking a new home following a star that led them to Italy.¹⁰³ This star was Venus, the goddess in whose honour a festival had been held by Caesar in 46 BC. The brightest fixed star and the brightest planet, Sirius and Venus, had an analogous semantic content and therefore functioned in Vergil’s state epic as interchangeable bodies, which in turn fused symbiotically into a fictional comet, the sidus Iulium.¹⁰⁴

The sidus Iulium outlasted the Augustan era, serving the Julian-Claudian dynasty until its end as a symbol of power. Like Caesar and Augustus, Nero was iconographically depicted with a crowning star.¹⁰⁵ Calpurnius Siculus updated the same pattern as part of a Nero-panegyric: in Nero’s reign, a comet appeared again in the sky, which shone even brighter than the star of Caesar, signalling the return of a golden age.¹⁰⁶ The comet, copying the sidus Iulium, and at the same time surpassing it, served, of course, to intimidate the enemies of Rome and to delegitimize potential challengers of the emperor.¹⁰⁷ This seems, however, to have been imperfectly achieved, for on 19 July AD 64, Rome was in flames. The citizens immediately remembered the Gallic fire, which had allegedly fallen on exactly the same calendar day. The ominous coincidence led to a consultation of the Sibylline Books.¹⁰⁸ The new fire disaster was therefore considered a fateful preordained event. That is exactly what Nero’s enemies intended. They suggested themselves, through a terrorist attack, to be the executors of a divine plan. Were these arsonists controlled by a prophecy related to the rise of Sirius?

The Neronian Fire

Most scholars do not want to accept the Christians as culprits for the fire of AD 64. If they link the fire disaster back to arson, they consider Nero to be the architect. They give credit to a historiography for which Nero was a pathological tyrant who burned down Rome, in order to make room for his planned palace, the domus aurea, and to rebuild the ruined metropolis all the more splendidly.¹⁰⁹ In his perversion, it is said, he went so far that he used the fire in the city as a backdrop for the presentation of his Troy recital.¹¹⁰ What Suetonius and Cassius Dio later present as fact was a mere rumour in Tacitus’ account: in order to ward off such slander, Nero would have blamed other offenders and made the Christians the scapegoats, which could easily be done, because for the Romans they were unpopular supporters of an Eastern religion.¹¹¹ According to Tacitus, they were wrongly executed. He presents his readers with the choice of considering the strange fact that Rome was hit by a devastating fire on exactly the same day as the ‘Gallic fire’ as either a coincidence or more likely to be the fault of the emperor.¹¹² His portrayal tends to suggest the latter, as his negative Nero-image ensured that the emperor was credited with the greatest crimes. For, like the senatorial-aristocratic historiography as a whole, Tacitus insists on vilifying the autocratic ruler. For that reason, he does not even consider that the Christians condemned to death by Nero were indeed the culprits, though he makes no secret of the fact that in his eyes they formed the lowest class of human beings.

The rumour that Nero reduced Rome to rubble may have been inspired by his own Trojan poetry. His lost poem Iliupersis portrayed the downfall of Troy, and in the epic tradition that followed Nero this event was prepared and framed by a Sirius motif. Did the emperor make use of it in a manner characteristic of epics? Does his poem combine the Trojans typologically with the ‘Gallic fire’ and the emblem of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the sidus Iulium?¹¹³ If so, his opponents would have had an easy time blaming him for the catastrophe of 19 July. The emperor would then have put into practice literary fantasies whose pivotal point was the early rising of the Dog Star. The fact that Nero, through the rebuilding of Rome, like Augustus in earlier times, behaved as a new Camillus seemed to confirm the truth of the rumour.¹¹⁴

Contrary to popular opinion, however, many researchers have refrained from considering Nero as an arsonist.¹¹⁵ It would have been simply absurd if an emperor, who was so anxious to be loved by the people, had lit the roofs of his citizens over their heads and not even spared his own palace. In fact, Nero personally organized the firefighting and caring for the homeless. The rumours circulated by Nero’s opponents had no resounding success. His affection for the people was met with affection in return. After his death, most wanted to believe he was still alive, or did not want to believe his end.¹¹⁶ Therefore, pretenders to the throne who attempted to recruit troops in the eastern part of the Mediterranean could attempt to impersonate Nero several times, as if he were still alive or even risen from the dead.¹¹⁷

But if Nero was not guilty, then who was? Research still favours Tacitus’ assumption of a random fire outbreak, so this question often does not arise. But if one considers the date of the fire and recognizes its symbolic apocalyptic value, the problem simply cannot be avoided. The hypothesis of a random outbreak would only be a permissible, temporary solution if there were no other explanations.

The counter-thesis is that it was, in fact, the Christians who set the fire.¹¹⁸ This forces the assumption of arson and thus the question of who were the perpetrators. Anyone who considers Christians innocent would therefore need to make a more plausible counter-proposal, rather than resorting to a chance hypothesis. The first Christians arrested, according to Tacitus, confessed. In his account, other Christians were imprisoned and condemned to death, in this case not for arson, but for their hatred of humanity.¹¹⁹ The Romans saw them as sympathizers of religiously motivated terrorists, viewing them as the breeding ground from which anti-Roman fantasies and religiously inspired ideas were fed. That made them accomplices. Research almost consistently refuses to accept this idea. In order to maintain their opinion that Christianity was a religion of love that had always been peaceful and remote from all violence, it is claimed either that the confessions of those initially detained were given under torture and thus worthless, or that such a confession means – contrary to the context – a pure creed.¹²⁰ But even if that were correct, why would that have been enough for the Roman judiciary to execute a confessed Christian as an arsonist? And why did Nero turn the Christians, and not the Jews among whom they had been counted, into scapegoats?

The latter presupposes that the Romans at that time knew how to make a clear distinction between admirers of a crucified Messiah, considered to be enemies of Rome, and other Jews who were loyal. This would have only been possible if the Jews had publicly distanced themselves from any enemies of Rome within their own ranks. To do this they had indeed a good motive, because an event with traumatic consequences for all Jews living in the city occurred in AD 49. They were expelled from Rome by the Emperor Claudius, because a certain Chrestus had caused riots among them. With Chrestus, no other than Christ is meant, since Tacitus also calls the Christians Chrestiani, followers of one Chrestus.¹²¹ This can hardly be explained by misunderstanding, as if the meaning of the title Christ (the anointed) was not familiar to the Romans, so that they had replaced it with a word that at that time had the same phonetic value. Rather, it was a deliberate mockery: because the Christians behaved as politically harmless and wrongly pursued followers of a crucified Redeemer, the Romans mockingly called this redeemer Chrestus, the ‘Decent’ or ‘Honest Man’, and his followers Chrestiani.

But how could this ‘Honest Man’, who had been executed under Tiberius, suddenly appear under Claudius in Rome? Again, there can be no question that Suetonius or his source was subject to a misunderstanding.¹²² The early Christians expected the return of their Messiah in the near future, and this made it possible for any of the charismatic claimants to take on the role of an eschatological King and Son of God. In this case, a messianic agitation against Roman rule seems to have led to the Jews having to leave the city. In Nero’s time, the Jews, and with them the Christians, had returned to Rome. After the burning of Rome in AD 64, the imperial fury, unlike in AD 49, was placed solely on the latter. Why did the suspicion fall on the Christians? According to the Acts of the Apostles, the Jews who were loyal to Rome used to denounce Christians to the Roman authorities and condemn them as rebels. This is what happened in Neronian Rome. A denunciation of the Christians delivered these people to the Roman judiciary and ensured that the Jews in Rome were unscathed.¹²³

In the apologetic self-portrayal of the Christians, the accusations made by the Jews against the Jesus movement were pure lies. Today’s Christians are willing to believe that because it fits in with their pacifist understanding of early Christianity -although many interpreters certainly see that there was a good reason to suspect the Jesus movement as it had promised the downfall of the world in fire. The Messiah longed to be baptised in a fire falling from the sky, and was to annihilate all those who refused to recognize his leadership in a great fire.¹²⁴ Hardly anyone, however, dares to consider if Christians acted against Roman rule with real violence. Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies, it is believed, excluded militant actions, as had the admonition given to the Roman Christians by Paul to remain loyal to the Emperor and not to refuse him taxes.¹²⁵ Such reasoning ignores that the required peacefulness of the Christians was temporary. Paul expected the replacement of the Roman Empire by the theocracy during his own lifetime, and this eschatological change was to be brought about by a divine judicial fire.¹²⁶ In this end-time scenario, Paul attributes the role of judges to the Christians themselves.¹²⁷ Similarly, the Apocalypse of John later expects an active participation by the Christians in the downfall of Rome. They are to take revenge on the city, burning the ‘Whore of Babylon’ and repaying double her misdeeds.¹²⁸

In this scripture, the returning Christ assumes the form of a white horse rider whose eyes glow like fire and out of whose mouth a sword protrudes. His name is Logos, ‘Word’,¹²⁹ because the fire prophecies heard from the mouth of Jesus were to be realized in the burning of Rome. By the same token, in the Apocalypse of John, Christian prophets spew fire that destroys their enemies.¹³⁰ In the founding myth of the Church, the Spirit of God rains down on the congregation in the form of tongues of fire.¹³¹ The divine fire that filled them was to spread along the missionary path throughout the Roman Empire. As the followers of Jesus defined themselves as the collective body of the resurrected Christ, the fire of his missionaries could ignite torches and eventually prepare for the fall of Rome.¹³²

Did partisans therefore incite a real fire in Nero’s time to execute Jesus’ will? Without mentioning the fire of Rome, the author of the apocryphal Pauline Acts has this in mind: Nero has Paul arrested in Rome and brought in for interrogation. Nero feels threatened by the ‘soldiers of Christ’ whom Paul recruits through his mission. Paul confirms that throughout the world, ‘soldiers’ are recruited for the cause of Christ, and recommends that the emperor should join them so that he does not perish in the fire of judgment soon to take place. Nero then gives orders to behead Paul and persecute all Christians.¹³³ Either the author of the Pauline Acts knew of fire prophecies that had preceded the burning of Rome, which served now as evidence of arson to the Roman authorities, or he has put the words into Paul’s mouth from his letters and other New Testament writings.¹³⁴

In the letters of Paul, Christians wear armour; they are warriors of God.¹³⁵ According to the opinio communis, such militant imagery was not to prepare for acts of violence, but had a purely spiritual purpose.¹³⁶ One wonders, however, if Christians actually ever believed that God would bring about the eschatological turnaround without using human help. They were expecting their Redeemer, like a nocturnal thief. If he came covertly to pick them up, they should be prepared to complete the hitherto secretly expanding Kingdom of God in the wake of Jesus on a secret day.¹³⁷ But they could only do that if the Roman Empire and its emperor were removed beforehand. The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas speaks a clearer language: ‘The Kingdom of the father is like a man who wanted to kill a powerful man. He drew the sword in his house. He pushed it into the wall to see if his hand was strong enough. Then he killed the powerful.’¹³⁸

Paul’s spiritual weapons are transformed into a deadly sword in this parable. Thus, an assassin who embodies the Church conducts secret trials before he leaves home and slays the ‘powerful’. This stands for the emperor and/or the Roman Empire. The metaphors of Paul are analogously interpretable. When he asks Christians to carry arms of light,¹³⁹ he quotes the Qumran war roll in which the ‘sons of light’ wage an eschatological war against the forces of darkness. This proves the spiritual weapons as possible placeholders for real weapons.¹⁴⁰

It goes without saying that it would have been suicidal for the Christians to face armed Roman legionaries. The only course of action they were capable of was to carry out symbolic actions that would cause the peoples of the Mediterranean to raise arms against Rome. That is what happened on 19 July AD 64. Those who set the fire could then trust that the symbolic added value of this date was internationally understandable. The peoples of the Mediterranean would have been prepared for the fact that the rising of the Dog Star on this day drove the destinies of the world again on new paths. Fire breaking out in Rome attracted attention across the provinces. This is shown in an event from AD 69 when the Capitol burned. In Gaul, the Druids interpreted this as a sign that the time had come for an uprising, because now also the Capitol, which had once survived the ‘Gallic fire’, was destroyed. The Gallic troops were mobilized and marched against Rome to overthrow the then ruling Emperor Vitellius.¹⁴¹ Therefore, if terrorists had, five years earlier, similarly chosen 19 July – the date of the ‘Gallic conflagration’ – to re-enact it, they could have had legitimate hope of wars of liberation by unleashing an eschatological fire. Of course, that did not happen, at least not immediately. Nevertheless, the ‘Neronian fire’ was not without consequences: the costs for the reconstruction of Rome were passed on to the provinces through higher tax collections, which increased their readiness to rebel. Two years later, when the governor of Judea seized money from the Jewish temple treasure, arguing that Nero needed the funds, the looting caused the cup to overflow.¹⁴² The party of the revolutionary-minded enemies of Rome finally prevailed. The Roman occupiers of Jerusalem were massacred; this was the beginning of the Jewish-Roman War in AD 66.

An oracle originated at that time which prophesied that world domination would now return from the West to the East, in order to inspire the messianic expectations of the insurgents.¹⁴³ Later, the victorious Romans did not question the veracity of the prophecy, but used it in the opposite sense. For them, the oracle announced the world domination of the general Vespasian, whose troops had besieged and destroyed Jerusalem.¹⁴⁴ Vespasian had announced himself as the new emperor in the east of the Roman Empire, before he returned from there to Rome. This made it possible for him to transfer the role of a Messiah coming from the East to his own person.¹⁴⁵ As befits ancient propaganda wars, a miraculous star also appeared in their inventory. It was regarded, depending on the standpoint, as a sign of either victory or defeat.¹⁴⁶ The new Emperor Vespasian went still further. Before he celebrated his Roman triumph over the Jews in AD 71, he stayed with his son Titus on the Campus Martius in a temple of the Sirius goddess Isis-Sothis that had been erected there by Caligula.¹⁴⁷ Previously, he had appeared in Alexandria in the temple of the Nile god Sarapis (Osiris) as if he were his incarnation. There, he allegedly performed miracles of salvation, which certified his claim to power, and he also received a prophecy that he would be the next ruler.¹⁴⁸ Egypt was the first Roman province to recognize Vespasian as the new emperor. Therefore, the ruler, imitating Augustus, used Egypto-centric credentials.

As the embodiment of the Nile god Sarapis, Vespasian was able to ask the Alexandrians to ‘draw from him’ like from the Nile.¹⁴⁹ When he entered Alexandria, an unusual Nile inundation was said to have occurred at a different season than normal.¹⁵⁰ Since the swelling of the Nile, however, was strongly associated with Sirius’ rising, the legend inevitably rose that the same star had appeared irregularly in the morning sky, as if to give the future ruler a heavenly escort upon entering the city. Thus, an imaginary star epiphany took on the function of the Augustan sidus Iulium, granting the new Flavian dynasty a stellar legitimacy in the tradition of the Julian-Claudian imperial family. To illustrate this to the Romans, Vespasian and Titus both spent the night in the temple of the Sirius goddess Isis-Sothis before their triumphal procession. In the tympanum of this temple, the goddess was shown riding on a dog.¹⁵¹ Thus, when the two rulers emerged from the temple in the morning, Sirius seemed to float above them, bestowing upon them the star’s shining light. To urge the Romans to accept Vespasian as their new emperor, the usurper hurried on his way from Egypt to Rome with ‘happy messages’ promising a new blessing.¹⁵² Such ‘happy messages’ had already served a similar function in the time of Augustus. Spread in the eastern Mediterranean, they gave the first emperor the role of a peacekeeper and world ruler.¹⁵³

Those who did not agree with Roman supremacy had to feel provoked by this panegyric. Even after the failure of the Jewish uprising, Christians did not give in. They opposed Vespasian’s euangelia (good news) with a different gospel. In Mark, the ‘good news’ proclaimed not a new emperor, but the coming theocracy.¹⁵⁴ Thus, the old subversive prophecies lived on in the Flavian period. Had the spiritual resistance to Rome previously manifested itself verbally? In order to oppose the imperial ideology and to show the Romans the nullity of their claim to world domination, there was no more drastic remedy than to set their capital on fire on a day that had the same stellar connotation as the imperial propaganda. Those rulers who basked in the glow of Sirius should be shown that the star’s fire brought them destruction instead. When Christians attacked with burning torches in Neronian Rome, they acted as messengers of Sirius and brought its destructive ardour down to Earth.

This would only be provable, however, if there were early Christian testimonies to a Sirius apocalypse preceding the ‘Neronian fire’. Such are not known, but there are indications that such a prophecy had prepared for the arson attack. Hippolytus quotes a Christian-era exegesis that he considers heretical, indicating that within the movement of Jesus there were people who identified their heavenly Redeemer with the rising Dog Star. Christ is called here, as in the Johannine literature, logos. This logos is a dog that not only tests the plants, but also humans at its rising. Everything that is destroyed by his heavenly fire proves to be unviable and deserves death.¹⁵⁵ This refers to the traditional method of seed testing: seedlings of crops were placed in the sun at the rising of Sirius to test their vitality. From the speed of their withering, it became clear what part of the harvest was covered for the coming sowing and which part could be released for consumption.¹⁵⁶ According to the ancient linguistic convention, however, it was not the sun, but ultimately Sirius, who decided on life and death, as if the Dog Star had lit the embers of the sun at his rising.¹⁵⁷

A Christian allegory has made this the model of the righteous fire announced by Jesus. As logos, the Son of God personifies a prophetic ‘word’ that has the power to fling fire upon the world. When such a fire prophecy revealed that the eschatological ‘Lord’s Day’ was imminent, it could motivate Christians to stage Jesus’ parousia by setting fire to Rome on 19 July. They could have chosen for their attack also 20 July, the day of the Venus festival connoted with the sidus Iulium, but decided rather for 19 July, because they followed the model of the ‘Gallic fire’. On the same calendar day on which this was dated, Jesus was supposed to be a fiery logos returning to the community of his followers and making them the executing tool of his righteous fire. It is difficult to imagine that such a Sirius apocalypse would be written after the burning of Rome, because that would have confirmed that Christians actually were the arsonists. For apologetic reasons, however, the Christians endeavoured to suppress the reason for their condemnation. There is no mention of it in their literature, and the Sirius prophecy was condemned as heretical.

From the manner in which the devotees of Jesus were executed under Nero, it can be seen that the Romans were likely to resist any Christian Sirius-propaganda that was known to them. According to the lex talionis, some of the Christians were crucified and burned alive, others sewn into animal skins and mauled by dogs.¹⁵⁸ The latter punishment must have had a symbolic meaning. If arsonists had come as an incarnation of a heavenly ‘dog’, it was consistent to have them ripped apart by dogs. The dogs were executory manifestations of the Dog Star legitimizing Roman rule: the ritual execution was to demonstrate to the world that the Christians had tried in vain to bring the power of Sirius to their side. Therefore, the false Sirius-god of the Christians, because he wanted to trigger a revolt in the collective body of his worshippers, was not only once again put to death on the cross, but was at the same time burned alive and torn apart by dogs.

From time immemorial, potential dangers that assumedly arose from the rising of the Dog Star had been attempted to be neutralized in the city by means of ritual defensive measures. Because Sirius was supposed to cause plant diseases, the Romans sacrificed dogs to him.¹⁵⁹ During the imperial period they did so in the Dog Days for a peculiar reason. Because the dogs had slept when the Gauls wanted to storm the Capitol during the conquest of Rome, they were considered traitors, who collaborated with the enemies of Rome. As such, they were crucified and carried in a solemn procession through the city, but with them a goose sat in a litter on a cushion. This was in order to honour the geese, who by their chattering had awakened and saved the Romans.¹⁶⁰

The Elder Pliny is the first author to testify to this Sirius festival. It could therefore have originated in this form only in the imperial era.¹⁶¹ If Pliny wrote this down before the ‘Neronian fire’, then the execution of the Christians might have copied the crucifixion of the ‘renegade dogs’, because they worshipped their Redeemer as the rising Dog Star. They would then have been considered Sirius-infected rabid dogs.¹⁶² If Pliny wrote the message after the fire, a reverse causality would be conceivable. The ritual dog killing is not dated on 19 July, as one would expect, but on 3 August.¹⁶³ Did the bizarre ritual preserve the memory of enemies of the Romans who were executed under Nero during the Dog Days, namely on 3 August? In retrospect, the Romans wanted to ridicule an attack that copied the conquest of Rome by the Gauls, demonstratively reminding the Christians that the Roman ‘head mountain’, the Capitol, had miraculously survived the catastrophe. So the centre was left from which the city’s body could regenerate, whereas enemies of Rome, who thought of themselves as the body of Christ and had set up a directing pseudo-Sirius as their leader, had to fail together with their divine head.

The fact that it has always been possible to connect the Christians and their Saviour with Sirius shows the nature of their appearance. They resembled wandering preachers who called themselves Cynics, ‘dogs’, and Jesus’ parable speeches had the same character as the Cynics’ diatribes.¹⁶⁴ The research literature therefore argues that the Christian ‘migratory charismatics’ were not only inspired by Cynicism,¹⁶⁵ but also worshipped Jesus as a ‘dog’.¹⁶⁶ This serves the purpose of depoliticizing the movement of Jesus, because the Cynics, the ‘dogs’, were supposedly not political oppositionists. This is a misjudgment. Cynics were professional provocateurs. The Emperor Vespasian had banished Demetrius, who belonged to this school, from the city because of his hate speech. Although he accepted this ‘muzzle’, he later yelled at the emperor in an encounter. Vespasian reacted calmly and contentedly called Demetrius a contemptuous ‘dog’.¹⁶⁷ In a famous anecdote, Diogenes, the legendary ancestor of the Cynics, expressed a stance on domination: Alexander the Great stepped in front of the beggar philosopher, who lived in a barrel, and received from him a request for the king to please step out of the sun.¹⁶⁸ But this same Diogenes was equated by his followers with Sirius. He had already been a ‘heavenly dog’ during his lifetime and had gone up to heaven after his death.¹⁶⁹ That can only have had the meaning of delegitimizing Alexander and his successors. As worshippers of the celestial ‘dog’, the Cynics claimed a monarchical rule of their own.¹⁷⁰ Out of the same subversive attitude, itinerant preachers in the name of the rising Sirius, in which they recognized Christ, were able to open their campaign against the Roman Empire.¹⁷¹

The affinity between the Christian enemies of the Romans and Cynics reveals details about the life of Peregrinus Proteus in the second century ad.¹⁷² According to Lucian, he was a Church leader in the Near East. Then he quarrelled with his community and wandered around as a cynic in the Mediterranean. He then arrived in Rome, where his inflammatory speeches led the Prefect to banish him from the city. He then travelled to Olympia and made a speech there, which invited the assembled people to raise arms against the Romans. He designed the end of his life according to the model of the Heracles myth, imitating the apotheosis of the hero: he plunged into the flames of a pyre. Heracles was the divine model not only of opposing Cynics, but also of their opponents, the ancient monarchs.¹⁷³ Zeus had begotten Heracles because he wanted to make him Lord of the World,¹⁷⁴ which he failed to do in myth. But the kings and emperors suggested that, in their own person, Heracles had posthumously obtained glory due to their reign. Therefore, the Roman ritual of the imperial apotheosis copied the death of Heracles, which in turn could cause a Cynic to use a self-immolation to call upon his followers to see in him alone a legitimate Hercules redivivus. They were to follow in the footsteps of their leader, who had gone up to heaven, and to continue his anti-Roman agitation.

For the same reason, the Cynics worshipped Sirius as their school founder, since Diogenes – the new Dog Star – was already figured in the myth of Heracles, his divine prototype:¹⁷⁵ in the pseudo-Hesiodic Scutum, the hero Heracles’ victory over Kyknos took place at the rising of the Dog Star.¹⁷⁶ Sirius’ fire also scorches the bones of all his other opponents in this work.¹⁷⁷ The calendar date of the duel therefore had a representative significance. Heracles’ first exploit, the killing of the Nemean lion, was already astrologically determined. Similarly, Sirius in the constellation of the ‘dog’ – like the lion’s constellation, which was simultaneously rising – possessed a legitimizing function. A star in the chest of the heavenly ‘lion’ was called Regulus, the ‘King Star’.¹⁷⁸ In the Greek myth, the Leo-named constellation is the lion that had been taken to heaven, after Heracles had once brought it down and whose fur he wore ever since. Therefore, monarchs could be iconographically represented as bearers of a lion’s skin. In return, the Christians saw in Leo a satanic power. He was the devil who walked around like a roaring lion,¹⁷⁹ whom a true Messianic lion of the tribe of Judah opposed.¹⁸⁰ Thus they may have followed the example of the Cynics, who had reversed the dynastic intention of the Heracles myth, and had put their mission in the service of Heracles’ successor, Diogenes. In Sibylline oracle literature, Nero is referred to as a lion followed by a dog.¹⁸¹ This may have been a symbol of an anti-Nero agitation, as he was the common enemy of both Cynics and Christians. The model of the Cynic hero has also rubbed off on the Christian Gospels and left recognizable traces in them.¹⁸² When, for example, the Gospel of John puts the words ‘It is finished’ into the mouth of the dying Jesus (19.39), it probably quotes a Herculean tragedy of Seneca published in Neronian times in which the hero decides the outcome of his life with the phrase peractum est.¹⁸³

Although they were created only in the Flavian period, the Jesus biographies retain older traditions that were current during the time of the fire of AD 64. Above all, the Gospel of Matthew deserves attention. His notion of a star appearing at the time of Jesus’ birth may have had only the purpose of overriding the stellar propaganda of the Romans and thus depriving all emperors, from Augustus to Vespasian, of the basis of legitimacy.¹⁸⁴ The star in Matthew guides the Magi, Persian priests, from the East to Bethlehem, to pay homage to the newborn Jesus as the future King.¹⁸⁵ How did the insertion of such a story come about? What the ancient readers understood by the star teaches us the reception history. A Matthew commentary of late antiquity quotes an apocryphal writing, the author of which was Adam’s son Seth. He prophesied to a people of the Far East the future appearance of a star, and taught them how to worship it. The scripture had been handed down from generation to generation for a long time, and for just as long, each year after the wheat harvest, selected men with astrological knowledge and magicians climbed to the top of the ‘victory mountain’ (mons victoralis) to await the appearance of the star. They did this again and again in vain, until one day the star actually descended to the mountain. In it was the face of a newborn boy, but above it a sign resembling a cross. The star child ordered the magicians to travel to Judea. So they did, with the advancing star pointing the way.¹⁸⁶

This miracle story is revealing to us in two respects. It informs us, first, that the ancient readers of Matthew have dated the birth of Jesus in the midsummer rather than winter. Accordingly, the Seth-Apocalypse, or at least its underlying tradition, should be older than the Constantinian version. Only since then was Jesus’ birth located calendarically in the middle of winter. Second, we recognize that the Gospel of Matthew evoked an annual ritual, namely the observations of the rising of Sirius on mountain tops.¹⁸⁷ For this reason, magi climbed the mons victoralis every year after the wheat harvest.¹⁸⁸ With the rise of Sirius, the cereal harvest season ended everywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. Even in Egypt, where the fields were harvested months earlier, the threshing continued for a long time. Instead of Sirius, however, a unique miracle star occurs in this story. This seems to be inspired by Augustus’ dynastic founding myth, which replaced Sirius with a singular comet. Christ’s birth-star should displace this. Augustus had said that he was born of the sidus Iulium, which was only meant metaphorically, but the Redeemer King Jesus himself was actually incarnated in the new miracle star. The sign of the cross, which rises above the head of the star child, caricatures the sidus Iulium hovering over the head of Caesar and his successor, an Augustan Sirius surrogate. Since Seth, the alleged author of this apocalypse, was assimilated to the Persian religious founder Zoroaster (Zarathustra),¹⁸⁹ the legend must be influenced by instructions for the observation of the rising Sirius, which has traditionally been attributed to him.¹⁹⁰ The fact that he was considered to be a Sirius-prophet is revealed in his Greek name Zoroastres, which contains the word for ‘star’ (astron).¹⁹¹

Luke’s version of Jesus’ nativity lacks the star motif, but he replaces it with the divine figure of an angel who reveals to shepherds that their Redeemer had just been born in the city of David. The light of the angel falling on them and shining on them infuses the shepherds with terror. Luke calls it doxa, ‘glory’,¹⁹² evoking the stellar power and horror of ancient kings. In addition, Luke describes Jesus’ birth as ‘rising from the heights’, which can only match the appearance of a star.¹⁹³ It seems, then, that Luke had the same Roman template in mind as Matthew, and consequently transformed the gloria Caesaris, which was manifested in the sidus Iulium, into the doxa given to Jesus from God. Both evangelists would have followed a common source. Whether this was a particular text or oral tradition is beyond our knowledge. But it can be assumed that a Christianized sidus Iulium played an important role in Nero’s time in the spiritual struggle against Rome. Only then was there a precise motive for making shepherds appear as bearers of revelation. Nero’s court poet Calpurnius Siculus had done the same when he imitated Vergil’s Eclogues, and for that reason shepherds put the news of a miracle-comet, which had appeared at the emperor’s accession to the throne, and outbid the splendour of sidus Iulium. The Gospel of Luke uses the bucolic ambience in the opposite sense of a national messianism. The herdsmen find the new-born Saviour in Bethlehem, where David once grew up as a shepherd.¹⁹⁴ That should mark Jesus as the new David, destined to rule Israel as a royal ‘shepherd’. Thus, a legendary bandit who led a guerrilla war, conquered Jerusalem and usurped the throne of the king became a guide to a messianic career to be followed by Jesus.

The fact that Luke’s Gospel and the Book of Acts only pretend that there is a relaxed relationship between Christians and Romans, and that an anti-Roman intention hides beneath the texts’ surface, is most clearly seen in the dating of Jesus’ birth in the year of a census ordered by Augustus.¹⁹⁵ Through Flavius Josephus, it is known that Judea was placed under direct Roman administration in AD 6 by such a census. This provincialization promptly triggered massive protests. Nationalists, who insisted that the land was the sole property of God, called for tax refusal and the shaking off of Roman rule.¹⁹⁶ Since then, rioters had repeatedly brought the country into turmoil. Thus, when Luke gave birth to the Son of God in this hour of need, he communicated to his readers a message readily understandable to them. They should see in the lytrosis, ‘salvation’, as hoped from Jesus, a release of the fetters that the Romans had laid on the enslaved people. Therefore, he made Jesus’ birth the initial spark of a liberation movement that itself came about in the same year.¹⁹⁷

Theological interpreters turn the meaning of the Lukan birth story on its head. They believe that the fact that Jesus’ parents travelled to Bethlehem to be counted and registered shows their fidelity to the Romans. Instead, they are representatives of a national humiliation. Luke allegedly had wanted to demarcate the sacred family from Jewish resistance fighters, who then refused taxes and boycotted the census.¹⁹⁸ Thus, Jesus’ own statement should be understood. When some Pharisees and followers of King Herod wanted to force Jesus to admit that he was a political rebel, they confronted him with the question of whether it was right to pay taxes. Then Jesus asked for a denarius, a Roman coin, on which the image of the Emperor was engraved with his name. Jesus then spoke the famous words: ‘Give back to the emperor what belongs to him, and to God what belongs to God!’¹⁹⁹ On a cursory level, that sounds like a declaration of loyalty to the Roman occupying power, as if the Kingdom and the Empire could coexist peacefully. But behind the apparent call for tax payments hides a contrary message. As the emperor can only get back what he gave before, the case of tax would not apply. Consequently, only the imperial currency represented by the Roman coin held before Jesus can be meant. God’s property, on the other hand, is the land expropriated by the Romans: whoever gives the Promised Land back to God must drive out the occupying power and its currency.²⁰⁰

Another passage, which is often used for a two-world doctrine, does not prove what it should. The Gospel of John puts the words ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ in Jesus’ mouth when he is before Pilate.²⁰¹ But the Romans were never deceived by a spiritualized salvation concept that the Christians used to impersonate themselves as a politically benign group, knowing that the Kingdom of God for whom Jesus and his missionaries were advertising was yet to be realized on Earth. A purely heavenly kingdom, which already exists invisibly, requires no foundation and no propaganda. So Jesus’ saying can only mean that the expected messianic kingdom has a heavenly model and derives its legitimacy from it. It is to come down from heaven to Earth.

Christian theologians believe that Jesus did not want his followers to bring about the dawn of the messianic end of the Earth by violent methods. Therefore, when he was arrested on the Mount of Olives, he prevented his followers from taking up arms and uttered the famous words: ‘He who uses the sword will perish by the sword.’²⁰² In a hopeless emergency, this was an appropriate response that avoided unnecessary bloodshed. On the other hand, when theological exegetes interpret the saying of Jesus in the sense of a generally valid pacifist programme, they remove it from its narrative context. For in Luke’s Gospel, in the preceding supper, Jesus commanded all his apostles to obtain swords.²⁰³ Such militant mobilization explains why his opponents felt threatened by him and seized him in time before the Passover. The research literature acknowledges that Luke refers here to a zealot tradition that saw a freedom fighter in Jesus, yet he allegedly cited this to defuse it.²⁰⁴ This would have been the reason why Jesus described two swords, which the disciples showed him, as sufficient. Of course, they could not expel the Romans with only two swords. Jesus’ command to arm themselves is said to have been for future migrant missions in pairs, so that they could protect themselves against bandits.

There is no evidence, however, that missionaries carried weapons. So another interpretation is closer: at the Passover, two swords were indeed enough to commit an assassination against a Roman dignitary. Such a signal could have the hoped-for effect of inciting the people to revolt. Before the Jewish War of Liberation, ‘terrorists’ called Sicarii mingled with the assembled congregation and massacred collaborators with daggers that they hid under their robes.²⁰⁵ A prominent high priest named Ananias was killed right at the beginning of the uprising.²⁰⁶ Killing celebrities of his kind has always been the wish of freedom fighters. But if the militant picture of Jesus, which conveys Luke’s special tradition, already existed at the time of Nero, then Christians could feel justified in performing an even more impressive symbolic action in harmony with their Redeemer.

On a symbolic date, the burning of Rome was an appeal not only to the Jews, but to all the peoples of the Mediterranean dominated by Rome, to free themselves from the Roman yoke. The Jesus of the Gospels accordingly longs for an eschatological baptism of fire and wants to set the whole Earth ablaze.²⁰⁷ He did not come to bring peace, but division and the sword, as he says in the same context.²⁰⁸ The martial imagery refers to the collapse of the family ties that cause Jesus’ message.²⁰⁹ It also, however, has a perfectly literal implication. Through Flavius Josephus, it is known that Jewish families actually split into pro-Roman and anti-Roman factions in the run-up to the Jewish revolt. The elders and the more fortunate advised themselves to submit to Roman rule, but many younger ones were ready to riot and wanted to resort to swords.²¹⁰

Through the messianic star that leads the Magi to Bethlehem in Matthew, Jesus’ role as Redeemer received an even more far-reaching explosive power that transcended the interior of the Imperium Romanum. For the Magi came from the Far East, where at that time not the Romans, but the Parthians, ruled, and returned to their homeland with the knowledge that world domination belonged to an Oriental king. Thus they brought to the Parthians, so to speak, the star of Caesar, who had threatened their empire, in a semantically reversed form. The Parthian Empire was now the only world power that could endanger Rome.²¹¹ Those who rejected Roman supremacy in the Near East were therefore well advised to press for an ever-threatening invasion by the Parthians. A Parthian war in Neronian time could awaken hope for assistance in particular among the Jews seeking a war of liberation.²¹² The previously mentioned oracle of the time, which expressed total Oriental expectation of the Redeemer, and that world domination would pass from the West to a king from the East, was understandable as an indirect invitation to the Parthian king to act as messianic saviour.

Since the Parthian Empire had replaced the Persian Empire and the Parthians were called Persians by the Romans, it was possible to pass the role of a Messiah to a Parthian king. As such, he would have been a new Cyrus, as Cyrus, the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, allegedly freed the Jews from their Babylonian captivity and allowed them to rebuild Solomon’s Temple. For all Jews loyal to the Persian Empire, who were content with a partial cultural sovereignty under the leadership of a high priest, Cyrus was therefore the first Messiah ever.²¹³ This made him a rival of a nationalist Messianism, for which only one man of David’s line came into question as the future king. Both concepts are unbalanced in the Old Testament, and the New Testament texts have a similar hybrid mix. On the one hand a messianic star, which blends the stellar rule symbolism of Augustus and is experienced by the Jewish vassal king Herod as a threat to his power and position, announces a Davidic Messiah, who is recognized by the Far East as such. On the other hand, in the Apocalypse of John, the returning Christ wears a garment bearing the name ‘King of Kings’, the ancient royal title of the Achaemenids, which the Parthians had adopted.²¹⁴ This seems to reflect the messianic expectation of Christians who were more willing to join the Parthian king than to remain subservient to the Roman emperor. They considered the idea that the Jews could restore a politically autonomous Israel by their own accord to be an unrealistic utopia.

Indeed, the expectation of a Messiah in Parthian dress was by no means hopeless, as long as the Romans and the Parthians fought each other. In fact, Jews who came to Judea from Mesopotamia, which was under the rule of the Parthians, supported the national revolt.²¹⁵ But the hope that the Parthians themselves would campaign with the Jews against Rome did not come true. It ended in AD 63 via a peace agreement which provisionally finished the Roman–Parthian hostilities. Nevertheless, the peace always remained unstable. Even in the Flavian period, some tried to move the Parthians to intervene with stellar propaganda. This had a special punchline: with the Magi, the dominating star of the Achaemenids returned from the West to the East. In legendary traditions, the newborn Cyrus had been abandoned and nursed by a bitch.²¹⁶ The bitch was a symbolic animal of Sirius,²¹⁷ and had been stolen by Alexander and the imitating Romans from the Persians. The Gospel of Matthew causes the star to return to its former Persian territory with the Magi to promote Parthian support of a Davidic Messiah who would assist them in the common struggle against the Roman Empire.

The dispute between Romans and Parthians had brewed over control of Armenia.²¹⁸ Their King Tiridates, a brother of the then Parthian king, officially surrendered to the absent Roman emperor in Asia Minor by laying down his diadem before his portrait in AD 63.²¹⁹ Three years later, he made this symbolic gesture before Nero himself, in Rome, where he had travelled especially for this purpose with a train of Magi on a long country road. Here he laid his diadem at the feet of the emperor personally, and proved his divine honours by means of a proskynesis (prostration). Nero picked him up and put the diadem back on.²²⁰ This was the usual ritual with which Roman emperors crowned Eastern vassal kings. Herod had previously bowed down before Augustus and received his royal crown back in the same way.²²¹

The Jesus of the Gospels would have become such a marionette of Rome if he had followed the offer of the devil to give him dominion, if he worshipped him. But Jesus rejected this sovereign request, because he wanted to submit only to his divine father.²²² In this story of temptation, the devil vicariously assumes the role of the emperor;²²³ the demons that Jesus fought make up his anti-God force. They deprive the souls of the people they take possession of, of their identity, so that they lose their self-control. Possession through demons acts as a narrative metaphor for the state of a foreign-dominated country in the Gospels. Jesus’ exorcisms, on the other hand, promise a messianic act of liberation that will redeem his homeland from the state of national self-alienation. Therefore, the demons that Jesus forces to leave the possessed are called ‘legion’ in one case.²²⁴ They are spiritual counterparts of the Roman occupying power whose expulsion is Jesus’ concern.²²⁵

Therefore, the Christians could see an anti-Herod and anti-Tiridates in Jesus. It has long been recognized that Matthew has copied the Magi who were led by a star to Bethlehem from those Magi who accompanied Tiridates on his way to Rome.²²⁶ The Gospel takes them back to the time of Augustus and provocatively does not let them travel to Rome but to Judea. If an imaginary comet had endowed both Augustus and Nero with heavenly legitimacy, a counter-comet now signals that a recognition of authority is due to Jesus alone. Thus, in Matthew’s version of the natal story, traumatic experiences of the Augustan and Neronian times merge.²²⁷ They present the new-born saviour as the future king, who, unlike Herod and Tiridates, will not submit to a foreign ruler.

That the divine reverence that Nero received from Tiridates and his Magi was a source of offence to opposing Christians provides a plausible explanation of why they chose AD 64 for an arson attack. At that time, the Armenian king was expected in Rome, so that he actually carried out the official submission before Nero, which he had symbolically done the year before, and thus sealed the agreed peace between the Romans and Parthians. This finally happened in AD 66. For Oriental enemies of Rome, who had hoped that a Parthian invasion would liberate their homeland from their Roman oppressors, the reason must have been enough to protest. They could not do anything more impressive than to set the capital of the Imperium Romanum on fire on 19 July, before the arrival of Tiridates.²²⁸ On this day, the Redeemer was to return to Earth and destroy his enemies. For the arsonists, Christ was incarnated in the judging fire of the Dog Star. This could later give Matthew the idea of having a miracle star appear at the time of Jesus’ birth, which eclipsed the comets with which Augustus and Nero had attested themselves monarchically. For, as seen, there is much to suggest that all these fictional comets were substitutes for the rising Sirius.

Conclusion

With Nero’s death, the Julio-Claudian dynasty perished. But he lived on in a ghostly way in a series of coups, with people posing as Nero and agitating in the Eastern Mediterranean against the Flavian emperors. Paradoxically, their motives were the same as those which directed anti-Neronian Christians in AD 64: they wanted to persuade the Parthians to assist their attempt to expel the Romans from their country. As early as AD 69, a false Nero almost set the Parthians in motion.²²⁹ A pseudo-Nero from the province of Asia recruited a growing number of followers in AD 80, took them to the Euphrates and found refuge with the Parthian King Artabanos, who made preparations to return him to Rome.²³⁰ As late as AD 88/89, the Parthians supported a false Nero and reluctantly delivered him to the Romans.²³¹ For the Christians of the Flavian period, it was of course impossible to join such Neronian pretenders. They expressed their opposition in a different way: the star, whose message the Magi had brought into Parthian dominion, implicitly called for the Eastern enemies of Rome to take sides in favour of a Davidic Messiah. In this way, the Gospel of Matthew conserved revolutionary expectations of earlier generations. Such also seems to be behind the fire of Rome on 19 July AD 64. For Jesus’ church, Nero was the Antichrist who merely parodied the true end-time king. To him, whom imperial propaganda praised as a luminous, benevolent star,²³² the Christians answered with a Redeemer in the guise of Sirius, whom no imperial power could withstand.

Notes

1. Acts 9.2, 18.25, and other references. Christians were first called Christiani in Antioch (Acts 11.26). Once they adopted this name, they risked political persecution. See Vittinghoff (1984).

2. Then there are Elijah and his disciple Elisha, who in turn have a mythical parallel in Moses and Joshua.

3. Ex 12; Jos 5.

4. To this and to the following, add Baudy (2006a), pp.25–49.

5. Lk 4.16–30. See Strobel (1972).

6. Lev 25.8.31. Joshua’s land distribution: Jos 13–21.

7. For a comprehensive overview, see Hengel (2011); cf. also, e.g., Baumbach (1973); Horsley (1985); Horsley (1987); Horsley (2003); Krieger (1998); Baudy (2006b), pp.35–49; Aslan (2013), pp.33–107.

8. However, very few researchers believe that Jesus pursued political goals. Reimarus, who had first assumed this (1778; posthumously 1972), found only a few supporters. Exceptions include Eisler (1929–30), Brandon (1967) and Aslan (2013). Theiβen (2004) considers Jesus and the early Christians to be anti-Roman, but sees them as pacifists. Bammel (1984) criticized the zealotic interpretation of Jesus from a traditional point of view.

9. Rom 12.4–6, 1 Cor 19.10, 12.12–16, Col 1.18, Eph 4.15f. See Baudy (2005b) for sources and bibliography.

10. On the political function of the resurrection myth, see Baudy (2005a). Theiβen regards Jesus as belonging to the prophets who appeared unarmed and therefore represented a quietistic version of apocalypticism: e.g., Theiβen (1997), p.396; Theiβen (2003), p.503. That is a misjudgement, for all the prophets produced a threatening situation for the Romans, which could turn into violence at any time. Therefore, the Romans sent the military against them.

11. Num 9.15f., 10.34f.

12. On the destructive dimension of this spirit fire, cf. Baudy (2012); Baudy (2015).

13. I first represented this thesis in 1991; see the other works of Baudy in the bibliography below.

14. Livy 5.39.2ff, with 6.1.11. Neronian fire: Tac. Ann. 14.41.

15. Sources in Baudy (1991), p.47f., n.27.

16. Merkelbach (1995), p.110f.

17. Cens. Die Nat. 18.10; Gemin. Astron. 8.16–24.

18. Porph. Nymph. 24; see Solin. Coll. Mem. 32.12f.

19. Antiochus according to Rhetorius (Cumont & Boll, vol. 1, p.163); Lyd. Mens. 3.16: Psellos de omnifaria doctrina 125 (PG 122, col. 761); Gennadius Dialogus Christiani cum Iudaeo (Jahn (1893), p.38, 18ff.). See Baudy (1991), p.49 n.52. This tradition replaces the usual dating of the world conflagration in the summer solstice and the deluge in the winter solstice within the cosmic year: Berossos FGrH 680 F 21.

20. Merkelbach (1963), pp.14–28.

21. Sacrifice of reddish cattle: Diod. 1.88.3; Plut. Is. 31 (Mor. 363a); sacrifice of reddish donkeys: Plut. Is. 30f. (Mor. 362e, 363c). For Egyptian sources testifying to analogous victims, see Yoyotte (1980–81).

22. Manetho FGrH 609 F22. A sacrifice of typhonic humans is also asserted by Diod. 1.88.3, and Plut. Is. 72 (Mor. 380c).

23. Later historical updates of the myth are listed by Merkelbach (1963), pp.23–27.

24. Manetho in Jos. C. Ap. 1.26. There are good reasons to believe that the Hellenistic Exodus narratives are in the tradition of an older anti-Judaic original to which biblical tradition responded polemically: so Assmann (1998), pp.47–72.

25. Jos. C. Ap. 1.26 (249).

26. Mnaseas of Patara, in Jos. C. Ap. 2.9 (114); Damakritos FGrH F1; Apion in Jos. C. Ap. 2.7 (80). According to Tac. Hist. 5.3, the Israelites were led on their desert migration by a donkey herd to water and thus saved from dehydration.

27. Illustration in Guyot & Klein (1994), p.232. Christians as donkey worshippers: Tert. Apol. 1.14.1; Min. Fel. 28.7.

28. Poseidonios FGrH 87 F109.

29. This technique also includes the soteriological revaluation of the death of the cross: see Ebertz (1987).

30. E.g., Ham (2005), pp.23–30. On the other hand, Patsch (1971) argued for a political interpretation, but without considering Jesus a revolutionary prone to violence, such as Eisler and Brandon did.

31. Mt 21.1–11.

32. Mt 21.5 quotes only Sach 9.9. The cutting of the context favoured a pacifist misinterpretation.

33. Sach 9.13–15.

34. 1 Kings 1.33.

35. 2 Sam 16.2.

36. 2 Sam 18.9.

37. Oracula Sibyllina 5.29; Plut. Mor. 567e–f; Philostr. Apoll. 4.48.

38. Ps. Sen. Oct. 227–51. Commenting: Williams (1994), pp.188–91. On the other hand, Nero had himself celebrated as an Apollonian dragon slayer (Carmina Einsiedlensia 1.34). That this panegyric was meant ironically and aimed at imperial criticism, see Korzeniewski (1974), p.923, is I think unreasonable.

39. In Jewish apocalyptic already in the first century BC, Pompey was depicted as a dragon: Pseudo-Solomon Odes 2.25–29. After the destruction of Jerusalem, Rome was similarly bestialized (4 Esr 11f.). In Oracula Sibyllina 8.88 and Apoc 12.3, the fire-red dragon reflects the model of the also red Typhon (Plut. Is. 22), likewise the whore Babylon, dressed in purple and riding on a scarlet seven-headed animal (Apoc 17.3–5). See Busch (1996), p.61. Similar to Typhon, in the Apocalypse of John the two animals (Apoc 13) representing the red dragon, which meant the Roman Empire, are thrown alive into a lake of fire (19.20). Nero as a dragonlike Antichrist (Beliar) appears also in Ascensio Isaiae 4.1–14.

40. The following section is intended to supplement the basic work of Fuchs (1938), with a stellar component. In the vast research literature on ancient apocalypticism, Sirius to my knowledge remains unnoticed.

41. Ps.-Skyl. 233.

42. Plut. Mor. 326a. This refers to the imitation of Alexander by Roman generals: see Michel (1967); Kühnen (2008).

43. Plut. Alex. 3 dates Alexander’s birth to the sixth of the month Hekatombaion. Converted, this day in 356 BC coincided with 19 July: Badian (1982), p.48, n.34, or 20 July: Miller (1975), p.229f.; Koch (2000), p.331, n.13. Both days corresponded with the rising of Sirius on the latitudes of the cities of Alexandria and Memphis: Olympiodorus 1.4 (Stüve, p.113). The date is to be regarded as unhistorical, as well as the competing dating to 6 Thargelion (Ael. Hist. 25), which need not concern us here. Alexander was to be associated with the rising Sirius and the concomitant constellation of Leo. In a legend dating back to Aristarchus, Philip II dreamed before the birth of his son that he had pressed a signet ring in which the image of a lion was engraved onto the body of his wife. This characterized Alexander as a hero inspired by lion-like courage: Plut. Alex. 2; Vita Alexandri 1.8.4 and 7. Baldus (1987), pp.408–16, related this to Alexander’s signet ring, adopted from the Achaemenids, which later would have been worn by his Roman imitators Pompey and Antonius. On an aureus of Antonius, a lion with a star over the back was depicted. This is neither a mere reference to the stellar character of the lion, so Michel (1967), pp.120–24, nor a solar symbol, so Baldus (1987), pp.414–16. Envisaged is most probably Sirius, rising synchronously with the lion (schol. Arat. Phaen. 150). Curt. 9.6.8 designates Alexander as columen ac sidus Macedoniae. Sidus is not a constellation, but a single star. The anti-Greek Egyptian oracle literature seems to have responded to this stellar propaganda: the demotic Lamb Oracle refers to the Greek invaders as dogs and mentions among them a ‘big dog’ (vi.19–21). This cannot be other than their leader, that is, Alexander. Cf. Meyer (1997), p.184.

44. Sources at Ameling (1988).

45. Hom. Il. 22.25–32.

46. Hom. Il. 5.1–8.

47. Hom. Il. 11.56–66.

48. Richer (1999–2000) attempts to discover a broader Sirius Achilles typology in a comparative way.

49. Plut. Is. 77 (Mor. 270a). Avesta: Yasna 8.44 (Panaino).

50. Avesta: Yasna 8.20–33 (Panaino). Merkelbach (1963), pp.70–76, plausibly dates the origin of this myth, because of its Egyptian symbolism, to the time when Egypt was conquered by the Persians. Panaino, who edited the text and interpreted it comprehensively (1990–95), rejects Merkelbach’s theory – (1995), ii.55–58 – and sees the myth as already anchored in the Indo-European tradition.

51. Avesta: Yasna 19.31–89 (Panaino).

52. Documentation by Kyrieleis (1986); see Bechtold (2011), pp.77–127. Possible Sirius references, however, are not envisaged here, as in other scholarship.

53. Cic. Div. 1.100; Livy 4.15; 16.8–11; Dion. Hal. Rom. Ant. 12.10–13.

54. Dion. Hal. Rom. Ant. 12.1 dates the event to the time of the rising of the Dog Star and refers to Egypt, where now the Nile was in flood.

55. Livy 5.18.9: Romane, aquam Albanam cave lacu contineri, cave in mare manare suo flumine sinas; emissamper agros rigabis dissipatam rivis extingues. See Puhvel (1973), pp.381–85; Puhvel (1988), pp.277–83.

56. Such as Niebuhr (1873), pp.407–20; and Schwegler (1858), p.217. The Troy-typology of the war against Veii has since been treated many times; see, for example, Kraus (1994).

57. Paus. 1.12.1. Both Achilles (Plut. Pyrrh. 1.13) and Alexander the Great (Plut. Pyrrh. 8.11) were models for Pyrrhos. Perret (1942) presented an unlikely thesis that the Trojan origin of the Romans was then invented by the Greeks. Rather, Pyrrhos seems to have used an already existing myth for his purposes. See Weber (1972), pp.213–15. Erskine (2001), pp.157–60, is sceptical.

58. Livy 40.6.1–40.22.8.

59. Livy 40.22.7.

60. It is an exaggeration that from the summit of Haimos there is a broad view as far as the Adriatic: Polyb. 34.12; Livy 40.22.5.

61. The closest analogy is the ritual observation of the rising of Sirius on a mountain peak on the island of Keos. This practice too belonged to a sacrificial feast with two addressees. Instead of Zeus and Helios, here Zeus and Sirius were recipients of the victim. According to the aetiological myth, the great shepherd Aristaeus once brought the Etesia to life for the first time and thus ended a drought catastrophe or a pernicious and human disease: Callim. Aet. 3 F75, 32ff. (Pfeiffer); Apoll. Argon. 2.516–27, with schol.; Diod. 4.82.2–3; Nigidius Figulus Sphaerae Graec. p.125f. (Swoboda); Hyg. Astr. 2.4; Serv. 1.14; Nonn. Dion. 5.269–79, 15.278 85. According to Herakl. Pont. F141 (Cic. Div. 1.130; Wehrli), the inhabitants of the island made predictions using the meteorological circumstances of the heliacal rising of Sirius, salubrisne an pestilens annus futurus sit. The similarity between the hill festivals celebrated at Keos and in Thrace has apparently created the myth that Aristaeus had wandered to Haimos at the end of his life and mysteriously disappeared there (Diod. 4.82.6). Analogous dog-star rites existed in the Cilician Taurus Mountains (Manil. Astr. 1.396–401), as well as in Egypt, where they were traced back to a certain Jachim (Aelian F105 [Hercher]). According to the astrological literature, revolts and changes of power were foretold here at the rising of Sirius: Nechepso and Petosiris F12 (Ries); Pseudo-Zoroaster in Geoponica 1.8 (Beckh). For the prognostic function of the Sirius rise, cf. Gundel (1927), pp.346–50.

62. Mundum vultuque gubernat, is said about Sirius at Manil. Astr. 1.407.

63. Apollod. Bibl. 1.6.3.

64. Cic. Div. 1.103; Val. Max. 1.5.3; Plut. Aem. 10. Vaahtera (2001), p.45, sees as the background of this omen only the similarity of the names Perseus and Persa, but does not recognize the stellar symbolism of the ‘doggy’.

65. Plut. Caes. 60; Suet. Jul. 79; without attribution already mentioned in Cic. Div. 2.110. For Caesar’s war plans, see Malitz (1984).

66. Plut. Caes. 61.2.

67. So also Koortbojan (2013), p.121f.

68. Extensively documented by Weinstock (1971). See Bechtold (2011), pp.161–225.

69. E.g., Plin. Nat. Hist. 2.93f. For further references and discussion, see Baudy (2001), pp.30–48.

70. Plut. Ant. 33.

71. Plut. Ant. 34.4, 37.5; Dio 48.39, 49.19. See Martin (1993), p.49.

72. Aug. Res Gest. 16.29; Just. 16.29, 42.3. On denarii of 19 BC, a kneeling Parthian (Phraates IV) is pictured, who surrenders the standards. See Hackl, Jacobs & Weber (2010), 2.590–93.

73. Baudy (2001), pp.44–47.

74. See the sources in Hackl, Jacobs & Weber (2010), 1.32.

75. Significantly, Calpurnius Siculus Eclogae 1.82f regarded the sidus Iulium as an omen for the coming civil wars. See, similarly, Obsequens 68. In the literature on the propaganda wars between Octavian and Antony, the sidus Iulium strangely goes unnoticed: Jeanmaire (1921); Scott (1933); Becher (1966); Fadinger (1969); Martin (1993); Clauss (1995). An exception is Pandey (2013) with the problematic thesis that Antony used the sidus Iulium ideologically earlier than Augustus.

76. Plin. Nat. Hist. 2.94: interiore gaudio sibi illum (sc. sidus) natum seque in eo nasci interpretatus est.

77. Dio 50.4; Plut. Ant. 54.9. See e.g., Becher (1966), p.24; Clauss (1995), p.45f.

78. Virg.Aen. 8.675–81.

79. Virg.Aen. 10.270–75.

80. Hor. Od. 1.37.21 calls Cleopatra a fatal monstrosity.

81. Serv. Ecl. 8.46 speaks of a star (stella), quam quidam AD gloriam Caesaris iuvenis pertinere existimabant.

82. App. Civ. 2.102.

83. Macrob. Sat. 1.14; Pliny Nat. Hist. 18.211; Plut. Caes. 59. See Malitz (1987); Bayer (2002). The model was the Decree of Canopus of Ptolemy III in 238 BC. From that time onwards, the day of the Sirius morning rise always should fall on the same calendar day.

84. See Baudy (2001), p.42.

85. Caesar reformed the late Republican calendar, which had 355 days (with months of twenty-eight to thirty-one days). Every second year, twenty-two or twenty-three days were inserted. Caesar in 46 BC interpolated two additional months between November and December. If the alleged sixty-seven intercalation days (Solin. Coll. Mem. 1.45; Dio 43.26.1) is supplemented by the leap month, which fell on 45 BC, one arrives at the ninety days claimed by Cens. Die Nat. 20.8.

86. For example, Ramsey & Licht (1997); Terio (2006), p.208, n.664.

87. 25 July as the day of the Sirius’ heliacal rising: Calendarium Gemini p.212f. (Manitius). Serv. Aen. 3.141 erroneously names 24 June; the surviving VIII. K. Iulias is to be replaced by VIII. K. Augustas (= 25 July).

88. InscrIt xiii.78.

89. Dio 43.26.2 reports that others have claimed that Caesar had inserted an even greater number of days. This is an important indication of my thesis that the sixty-seven days Dio mentions are not based on tradition but on calculation. Therefore, we have to do an anachronistic calculation ourselves in reconstructing the fixed date, as I did – (2001), pp.38–42. To reproach this anachronism – Ramsey (2006), p.106f., n.136; Terio (2006), p.208, n.664 – is pointless. Even if the Venus festival fell on 25 July in 46 BC, this would not change much in my theory, since Caesar would only have replaced the Egyptian day of the Sirius early rising with the Roman date.

90. Plin. Nat. Hist. 2.94; Suet. Caes. 8.8; Dio 45.6–7.1; Serv. Ecl. 9.46. Like Gurval (1997); Matijevic (2005), p.63; and Matijevic (2006), p.146 – against the opinio communis – I do not consider the miraculous star a real comet, but an imaginary sign. According to Serv. Aen. 8.681 it was the persuasive work of Augustus that led the people to see in the star the soul of the deified Caesar. Rather, he invented the apotheosis together with the star.

91. Schmid (2005), p.53, n.195, objects to my theory: ‘Above all, the argument that Augustus was able to invent a comet within the framework of an “image campaign”, is skewed, for whose sighting a good 25 years later many of the eyewitnesses still lived.’

92. So Ramsey & Light (1997).

93. Serv. Ecl. 9.46 refers to Baebius Macer and the memoirs of Augustus as sources.

94. Just. 37.2. Again, Ramsey (1999) in my opinion has tried in vain to prove the reality of the two comets by Chinese annals.

95. Just. 38.7.

96. Just. 38.4.

97. In detail Hubaux (1958).

98. The Camillus–Augustus typology has often been dealt with in the research literature, e.g., Stubler (1941), p.71f.; Hellegouarc’h (1970); Haas (2015), pp.201–27.

99. Virg. Ecl. 9.46–50.

100. Virg. Georg. 4.281–559. Aristaeus receives the revelation of Proteus at the rising of Sirius: Virg. Georg. 4.425.

101. Virg.Aen. 10.270–75.

102. Virg. Aen. 3.73–171; the rising of Sirius: Virg. Aen. 3.140f.

103. Varro at Virg. Aen. 1.382. See Suerbaum (1985).

104. For the multivalence of the Vergilian star prodigies, cf. Engelhardt (1970); Borzsak (1983); Gorler (1986); Botha (1991); West (1993); Williams (2004).

105. Bergmann (1998), p.151f.

106. Calp. Ecl. 1.77–88. Sen. Nat. Quaest. 7.17.2 proves that Nero’s comet was identified with the sidus Iulium. A comet was considered a sign of Claudius’ death: Plin. Nat. Hist. 2.92; Suet. Claud. 46. The dating of the Calpurnius poem is controversial. It can be left open as to whether it originated as early as AD 54 – Scheda (1969), p.60; Fugmann (1992), p.204; Merfeld (1999), pp.72–79; Vinchesi (2002), pp.141, 145 – or was later written, be it for the Neronia in AD 60 – so Toynbee (1942), p.90; Rogers (1953), p.241 – or that of AD 65 – so Korzeniewski (1971), p.4; Verdière (1985), p.1911f.; Bergmann (1998), p.14. In any case, the author would then mentally return to the year 54; see Schmitzer (2003), p.215.

107. The comets observed during Nero’s reign are not literary inventions: see Rogers (1953); Grzynek (1999). They were regarded by the emperor’s enemies as negative omens and transformed by Nero’s propaganda into positive omens, as in AD 64 (Tac. Ann. 15.47; Suet. Ner. 36), when Nero’s Egyptian astrologer Balbillus supported the emperor against the Piso conspiracy: Suet. Ner. 36. To him or to Nero’s educator, Chairemon of Alexandria, who published a book on comets and explained that comets can also be positive signs (FGrH 618 F8; by Barzano (1985), p.1997 n.88, related to the comets of AD 60 or 64), the myth may originate in a story that a terrible comet had once appeared in Egypt and been named after the then ruling Typhon (Plin. Nat. Hist. 2.91). In Ps. Sen. Oct. 227–51, a hostile comet reflects Nero’s tyranny, in which the un-godlike rule of Typhon is repeated: 237–44.

108. Tac. Ann. 15.44.1.

109. Suet. Ner. 38; Dio 62.16.

110. With contradictory locations: Suet. Ner. 38; Dio 62.18.

111. Tac. Ann. 15.44.2–5.

112. Tac. Ann. 15.38.1.

113. For further evidence, see Baudy (1991), pp.13–15. Many researchers attribute the charge of arson against Nero to his Troy poetry without taking into account the date of the fire.

114. Nero imitated Augustus, who wanted to be like Camillus, a second Romulus, and new founder of Rome (Suet. Aug. 7.2; Tac. Ann. 15.40.2). See Huss (1978), p.138.

115. Only a few examples from the extensive literature are mentioned here: Kienast (1994), pp.425–37; Holland (2000), pp.174–92; Krüger (2012), pp.219–40; Waldherr (2005), pp.210–17; Clauss (2015), pp.78–82; Sonnabend (2016), pp.110–29. Disagreeing with this, however, Champlin (2003), p.185, argues that Nero could have set the fire, but he was out of control. For the popular image of Nero, cf. the reception-historical contributions in Walde (2013).

116. Dio Chrys. Or. 21.10. Long after Nero’s death, flowers lay on his grave: Suet. Ner. 57.

117. Such pseudo-Nerones are attested for AD 69 (Tac. Hist. 1.2, 2.8f.; Dio 63.9.3), AD 80 (Dio 66.9.3b) and AD 88–89 (Suet. Ner. 57). This influenced Jewish and Christian apocalyptic. See Lawrence (1978); Bodinger (1989); Tuplin (1989); Jakob-Sonnabend (1990), pp.133–51; Klauck (2003).

118. Baudy (1991). This position is agreed with by Bedenbender (2013), p.300f.; and Clauss (2015), pp.78–82. On the whole it is rejected on the grounds that the Christian fire apocalyptic would not be sufficient proof: Lafer (2001), p.33; Sonnabend (2016), p.122f. That is correct, but it is more about older research – Baudy (1991), p.46, n.10 – than my calendrical argument. Harwood (1992), p.306, also considers the Christians as arsonists. Grant (1978), p.138; Fini

(1994), p.162f.; Kolb (2002), p.629; and Cross (2006), p.125, n.16, acknowledge the possibility of a Christian attack.

119. Tac. Ann. 15.44.5.

120. Representatives of this interpretation claim that Tacitus relieves the Christians of the charge of arson. But this is explained, as has been noted, solely by his anti-Neronian viewpoint. That Christians were condemned only for their odium humani generis is a thesis recently proposed by Lund (2008) and Schmitt (2011). Schmitt even denies that they were accused of arson, and Lund rejects that the Chrestiani mentioned by Tacitus were Christians at all.

121. Suet. Claud. 25.4. See Botermann (1996), pp.57–71; Cineira (1999), pp.2f., 201–24; Baudy

(2006), p.44f.; Engberg (2007), pp.99–102.

122. Krauter (2009), p.133f., uses the apparent anachronism as an argument for the thesis that Suetonius’ Chrestus could not have been Christ.

123. For example, Keresztes (1984), p.409; Keresztes (1989), pp.75–79.

124. For example, Henderson (1905), p.251; Weigall (1943), p.273; Bishop (1964), pp.82–88; Robichon (1986), p.254; Kienast (1994), pp.435–37; Holland (2000), p.183; Waldherr (2005), p.216; Incigneri (2003), p.215f.

125. Rom 13.1–7. That Paul’s epistles nevertheless show an anti-Roman tendency is the thesis of an anti-imperial interpretation of Paul: Horsley (1997), pp.1–8, 140–47; Elliott (2008); López (2008); Ehrensperger & Tucker (2010). Krauter (2009) and Kim (2008) are opposed to this.

126. 1 Cor 3.13–15: fire testing on the Day of the Lord. 1 Cor 2.6.2 prophesies the disempowerment of the rulers of this world. The gospel is the odour of death for some, the scent of life for others (2.16). God will soon crush Satan and put him under the feet of Christians (Rom 8.19–23). Similarly, in the pseudepigraphic Letter 2 Thess: Jesus reveals himself in the sky in blazing fire (1.7f.); he kills his adversary with the breath of his mouth and the lustre of his appearance (2.8).

127. 1 Cor 6.3.

128. Apoc 18.6.

129. Apoc 19.11–16.

130. Apoc 11.5.

131. Acts 2.

132. See Baudy (2015).

133. Passio sancti Pauli apostoli 23–44, 6–8 (Lipsius).

134. Cf. Rordorf (1982).

135. 2 Cor 10.4; 1 Thess 5.8; Rom 13.12. See also Eph 6.10–17.

136. For example, Macky (1998).

137. 1 Thess 5.1; Mt 24.43f.; Lk 12.39f.; Apoc 3.3; 16.15; 2 Peter 3.10.

138. Gospel of Thomas, Logion 98. Lüdemann & Janβen (1997), p.130, trace the parable back to the historical Jesus.

139. Rom 13.12.

140. Schelkle (1981), p. 139, conversely, believes that Christian metaphors have demilitarized Jewish apocalypticism: anyone who claims this has to bear the burden of proof.

141. Tac. Hist. 4.54.1–3; see Baudy (1991), p.26.

142. Jos. Bell. Jud. 2.14.6 (293).

143. See Kippenberg (1983).

144. Jos. Bell. Jud. 6.5.4 (312f.); Tac. Hist. 5.13; Suet. Vesp. 4.5.

145. This happened through the Jewish defector Flavius Josephus: Jos. Bell. Jud. 3.8.9 (399–404). Rabbinic Judaism sought favour with the Romans using a legend, which attributed a corresponding prophecy to Johanan b. Zakkai (Goldschmidt).

146. Jos. Bell. Jud. 6.5.3 (288f.).

147. Jos. Bell. Jud. 7.5.4 (123f.).

148. Tac. Hist. 4.81f.; Suet. Vesp. 7.1.

149. Philostr. Apoll. 5.20. See Zimmermann (2003).

150. Dio 65.8.

151. Coin pictures show Isis-Sothis riding a dog in the tympanum of the temple: Merkelbach

(1995), p.587, fig. 111. ‘I’m the one who rises in the dog’s star,’ says the goddess of herself in the Isis aretalogies: Merkelbach (1995), p.116.

152. Jos. Bell. Jud. 4.10.6 (616). According to Jos. Bell. Jud. 4.11.5 (654), in return Vespasian received in Alexandria congratulations from Rome, which were also called ‘good news’.

153. Thus, in the inscribed calendar decree issued in the province of Asia, which ordered that the year should henceforth begin on the day on which the world saviour Augustus was born: Leipoldt & Grundmann (1982), pp.205–07.

154. Mk 1.14f. Recent research considers Mark to be the author of a ‘counter-gospel’ who projected back to the time of Jesus experiences from the time of Vespasian: Theiβen (1999); Ebner (2003); Heininger (2009); Bedenbender (2013).

155. Hippol. Ref. 4.48.12. See Baudy (1991), p.29.

156. Palladius Opus Agriculturae 7.9; see Baudy (1986), pp.13–22.

157. According to Aratus Phaen. 332–34, the rising Sirius rages also in tree plantations: only the vital plants survive the test. Trees were planted or transplanted in the Near East at this time (Theophr. Hist. Plant. 2.6.4; Plin. Nat. Hist. 13.37). Theophrastus calls the trees that were destroyed by Sirius astróbleta, ‘slain by the star’ (Caus. Plant. 5.9.1). For this he forms the nouns astrobolía (5.9.2) and astrobolesía (5.9.4). Sirius was considered a dog spitting fire:

Germ. Aratus 334; Manil. Astr. 5.207 (latratque Canicula flammas); compare Manil. Astr. 5.17 (portans incendia). See Ricoux (1996), pp.140, 142.

158. Tac. Ann. 15.44.4.

159. To ward off the damaging effect of the dog star, the Romans sacrificed reddish dogs at the Robigalia in April (Festus, p.358, 27L); cf. p.39, 13L; Ovid Fasti 4.905–42; Plin. Nat. Hist. 18.14). Of course, this did not happen, as Ovid falsely asserts (Fasti 4.904), because the dog star had risen on 25 April, but rather because its periodically manifesting power during the summer ascent extended over the whole year. Cf. Serv. Georg. 4.424. The Robigalia were held at the time of the heliacal setting of Sirius.

160. Plin. Nat. Hist. 29.56f; Plut. Fort. Rom. 12 (Mor. 324d–326a); Ael. Nat. An. 12.33; Lyd. Mens. 4.114; Serv. Georg. 8.650. August. Civ. 2.22 mentions only the ritual worship of the goose.

161. So Ungern-Sternberg (2000), p.217.

162. See Pliny Nat. Hist. 2.152.

163. Lyd. Mens. 4.114.

164. See e.g., Theiβen (1983); Döring (2006), pp.101–07.

165. See especially Croissan (1994).

166. Lang (2010).

167. Suet. Vesp. 13; cf. Dio 65.13; Suet. Dom. 10.1.

168. Plut. Alex. 14.2. According to Diog. Laert. 6.60, he said to Alexander, who introduced himself as ‘the great king’, confidently, ‘And I am Diogenes, the dog.’

169. Kerkidas of Megalopolis F1 (Powell CA); Anth. Pal. 7.64; Antipater of Thessalonica (Anth. Pal. 11.158). For this epigram poetry, cf. Häusle (1989).

170. I cannot understand the thesis of Navia (1998), p. 125f., that Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism (Diog. Laert. 6.63, 6.72) would have inspired Alexander to found a universal empire.

171. Based on other observations, Ricoux (2001) also concluded that Jesus was seen as Sirius by his followers. But she does not recognize the subversive message of this assignment, and also overlooks the meaning of 19 July, as she relates all the testimonies to 25 July, the Roman date of the heliacal rising of Sirius.

172. Lucian De morte Peregrini. The often-asked question as to whether Lucian’s work reflects the historical reality or should be regarded as a literary fiction cannot be discussed here. Even if Lucian invented many things, his portrayal would be revealing of the opinion formed about Christians and Cynics in second-century AD antiquity.

173. Drerichs (1951); Kloft (1994); Hartwich (1994); Huttner (1997); Talbert (1978).

174. Dio Chrys. Or. 1.84.

175. Diog. Laert. 9.12–14 quotes an exchange of letters between Dareios and Herakleitos, in which the latter rejects an invitation to come to the royal court. So also Ps.-Herakl. Ep. 4. On the transference of Cynic features to Herakleitos: Du Toit (1997), pp.140–47.

176. Ps. Hes. Scut. 393–401.

177. Ps. Hes. Scut. 153.

178. Plin. Nat. Hist. 18.271 (according to Caesar) dates the appearance of the Regulus to 30 July, the rising of Sirius to 17 July, when the sun entered the lion’s first degree (Nat. Hist. 18.269). The choice of 17 instead of 19 July is explained by the calculation as seen from a more southern latitude. The indication of 21 (Solin. Coll. Mem. 32.12) or 22 July (schol. Arat. Phaen. 150) presupposes still another place of observation for the synchronous entry of the sun into the lion and the Sirius rising, although the latter has been traditionally placed on 19 July.

179. 1 Peter 5.8.

180. Apoc 5.5. The opposing symbolism of the lion manifests itself in a puzzle of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (Logion 7).

181. Oracula Sibyllina 5.29, 8.157.

182. In addition, see Pfister (1937). Controversial in later research: Rose (1948); Simon (1955); Aune (1990); Hartwich (1994).

183. This was already seen before Pfister: Ackermann (1912), p.442.

184. See Baudy (2001), pp.48–69.

185. Mt 2.

186. Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum (PG 56, 637f.). For scholarship on the dating, see Baudy

(2001), p.51, n.57; on the Iranian background, see Baudy (2001), pp.54–57, with n.84.

187. For references, see above, n.61.

188. Such as Baudy (1991), p.32; and Ricoux (1995), p.151; Ricoux (2001).

189. Cf. Bidez & Cumont (1938), 1.45f.; Baudy (1991), pp.23f., 32f.

190. Pseudo-Zoroaster in Geoponica 1.8, 2.15.

191. Cassel (1886), pp.15–23.

192. Lk 2.8f.

193. Lk 1.78. See Schreiber (2009), p.66.

194. Luke names Bethlehem the city of David: Lk 2.4. Here young David once guarded the sheep (1 Sam 16:11), and Matthew quotes the prophecy that a leader will come forth from Bethlehem to feed the people of Israel (Mt 2.6: Micah 5). See 2 Sam 5.2; Ez 34.23; Psalm 78.70f.; Kollmann (2009), p.35. Wolter (2000), p.507f., rejects a Davidic typology and sees Jesus’ natal story standing alone in the bucolic tradition of paganism. Conversely, Schürmann (1969), pp.104–09, and Fitzmyer (2006), p.395, argue for a purely inner-Jewish background. Both positions are not sustainable. The bucolic motifs counteract the Roman power propaganda – see Schreiber (2009), pp.28–54, 65, 67; (2011), p.92 – and are quite compatible with a Davidian messianism: see Schmithals (1973).

195. Lk 2.1.

196. Jos. Jud. Ant. 18.1.1 (1–8).

197. See Baudy (2001), p.50f.; Baudy (2002), p.61f. This is attributed to a particular anti-Roman source of Luke by Braunert (1957). Against this, see Schreckenberg (1980), p.105. I do not wish to explore the attempts to prove that the journey of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem is historically credible, e.g., Rubel (2011).

198. E.g., Moehring (1972); Klein (2000), p.207f.

199. Mk 12.13–17; Mt 22.15–22; Lk 20.20–26.

200. See Bünker (1986); Horsley (1987), pp.306–17; Horsley (2003), p.99; Schreiber (2004), p.94f.; Herzog (2005), pp.182–92; Baudy (2002), p.42f.

201. John 18.36.

202. Mt 26.52.

203. Lk 22.36.

204. See for example, Theiβen (2002), p.118. For a counter-argument, see Baudy (2002a), pp.48–50.

205. Jos. Jud. Ant. 20.8.18 (185–88).

206. Jos. Bell. Jud. 2.17.9 (441).

207. Lk 12.49–52.

208. Lk 12.49–52 (division); Mt 10.34 (sword).

209. Lk 12.52f.; Mt 10.35–37.

210. Jos. Bell. Jud. 4.3.2 (131–33). See Baudy (2015), p.49.

211. Just. 41.1.1: world domination shared between Romans and Parthians.

212. Such hopes could correspond to the mistrust of the Romans against the Parthians, despite existing contacts, see Russell (2015), p.258f.

213. Is 44.24–48.22; 2 Chron. 36.22f.

214. Apoc 19.11–16. The Mule Rider is to be identified in my opinion with the first apocalyptic rider in Apoc 6.3. He is armed with a Parthian-style bow which implies the crossing of the Euphrates’ border.

215. Dio 65.4.3. In his speech to the insurgents, Agrippa II met wider expectations: Jos. Bell. Jud. 2.16.5 (388f.). See Baudy (2001), p.57.

216. Just. 1.4.10. Herodotus knows the myth, but humanizes the female dog as the wife of a shepherd; she was called Kyno (Spako in Persian), ‘bitch’: Hdt. 1.110.

217. Ricoux (1999), p.224; Ricoux (2000), p.73.

218. Ziegler (1964), pp.67–75; Heil (1997); Ehrhardt (1998).

219. Tac. Ann. 15.29.1.

220. Pliny Nat. Hist. 30.16; Suet. Nero 13; Dio 63.1.1–5.2. The historicity of Tiridates’ speech as quoted by Dio is doubted by Müller (2014), p.304f.

221. Jos. Bell. Jud. 1.20.1–3 (386–93), Jud. Ant. 6.6.6 (187).

222. Mt 4.8–10; Lk 4.5–8.

223. So Theiβen (1989), pp.215–32, who opposes an apolitical understanding of Jesus’ attitude. See Baudy (2002), p.45.

224. Mk 5.1–13; see Mt 8.28–32; Lk 8.26–33.

225. Reinach (1903); Theiβen (1974), p.253; Theiβen (1989), p.119; Baudy (2002), p.43f.; Guijarro (2002), pp.48–62; Strecker (2002), pp.48–62; Horsley (2003), p.67f; Klinghardt (2007); Lau (2007); Bedenbender (2013), pp.266–77.

226. Dieterich (1911); Cumont (1933); Gage (1968), pp.96–113.

227. On the other hand, van Kooten (2015), pp.570–78, 588, unilaterally advocates the Augustan period as a reference point.

228. Baudy (1991), p.31f; Baudy (2001), pp.56–64.

229. Tac. Hist. 1.2.2. He was a slave from the Pontus, or a freedman from Italy, who recruited deserters in the East: Tac. Hist. 2.8.

230. Dio 66.19.3.

231. Suet. Nero 57. Nero’s alleged plan to flee to the Parthians (Suet. Nero 47) is a legend inspired by the pseudo-Nerones.

232. Sen. Clem. 1.3.3.

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