On the Destruction of Jerusalem 2.1–2.8

When Herod was buried, the people brought out their free judgments, as men usually do about the dead: he had been harsh and intolerable, had exercised unjust rule over the citizens, a tyrant and not a king of his people, a parricide at home, a plunderer of the public; he had left nobody anything; everything had been drained by taxes; foreigners had been enriched and Jews emptied out, because he had brought an enemy into the temple and polluted all sacred things with sacrilege. Blessed were those who had died, since tortures were not lacking to the living. Judea, they said, had suffered more evils in a few years under Herod's rule, after the captivity had been driven off, than it had endured under a barbarian enemy in the captivity itself, when the kings of the Babylonians ruled over them; under those, exile had been more bearable than one's own home under Herod; by those they had been sent back to their own, by this man driven out; he was harsher than Darius, prouder than Artaxerxes, more rapacious than the Medes. They had hoped for an end of evils, that they might come out of exile if he closed his last day; but to the misery of servitude Archelaus had been added, a self-appointed successor, who both brought back Herod and added new things. It was wretched in kingdoms that a master was chosen, more wretched that he was imposed on the unwilling. It seemed some comfort in servitude if they chose a master for themselves, because one becomes kinder if rule is conferred on him, prouder if it is usurped. So Archelaus would be far more intolerable than Herod, since this one had seized the kingdom, the other had received it. These things were said often not only in Judea but at Rome too, where, with Archelaus present and the accusers pleading their charges to his face before Caesar and the senate, there was long dispute about confirming or abrogating Archelaus's kingdom. In the end, when a place was given for the hearing in the temple of Apollo, which Caesar had founded and beautified with many ornaments, Antipater, Salome's son, a powerful speaker, went through what we said above and much else. He was amazed, he said, that Archelaus pretended to be asking Caesar for the kingdom when for a long time, by rash usurpation, he had acted as king in Judea without consulting Caesar. For what were the golden chair and the diadem brought out but insignia of kingship? With what spirit had he presumed to sit on the royal throne, to greet from the lofty seat the people crowding around, with soldiers' arms about him, in the manner and custom of emperors to bring out the diadem, which ought to have been reserved for Caesar's judgment—not only by the power of the Roman empire but by the right of the will? For Herod could not have snatched from Caesar or the senate what he himself had received from the senate; in an earlier will he had expressed clearly enough the judgment of his own will, by which he declared, in sound mind and with considered counsel, that Antipas should succeed him in the kingdom, and finally he had reserved everything to Caesar's judgment—although, his body already broken, anxious in his last danger and no longer capable of any sense or counsel, he had dictated not what he judged but what was pressed on him. So the one who seized the rule had pronounced on himself that, by your judgment, Caesar, he did not deserve to be substituted in the kingdom; for had he been conscious of his merits, he would have hastened to ask rather than to usurp. And not asking but usurping what lay in a petition is, even in money affairs, usually prejudicial, so that litigants who act out of order lose their case. Here, however, it was not a matter of money called into accusation, but the violated right of the Roman empire, reverence scorned, power despised—a man who thought unworthy the senate of the Roman curia, which was accustomed to give and take away kingdoms and to keep with Caesar the ancient prerogative of conferring rule. What would he do when he had begun to reign lawfully, who before reigning had most insolently killed very many who had asked for help in their exhausted condition and relief from taxes? To those asking for a remedy war was inflicted; nine thousand Jews were killed during the very festival of the Passover, venerable among them; men were sacrificed instead of beasts; the blood of the consecrated who had come together for the temple feasts was shed—a pitiable spectacle! If anyone counted the heaps of the slain, would he not think the Babylonians had returned? How much more cruel were things done by a fellow citizen which in a barbarian enemy would be thought full of monstrous savagery and impiety! This was the dole given to the citizens, this the sacrifice by which Archelaus had commended the beginnings of his reign. Caesar and the senate ought to pity the remnants of Judea, which, once supported by free peoples, would now wish for servitude, if only it could be borne tolerably under a just king—and he was far from the right to rule. For among the Jews the kingdom belongs to no one except one of the line of Judah, as the law said. But this man, an Idumean by race, whom no origin of royal descent touched, had crept into an undue honor. For although Antipater was the grandfather of both himself and Archelaus, outstanding in wealth and powerful in other arts, and especially in the friendship of the Romans, and tried in war by the elder Caesar, though he could have taken the kingdom for himself, he never aimed at it; indeed he preferred to defend it for others rather than acquire it for himself, and he was rightly held as the best of fathers, who vindicated Judea into freedom by his wounds and did not lead it into servitude. Herod had aspired to the kingdom on the testimony of Antony, his father's guest; from him the affairs of the Jews had been diminished; he had acted like an enemy, not a ruler. Since then he himself had been an adulterer to the kingdom, how could a lawful king be created by him? They did not refuse to be under a kingdom, but they asked to live under the Roman, whose favor they had won from the time of the Maccabees; afterwards they had degenerated through the usurpation of the kingdom, so as to be far inferior even to those against whom they had sought Roman alliance. Finally they begged that Judea might obtain from you a governor's jurisdiction on the same terms as Syria, so that proof might be given of our devotion, whether we who are called seditious and rebels can obey moderate judges. Against this Nicolaus, answering for Archelaus, asserted that a most restless nation had paid the penalty of its insolence; Archelaus should not be charged with the odium of an inexcusable crime on this account, if they had disturbed the peace by sedition and departed in spirit and arms from alliance with the Romans. As for the precedence of the will, who would doubt it, since later wills are usually preferred to earlier ones, and this one ought to seem much stronger than the rest, in which Caesar's prerogative of confirming the royal decision was reserved? By this the reverence of the Roman name was heaped up rather than diminished, if you, Caesar, do not snatch from kings what is allowed to private persons—that their wills should hold, and that they should write with their last pen whom they most wish to succeed them—and if, again, they reserve to you this honor, that confirmation of the decision is sought from you, and that the man succeeds whom the father has chosen and you have approved. When then was Herod wiser—when he kept your prerogative, Caesar, or when he passed it over? Where Antipas is substituted, Caesar is passed over; where Archelaus is put in his place, Caesar is called in. Without confirmation nothing is stable. So by divine judgment, where justice was lacking, confirmation was lacking either to pretense or to will; but where fairness was at hand for examination, strength was sought so that the decision might be confirmed. Consider then whether he did wrong who chose you, or whether what he left to be sanctioned by you as arbiter, the lord of all things, to whom even kings rightly yield in power, ought to be rescinded. For he who knew whom to choose to confirm surely knew whom to choose to rule; nor could he be deceived in his successor who was not deceived in his confirmer. For he who made you arbiter knew that he must appoint a successor such that the one you were to confirm would not displease you. Having heard the parties, Caesar put off his decision; then, having taken counsel with the senate, he set Archelaus over the nation to exercise the office of ruler, not the honor of king; yet he promised also to give him the kingdom if he behaved so as to be approved. For already attempts at dissension among the people of Israel were being reported. He appointed two of Herod's sons tetrarchs, Philip and Antipas, who had contended with Archelaus for the kingdom. To Herod's sister, whose name was Salome, he kept her legacy and added other things himself. He also judged that the thousand talents left to him should be divided between two daughters of Herod, added another six hundred thousand, and decided that they should be married to the children of Pheroras.

Meanwhile a certain young man, pretending to be Alexander and claiming that, out of pity, those to whom his father Herod had entrusted the task of killing had substituted others in his place and let him go with his brother Aristobulus, went to Miletus and from there to Rome, where he would be harder to recognize among strangers. There he would easily have stirred up the Jews, who are most ready for revolution, had not Caesar, learning of him, ordered him to be brought to him quickly by one Celadus, who had known Alexander well. When Celadus saw the young man, he hesitated, deceived by the likeness. But perceiving that the other marks did not agree, he asked where Aristobulus was. The young man asserted that he was living on the island of Cyprus, guarding against plots, because brothers together would more easily be killed. Then, brought to Caesar, he at once confessed, when impunity was promised, that relying on the appearance of likeness he had pretended to be Alexander, in order to obtain countless gifts from the Jews as if he were the king's son. Caesar laughed at the trick, ordered him to be let go unpunished, and declared that those who had paid him honors as if to a king beyond a private man's measure had been punished enough, because they had endured endless losses through superfluous expense. Archelaus, having gone to Judea and been accused before Caesar for the obscenity of his conduct and his insolence, after the case between the parties had been heard, was banished to Vienne, and his wealth was added to Caesar's treasury. He deservedly paid this price, since he did not restrain his desires even from his own brother's wife. For when Alexander died, put to death by his father's command, his wife Glaphyra, daughter of Archelaus king of the Cappadocians, as we mentioned above, was joined in a second marriage to Juba, king of Libya. When he died, she returned to her father. There Archelaus saw her, and, thinking by no means that the brother of her husband, the uncle of her children, should be piously avoided, began to love her so desperately that he put away his wife Mariamne and put Glaphyra in her place. Not long after, when the woman returned to Judea, she saw Alexander in her dreams and longed to embrace him. But he, like one indignant, recoiled from her embrace and seemed to say: “Is this, Glaphyra, the faith you promised? Is this how you have kept my love for you, of which you ought to have been mindful? But granted that as a young woman you did not shun a second marriage—ought you also to have sought a third, and the brother of your husband? Did my injury so delight you that you were not ashamed to come back into my house married to a third husband? But I shall see to it that my disgrace and your contamination do not last longer; nor will you long rejoice in the incestuous marriage with my brother.” The woman rose and told her household the dream, and two days later she herself died, and so gave proof that marriages of this kind are approved neither by the laws of the living nor by the will of the dead.

Archelaus himself also saw in his dreams nine ears of grain, full and large, being devoured by oxen. When he asked about it, the interpreter answered that the nine ears signified nine years in which he had enjoyed the greatest and most ample power; so in the ninth year of his rule a change would come to him, because oxen, which usually turn over the fields with the plough, signify a laborious change that devours and swallows up former merits. When this was known, on the fifth day a man came from Caesar to take him to Rome for trial; there he was condemned and driven into exile, and by his death too he fulfilled his dream. The principality of the nation that had belonged to Archelaus was turned into the name of a province—the name by which the Romans called the distant regions they brought under their law by conquest. The tetrarchies remained, however, as they were, Philip and Herod, the name having been changed, since he was earlier called Antipas. For Salome, at her death, had left the places she had held and the power over her people to Livia, Caesar's wife. This was the state of Judea when Caesar died, leaving as successor of the Roman empire Tiberius, his stepson, son of his wife Livia by her former husband; in whose honor Herod founded Tiberias. Philip also thought a city should be called Livias after the name of his mother. And because our purpose is to lay open the causes by which the people of the Jews fell away from the Roman empire and hastened their own destruction, the facts show that Pilate, governor of the province, gave the beginning of ruin, since he was the first of all who did not hesitate to bring images of Caesar into the buildings of Jerusalem. When the people, moved by this, resisted, and he decided that the images should be received, he drove very many to death. While these things were being done in Judea, Agrippa, son of Aristobulus, came to Rome, wishing to go to law against Herod the tetrarch before Tiberius. But, scorned by Tiberius while he was living at Rome, he gathered very many friends, and above all Gaius, son of Germanicus, whom—either because, thanks to his father's name, he was beloved by the people, or because he thought him close to the rule by nearness of royal birth, or by a kind of presentiment—he cultivated more zealously than either his age or his rank allowed, so that one day, raising his hands, he prayed that Tiberius might soon die and he might see Gaius emperor. When this was betrayed by his freedman Eutychus, Agrippa was put in chains by Tiberius's order and tormented grievously, and he was not released until Tiberius ended his days. Tiberius's times were foul with debaucheries—the retreats of the goats—and his sloth intolerable; yet they roused no man of effective action to kill him, out of reverence, I think, for the still recent Roman empire, or from terror of his most savage cruelty, since harshness is usually the safer the heavier it is.

During his reign a notorious scandal concerning Paulina, a woman of most distinguished family, became widely known at Rome. Though she had an excellent reputation for chastity among all, and was also of the most outstanding beauty and eminent charm, she was tempted by the solicitations of Mundus, a commander of the equestrian order; and though not bent, through the fault of excessive superstition she lay open to deception. For Mundus suborned priests of Isis to bring her a message as if from Anubis: that he invited her to the temple, that he was delighted with her devotion and chastity, that he asked for a night, that he had something he wished to entrust to her in secret. Receiving this gladly, she reported it to her husband: her god was answering her prayers, he was asking for her presence, she could not refuse obedience. So with her own and her husband's consent she went to the temple of Isis and spent the night there; and with witnesses removed far off, as if to receive knowledge of a sacred mystery, she settled herself on her couch, thinking that her god would come to her in dreams and show himself to her in a vision. But when some of the night had passed, so that the woman, full of sleep, might more easily be deceived, Mundus came wearing the face and dress of Anubis, lifted her coverings, and rushed into kisses. To the awakened woman he said that he was Anubis, and he showed her Anubis's face. She believed it was the god and declared herself blessed that her god had deigned to visit her. She did not refuse his embrace, though she asked whether a god could unite with a human. He brought out examples: that Alcmena had received Jupiter, highest of the gods; that Leda had enjoyed his embrace; and that very many other women had given birth to gods; and he persuaded her that a god would be born of her by him too. He lay with the woman. She returned to her husband rather glad, saying that she had united with a god and by his promise would bear a god. There was great joy of the woman and her husband in her defilement. Afterwards Mundus met her and said to the woman: “Blessed Paulina, in the embrace of a god! Great is the god Anubis, whose mysteries you have received. But learn not to refuse men as you do not refuse gods, for the gods grant to men what you had refused, since they do not disdain to give us their forms and names. See, the god Anubis called Mundus too to his rites, to join him to you. What did your hardness profit you, except to cheat yourself of the profit of the twenty thousand I had offered? Imitate the more indulgent gods, who grant us for nothing what could not be obtained from you at a great price. And if human names offend you, it pleased that one to be called Anubis, and by the grace of this name he helped his desire.” Struck by this speech, the woman understood that she had been mocked, and, grieving at the injury to her chastity, confessed the fraud to her husband. He, having nothing to be indignant at in his wife, since he himself had allowed her to sleep in the temple, and aware of her conjugal chastity, brought a complaint to the emperor. He, moved by the insult to a powerful man and the device of an atrocious outrage, seized the priests from the temple, put them to the question, killed them when they confessed, and sank the image of Isis in the Tiber. Mundus was allowed to flee, because, overcome by the force of love and the charm of beauty, he was thought deserving of a lighter penalty for his crimes.

I did not think the scandal that happened under Tiberius's rule should be passed over, so that from it the disgrace of the emperor might be gathered. For as the life of a good prince is a kind of prescription of uprightness and a pattern of living for all, so the filth of an emperor is a law of crimes. By him Pilate was sent into Judea, a wicked man; and, setting a lie on a small matter, he got round the Samaritans so that they went to the mountain called Gadir (for it was sacred to them), pretending he wished to learn their mysteries. And going up, he got ahead of the people with his cavalry and laid them low with his infantry, inventing the charge that they had prepared to break away from the Romans and seek a meeting place for themselves. For what would he not dare, who even crucified Christ the Lord, who came for the salvation of the human race, pouring out on men the grace of his mercy by many divine works, and teaching nothing else than to make the peoples obedient first to God and then to the emperors? Madman, who was the agent of a sacrilegious fury so as to kill the author of salvation! From that time the affairs of the Jews were betrayed, from that time destruction came to the nation and the overthrow of the temple was hastened. For if Herod, who put John to death, paid the price of his faithlessness and cruelty, cast down from his kingdom and sent into exile, how much more is it given to understand that he was driven by headlong furies who killed Christ! What the cause of John's death was, I shall explain briefly. We showed above that Philip and Herod, who was earlier called Antipas, were brothers. Philip's wife was Herodias, whom Herod united to himself by an unlawful and wicked right of marriage. John did not bear this, and said to him: “It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife.” Then he, provoked, thrust John into prison. Not long after he killed that just man, the steadfast executor of the divine law. For he rebuked the incest of his brother's bed not only as a preacher of the gospel, but also, as an executor of the law, he condemned the transgressor of the law who had taken the wife of a living brother, especially one who had offspring by his brother. From this the hatred of almost all the Jews was roused against Herod and his punishment hastened. Its author was Herodias: seeing that Agrippa had gained very great influence with Caesar, she drove Herod to go to Rome to win the emperor's favor for himself, reproaching him with the disgrace of sloth, that, shunning labors while he stayed at home, he let unworthy men be preferred to himself. For since Agrippa had been made king from a private man, how much more would Caesar not hesitate to confer a kingdom on him, long since a tetrarch? So, unable to bear the woman's reproaches, he set out for Rome; and while he was seeking the friendship of Gaius, he was accused by Agrippa and lost even the tetrarchy he had received from Julius Augustus; and fleeing to Spain together with his wife Herodias, he was consumed by grief of mind. When Tiberius died, Gaius succeeded, who, wishing to be seen and called lord and god, gave the Jews causes for a most serious revolt; and had he not closed his rule by a hastened end, he would have made an earlier end of the Jewish nation. For he not only did not call his men back from what was unlawful, but even threatened those he sent into Judea with the last punishments unless they carried out by arms everything against the right and law of religion. Agrippa had very great power under his rule; but when he wished to surround Jerusalem with a very great wall, so that it would be impregnable to the Romans (for he foresaw the coming ruin), he was cut off by death and left the work unfinished. Nor did he exercise less power under Claudius's rule, since he was present at its very beginnings: when Gaius was killed and Claudius was taken up by the soldiers into the rule while the senate resisted him, from weariness of kingship the senate sent Agrippa as envoy; with him as interpreter, the limits of a moderate rule were promised, favor defined, and peace agreed. In place of his father Agrippa, his son Agrippa was made king by Claudius Caesar.

Claudius himself, when after thirteen years he was failing, gave Nero as prince to the Roman empire, captured by the persuasions of his wife Agrippina, who was so strong in frauds that she made the emperor's son Britannicus, designated successor by the very right of nature, without a share in the principate. She soon repented of this art, because, while she provided an emperor born of herself, she denied him her own: not knowing that, lifted up by rule, he would not acknowledge his mother and would turn the reward of her kindness into her destruction. He also held Octavia, Claudius's daughter, in the place of a wife: in reverse order the son-in-law was preferred to the son, because the evils of the state outweighed, to which a parricide, a sacrilegious man, an incestuous man was owed, so that in that criminal no merits of good arts would reign. Under such an emperor—whether in view of his character and in contempt of his sloth, or because, for their grave sacrileges, the protection of the most high God having been turned away, the final destruction was being prepared for the Jews—Judea broke out into grave revolts, robberies, dissensions, through the insolence of those whom Eleazar, chief of the brigands, led as he most grievously laid waste for twenty years. At length, however, he was captured by Felix, who governed Judea, sent to Rome, and paid a heavy penalty. Not even by the great number of those slain was the people inhabiting Judea broken; but in Jerusalem itself another kind of brigand sprang up, who were called sicarii—no longer hidden in secret places nor lying in wait in the darkness of night for travelers without escort, but in the light of day and in the middle of the city and the crowded throng they struck whomever they came close to, carrying short swords in their hands, mingled with the packed people. When they had stabbed one close to them, he fell unawares by a hidden wound, so that death forestalled complaint; the corpse was in plain view, but the killer lay hidden; and if anyone was moved by another's wound, being nearer he was himself struck and became a part of the slain. So, whether from fear of danger or from concealment of the deed, the sicarius was not detected, so great was the speed of the plotters and their art of concealment. The priest Jonathan was killed; many were added every day, and the fear of the living was heavier than the misery of the slain. Each man went out every day as if to battle, yet under a harder condition, for an enemy is seen in advance, but the sicarius lay hidden: death was before their eyes, fear in their minds. No one believed he would return, nor was trust given to friends while the sicarius was feared. Terrified by this, very many—innocent of the crime of robbery and of fellowship with the sicarii, but though harmless in hand, weaker in counsel—went to the desert. But while they looked to themselves, their departures caused terror; from this arose first suspicion of war against the Romans, then it blazed up unconquerably. In fear of this the governor of the province sent cavalry and an infantry column and made a very great slaughter of the multitude.

An Egyptian false prophet also came, steeped in magic arts; while he boasted that by a prophetic spirit he announced heavenly oracles, he gathered to himself about thirty thousand Jews, and assembling them at the Mount of Olives, he burst into Jerusalem in frequent raids, so that he even attacked the Roman guards who were stationed before Jerusalem to keep the people from any movement. When this insolence too was suppressed, another part, as in a sick body, became more gravely inflamed. For very many cried out openly that they must break from the Romans and prefer freedom to servitude; and going out into the countryside, they took by force the food they lacked.

Finally, in the city of Caesarea a serious strife arose between Jews and gentiles, the Jews claiming possession of the whole city as founded by Herod, a Jew; the gentiles objecting that the founder was indeed a Jew but had named it for Caesar, and had moreover built a temple in it and set up statues, and that therefore it seemed rather to be made over to gentile uses. The strife of these contentions turned to blows, because the leading men of the Jews could not restrain their own people given over to sedition, and the gentiles thought it a disgrace if they had to give way to the Jews. So they roused Felix, so that, eager to restrain the multitude of both sides which would not be quiet, he took counsel by arms, especially, since he could do no otherwise. Festus succeeded him, who arrested very many brigands and gave not a few the last penalty. Albinus too, when the same power was entrusted to him by the Romans, omitted no kind of wickedness—a shameless plunderer of rapine, so that whoever had not given money was dragged to chains, though innocent, and whoever had given was acquitted even if guilty. Greed bred pride, so that he showed himself a tyrant to the poorer and a slave to the richer. Yet he, though he had surpassed the wickedness of his predecessors, was so far passed by and left behind by his successor Florus—by a long interval, though Florus came next—as if sluggish and slow in crimes, that by comparison with a worse man he was thought upright. And those who at first had complained, afflicted, later longed for Festus as a good judge. For Albinus drained individuals; Florus plundered cities—most polluted in obscenities, most cruel in savagery, disturbing everything by arms and sowing battles upon battles, who would neither pardon when entreated nor spare when glutted. In the sight of Berenice, sister of King Agrippa, who had come to the temple for the sake of religion, he raged against the people with most bitter slaughter; and he did not think he should defer to her as she entreated, though he saw her standing barefoot in the service of religion, and held her in contempt as she prayed. So she herself wrote to King Agrippa, and the people of the Jews sent to him begging help for their freedom. When he came out of Egypt, many went more than sixty stadia out from the city of Jerusalem to meet him; and when he had been led around the city and found their complaints true, they began to insist that envoys be sent to Nero. He, though he too pitied their grief as that of his fellow citizens, yet with deep prudence saw that attempts at war against the Romans were being stirred, and lest odium arise for himself and the final danger for the people, he gathered the people together in the place next to the temple, divided from it by a bridge, called the Xystus, and gave a speech of this kind.