One of the great determining events in ancient and modern history took place on January 1, 27 B.C.E., when Gaius Caesar Octavianus, returned from his successful campaigns in the East, was solemnly invested with the civil and military primacy of the Roman world. The importance of that particular historic moment is due of course not to anything in itself, but to the fact that it was the external and overt stamp put upon the development of centuries. The basic governmental scheme of ancient society—the city-state—was bankrupt. Its affairs were being wound up, and the receiver was in possession.
The reconstitution by Augustus appeared to the men of his day as the inauguration of an epoch. Poets hailed the dawn of a new day, and unqualifiedly saluted its great figure as a living god.[275] But we shall receive a false impression of the time and its condition, if we assume it to resemble an empire of modern type.
The Roman empire as founded by Augustus was simply the expression of the fact that between the Euphrates and the Ocean, between the Danube and the great African Desert, all the various forms of constituted authority were subject to revision by the will of the Roman people, i.e. those who actually lived, or had 258an indefeasible right to live, within the walls of the Roman city. The populus Romanus had chosen to delegate functions of great extent and importance to a single man, to Augustus; but the power wielded by Augustus was not in any sense the power of an unrestrained master, nor was the rule of the Roman people the actual and direct government of the nations subject to it.
It would be quite impossible to enumerate the various communities which, under Augustus, as they had before, maintained their customs as the unbroken tradition of many centuries. In the mountains of Asia Minor it is likely that such a people as the Carduchi, whom Xenophon encountered there, were still under Augustus determining their mutual rights and obligations by rules that were either the same as those of Xenophon’s time or directly derived from those rules.[276] So the cartouches on the Egyptian monuments might have been read by the clerks of Amen-hem-et, and would have excited no queries from them. The communities of the Mediterranean enforced their law—that is, the rules which constrained the individual member to respect the claims of his fellows—without noticeable break. The difference was that there was a limit to which it might be enforced, and that limit was set by the caprice of another and a paramount people.
Although the sovereignty of the Roman people was limitless, it was not, as a matter of fact, capriciously exercised. During the republic the theory of provincial organization had been somewhat of the following 259nature. Within any given territory contained in the limits of the province, there existed a certain number of individual civic units, which might take the form of city-states, territorial states of varying extent, leagues of communities, kingdoms, tetrarchies, or hieratic religious communes. Any or all of these might be gathered within a single province, a word which is essentially abstract, and denoted a magisterial function rather than a territory. Into the midst of these civitates, this jumble of conflicting civic interests, there was sent a representative of the sovereign Roman people, invested with imperium, or supreme power, a term in which for Romans was the essence of the higher magistracies. Since the provincial magistrate had no colleagues, and since the tribunician check upon him was inoperative beyond the first milestone from the city, the wielder of the imperium outside of Italy was at law and often in fact an absolute despot for the period of his office.
However, in theory his functions were divided as follows: first, he was the only officer with jurisdiction over the Roman citizens temporarily resident in the province; secondly, he kept the peace; thirdly, he guaranteed the treaty rights of those communities that had treaties with Rome; and fourthly, he enforced and maintained the local customary law of all these communities. His judicial functions might include cases of all these kinds, so that in rapid succession the praetor or propraetor might be called upon to enforce the Twelve Tables and an ancient tribal usage of the Galatian Tectosages.
260The checks upon the holder of imperium at Rome consisted in the peculiar Roman theory of magistracy, one of the corollaries of which was the right of any other equal or superior magistrate, or of any tribune, to veto any administrative act. A second check lay in the right of appeal in capital cases to the people. A third was found in the accountability for every illegal or oppressive action. This accountability however existed only after the magistracy had expired.
Outside of Rome only the last check existed. For everything done beyond the functions enumerated above, it was possible, even usual, to attempt to make the governor responsible after his term of office was over. We know how frequently that attempt was futile, and how constantly and flagrantly corrupt juries acquitted equally corrupt governors. “Catiline will be acquitted of extortion,” writes Cicero in 65 B.C.E., “if the jury believes that the sun does not shine at noon.”[277] The jury evidently thought so, since he was acquitted. But upon occasion, and generally when there were personal and political motives at work as well, these governors were convicted, so that there was always a certain risk attached to any attempt at playing the tyrant for the brief period of a governor’s authority.[278]
The Augustan monarchy brought no real change into the theory of provincial organization, except as to relatively unimportant details. But one great reform was instituted. The responsibility of the governor became a real one, and was sharply presented to those officials. For the provinces, accordingly, the advent of Augustus 261was an unmixed blessing, since, except for a few sentimentalists, the presence of the Roman representative as the final court of appeal was not at all resented. We can accordingly understand the extravagance with which the rich and populous East, always the center of wealth and civilization, received the Reformer, and the unanimity and perhaps sincerity with which he was hailed as living god.[279]
We cannot be certain that this was encouraged by Augustus himself. There is nothing in his character that indicates any special sympathy with the point of view demanded by it; nothing of that daemonic strain noticeable in Alexander, which makes it easy to believe that the latter was one of the first to be convinced by the salutation of the priests of Ammon. But Augustus recognized at once the value for unity that the tendency to deify the monarch possessed. The reverence for the living monarch, to be transformed into an undisguised worship at his death, was, however, to be superimposed upon existing forms. Nothing was more characteristically Roman than Augustus’ eagerness to make it clear that the vast domain of the empire was to remain, as before, a mass of disparate communities of which the populus Romanus was only one, although a paramount one, and that in each of these communities every effort was to be made to maintain the ancestral ritual in government and worship. What he added was simply the principle that to keep the community together, to prevent the chaos and anarchy of a dissolution of the empire, it was necessary to bestow on the princeps, on 262the First Citizen of the paramount Roman people, such powers and functions as would assure the coherence of the whole. These powers he selected himself. Such a step as that taken by the Constitution of Caracalla, which attempted to enforce a legal merging of all the communities into a single state, would have been nothing else than abhorrent to Augustus.[280] And, indeed, it was a distinctly un-Roman idea.
In Rome Augustus was chiefly intent upon a restoration of everything that could well be restored in the social, religious, and political life of the people. Certain of the political elements, such as the actual sovereignty of the populus, as far as it could be physically assembled in the Campus Martius, had to be abandoned, as demonstrably inconsistent with the larger purpose which Augustus had set himself. But in every other respect, he did not, as Julius Caesar had done, compel the Romans to face the unpleasant fact that a revolution had taken place, but professed to be simply a restorer of the ancient polity. Perhaps he did not face the facts himself. At any rate he seems sincerely to have believed that morality and sobriety could be reconstituted by statute, and that one, by dint of willing, might live under Caesar as men lived under Numa—barring such un-Sabine additions as marble palaces and purple togas.
With his mind full of these views, Augustus could hardly be expected to regard favorably those tendencies in his own time which inevitably made for real unity of the empire in speech, blood, and religion. He was quite 263aware that this unity would not be produced by a coalescing of everything into new forms, but by the conquest of all or most of the existing elements by the one most powerful or most aggressive. Unchecked, it was likely that Greek speech would drive out Latin, Syrian blood dominate Roman, or any one of the various Oriental worships dislodge the Capitoline Triad.
On the last point he had even a definite policy of opposition. His sagacious adviser Maecenas had laid great stress upon the ease with which foreign religions introduce a modification of habits of life, in his last words:[281]
Take active part in divine worship, in every way established by our ancestral customs, and compel others to respect religion, but avoid and punish those who attempt to introduce foreign elements into it. Do so not merely as a mark of honor to the gods—although you may be sure that anyone who despises them, sets little value upon anything—but because those who introduce new deities are by that very act persuading the masses to observe laws foreign to our own. Hence we have secret gatherings and assemblies of different sort, all of which are inconsistent with the monarchical principle.
His commendation of Gaius’ avoidance of sacrifice at Jerusalem was of a piece with this policy.[282]
The Jews in Rome, who had been directly favored by Caesar, had to be contented, as far as Augustus was concerned, with freedom from molestation. However, this freedom was real enough to enable their situation in Rome to reach the development hinted at in the Augustan poets, although their activities militated strongly against the most cherished plans of Augustus.
In the rest of the empire the Jews of the various 264communities found their situation unchanged. Even the obnoxious privileges which they had in several cities of Asia continued unimpaired,[283] and here the orthodox Jewish propaganda and a few generations later the heterodox Jewish propaganda made rapid strides.[284]
Judea belonged, in spite of the quasi-independence of Herod, to the province of Syria, which meant that such dues as Herod, the Jewish king, owed Rome would be enforced, if he were recalcitrant, by the Roman legate at Antioch. Herod’s name throughout the empire was as much a synonym for wealth as it is now for cruelty. And his wealth and power advertised the Jews notably, a fact which their propaganda could scarcely help turning to account.[285]
The attitude of the various Jewish synagogues and communes toward Judea was one that appeared to the men of the day as that which bound various colonies of a city to the mother-city. Indeed the Jewish communities outside of Palestine were styled explicitly colonies, ?ποικ?α. Such a tie, however, was conceived in the Greek fashion and not in the Roman. The Greek colony was bound to its mother-city by sentiment only, not, as in the case of the Romans, by law. That sentiment might be powerful enough at times, but it was not inconsistent with the bitterest warfare. Consequently such movements as appear in Palestine need not at all have been reflected in the synagogues of the East and West, and there is nothing to indicate that the active and successful proselytizing of the Asiatic and Roman 265synagogues was either directed or systematically encouraged by the Pharisaic majority in the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem. It will at all times create a wholly false impression to speak of the Jews of that period as of a single community bound by common interests and open to identical influences. The independence of the Jewish congregations of one another was quite real, and was even insisted upon. Neither the high priest nor the Nasi of the Sanhedrin pretended to any authority except over those legally resident in Judea; and often, when the reverence for the temple and the holy city was most strongly emphasized, intense contempt might be manifested for those who were at the moment the holders of the supreme authority in the mother-country.
Another matter that is apt to be lost sight of in this connection is the fact that not all Jews of the time lived within the Roman empire. The Persian kingdom, which Alexander had conquered, and which the Seleucidae had with varying success attempted to maintain, had fallen to pieces long before the Roman occupation of Syria. Media, Babylonia, Bactria resumed a quasi-independence, which however was soon lost when the obscure province of Parthia—as Persis had done five centuries before—assumed a dominance that ended in direct supremacy. The Roman limits were set at the river Euphrates, leaving Armenia a bloody, debatable ground. The one great moment in the history of this new Parthian empire was the decisive defeat of Crassus at Carrhae in 58 B.C.E., a victory that gave the Parthians sufficient prestige to maintain themselves 266under conditions of domestic disorder that would ordinarily have been fatal. The Augustan poets and courtiers might magnify the return of the Roman standards by King Phraates to their hearts’ content. They might, as they did, exultantly proclaim that the Crassi were avenged, that the known world to the shadowy confines of the Indus bowed to the will of the living god Augustus. The fact remained that, after Carrhae, the conquest of the country beyond the Euphrates ceased to be a part of the Roman programme, and, except for the transient successes of Trajan, was never seriously attempted.
In this Parthian kingdom, of which the capital was the ancient and indestructible city of Babylon, Jews had dwelt since the time of Nebuchadnezzar. There is even every reason to believe that those who remained at Babylon were decidedly not the least notable of the people in birth or culture. And between Babylon and Judea there was constant communication. When Babylon became the seat of the only power still existing that seemed formidable to Rome, it is obvious that the uninterrupted communication between the Jews of that section and the mother-country would create political situations of no slight delicacy, and may have played a much more important part in determining the relations of the governing Romans to the Jews than our sources show.
That there was at all times a Parthian party among the Palestinian Jews there can be no doubt. We know too little of the history of Parthia to speak confidently 267on the subject, but Parthian rulers seem to have brought to the Jewish religious philosophy a larger measure of sympathy and comprehension than most Roman representatives. While the existence of Parthian sympathizers may date almost from the beginning of Parthian supremacy, their presence was very concretely manifested when Jannai’s son, Aristobulus, appealed to Parthia as Hyrcanus had appealed to Rome. Indeed a Parthian army invaded and captured Palestine, and gave Aristobulus’ son, Mattathiah-Antigonus, a brief lease of royal dignity. Every instance of dissatisfaction with the Roman government was the occasion for the rise of Parthian sympathies.
It may further be recalled that Parthia was the continuation of Persia. Of all foreign dominations the Persian rule was the one most regretted by the Jews, and the Persian king’s claim to reverence never died out in the regions once subject to him. We may remember with what humility, some years later, Izates of Adiabene dismounted and walked on foot before the exiled Parthian king, although the latter had gone to him as a suppliant, and had been prostrate in the dust before him. The prestige of the Great King, diminished considerably to be sure, had still not completely faded.[286]
The one general term that covered all the Jews of various types was “race of the Jews,” gens Iudaeorum, γ?νο? ?ουδα?ων. It was meant to be a racial descriptive appellation, and was constantly combined with other adjectives denoting nationality or citizenship. The temptation to make an actual unit of any group that can be covered by a single term is well-nigh irresistible, 268and it is strengthened for us by the century-old associations that have made Palestine the embodiment of an ideal. Varying as the Jews of that time were in temperament, character, occupations, position, and mental endowments, the fate and vicissitudes of the mother-country, and particularly of the holy metropolis Jerusalem, went home vividly to all of them, scattered as they were between the shores of the Caspian Sea and Spain. In this respect the gens Iudaeorum was a real unit. Their hearts were turned to the Zion Hill.
Not all Palestine, however, formed this mother-country. The mere fact that the Hasmoneans had brought a great deal of the surrounding territory under subjection, and made the boundaries of their power almost as extensive as those of David and Solomon, did not make a single country of their dominions. The real metropolis was Jerusalem and its supporting territory of Judea. In this predominance of the city in post-Exilic Judaism, we may see either Greek influence or the continuance of the ancient city-state idea, as much a general characteristic of Eastern civilization as it is specifically of Greek. Not even undoubted Jewish descent, or loyalty to the Jewish Law, made of the adjacent lands an integral part of Judea. The Jews of Gaulonitis, Galilee, Ituraea, Peraea, Trachonitis, Idumaea, were, like the Jews of Rome, of Alexandria, or of Babylon, Jews of foreign nationality to inhabitants of Jerusalem, although the association was notably closer and the occasion of common performance of Jewish rites much more frequent than was the case with the more distant Jews.
TOMBS OF THE KINGS, VALLEY OF KEDRON, JERUSALEM
(From Wilson’s “Jerusalem”)
269The Idumean Herod had been confirmed by Rome in the sovereignty of a wide and miscellaneous territory, which included Greek cities, as well as these territorial units enumerated above. The favor he enjoyed granted him practically all the privileges that an independent sovereign could hold, except that of issuing gold coins.[287] Further, the authority was only for his life. The right of disposing of his dominions was no part of his power. His will was merely suggestive, and carried no weight beyond that.
His favor in the eyes of the Romans was based upon his scarcely disguised Hellenic sympathies and his proven loyalty to his masters. The Parthian invasion of 40 B.C.E. and the existence of Parthian sympathizers made the maintenance of order in Palestine a matter of the highest importance. The significance of these Eastern marches for the stability and safety of Rome was even greater than those of the North along the Rhine, where also constant turbulence was to be feared, and eternal vigilance was demanded. In the East, however, there was not merely a horde of plundering savages to be repelled, but the aggression of an ancient and civilized power, bearing a title to prestige compared with which that of Macedonian and Roman was of recent growth. And Parthian successes here immediately jeopardized Egypt, already rapidly becoming the granary of the Empire.
Quite in accordance with Roman policy, indeed with ancient policy in general, Augustus vastly preferred to have the peace of this region assured by means of a reliable native government than directly by Roman administration. 270The Romans did not covet responsibility. If a native prince was trustworthy, it was a matter of common sense to permit him to undertake the arduous duty of policing the country rather than assume it themselves. The difficulty was to discover such a man or government. Experience and the suspiciousness that was almost a national trait convinced the Romans that only very few were to be trusted, and these not for long. In Herod, however, they seemed to have discovered a trustworthy instrument, and while it is not strictly true that the powers conferred upon him were of unexampled extent, they were undoubtedly unusual and amply justified the regal splendor Herod assumed. The readiness with which Herod’s loyalty to Antony was pardoned demonstrated the clear perception on the part of Augustus of how admirably Herod could serve Roman purposes here.
One of the motives that generally impelled Romans to permit native autonomy was no doubt to gain credit for generosity with their subjects. They might be forgiven for supposing that Roman rule would be more acceptable if it came indirectly through the medium of a king that was himself of Jewish stock. The distinction between Idumean and Jew proper would hardly be recognized by a Roman, although the distinction between the geographical entities of Idumaea and Judea was familiar enough.
But the Romans likewise knew and consciously exploited Herod’s unpopularity. Strabo states that the humiliating execution of Antigonus was intended 271to decrease the prestige of the latter and increase that of Herod.[288] Josephus and the Talmud would be ample evidences themselves of the hatred and the bitter antagonism with which Herod was regarded.[289] None the less it may well be that the unpopularity was largely personal, and produced by the violence and cruelties of which Herod was guilty. It appears so in Strabo’s account. Idumean descent cannot have been the principal reproach directed against Herod by his subjects. On more than one occasion the Idumeans had evinced their attachment to the Jewish Law.[290] Nor was Herod wholly without ardent supporters. In the cities which he had founded there were many men devoted to him. Even—or perhaps especially—among the priests, there was a distinctly Herodian faction.[291] It is highly likely that hatred of Herod was especially strong in those who hated Rome as well, either through Parthian proclivities or because Rome seemed to present a danger to the maintenance of their institutions. And among these men were, it appears, most of those whose teachings have come down to us in the course of later tradition.
To the Romans this devotion of the Palestinian Jews to their Law seemed an excessive and even reprehensible thing. As we have seen, the Jews were qualified as superstitiosi, “superstitious” (above, p. 177). In general, to be sure, zeal for ancestral institutions was supported by the Romans, and they were not particularly concerned that foreign institutions should resemble theirs. However, if there were any from which a 272breach of the peace was to be apprehended, they might be regarded as practices to be suppressed.
The Romans had shown for certain Jewish customs a very marked respect. The intense Jewish repugnance to images was at first difficult for Romans to realize, since they had been training themselves for generations to test the degree of civilization by the i............