A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (6 page)

Spartacus passed into Roman folklore as a bogeyman, like Napoleon, and was used to frighten the children. Voltaire described his struggle as ‘possibly the only just war in history’.
But history belongs to the conquerors. Roman history was played against a backdrop – painted bloody and brooding, occasionally lit by charm and consideration – of innumerable slaves.
They were essential to the life of their masters and their lives were not always a living death. They were also essential to the economy of the Empire and without them the roads, bridges, ports,
aqueducts, amphitheatres (though some were built by soldiers), triumphal arches, markets and public baths could not have been built or maintained. Maintenance is the essence of civilization and
without slavery Rome could not have been civilized.

THE ROMANS
AND THEIR JEWS

The Romans may not have liked their Jews but they never attacked them with that committed hatred characteristic of Christian (and other) rulers in Europe from the Middle Ages
to the first half of the twentieth century. Judaism, one of many cults around for Romans looking for fresh religious experience, was respected; Jews were not.

The religion was puzzling and unintelligible, the habits of its practitioners distasteful and inconvenient. ‘They worship nothing but the clouds and the sky . . . they despise Roman laws .
. . they have this man Moses . . . they smell of candles and tunny fish tails . . . they practise circumcision . . .’ (wrongly supposed to increase sexual potency), complained Juvenal. And on
the seventh day, the Sabbath, they absolutely refused to budge, rendering them unsuitable for military service. ‘No Jew on the Sabbath,’ wrote Augustus to Tiberius (getting it wrong),
‘fasted as seriously as I did . . .’

Throughout our period, from Julius Caesar to the Emperor Nero (both venerated by the Jews), their privileges and exemptions were confirmed and honoured throughout the Empire, and, when
challenged by officials or rival subjects, were usually upheld. The annual levy of a drachma, paid by Jewry in the Diaspora to the temple in Jerusalem, was transmitted intact, even during a hard
currency crisis in Rome. A
centurion who raised his skirt and farted, to show his contempt, in the Temple precinct was reduced to the ranks. Roman standards bearing eagles, or
bulls, had to be covered when paraded through Jerusalem.

Recent excavations in Aphrodisias,
⁵
near Smyrna in Turkey, have revealed an inscription in the stalls of the amphitheatre which reads, ‘reserved for
His Imperial Majesty’s loyal Jewish subjects’. Aphrodisias, a city as large as Pompeii, was destroyed by earthquakes in the seventh century and vanished from history. Like every other
town in the Empire, Aphrodisias had its quota (though there were no restrictions as that word implies) of Jews, and an inscription in creamy white marble, for which the place was famous, lists
seventy, mostly with non-Jewish-sounding names, which suggests proselytes – on whom, again, there was no restriction.

Of the 4 million Jews in the Roman world (more, relatively, than in ours), half had emigrated, mostly voluntarily and happily, from Judaea. One explanation for their numbers may be that unlike
many peoples in the ancient world they did not practise infanticide. They spoke the language of the country where they had settled – often Greek, though they were not Hellenized. They could
read, but not necessarily understand – never a rabbinical requirement – the law and their prayers in Hebrew. Like overseas Chinese in Europe today, but emphatically not in the takeaway
context, they were everywhere.

Marseilles, a Greek colony, had thousands of Jews centuries before Christ. Jews may have been in England with the Phoenicians, exploiting the mines of Cornwall. They deferred to no central
religious authority (unlike the equally ubiquitous
Roman Catholics of our day) and their only common link was a sentiment for Jerusalem, realized in the obligatory temple tax
of one drachma
⁶
a year. Jews were particularly strong in Alexandria, feuding with the Greeks and interrupting the Games. They were also prominent in Antioch,
Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia and Pamphylia – everywhere in fact visited by Paul on his journeys. When he arrived, under praetorian escort, in Rome in
AD
62, he would
have found 40,000 Jews and fourteen synagogues. The first swathe of Jews, thousands of them, had arrived as prisoners-of-war in Pompey’s triumphal procession 100 years before in 61
BC
, and were sold into slavery as part of the successful general’s perks. But as we have seen (
vide
chapter on slaves), with a bit of
nous
and
application a slave in Roman times could be manumitted, and once they were free they had settled down on the wrong side of the Tiber – in what is now Trastevere – as butchers, bakers,
candlestick-makers, in any kind of métier except that of moneylending, which was enjoined upon them by the Christians in a later era. Some gained unpopularity (and were occasionally banned)
as fortune-tellers. A Jewish actor (as we have already seen, a questionable profession) who welcomed
Josephus to Rome had insinuated himself into Poppaea’s circle,
probably as master of (a certain kind of) ‘ceremonies’ at the palace.

Paul rented a flat near the praetorian barracks, and lived there for two years, at his own expense, practising without let or hindrance the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ – to paraphrase
the last two verses of the Acts. He would have been the only Jew on the block. One wonders what happened then. Legends abound. Paul might have died before the fire of Rome in
AD
64, but it is unlikely that he could have survived Nero’s persecution of the Christians – as they were not yet called – because although they did not, of course,
start the fire (nor did Nero) it suited the Emperor to pretend that they had. Poppaea, the Emperor’s mistress and eventual wife, was not a Jewish proselyte but favoured Jews and protected
them against the accusation of arson which fell so savagely on the Christians, a sect indistinguishable, to the Romans, from the Jews.

Few Romans could, or would, have said ‘some of my best friends are Jews’. The Emperor Gaius could have and should have because Herod Agrippa
was
his only friend, but being
Caligula he didn’t and indeed planned a grotesque insult, which nearly broke Agrippa’s heart
(vide
chapter on Caligula). Jews in the Roman Empire, however successful, rarely
assimilated with the powers-that-were, unlike the Jews of South Africa or at the court of Edward VII during the British Empire.

Only one Jew, a nephew of Philo the philosopher and historian from Alexandria, abandoned his religion and became Prefect of Egypt, as well as Prefect of Police and Corn and of the Praetorian
Guard, one of the top jobs in the Empire. Josephus, of whom much more anon, having changed sides in the Jewish War, boasted of his Roman acquaintance; but
the family which
fraternized consistently with the Julio-Flavian dynasty was that of Herod the Great, who weren’t really Jews at all.
⁷

Herod came from Idumaea, the biblical Edom, the bottom left-hand corner of what is now Israel, inland of the Gaza Strip. The Herod of the New Testament, he who massacred the Innocents, gross,
cruel and stinking, like Henry VIII at the end of
his
life but with four more wives, has left an impression of horror difficult to dent. Immobilized by advanced arterio-sclerosis, paranoiac
and communicating with his family, it would seem, only through torture and assassination, it is amazing that he survived so long, but as a young man this handsome, athletic and kind Arab –
not many princes in his day bothered to ransom their younger brothers – managed to convince the Romans
and
the Jews he was the only figure in the landscape they could trust. He was
trusted by and loyal to Antony and then, in spite of being penniless, was believed by the new conqueror, Octavian (Augustus), who added to his dominions and trusted him as completely. By the age of
thirty-six, through charm, daring and political genius – much of which consisted in out-bribing the bribers – he became the King of Judaea, ‘the friend of Caesar, the most
distinguished non-Roman in the Roman world, known throughout
the Empire for his wealth, his splendour and his magnificence’.
⁸

His money came not from taxation and, though he was the biggest spender in the ancient world, and second to the Emperor Hadrian the biggest builder, he was never in debt. Through his mother,
whose father was a merchant in Petra – not then a picturesque spot with rose-red walls, but the most profitable trading-post in the world – he controlled the traffic from the East to
the Mediterranean, owned the palm and balsam groves round Jericho, ran on Augustus’ behalf the copper mines in Cyprus and split the profits with him, and lent money to other local kings.

Though not a Jew, he professed and marketed Judaism (although the spiritual element eluded him) with as much zeal and on a greater scale than any Jewish king since Solomon. (The institution of
monarchy, ‘fashionable in modern times’, as Gibbon sourly remarks, was a Jewish invention.) He rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem within an enclosure covering thirty-five acres, greater
than the area of the Acropolis, and filled it with colossal buildings. The Temple was begun in 19
BC
and not completed till
AD
64. The little Old
City of today’s Jerusalem, cosy if tortured, encircled by Saladin’s intact wall, is a fraction of the size of Herod’s and is without an edifice of any remark. Herod’s city
was staggering. Here is Sir Charles Wilson, quoted by Stewart Perowne, on the Royal Portico, which he investigated 100 years ago: ‘It is almost impossible to realize the effect which would be
produced by a building longer and higher than York Cathedral, standing on a solid mass of masonry almost equal in height to the tallest of our church spires: and to this we must add the whiteness
of stone fresh from the mason’s hands.’

Within his kingdom, Herod created ‘western’ cities like Caesarea, and the fortress Masada, where he planned to retreat in case of heavy trouble from his own
subjects. Synonymous with munificence internationally, like a Carnegie, a Rockefeller or a Rothschild, Herod spread his
euergetai
– good works – throughout the Empire, repaving
Antioch with marble, presiding at great expense over the Olympic Games and constantly giving hand-outs to good and bad causes.

One of his subjects, born just before his death, must have been awed by Herod’s development of Jerusalem. The young Galilean from Nazareth – not a highly rated place in his day
– may have contemplated its gardens and palaces with resentment, for he was not invited in. Jesus’ only rich friend was Lazarus, in nearby Bethania (Bethany), whose hospitality he was
able to repay with the ultimate gift – life. His overturning of the money-changers’ tables outside the Temple would have been regarded by the fat cats of Jerusalem as a Republican
Senator would consider a raid on the souvenir shop at Fort Knox today.

The special relationship between Rome and Jerusalem, the Imperial family and Herod, could not survive his death and in
AD
6, Judaea was annexed as a province and subsumed
by Syria. Through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, Herod the Great’s dominions were chopped about and administered by governors or procurators of no particular account,
certain of whom are known to us for their appearance in the New Testament. Pontius Pilate was corrupt, bad-tempered and tactless; Felix, who imprisoned Paul and whom he disdained to bribe, was
bent; Festus, who wanted to acquit Paul, was straight; the worst was Cestius Gallus, the legate of Syria whose behaviour at Passover in Jerusalem in
AD
66 provoked the
Jewish War.

The Jewish War, which lasted six years – a long time if the relative strength of the parties is considered, especially since the Jews spent much of their energy
fighting each other – was painful and exasperating for the Romans and catastrophic for the Jews. If Josephus is to be believed,
⁹
and there is no one
else to turn to since the usual sources – Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius – are either brief, silent, contemptuous or not extant, the Jews brought their final solution on
themselves.