With Domitian we have happily been less concerned. How such a mixture of depravity and savageness, of falsity and ingratitude can have sprung from the virtuous union which also produced a Titus, is a mystery of atavism. But at last the dagger of Stephanus struck him down, and a better phase of the Empire was renewed. Rome gauged his character right when she nicknamed him ‘the bald Nero.’
Of the Jews whom we have introduced, Ishmael Ben Phabi vanishes into obscurity. He lives, however, in the energetic curse which the Talmud pronounces upon family after family of the priests of that epoch. He occurs in the line which denounces the violence of himself and his sons: ‘Woe to the family of Ishmael Ben Phabi! woe to their fists!... Their servants strike the people with their rods!’
Josephus became the devoted creature of the Flavian dynasty. By timely prophecies he managed to secure the favour of Vespasian and Titus, as he had won their admiration by his genius and courage. He played his difficult part with consummate astuteness, and secured his safety in spite of the execration of the Jews and the suspicion of the Romans. But what shall we say of a man who, in spite of his boasted patriotism, could, after being an eyewitness of the long, slow agony of his country’s dissolution, be a guest of the Romans during the games in which hundreds of his miserable fellow-countrymen perished in the amphitheatre?—of a man who could commemorate without a pang the unequalled splendour of the triumph at Rome, when Vespasian and Titus, robed in purple and silk and crowned with laurel, sat in their chariots amid rivers of splendid spoils, and Domitian rode a gallant war-horse by their side, and Simon Bar-Gioras, after cruel insults, was led aside at the foot of the Capitol to be strangled in the Tullian Vault? Judæa Captiva wept under her palm-tree, desolate, broken-hearted, with her hair about her ears, and the famous Arch of Triumph was built which still shows the golden candlestick, and table of shewbread, and vessels of incense—beneath which it is said that no Jew will walk, because even in a strange land they remember thee, O Zion! But the sleek priest and warrior who had been selected as one of the defenders of his country, accepted an assignment of land from devastated territories of his native country; inhabited a suite of rooms in Vespasian’s own house; and continued to live in the sunlight of court favour, not only under Titus, but also under Domitian. And then, not by martyrdom, not as a patriot, but as the pensioned favourite of those who had massacred his countrymen and destroyed the tombs and city of his fathers, he died, and went to his own place, leaving behind him, even in the light of his own falsified records, an ignoble and dishonoured name.
King Agrippa II., after a considerable portion of his domains had been reduced to a desert, lived also in Rome, as a titular king, and died, at the age of seventy, in the reign of Trajan—the last prince of the House of Herod. Happy had it been for him if St. Paul had, not almost, but altogether persuaded him to be a Christian. He languished on, wealthy and despised, with Josephus as his bosom friend. It might have been said of him, in the language of the Prophet: ‘All the kings of the nations, all of them, sleep in glory, every one in his own house. But thou art cast away from thy sepulchre, like an abominable branch.... Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land, thou hast slain thy people.’
Berenice, the widow of two kings, was no longer young when she won Vespasian by her splendid presents, and Titus by her Eastern beauty and fascination. But he listened to the voice of duty when he dismissed her from Rome, and when she returned he avoided seeing her. She, too, vanished into the darkness, and died we know not when.
Aliturus, no longer the apostate Jew, but the humble Christian, found it, of course, impossible to play any longer the part of the favourite pantomime of the Roman stage. He loathed the thought of ever again wearing his motley before the grinning and degraded populace. He would fain have aided the struggling Church of Rome, but there was nothing that he could do; and the presence of one whose person was so well known would only imperil the gatherings of that handful of slaves and artisans in the catacombs. The Christians themselves advised him to leave the city, which he could not dissociate from his dead past. He sold his house in Rome, and his villa in the suburbs, and, leaving a large sum in the hands of Cletus to help his flock, he sailed for Palestine, receiving before he started the blessing of Paul the prisoner, and carrying with him letters of commendation from the Beloved Disciple to Simeon and others of the Desposyni, or ‘relations of the Lord.’ These letters neither revealed his real name, which he had changed to Amandus, nor his past history, which might have created an invincible prejudice; but certified that he had been converted to the faith, and was now a brother, faithful and beloved. He freely gave of his wealth to the destitute, and was of great service to a church pre-eminently poor.
And, remaining in Jerusalem, he was an eye-witness of all that horrid siege, in which a nation overwhelmed with unutterable calamities, intensified by their own unutterable guilt, sighed in vain to see one of the days of the Son of Man. Joining the moderate party, he did his little best to counteract the overweening tyranny of John of Giscala. He witnessed the slaughter committed by the Idumeans, when they had been invited into the city. He saw the insults heaped on the corpse of the murdered High Priest Hanan; and the martyrdom of Zechariah, the son of Baruch, in the middle of the Temple; and the High Priest Matthias murdered by Simon Bar-Gioras, after his three sons had been slain before his eyes. He heard the roar of internecine conflict, when three sections of fanatics fought furiously against each other. Day by day he was agonised by the inconceivable miseries of the starving and maddened people. He saw the granaries madly burnt in civil discords; the marble floor of the sanctuary wet with footsteps dipped in blood; the gore of worshippers slain by the hurtling engines of zealots, mingling with the blood of the sacrifices; the deserters sent back with their hands cut off, or ripped open to search for the gold which they had swallowed, or crucified outside the city-walls, till wood failed for the crosses, and crosses for the bodies; the streets and houses full only of the corpses of those whom famine had slain; the horrible disorders of rampant licentiousness, which were the expression of blasphemous despair. He saw Martha, the daughter of the wealthy Gamaliel, trying to pick grains for food from the ordure of the streets; he saw the miserable mother who, in the pangs of hunger, roasted and devoured her own child. He heard the incessant thunder of the battering-rams upon the walls, and the whizz of the dazzling stones hurled from the catapults, and the monotonous cry of the poor scourged maniac wandering about day and night with the wail: ‘A voice from the East, a voice from the West, a voice from the four winds! Woe, woe to Jerusalem, and to the people, and to the Holy House!’ He heard Josephus and Titus pleading with the frantic people, and the false prophets deluding them. He heard the crash of the falling cloister which buried six thousand men, women, and children under its ruins, and the roaring of the flames, and the groans of the wounded, and the shout of the victors, and the despairing yell of the defeated. He saw the priests tearing the gilded spikes from the Temple roof, and hurling them down upon the Romans. In spite of the strong efforts of Titus—under the urgent entreaties of Agrippa and Josephus—to spare the Temple, he saw a Roman soldier, as though inspired by some divine fury, snatch up a burning brand, and spring upon the back of a comrade, and hurl his torch through the golden window of one of the chambers which surrounded the Holiest Place; and then, when the flames burst out on every side, he saw the whole Temple hill assume the aspect of a great bellowing volcano stored with fire, while amid the upheaped corpses the blood, streaming in rivers from fresh wounds, hissed and bubbled as though it would almost have quenched the flames. He saw something of that awfully desperate struggle of madness and fury,
‘When through the cedarn courts, and gates of gold,
The trampled ranks in miry carnage rolled.
To save their Temple every hand essayed,