It is this strength of resistance that has made the Jews, in spite of all the calamities that they have continually had to endure all through the course of our story, still play such an active and large part in it. All read with reverence the same sacred Book. Even those Jews that had been scattered, and had settled far from Jerusalem, looked up to Jerusalem as their capital city. The Temple of their great God was there. They received and obeyed orders from there. They went up there to great feasts and religious ceremonies. There were very many Jews in the many Greek cities of Asia Minor, very many in Egypt, many in Cyprus and other islands, many in Greece itself. Although Judæa was a small subject state when Pompey saw it, and had an official appointed by Rome as its ruler, it was important to him to have the favour of the Jews on his side, just because they were so far and widely dispersed and could exercise influence in so many lands.
At first, in the struggle between Cæsar and Pompey, the favour of the Jews had been given to Pompey. Probably they were disposed to fight for the side that they thought most likely to win, so as to get some future favours for themselves in return. As a matter of fact, both Greeks and Romans were so little concerned with religious things that, except for insulting the Jewish customs by their indifference, they showed very little hostility to them.
When Cæsar went to Egypt he gave the Jews every opportunity of worshipping God in their own way and living their peculiar life in the manner that pleased them. The official appointed by Rome to govern Judæa at this time was Antipater, a native of the neighbouring land of Idumæa, and his son, who succeeded him in the governorship, was called Herod, Herod the Great, who ruled, with the title of king (though he was only a king by leave of Rome, and king of a country paying tribute to Rome), until the year 4 B.C. We are just coming now to the Christian Era, as we call it. The years will then no longer grow fewer and fewer as they come to the year of the birth of Christ; but more and more as they mount up away from that date.
In the early days of the rule of Herod in Judæa, that is, about the year 40 B.C., there came a new danger on the land. Those Parthians, whom Julius Cæsar had defeated, swarmed back again, on their horses, across the Euphrates, and swept over a great part of the country. Herod implored the help of Rome, and not in vain; but Julius Cæsar was no longer the world's master then. He had been dead for several years.
You must, I am sure, remember that scene in the Senate-house in Rome—if you do not remember reading it in any history book you will have heard of it from Shakespeare's play of Julius Cæsar—how his best friends clustered round him, and the dearest of all gave him a fatal dagger-stroke. "Et tu, Brute!" he exclaimed, as even Brutus, his most intimate friend, dealt a death blow.
The assassins of Cæsar asserted that they did the foul deed for the good of the State, to rid Rome of the tyranny of the dictator. That may have been the real reason of some of them. Others may have been thinking of their own advantage and how they might advance if they put such a big man as Cæsar out of the way. But whatever their intentions were, the effect on the State was terrible.
The great orator, Cicero, had hopes that the Republic might be restored, that the rule of one man might be ended and the good old days come back again. But the people in Rome were not such as they had been in those good old days when they followed the good old customs. It is no wonder that they had changed.
See what had happened. Rome had conquered the world. Masses of wealth from the conquered provinces had been brought to her and were constantly coming in. The rich men had their splendid houses and villas. They vied with each other in giving feasts and entertainments to the populace, in order to gain the votes of the people and to be elected to high positions, at home or abroad, in which they could make large fortunes by receiving bribes or by taxing the provinces. All their old ideas of what it was right to do had been upset by the Greek thought that prevailed through all the world that was at all educated. There was no respect for the laws, and they had no religion that made any difference to their conduct.
Octavius and Antony