Claudia had been listening to her husband. “But, Pilate, aren’t you creating a situation that will produce fighting between our troops and these Jews?”
“And if there is bloodshed?” Pilate’s eyes flashed sudden anger. “Haven’t I been patient with these obstinate rebels? If they choose to get themselves run through with swords, isn’t it their own doing?” Then quickly he recovered his poise. “Claudia,” he said quietly, “I have given them every opportunity to return peaceably to Jerusalem. Have I not?”
“Yes. But you have not agreed to have the ensigns sheathed. And until you do....”
He turned upon her, his countenance flaming, his mood changed completely. “Do you stand with these stubborn provincials against Rome? Are you with them, or are you with me?”
“Before you interrupted me, Procurator,” Claudia’s voice was as cold as her smile, “I was going to observe that in displaying the army’s emblems, you are really breaking a tradition, so far as I have been able to understand it, and this tradition may very well be a long-standing order of the Emperor and, indeed, of Augustus before him. I care not a fig about these Jews. Nor do I care about their High Priest or their Yahweh. I am concerned only with what will be the attitude of the Emperor and the Prefect Sejanus toward the Procurator as a result of this unprecedented breach of the established order.” She turned away, her head high. Pilate seemed taken aback; he looked at her somewhat sheepishly and licked his lips as though he were about to speak. But he said nothing. Instead, he turned abruptly to Longinus. “I take responsibility for the orders I give,” he said tersely. “My orders to you are unchanged.”
Longinus saluted, then without a word turned on his heel and withdrew.
By early afternoon the great concourse had filled with excited, chattering Jews. Their determined stand, they felt confident, had defeated the Procurator; their reminder that the Emperors had honored the Jews and their Yahweh and that Tiberius might not approve a course taken in defiance of the long-established tradition had frightened Pilate. He was calling them together, wasn’t he, to announce that he was withdrawing the hated emblems and to ask them to return home victors?
But they had judged the Procurator wrongly. And they discovered their mistake as soon as he began to address the throng from his box high in the stands of the great oval.
“For five days, and this is now the sixth, you have kept our Caesarea in turmoil. You have been obstinate and insubordinate and have shown little respect to the Procurator, who represents the Emperor and in this province personifies the power and majesty of the Empire. You have threatened him with reprisal, saying that he has flouted the orders of our Emperor. You were not only inhospitable in refusing to welcome the Procurator to Jerusalem, you were actually hostile. In being hostile to us, you have shown yourselves contemptuous of Rome and enemies of our Empire; in being stubbornly hateful to me, you have shown yourselves no friends of the Emperor.”
Pilate paused, his face suffused with color as his anger grew with his listing of their offenses. Then he stood back on his heels, squared his shoulders, and held up his tightly clenched fist. “Now hear me, men of Judaea!” he shouted. “I have asked you to disperse and return to your homes. Stubbornly you have refused to heed my command. I am asking you again to abandon this unreasonable, senseless, and ill-advised effort and get yourselves outside the gates of Caesarea and on the roads that lead homeward. Hear me, by great Jove! This is my last command to you.” He leveled a shaking forefinger toward the multitude. “I have stationed my soldiers in disguise among you, and they are heavily armed. They have been instructed, upon my next command, to spring upon you and run you through with their swords.”