If we desire to trace the development of this all-overwhelming factor in our reckoning, it will not be possible to go back very far. During the fifth century B.C.E., in which Greek genius is believed to have reached its apogee, it is doubtful whether even the faintest whisper had reached Greeks that told of the race of Italic barbarians destined so soon to dominate the world. Little as was known of the Jews by Greeks of this period, the Romans were still less known. The eyes of men were persistently turned east.
Rome, however, even then was not wholly insignificant. Many centuries before, there had grown up, on the south bank of the Tiber, a town of composite racial origin. It is possible to consider it an outpost of the Etruscans against Sabine and Latin, or a Latin outpost against the Etruscans. Whatever its origin, at an indeterminate time, when the Etruscan hegemony over central Italy was already weakened, this town of Rome became a member of the Latin Confederation, a group of cities of which the common bond was the shrine of Jupiter Latiaris on the Alban Mount.
There may have been rude hamlets upon this site from times very ancient indeed. But from the beginning of its existence as a real city Rome must have been a considerable community. Her strategic position upon seven hills, the commercial advantages of her location upon a navigable stream, conspired to this end.
The Latin Confederation had long been under the real or titular presidency of the city of Alba. At some time before our records become reliable, Rome had obtained a decidedly real leadership in the league, and unscrupulously used the latter’s resources for the furtherance of her own power and wealth. Without a definite programme of conquest, and with military skill and personal hardihood very little, if at all, superior to that of their neighbors, the Romans had, by steadfastness and native shrewdness, developed a policy which it is difficult to put in precise terms, because it was never even approximately formulated, but which may be said to consist of unremitting vigilance and long memory, combined with special alertness to profit by the mistakes or division of the foe. It may be that the indubitably mixed character of Rome’s population produced that result. Certainly in these respects no other ancient community was its equal.
The legendary history of Rome is as generally familiar as the commonest household stories of the race. Modern investigators have abandoned the attempt to find out even partially the line at which its history ceases to be legendary. Fairly correct accounts of Rome begin with the permanent contact of the city with a literate community of which the records have survived, namely, the Greeks.[[230]]
The Greeks had founded cities along the southern coast of Italy and the eastern half of Sicily as early as the ninth century B.C.E. With some of these cities it was inevitable that Rome should be in frequent communication, but the communication did not impress itself for many years upon that class of Greeks which, in the extant books, speaks for the whole people. Not till the time of Alexander (330 B.C.E.) do our Greek records begin to deal with Romans. At that time Rome was already the dominant power in central and in the interior of southern Italy, succeeding roughly to the empire of that great Tuscan League of which she was once the subject. And yet, Alexander’s teacher, the encyclopedically learned Aristotle, had only vaguely heard of Rome as an Italian city overrun by marauding Gauls.[[231]]
The position occupied then by Rome would of itself have made active participation in Mediterranean affairs a necessity. The embroilment of Romans in the conflicts in which international politics is expressed was precipitated by the ambition of the restless Diadochi and their successors. It was a kinsman of the lurid Demetrius the Besieger, the Epirote prince Pyrrhus, who undertook to save the Greek civilization of the coast cities from the Italian barbarians. Pyrrhus ultimately retired with his tail between his legs, after having dragged the Romans into Sicily and brought them face to face with the Carthaginians. The succeeding three generations were occupied in the mortal grapple between these two. It ended with the triumph of Rome.
So far Rome had dealt only with the West, but with the permanent eastward bent of men’s minds the lord of the Western Mediterranean was, as such, a power in the East as well. Scarcely a single generation passed before it became the sole power in the East, so that future political history becomes the act of officially recording successive realizations of that fact. And yet, this extraordinary people, which had in an astoundingly short time secured the primacy over a considerable fraction of the earth, was apparently possessed of slighter intellectual endowments than many of its subjects. It had not succeeded in giving such culture as it had developed any artistic form. And before it had taken any steps in that direction, it came into immediate contact with nations of much older culture, which had done so; in one case, a nation which had carried artistry of form to a degree never subsequently attained by any single people. First, the Etruscans had given in bulk a mass of finished cultural elements, especially in religion and constructive crafts, and had otherwise exercised an influence now wholly undeterminable. Secondly, by Etruscan mediation and afterwards directly, the Romans became the intellectual vassals of the Greeks, a fact that lends some justification to the modern tendency to treat classical antiquity as a single term.
The Romans obtained their very earliest knowledge of the Jews when the political and social development just outlined was practically complete.
The treaty cited in I Macc. viii. 22 seq. is perhaps apocryphal, but the substantial accuracy of the chapter is scarcely doubtful. “And Judas had heard the name of the Romans,” we read, and this statement is followed by a lengthy recital of the recent conquests of Rome. After the first Hasmonean successes the little knowledge that Roman and Jew had of each other may be so summed up. On the Roman side, the responsible senatorial oligarchy learned with undisguised satisfaction that a previously unknown tribe of Syrian mountaineers, grouped about a famous temple-rock not far from the Egyptian frontier, had successfully maintained themselves against a troublesome and unaccountable tributary king. On the Jewish side, the leaders of the victorious rebels, conscious of the precarious nature of their success, turned at once to that mighty people—known as yet scarcely by report—which from far off directed men’s destinies. Even at that time the Roman policy of divide et impera, “divide and rule,” was well understood and consciously exploited by all who could do so. The embassy sent by Judas—there is no real reason for questioning its authenticity—presented to curious Romans in 162 B.C.E. an aspect in no way different from that of other Syrian embassies long familiar to the capital. And if it is true that some of that train or of a later embassy of Simon took up permanent residence in Rome, that fact was probably scarcely noticed from sheer lack of novelty.