With his mind full of these views, Augustus could hardly be expected to regard favorably those tendencies in his own time which inevitably made for real unity of the empire in speech, blood, and religion. He was quite aware that this unity would not be produced by a coalescing of everything into new forms, but by the conquest of all or most of the existing elements by the one most powerful or most aggressive. Unchecked, it was likely that Greek speech would drive out Latin, Syrian blood dominate Roman, or any one of the various Oriental worships dislodge the Capitoline Triad.
On the last point he had even a definite policy of opposition. His sagacious adviser Maecenas had laid great stress upon the ease with which foreign religions introduce a modification of habits of life, in his last words:[[281]]
Take active part in divine worship, in every way established by our ancestral customs, and compel others to respect religion, but avoid and punish those who attempt to introduce foreign elements into it. Do so not merely as a mark of honor to the gods—although you may be sure that anyone who despises them, sets little value upon anything—but because those who introduce new deities are by that very act persuading the masses to observe laws foreign to our own. Hence we have secret gatherings and assemblies of different sort, all of which are inconsistent with the monarchical principle.
His commendation of Gaius’ avoidance of sacrifice at Jerusalem was of a piece with this policy.[[282]]
The Jews in Rome, who had been directly favored by Caesar, had to be contented, as far as Augustus was concerned, with freedom from molestation. However, this freedom was real enough to enable their situation in Rome to reach the development hinted at in the Augustan poets, although their activities militated strongly against the most cherished plans of Augustus.
In the rest of the empire the Jews of the various communities found their situation unchanged. Even the obnoxious privileges which they had in several cities of Asia continued unimpaired,[[283]] and here the orthodox Jewish propaganda and a few generations later the heterodox Jewish propaganda made rapid strides.[[284]]
Judea belonged, in spite of the quasi-independence of Herod, to the province of Syria, which meant that such dues as Herod, the Jewish king, owed Rome would be enforced, if he were recalcitrant, by the Roman legate at Antioch. Herod’s name throughout the empire was as much a synonym for wealth as it is now for cruelty. And his wealth and power advertised the Jews notably, a fact which their propaganda could scarcely help turning to account.[[285]]
The attitude of the various Jewish synagogues and communes toward Judea was one that appeared to the men of the day as that which bound various colonies of a city to the mother-city. Indeed the Jewish communities outside of Palestine were styled explicitly colonies, ἀποικία. Such a tie, however, was conceived in the Greek fashion and not in the Roman. The Greek colony was bound to its mother-city by sentiment only, not, as in the case of the Romans, by law. That sentiment might be powerful enough at times, but it was not inconsistent with the bitterest warfare. Consequently such movements as appear in Palestine need not at all have been reflected in the synagogues of the East and West, and there is nothing to indicate that the active and successful proselytizing of the Asiatic and Roman synagogues was either directed or systematically encouraged by the Pharisaic majority in the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem. It will at all times create a wholly false impression to speak of the Jews of that period as of a single community bound by common interests and open to identical influences. The independence of the Jewish congregations of one another was quite real, and was even insisted upon. Neither the high priest nor the Nasi of the Sanhedrin pretended to any authority except over those legally resident in Judea; and often, when the reverence for the temple and the holy city was most strongly emphasized, intense contempt might be manifested for those who were at the moment the holders of the supreme authority in the mother-country.
Another matter that is apt to be lost sight of in this connection is the fact that not all Jews of the time lived within the Roman empire. The Persian kingdom, which Alexander had conquered, and which the Seleucidae had with varying success attempted to maintain, had fallen to pieces long before the Roman occupation of Syria. Media, Babylonia, Bactria resumed a quasi-independence, which however was soon lost when the obscure province of Parthia—as Persis had done five centuries before—assumed a dominance that ended in direct supremacy. The Roman limits were set at the river Euphrates, leaving Armenia a bloody, debatable ground. The one great moment in the history of this new Parthian empire was the decisive defeat of Crassus at Carrhae in 58 B.C.E., a victory that gave the Parthians sufficient prestige to maintain themselves under conditions of domestic disorder that would ordinarily have been fatal. The Augustan poets and courtiers might magnify the return of the Roman standards by King Phraates to their hearts’ content. They might, as they did, exultantly proclaim that the Crassi were avenged, that the known world to the shadowy confines of the Indus bowed to the will of the living god Augustus. The fact remained that, after Carrhae, the conquest of the country beyond the Euphrates ceased to be a part of the Roman programme, and, except for the transient successes of Trajan, was never seriously attempted.
In this Parthian kingdom, of which the capital was the ancient and indestructible city of Babylon, Jews had dwelt since the time of Nebuchadnezzar. There is even every reason to believe that those who remained at Babylon were decidedly not the least notable of the people in birth or culture. And between Babylon and Judea there was constant communication. When Babylon became the seat of the only power still existing that seemed formidable to Rome, it is obvious that the uninterrupted communication between the Jews of that section and the mother-country would create political situations of no slight delicacy, and may have played a much more important part in determining the relations of the governing Romans to the Jews than our sources show.