Under Nero, says Josephus, the country went from bad to worse, and was filled with brigands and impostors.[[317]] How little it was possible to distinguish between these two classes appears from the fact that Josephus continually mentions them in couples. Those whom he calls Assassins, or Sicarii, can be placed in neither category. One thing is evident. Their apparently wanton murders must have had other incentives than pillage, for even Josephus does not charge them with that; they were obviously animated by a purpose that may be called either patriotism or fanatic zeal, depending upon one’s bias. That is shown plainly enough in a casual statement of Josephus that these brigands were attempting to foment by force a war on Rome, τὸν δῆμον εἰς τὸν πρὸς Ῥωμαίοις πόλεμον ἠρέθιζον.
The usual “prophet,” in this case an unnamed Egyptian, appears with his promise to make the walls of Jerusalem fall at his command, and the usual attack of armed soldiers on a helpless group of unarmed fanatics. In the Wars, Josephus speaks of a great number of these self-styled prophets (II. xiii. 4): “Cheats and vagabonds caused rebellion and total subversion of society, under the pretense of being divinely inspired. They infected the common people with madness, and led them into the desert with the promise that God would there show them how to gain freedom.” The procurator Felix took the customary measures of treating these expeditions as open sedition and crushing them with all the power at his command—acts which can only have inflamed the prevailing disorders.
The picture drawn by Josephus of the Judea of those days represents a condition nothing short of anarchy. Such a situation could have existed only under an incompetent Roman governor. Whether the procurator Gessius Florus was or was not quite the monster he is depicted as being in the Wars, he can scarcely have been an efficient administrator. It is very likely that the various acts of cruelty imputed to him by Josephus were examples of the intemperate violence of a weak man exasperated by his own failure to control the situation. However this may be, it certainly was not the excesses of an individual governor that provoked the rebellion of 68 C.E., even if we accept Josephus’ account of him in full, and assume him to have been a second and worse Verres. The outbreak of that year was the result of causes lying far deeper in the condition of the time and the character of the people.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE REVOLT OF 68 C.E.
The Jews were not the only nation that fought with desperate fury against complete submergence in the floods of Roman dominance. The spread of the Roman arms had encountered, from the beginning, seemingly small obstacles that proved more serious checks than the greater ones. Thus, after the Second Punic War, when Rome was already in the ascendant in the world, the relatively fresh strength of a conquering people was all but exhausted in the attempt to subdue and render thoroughly Roman the mountain tribes of the Ligurians in the northern part of the peninsula.[[318]] In later times, after Caesar’s conquest, the subjugation of Belgium was a weary succession of revolts and massacres and punitive expeditions that stretched over several generations. Similarly in Numidia it was found that formal submission of the tribes that filled this region insured no permanence of control.[[319]]
In the last cases, however, the danger that was warded off seemed in Roman eyes to be remote. In the case of Judea the very existence of the eastern empire was threatened. On the other side of the Syrian desert there was a watchful and ready enemy, who might appear in force at any time and with whose arrival there might break out into open conflagration the smouldering disloyalty that still was present in the Asiatic provinces.
The Jewish rebellion of 68 C.E. was not an isolated phenomenon. For the Jews it formed the beginning of a series of insurrections that did not end till the founding of Aelia Capitolina put a visible seal on the futility of all such attempts. To us the outcome seems so inevitable that the heroism of the Zealots has stood for centuries as a striking example of unrestrained fanaticism. To take a modern instance, if the single island of Cyprus were to attempt, by its unaided strength, to cast off the British rule, it would not seem to be engaged in a more completely forlorn enterprise than were the Jews who undertook to defy the power of the legions. And yet those who began and conducted the revolt were neither fools nor madmen, and the hopes that buoyed them must have been very real when they attempted the impossible.
We must first of all remember that a foreign suzerainty was not necessarily incompatible with Jewish theocratic ideals. Tradition had accustomed the Jews to Assyrian and Persian dominance, and their most sacred recollections contained ample warrant for those who would bear the rule of Caesar with complete equanimity. But it had been axiomatic that the rule of a foreign master was a divinely imposed penalty, a trial, a test of submission. At some time the period of trials would cease, and the normal condition of complete freedom from outside control under the sway of God would be restored. The Messianic hope made that situation more and more vividly present to the hearts of men.
Nor did actual experience of recorded history make this possibility a vain dream. The vicissitudes of fortune, the sudden rise of obscure nations to supremacy, and their quick destruction, were rhetorical commonplaces. The East knew abundant cases of the kind. Empires had risen and crumbled almost within the recollection of living men. That was particularly so after Alexander, when sudden glories and eclipses were too common to be noteworthy.