And we must further reckon with the fact that a potent incentive was the living faith in an actual God, who could and did hurl the mighty from their seat. To these men the destruction of Sennacherib or the triumph of Gideon was no legend, but a real event, which might occur in their days as in the days of their fathers. The attempt, accordingly, to secure the independence of a small portion of the empire need not have seemed to the men that undertook it quite as insensate a proceeding as it does to us.
Our most complete source for the period is discredited by the parti pris of the author, the disloyal Josephus. The Roman sources indicate that in the Jewish revolt there was nothing different from the revolts in other parts of the world, revolts to which Romans were accustomed. There was no direct external provocation. There was no one event that seemed to account adequately for an outburst just then. But we find no indication that Romans felt it to be a strange or inexplicable fact for men to rise in order to recover their freedom. The imperial interests demanded that the hopelessness of such rising should be made apparent. It was therefore to the leaders of the community, the aristocracy, that Romans looked to keep in check the ignorant multitude to whom the superiority of Romans in war or civilization might not at all be apparent.
The contemptible young rake who, as Agrippa II, continued for some years the empty title of “king of the Jews,” was no doubt at one with the smug Josephus in his sincere conviction of the overwhelming might of the Romans and the folly of attacking it. We cannot sufficiently admire the successful way in which the king concealed his heartfelt pity for the sufferings of the Jews, “since he wished to humble the exalted thoughts they were indulging,” as Josephus naïvely tells us (Wars, II. xvi. 2). However, not mere truckling to the Romans, but sober conviction, would sufficiently account for the pro-Roman leanings of men like Agrippa and Josephus. The long speech put in the king’s mouth (ibid. II. xvi. 4) was perhaps never delivered, but it states the feeling of the pro-Roman party and of the Romans themselves eminently well.
Both Josephus and Agrippa could hold no other view than that it was some single act or series of acts of the procurator Florus that animated the leaders of the revolt. It seemed to them a “small reason” for engaging in what was conceded even by the most hopeful to be a desperate and frightful war. The burden of the king’s supposed speech, however, in which we are justified in seeing the sentiment of the historian, is this: “Who and what are these Jews that they can refuse to submit to that nation to which all others have submitted?”[[320]] We find enumerated for us the extent and wealth of the Roman possessions with a fervor of patriotism that might have shamed many a Roman. “Are you richer than the Gauls, more powerful in body than the Germans, wiser than the Greeks, more numerous than all the inhabitants of the earth put together?” he asks, and enforces his question with a detailed account of the enormous numbers of people who in the several provinces are kept in check by a handful of legionaries.
As an appeal to common sense, the speech, in spite of its obvious exaggerations, ought to have been successful. But what the Romans and the Romanized Jews chose to overlook was that common sense was scarcely a factor in producing the “exalted opinions” which Agrippa sought to abase. The glowing assurance of direct divine interposition was of course lacking to the speaker, and the wilder and more exuberant fancies that made the present time big with great upheavals and opened vistas of strange and sweeping changes, could not be answered by a statistical enumeration of the forces at the disposal of Romans and Jews respectively.
In the previous chapter one fact has been frequently mentioned which Josephus states quite casually as an ordinary incident of the events he is describing. That fact is the readiness with which the Romans took alarm, not only at the armed “brigands,” who were really at all times in open revolt, but at anyone who, posing as preacher or prophet, gathered a crowd about him for thoroughly unwarlike purposes. We do not find elsewhere in the empire this quickness of animadversion on the part of the authorities to such acts. The Armenian Peregrinus was quite unmolested by the Roman officials when he undertook to perform before the eyes of the assembled crowd the miracle of Hercules on Mount Oeta.[[321]] Nor is there any evidence, however large the multitude was that surrounded the itinerant magician elsewhere, that riot and subversion were apprehended from that fact. Yet when the Egyptian promised to divide the walls of Jerusalem (above, p. [285]), or Theudas to pass dry shod over the Jordan, or another man to discover the hidden treasures on the Gerizim (above, p. [284]), a troop was sent at once to crush with bloody effectiveness an incipient rebellion. Obviously, in Judea, and not elsewhere, the assertion of divine inspiration carried with it a claim to certain political rights, or was deemed to do so, which was incompatible with Roman sovereignty.
It is easy enough to understand what that claim was, and easy enough to understand why it does not stand forth more clearly in Josephus’ narrative. The coming of the Messianic kingdom had been looked for by previous generations as well, but in the generation that preceded 68 C.E. it became more and more strongly believed to be immediately at hand and to demand from those who would share in it a more than passive reception.
We are not to suppose that every one of these impostors or thaumaturgs claimed Messianic rank. That it is not expressly stated by Josephus proves little, since he actively strove to suppress any indication that there were rebellious incentives among his people other than the brutal oppressions of Florus. But to claim to be Messiah was a serious matter both to the people and to the Roman officials, and we assume that these rather vulgar swindlers hardly dared to go so far. However, whether individuals did or did not make these pretensions, it is clear that during the reign of Nero the sense of an impending cataclysm was growing, and the most fondly held dreams of the Jews, which clustered about the Messianic idea, seemed to come near to realization.
Besides the cumulative force which the Jewish eschatology and Messianic hope acquired by the mere tradition from generation to generation, there was another and more general factor. The constitution established by Augustus might strive as it would to resemble with only slight modifications the republican forms it displaced. The East, for its part, had never been deceived into regarding it otherwise than a monarchy. And as such it was an unmistakable notch in the course of events. At a specific moment, whether it was Caesar’s entry into Rome or Augustus’ investiture with the principate, living men had seen and noted a page turned in the history of the world.
In this new monarchical constitution, the weak point was the succession. The glamour of acknowledged divinity rested upon Julius Caesar and Augustus, and in their blood there seemed to be an assurance of title to the lordship of the world. What would happen if this blood should fail? No machinery existed that would automatically indicate who the successor would be. Changes of dynasty, whether regular or violent, were of course no new thing to the East, but this was not the same. The Roman empire was unique. The imperator, or αὐτοκράτωρ, was as new in conception as in title. Divinely established, the imperial dignity would be divinely maintained in those who by their origin could claim an unbroken chain of divine descent. He whom we know as Nero was on the monuments “Nero Claudius Caesar, son of the god Claudius and great-great-grandson of the god Augustus”; and the last was at all times officially styled Divi filius, “son of the God.”[[322]]