But Nero’s childlessness made it plain that the divine maintenance would be wanting. With Nero, the line of Augustus would become extinct. For Rome that presaged confusion and civil war. For the little stretch of country between the Lebanon and the River of Egypt, it loosed all the hopes and fears and expectations to which each generation had added a little, and which were to be realized in the dissolution that was hurrying on.
Nor must we forget that the reign of Nero had been marked by frequent rebellions. Armenia had revolted and been subdued. At the other end of the Roman world, the Britons had risen in a bloody insurrection. And in the very midst of the Jewish war, the inevitable Gallic rebellion broke out, ostensibly against Nero personally, but doubtless impelled by motives of national feeling as well. Perhaps, if we had as detailed a narrative of the British, Armenian, and Gallic insurrections as we have of the Jewish, we should find many preliminary conditions the same. Perhaps in those countries too “brigands” and “impostors” stirred the people to revolt by playing upon their sacred traditions and appealing to their hopes of a national restoration.[[323]]
One very curious circumstance is the association of this last emperor of the Julian house with the Jews generally and the Messiahship particularly. How far it is possible to discover the real Nero under the mass of slanderous gossip and poisonous rhetoric which Suetonius and Tacitus have heaped upon him, is not easy to determine, nor is it necessary to do so at this point. One thing may, however, be insisted upon. He courted and achieved a high degree of popularity. This is hinted at, not only in the fact noted in Suetonius (Nero, 37), that in a public prayer he ostentatiously referred only to himself and the people, and omitted any mention of the senate, but is expressly referred to in the same writer (ibid. 53): Maxime autem popularitate efferebatur, omnium aemulus qui quoquo modo animum vulgi moverent, “Above all, his chief desire was for popularity, and, to gain this, he imitated all who in any way had caught the fancy of the mob.” To this may be added the confirmatory evidence of the lasting veneration felt for his memory by the populace (ibid. 57) and the assumption of his name by Otho when the latter desired to court popular favor (Suetonius, Otho, 7).[[324]]
This favor among the masses in the city would of itself indicate a hold on the Oriental part of his subjects, which Nero’s personal traits make especially likely. And of these Oriental or half-Oriental Romans a very considerable fraction were Jews. The all-powerful Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s mistress and afterwards his wife, is on good grounds believed to have been a semi-proselyte, a metuens.[[325]] Josephus ascribes Nero’s interference to her influence when Agrippa II attempted to make a display of the temple ceremonies. It is also not unlikely that the change of attitude on the part of Josephus toward Nero was due to the general feeling of the Roman Jewry toward his memory—a feeling of which Josephus had no cognizance in writing the Wars, but which had come to his attention when the Antiquities was composed. In the Wars (IV. ix. 2) we hear “how he abused his power and intrusted the control of affairs to unworthy freedmen, those wicked men, Nymphidius and Tigellinus.” In the Antiquities (XX. viii. 3) we find a temperate paragraph warning readers that the extant accounts of Nero are thoroughly unreliable, especially the accounts of those “who have impudently and senselessly lied about him.”[[326]]
That among the Roman populace there were some who believed that Nero was not dead, but still alive, and would return to be avenged upon his foes, is not strange. But it is particularly strange that in the extreme East the hereditary rivals of Rome, the Parthians, cherished his memory, so that their king Vologaesus expressly asked for recognition of that fact when he strove to renew his alliance with Rome. It was among the Parthians that the man who claimed to be Nero found enthusiastic support about 88 C.E. (Suet. Nero, 57). The Parthians seem to have been ready to invade the Roman empire to re-establish this “Nero” (Tac. Hist. I. ii. 6). That, it is true, happened long afterward; but directly after Nero’s death, in the very throes of the Jewish war, a similar belief spread like wildfire over Greece and Asia Minor, and a slave, by calling himself Nero, secured temporary control of the island of Cythnus (Tac. Hist. I. ii. 8).
One phrase of Suetonius is especially noteworthy. Long before Nero’s death it had been prophesied that he would be deposed, and would return as lord of the East: Nonnulli, Suetonius goes on to say, nominatim regnum Hierosolymorum [spoponderant], “Some assured him specifically that he would be king of Jerusalem.”
There is no direct confirmation in the Jewish sources of this association of Nero with a restored kingdom at Jerusalem. The very late Talmudic legend which states that Nero became a convert and was the ancestor of Rabbi Meïr[[327]] must, of course, be disregarded. No notable heathen sovereign escaped conversion in the Jewish legends. To the Christians, Nero was Belial or Antichrist for reasons obvious enough, and the Sibylline verses which so represent him are probably of Christian origin. But since the Messianic idea of the Jews was well-known throughout the Roman world (Suet. Vespasian, 4), the prediction made to Nero meant nothing less than that he was the promised Messiah, a conception startling enough, but perhaps less so to Nero’s generation than to ours.
It may further be possible to find an association between Nero and the Jews in the words that Philostratus[[328]] (Life of Apollonius, v. 33) puts in the mouth of the Alexandrian Euphrates. The Jews, Euphrates says, are the enemies of the human race almost as much as Nero, but it is the latter against whom Vespasian should direct his arms, not the former.
Whether, however, it was Nero or someone else, the intense force of the Messianic idea of the time of the revolt is attested explicitly by Suetonius in the passage alluded to above. Percrebuerat Oriente toto vetus et constans opinio esse in fatis ut eo tempore Iudaea profecti rerum potirentur, “Throughout the length and breadth of the East there was current an old and unvarying belief to the effect that it was decreed by fate that supreme power would fall into the hands of men coming from Judea.” If to Tacitus the insurrection was merely the expected outbreak of a turbulent province, repressed with difficulty in previous generations, and inevitable under all circumstances; if, to Josephus, the revolt was the foolish attempt of deluded but unfortunate men, driven mad by the oppressions of officials and led by selfish rascals, Suetonius, who retailed the gossip of the seven seas, had clearer insight when he referred the actual outbreak of hostilities to the general conviction that the result of the war would determine the fate of the empire. The Law would go out from Zion: Iudaea profecti rerum potirentur.
The war, which resulted in the fall of Jerusalem, was in the eyes of Josephus (Wars, Preface, § 1) the greatest war in recorded history. The words he uses are very much like those of Livy when he is about to describe the Second Punic War (Livy, XXI. i.), where, it must be admitted, the statement seems somewhat more fitting. The Roman historians naturally enough do not attach quite the same importance to a rebellion in a border province, however dangerous or desperate. But no one regarded it as an insignificant episode in the maintenance of the imperial frontier. There were many accounts of it, most of them written “sophistically” (ibid. I. i. 1), i.e. with a definite purpose that was quite apart from that of presenting a true version of the facts. These men, we are told by the author, wrote from hate or for favor. They desired to flatter the Romans or to vent their spleen on the Jews. The accurate truth was, of course, to be found only in the austerely veridical account written by Josephus in Aramaic, and translated by him into Greek.