Frater Idumaeos meruit cum patre triumphos,
Quae datur ex Chattis laurea, tota tua est.
Crete granted a great name; Africa, a greater; the former to Metellus, the latter to Scipio. Even more renowned a title was derived from Germany and the conquered Rhine. That title, Caesar, your boyhood valor also earned. The Idumean triumph[[331]] you must share with your brother and father. The laurel wreath inscribed with the name of the Chatti—that is all your own.
The destruction of the city and temple affected the imaginations of all men, Jew and non-Jew, very powerfully. A large number of the various apocryphal books are referred to this period, especially those which are filled with lamentations over the desolate condition of the former princess among provinces. But dramatic and affecting as it was, the destruction of the temple was not at the time the epochal event it seems to us now. It made only a slight change in the political condition even of Palestinian Jews, and even in the spiritual condition of the Jews at large it played seemingly a subordinate part.
CHAPTER XIX
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROMAN JEWISH COMMUNITY
The Jews in Rome at the time of Cicero formed, we have seen, an important and numerous class amidst the largely orientalized plebs of the city. With the other foreigners resident in the city they had a powerful patron in Caesar, as their grief at his death attested. Under his successor they found at least an indulgent, if somewhat contemptuous, toleration, which however was directed not toward them specially, but toward the other foreigners in the capital as well. And as we have seen, the religious reformation of Augustus, and his active disapproval of foreign cults, did not prevent the Jews from spreading rapidly in all classes of society.
Under Tiberius we hear of a general expulsion of the Jews, as afterward under Claudius. “Expulsion of Jews” is a term with which later European history has made us familiar. In the case of such expulsions as the Jews suffered in England, France, Spain, and Portugal, we know that the term is literally exact. Practically all Jews were in the instances cited compelled to leave the country and settle elsewhere. The expulsion ordered by Tiberius was unquestionably wholly ineffective in practice, since there were many Jews in Rome shortly after, although we have no record that the decree was repealed. But it may be questioned whether even in theory it resembled the expulsions of later times.
The facts are given fully by Suetonius (Tiberius, 36):
Externas caerimonias Aegyptios Iudaicosque ritus compescuit, coactis qui superstitione ea tenebantur religiosas vestes cum instrumento omni comburere. Iudaeorum iuventutem per speciem sacramenti in provincias gravioris caeli distribuit: reliquos gentis eiusdem vel similia sectantes urbe summovit sub poena perpetuae servitutis nisi obtemperassent.