[166] In the same decree it is said: καὶ ὅπως μηδεὶς μήτε ἄρχων μήτε στρατηγὸς ἢ πρεσβευτὴς ἐν τοῖς ὄροις τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἀνιστᾷ ("perhaps συνιστᾷ" Wilamowitz) συμμαχίαν καὶ στρατιώτας ἐξιῇ (so Wilamowitz, for ἐξείη) ἢ τὰ χρήματα τούτων εἰσπράττεσθαι ἢ εἰς παραχειμασίαν ἢ ἄλλῳ τινὶ ὀνόματι, ἀλλ' εἶναι πανταχόθεν ἀνεπηρεάστους (comp. Arch. xiv. 10, 2: παραχειμασίαν δὲ καὶ χρήματα πράττεσθαι οὐ δοκιμάζω). This corresponds in the main to the formula of the charter, a little older, for Termessus (C. I. L. i. n. 204): nei quis magistratu prove magistratu legatus ne[ive] quis alius meilites in oppidum Thermesum ... agrumve ... hiemandi caussa introducito ... nisei senatus nominatim utei Thermesum ... in hibernacula meilites deducantur decreverit. The marching through is accordingly allowed. In the Privilegium for Judaea the levy seems, moreover, to have been prohibited.
[167] This title, which primarily denotes the collegiate tetrarchate, such as was usual among the Galatians, was then more generally employed for the rule of all together, nay, even for the rule of one, but always as in rank inferior to that of king. In this way, besides Galatia, it appears also in Syria, perhaps from the time of Pompeius, certainly from that of Augustus. The juxtaposition of an ethnarch and two tetrarchs, as it was arranged in the year 713 41 B.C. Judaea, according to Josephus (Arch. xiv. 13, 1; Bell. Jud. i. 12, 5), is not again met with elsewhere; Pherores tetrarch of Peraea under his brother Herodes (Bell. Jud. i. 24, 5) is analogous.
[168] The statement of Josephus that Judaea was attached to the province of Syria and placed under its governor (Arch. xvii fin.: τοῦ δὲ Ἀρχελάου χώρας ὑποτελοῦς προσνεμηθείσης τῇ Σύρων; xviii. 1, 1: εἰς τὴν Ἰουδαίων προσθήκην τῆς Συρίας γενομένην; c. 4, 6) appears to be incorrect; on the contrary, Judaea probably formed thenceforth a procuratorial province of itself. An exact distinction between the de iure and de facto interference of the Syrian governor may not be expected in the case of Josephus. The fact that he organised the new province and conducted the first census does not decide the question what arrangement was assigned to it. Where the Jews complain of their procurator to the governor of Syria and the latter interferes against him, the procurator is certainly dependent on the legate; but, when L. Vitellius did this (Josephus, Arch. xviii. 4, 2), his power extended in quite an extraordinary way over the province (Tacitus, Ann. vi. 32; Staatsrecht, ii. 822), and in the other case the words of Tacitus, Ann. xii. 54: quia Claudius ius statuendi etiam de procuratoribus dederat, show that the governor of Syria could not have pronounced such a judgment in virtue of his general jurisdiction. Both the ius gladii of these procurators (Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 8, 1: μέχρι τοῦ κτείνειν λαβὼν παρὰ τοῦ Καίσαρος ἐξουσίαν, Arch. xviii. 1, 1; ἡγησόμενος Ἰουδαίων τῇ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἐξουσίᾳ) and their whole demeanour show that they did not belong to those who, placed under an imperial legate, attended only to financial affairs, but rather, like the procurators of Noricum and Raetia, formed the supreme authority for the administration of law and the command of the army. Thus the legates of Syria had there only the position which those of Pannonia had in Noricum and the upper German legate in Raetia. This corresponds also to the general development of matters; all the larger kingdoms were on their annexation not attached to the neighbouring large governorships, whose plenitude of power it was not the tendency of this epoch to enlarge, but were made into independent governorships, mostly at first equestrian.
[169] According to Josephus (Arch. xx. 8, 7, more exact than Bell. Jud. ii. 13, 7) the greatest part of the Roman troops in Palestine consisted of Caesareans and Sebastenes. The ala Sebastenorum fought in the Jewish war under Vespasian (Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 12, 5). Comp. Eph. epigr. v. 194. There are no alae and cohortes Iudaeorum.
[170] The revenues of Herod amounted, according to Josephus, Arch. xvii. 11, 4, to about 1200 talents, whereof about 100 fell to Batanaea with the adjoining lands, 200 to Galilee and Peraea, the rest to the share of Archelaus; in this doubtless the older Hebrew talent (of about £390) is meant, not, as Hultsch (Metrol.2, p. 605) assumes, the denarial talent (of about £260), as the revenues of the same territory under Claudius are estimated in the same Josephus (Arch. xix. 8, 2), at 12,000,000 denarii (about £500,000). The chief item in it was formed by the land-tax, the amount of which we do not know; in the Syrian time it amounted at least for a time to the third part of corn and the half of wine and oil (1 Maccab. x. 30), in Caesar’s time for Joppa a fourth of the fruit ([p. 175], note), besides which at that time the temple-tenth still existed. To this was added a number of other taxes and customs, auction-charges, salt-tax, road and bridge moneys, and the like; it is to these that the publicans of the Gospels have reference.
[171] On the marble screen (δρύφακτος), which marked off the inner court of the temple, were placed for that reason tablets of warning in the Latin and Greek language (Josephus, Bell. Jud. v. 5, 2; vi. 2, 4; Arch. xv. 11, 5). One of the latter, which has recently been found (Revue Archéologique, xxiii. 1872, p. 220), and is now in the public museum of Constantinople, is to this effect: μήθ' ἕνα ἀλλογενῆ εἰσπορεύεσθαι ἐντὸς τοῦ περὶ τὸ ἱερὸν τρυφάκτου καὶ περιβόλου. ὃς δ' ἂν ληφθῆ, ἑαυτῷ αἴτιος ἔσται διὰ τὸ ἐξακολουθεῖν θάνατον. The iota in the dative is present, and the writing good and suitable for the early imperial period. These tablets were hardly set up by the Jewish kings, who would scarcely have added a Latin text, and had no cause to threaten the penalty of death with this singular anonymity. If they were set up by the Roman government, both are explained; Titus also says (in Josephus, Bell. Jud. vi. 2, 4), in an appeal to the Jews: οὐχ ἡμεῖς τοὺς ὑπερβάντας ὑμῖν ἀναιρεῖν ἐπετρέψαμεν, κἂν Ῥωμαῖός τις ᾖ;—If the tablet really bears traces of axe-cuts, these came from the soldiers of Titus.
[172] The special hatred of Gaius against the Jews (Philo, Leg. 20) was not the cause, but the consequence, of the Alexandrian Jew-hunt. Since therefore the understanding of the leaders of the Jew-hunt with the governor (Philo, in Flacc. 4) cannot have subsisted on the footing that the Jews imagined, because the governor could not reasonably believe that he would recommend himself to the new emperor by abandoning the Jews, the question certainly arises, why the leaders of those hostile to the Jews chose this very moment for the Jew-hunt, and above all, why the governor, whose excellence Philo so emphatically acknowledges, allowed it, and, at least in its further course, took personal part in it. Probably things occurred as they are narrated above: hatred and envy towards the Jews had long been fermenting in Alexandria (Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 9; Philo, Leg. 18); the abeyance of the old stern government, and the evident disfavour in which the prefect stood with Gaius, gave room for the tumult; the arrival of Agrippa furnished the occasion; the adroit conversion of the synagogues into temples of Gaius stamped the Jews as enemies of the emperor, and, after this was done, Flaccus must certainly have seized on the persecution to rehabilitate himself thereby with the emperor.
[173] When Strabo was in Egypt in the earlier Augustan period the Jews in Alexandria were under an Ethnarch (Geogr. xvii. 1, 13, p. 798, and in Josephus, Arch. xiv. 7, 2). Thereupon, when under Augustus the Ethnarchos or Genarchos, as he was called, died, a council of the elders took his place (Philo, Leg. 10); yet Augustus, as Claudius states (Josephus, Arch. xix. 5, 2), “did not prohibit the Jews from appointing an Ethnarch,” which probably is meant to signify that the choice of a single president was only omitted for this time, not abolished once for all. Under Gaius there were evidently only elders of the Jewish body; and also under Vespasian these are met with (Josephus, Bell. vii. 10, 1). An archon of the Jews in Antioch is named in Josephus, Bell. vii. 3, 3.
[174] Apion spoke and wrote on all and sundry matters, upon the metals and the Roman letters, on magic and concerning the Hetaerae, on the early history of Egypt and the cookery receipts of Apicius; but above all he made his fortune by his discourses upon Homer, which acquired for him honorary citizenship in numerous Greek cities. He had discovered that Homer had begun his Iliad with the unsuitable word μῆνις for the reason that the first two letters, as numerals, exhibit the number of the books of the two epics which he was to write; he named the guest-friend in Ithaca, with whom he had made inquiries as to the draught-board of the suitors; indeed he affirmed that he had conjured up Homer himself from the nether world to question him about his native country, and that Homer had come and had told it to him, but had bound him not to betray it to others.
[175] The writings of Philo, which bring before us this whole catastrophe with incomparable reality, nowhere strike this chord; but, apart even from the fact that this rich and aged man had in him more of the good man than of the good hater, it is obvious of itself that these consequences of the occurrences on the Jewish side were not publicly set forth. What the Jews thought and felt may not be judged of by what they found it convenient to say, particularly in their works written in Greek. If the Book of Wisdom and the third book of Maccabees are in reality directed against the Alexandrian persecution of the Jews (Hausrath, Neutestam. Zeitgesch. ii. 259 ff.)—which we may add is anything but certain—they are, if possible, couched in a still tamer tone than the writings of Philo.