CHAPTER VII
PONTIUS PILATE
HIS Name.—The prænomen or first name of Pilate is not known. Rosadi calls him Lucius, but upon what authority is not stated. His nomen or family name indicates that he was connected either by descent or by adoption with the gens of the Pontii, a tribe first made famous in Roman history in the person and achievements of C. Pontius Telesinus, the great Samnite general. A German legend, however, offers another explanation. According to this story, Pilate was the natural son of Tyrus, King of Mayence. His father sent him to Rome as a hostage, and there he was guilty of murder. Afterwards he was sent to Pontus, where he distinguished himself by subduing certain barbarian tribes. In recognition of his services, it is said, he received the name Pontius. But this account is a pure fabrication. It is possible that it was invented by the 22d legion, which was assigned to Palestine at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, and was afterwards stationed at Mayence. The soldiers of this legion might have been "either the bearers of this tradition or the inventors of the fable."
It is historically almost certain that Pilate was a native of Seville, one of the cities of Bætic Spain that enjoyed rights of Roman citizenship. In the war of annihilation waged by Agrippa against the Cantabrians, the father of Pilate, Marcus Pontius, acquired fame as a general on the side of Rome. He seems to have been a renegade to the cause of the Spaniards, his countrymen. And when Spain had been conquered by Rome, as a reward for service, and as a mark of distinction, he received the pilum (javelin), and from this fact his family took the name of Pilati. This is the common explanation of the origin of the cognomen Pilatus.
Others have sought to derive the word Pilate from pileatus, which, among the Romans, was the cap worn as a badge of servitude by manumitted slaves. This derivation would make Pontius Pilate a libertus, or the descendant of one.
Of his youth, very little is known. But it is believed that, after leaving Spain, he entered the suite of Germanicus on the Rhine and served through the German campaigns; and that, when peace was concluded, he went to Rome in search of fortune and in pursuit of pleasure.
His Marriage.—Soon after his arrival in Rome, Pilate was married to Claudia, the youngest daughter of Julia, the daughter of Augustus. Julia was a woman of the most dissolute and reckless habits. According to Suetonius, nothing so embittered the life of the Roman emperor as the shameful conduct of the mother of the wife of the procurator of Judea. He had reared her with the utmost care, had accustomed her to domestic employments such as knitting and spinning, and had sought to inculcate principles of purity and nobility of soul by requiring her to speak and act openly before the family, that everything which was said and done might be put down in a diary. His guardianship of the attentions paid her by young men was so strict that he once wrote a letter to Lucius Vinicius, a handsome young man of good family, in which he said: "You have not behaved very modestly, in making a visit to my daughter at Baiæ." Notwithstanding this good training, Julia became one of the lewdest and coarsest women in Rome. Augustus married her first to Marcellus; then, after the death of Marcellus, to Marcus Agrippa; and, finally, to Tiberius. But in spite of the noble matches that had been made for her, her lewdness and debaucheries became so notorious that Augustus was compelled to banish her from Rome. It is said that he was so much ashamed of her infamous conduct that for a long time he avoided all company, and even had thoughts of putting her to death. His sorrow and humiliation are shown from the circumstance that when one Phœbe, a freedwoman and confidante of hers, hanged herself about the time the decree of banishment was passed by the senate, he said: "I had rather be the father of Phœbe than of Julia." And whenever the name of Julia was mentioned to him, during her exile, Augustus was wont to exclaim: "Would I were wifeless, or had childless died."[51]