Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea

by Seward, Desmond

  A reference to Caecina in The Jewish War is so outspoken as to indicate that Caecina must have been dead by the time it was written, which helps in trying to date the book’s completion. Describing Caecina’s betrayal of Vitellius during the civil war, the author says, “the scandal of his treachery was obscured by the unmerited honors that he received from Vespasian.” 9 Had Caecina still been alive, Josephus would never have dared to write about so powerful a senator in such a way. The passage was calculated to please Titus, who must have been fairly sensitive about the subject of Caecina. Despite Caecina’s attempted coup, his brutal assassination had shocked all Rome, and in retrospect even Suetonius expressed disapproval.10

  From Josephus’s point of view, the failed plot had one reassuring consequence: Queen Berenice was forced to leave Rome. The patron of Justus had come back during the late seventies and was living with Titus in his palace as if she were his wife, although she was at least ten years older. A single source claims that this inexhaustible lady had been sleeping with Caecina as well and cites this as the true reason why she was forced to leave the city, although the claim is not supported by any other authority. But it really does look as if Titus sent her away after Caecina’s plot, perhaps because his romance with her was adding to his unpopularity.11

  On 24 June 79, Vespasian died at sixty-nine, apparently from malaria. On his deathbed, he made a last joke. Referring to his imminent deification, he muttered, “How depressing! I think I’m turning into a god.”12 Despite Titus’s amiable manners and outstanding record as a soldier, the citizens of Rome were suspicious of him, and there was a certain amount of hostility toward his succession. Executing Caecina and driving Marcellus to suicide were seen as the behavior of a tyrant rather than as self-defense. Many Romans were convinced that he was both cruel and debauched, and they were particularly upset by his affair with Queen Berenice. “People not only thought privately but said openly that he was going to be a second Nero,” records Suetonius.13

  Yet the Romans received a pleasant surprise, as Titus turned out to be genuinely benevolent. Far from indulging a Neronian taste for debauchery, he dismissed his troop of catamites and sent Berenice home—in Suetonius’s famous phrase, invitus invitam (“he reluctant, she reluctant”)—after she had tried to return to Rome, hoping to marry him. As for Josephus, “The way I was treated by the Emperors remained unchanged,” he tells us in the Vita. “When Vespasian died, Titus, who succeeded to the empire, showed me the same consideration that his father had done, never believing any of the accusations that were always being made against me.” It sounds as if he had plenty of enemies in Rome.14 Unfortunately, Titus died of a fever after a reign of only two years.

  The new emperor was Titus’s younger brother, Domitian, whose good looks and quiet, shortsighted appearance concealed a brutal arrogance. He was unpredictable and treacherous, a truly horrible man who delighted in cruelty. At first, his subjects did not know what to make of him, as he liked to spend several hours a day alone—spearing flies with a needle. Even if Josephus writes that Domitian “showed the same esteem for me as his father,” he must have lived in terror of him like everybody else in Rome.15 Instead of providing the tranquil setting for a serene retirement, the city grew increasingly dangerous as the emperor developed into a tyrant.

  Josephus did his best to flatter him in the seventh book of The Jewish War, which was probably altered during the new reign. Seemingly breathless with admiration, Josephus tells of a campaign waged by Domitian against the Gauls and Germans in 70, when Vespasian was not yet installed at Rome. “Endowed by nature with his father’s heroism, possessing experience beyond his years, he at once advanced on the barbarians whose courage failed when they heard that he was coming and surrendered in terror,” writes Josephus. The young man had gone home “covered in glory and praised by all for an achievement that was extraordinary for his age and worthy of his father.”16

  Writing after Domitian was safely dead, Suetonius has a rather different story. “To put himself on a level with his father and brother, he went off on an entirely unnecessary campaign in Gaul and Germany, despite his father’s friends having tried to stop him.” According to Suetonius, Vespasian rebuked his son, who was made to live at the palace to keep him out of mischief.17

  In the same book of The Jewish War, Josephus describes how Domitian made “a glorious appearance” when he accompanied his father and brother during their triumph, “riding beside them sumptuously appareled.” All too clearly, this is an attempt to imply that he was sharing in it and must therefore have made an important contribution to their victory, which we know to be nonsense.18

  Although Josephus can be accused of sycophancy, it is only fair to remember that historians dared not take chances in Domitian’s Rome. Even omissions could lead to ruin. The emperor “put to death . . . Hermogenes of Tarsus because of [unspecified] allusion in his History, and went so far as to crucify the slaves who wrote it down,” Suetonius informs us.19 Where Domitian was concerned, it was dangerous not only to tell the truth but to refrain from fulsome compliments. This was especially the case with Josephus, who had so many enemies and whose survival had depended on imperial protection. Although there was an attempted rebellion by Antonius Saturninus in 89, it was discovered and crushed. By the time he was assassinated in 96, Domitian had become “an object of terror and hatred,” according to Suetonius.20 Looking back from the next century, Tacitus expressed his relief at writing in a time when he could tell the truth without fear.

  Yet it was during Domitian’s reign that Josephus added his description of the siege of Masada, in the seventh book, which completed The Jewish War. Vespasian and Titus, who might have objected to so much praise of Zealot heroism, were dead, whereas Domitian had not been involved in the Judean war. We also know from Suetonius that on the whole Domitian took very little interest in history; some exceptionally ill-natured person must have brought the tactless works of poor Hermogenes to his attention.

  According to Josephus, Domitian was surprisingly kind to him. “He punished my Jewish accusers, and for a similar offence gave orders for the chastisement of a slave [who was] a eunuch and my son’s tutor. He also exempted my property in Judea from taxation, a mark of high honor.”21 Why Josephus regarded this as so flattering is explained by Suetonius, who says that normally the emperor took pains to ensure that taxes were levied on Jews or people who lived as Jews without acknowledging their faith; Suetonius saw a man of ninety stripped and examined in court for evidence of circumcision.

  What makes the way that Josephus prospered during Domitian’s reign so unexpected is the hostile climate toward Jews that sprang up in Flavian Rome. The war had confirmed the Romans’ instinctive distrust of monotheism and strengthened their antagonism toward Hebrews as interlopers from the East. Most of the Diaspora had a miserable time, living in fear of persecution and pogroms. We know of no rich or influential Jews in the city at this date. Even “god-fearers” who had not converted to Judaism were in danger. The emperor put to death his cousin Flavius Clemens, the consul and father of his intended heirs, for “godlessness” and banished Clemens’s wife, Flavia Domitilla, who was also a relative, on the same charge. (Dio Cassius explains that “godlessness” meant “drifting into Jewish ways.”22) The war had never been forgotten, and as late as the year 85, coins were still being struck with the legend Iudaea capta. Could Josephus have done the emperor some special service, perhaps as a diplomat or a spy?

  Josephus also tells us in the Vita that “Domitia, Caesar’s wife, never stopped conferring favors on me.”23 One would like to know more about these “favors” from an empress who, if not quite such a byword as Poppaea, enjoyed an unsavory reputation. Once Titus’s mistress, she started sleeping with him again when he became emperor, according to rumors, but she later insisted on oath that it was untrue—“although she would never have denied it had there been the slightest bit of truth in the story, and would certainly have boasted of it, as she always did about all her sc
andalous behavior,” comments Suetonius.24 Furthermore, Domitia seems to have been involved in the plot to murder her husband.

  To receive so many favors, Josephus must have attended court fairly often, in however modest a capacity. Its atmosphere cannot have been much different from that of Nero’s court, dominated by money and sex. (Domitian was particularly fond of what he termed “bed-wrestling.”) The place was packed with millionaires and bankrupt adventurers, with office-hunters and swindlers, with actors and prostitutes—male and female. Over all loomed the baleful shadow of the emperor, increasingly unbalanced, proclaiming himself to be a god while still alive and turning into a bloodthirsty paranoiac.

  His growing bloodlust expressed itself in the invention of new types of gladiatorial combat. Some of the imperial games were staged at night, with the arena lit by torches, while there were mass battles between dwarves on one side and women on the other, all of whom were made to kill each other. During the last three years of his reign, nobody of any importance in Rome felt safe, since he was ordering executions every day. Josephus must have needed strong nerves to dance attendance on such a man.

  It was surely a relief to retreat from court politics into ancient history. He found a new patron, who seems to have been a friend for a long time. “Epaphroditus, a man who loves all kinds of knowledge, and enjoys learning about history because he himself was involved in great affairs of state and saw many changes of fortune,” is how he describes him in the preface to the Antiquities of the Jews. “Throughout [his life] he has shown the rare strength that comes from a noble nature combined with rock-like courage and principle.”25

  Unfortunately, it is not possible to identify Epaphroditus with any certainty. It used to be thought that he was Nero’s former private secretary, the freedman who had helped him cut his throat and whom Domitian put to death for the lèse-majesté of having connived at an emperor’s suicide. The most likely candidate, however, is another elderly freedman of the same name, an Alexandrian who had settled in Rome during Nero’s time. Described as “big and dark like an elephant,” Marcus Mettius Epaphroditus was a bibliophile, with a library of 30,000 volumes, who liked to pose as an expert on Homer and other Greek poets. Given his name, he does not seem to have been a Jew, although clearly he was intrigued by Judaism. Perhaps he gave Josephus the run of his library.

  Josephus informs us in the preface that Epaphroditus has persuaded him to write the Jewish Antiquities (more correctly called The Jewish Archaeology ). This is the history of his nation, which starts with the creation and closes with the misdeeds of the Procurator Florus. In eleven out of its twenty books he retells and reinterprets the Bible, ingeniously discovering scriptural predictions that Rome will rule the world and that the Jews should submit to their government; whenever possible, he tries to find agreement between Roman and Jewish values. To strengthen his argument, he adds a good deal of new material, while he makes odd omissions, such as the story of the Golden Calf, perhaps because it does not reflect flatteringly on his nation. The book contains some weirdly arcane information; for example, that the fallen angels, who were expelled from heaven with Lucifer, married women and begot terrifyingly evil sons, half angelic and half human, who persecuted Noah but were destroyed by the Flood.26 Building bridges with his Roman readership, in the second half he reassures them by drawing to some extent on Greek authors with whom they were familiar, such as Polybius or Strabo. His account of what pagans saw as a mysterious people with an uncanny religion must have fascinated many who had never encountered the Jewish scriptures.

  Interestingly, in the Jewish Antiquities he speaks of the Pharisees much more favorably than he does in The Jewish War. “They live according to what reason dictates,” he tells us. “Believing everything is due to fate, they do not take away men’s freedom from acting as they choose, since according to their view God prefers to create temperament as an instrument of fate, leaving a man free to act virtuously or viciously.”27 He also says that “Sadducees are listened to only by the rich and the people do not respect them, while the Pharisees have the ear of the multitude.”28 By now he writes as someone who is following the Pharisee way.

  He knew that he had written a wonderful book, and he displays the same sort of vanity that is so evident in The Jewish War. “Nobody else, Jew or Gentile, would have been capable, however much they might have wanted, of producing quite so accurate an account as mine,” he boasts at the end of the Jewish Antiquities. “My fellow countrymen freely admit that I excel them all in Jewish learning.”

  Then, out of the blue, he was attacked by Justus of Tiberias in a “chronicle” that has not survived. It described The Jewish War as a tissue of lies, making grave charges about the author’s behavior during the campaign. He was accused of being one of the architects of the Jewish war, of forcing Galilean cities to rise against Rome, of looting on a massive scale and even of rape. Justus wrote so eloquently that Josephus found himself in serious danger. He was saved only by Domitian’s protection. But while the emperor defused the authorities’ suspicions, the accusations continued to fuel hostility toward him among the Jewish community, who may never have forgiven him for caricaturing the Zealots.

  What made Justus so dangerous was that he was a Galilean who, like Josephus, had at first supported the war for independence but had then gone over to Rome. Since he had been personally involved, he was exceptionally well informed about what had happened in his native province in 66-67 and was able to demonstrate that, to some extent at least, the account given in The Jewish War was a distortion. He also wrote Greek fluently. His attack was the reason why Josephus wrote the Vita, most of which is an angry polemic against Justus, whom he charges with being a rabble-rouser during the war, of attempting to take over all Galilee, and of persuading Tiberias to rise against King Agrippa. He tries to convince readers that Justus was a criminal liar, who would never have dared to publish his book were Vespasian or Titus still alive because they knew what really took place. It is clear from Josephus’s shrill tone that Justus thoroughly frightened him.

  Accusations like this were to dog him for the rest of his career, as opponents attempted to demolish the account in The Jewish War. In his last book (the Contra Apionem, written toward the end of his life), he indignantly returns to the topic, claiming that his patrons “testify to my scrupulous concern for the truth, and they are scarcely persons who would conceal what they really thought or stay silent if I distorted anything or left out any of the facts from ignorance or prejudice. Yet contemptible people try to belittle my history, pretending that it reads like a prize essay for school boys.”29

  Josephus added the Vita to the Jewish Antiquities as an appendix. He may have meant to write a proper autobiography but was distracted by the urgent need to defend himself against Justus and expected that the Antiquities would have a wider circulation than the short Vita on its own. As a result, he unbalanced what could have been another superb book. Even so, he produced the only non-Christian autobiography to survive from the ancient world.30 Although the Vita is more of a defense of a short period in his career than the story of his life, it supplies us with some fascinating details. Interestingly, he gives a different account of the war’s origins from that in The Jewish War. There he had claimed that the Jews had always opposed the war against Rome, but that they were forced into it by a small group of fanatics. In the Vita, however, he admits that most Jews supported the war from the start. Yet he never quite explains his own position.

  The Jewish Antiquities had taken him nearly two decades to write. At the end, he tells us he finished it during the thirteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Domitian and in the fifty-sixth year of his age, which means some date between September 93 and September the following year. Even in the Jewish Antiquities he was conscious of Domitian’s shadow, portraying the appalling Emperor Tiberius in a flattering light and commending his skill at divining the future. Everybody knew that Domitian admired Tiberius; Suetonius says that the only books he ever read were his
predecessor’s memoirs and correspondence.

  Josephus’s Contra Apionem, written after the Jewish Antiquities and also dedicated to Epaphroditus, was an eloquent, neatly constructed treatise against the anti-Semitism of the period. Apion had been an Egyptian grammarian who, sixty years earlier, had led a deputation of carefully chosen scholars from Alexandria to Rome in order to launch a spiteful attack the Jewish religion in a debate with the redoubtable Philo. In his book, Josephus uses Apion as a stalking horse so that he can refute ignorant criticisms of the Jewish nation and faith and demonstrate that Jewish civilization—its religion, laws, and customs—is not only much older than Greek civilization but superior.

  “In the first volume of this work, my most esteemed Epaphroditus, I demonstrated the antiquity of our race, corroborating my statements by the writings of Phoenicians, Chaldeans, and Egyptians, besides citing numerous Greek historians,” is his summary of the first volume.31 In the second he demolishes authors who have attacked Judaism, starting with a rebuttal of Apion that readers may think is occasionally a little callous. “An ulcer on his person rendered circumcision essential,” he records joyfully of the long dead Apion’s end. “The operation brought no relief, gangrene setting in, so that he died in terrible agonies.”32 Other opponents, such as Appolonius Molon, are accused of being “reprobates, sophists and deceivers of youth.” In a more positive mood, he contrasts his people’s concept of God with the paganism of Greece, while he reminds his readers that Jews have a far longer history than Greeks. It is generally agreed that Contra Apionem is his best-written book. He is still at the height of his intellectual powers.33