Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome
Page 36
It would indeed have been surprising if such a hands-on ruler stayed away from what was both the greatest military crisis of his reign and a perfect opportunity to check that his military training methods, to which he had devoted so much time and energy, were fit for the purpose.
In the flush of victory Bar Kokhba established a disciplined state, and Judaea was totally free of foreign influence or control. A good deal is known about how he governed, thanks in part to coins but most of all to astonishing discoveries in caves in the desert wadis west of the Dead Sea—legible papers and artifacts in perfect condition thanks to the arid weather conditions.
A new calendar was decreed and appeared on coins and in letters. The year 132 became “the First Year of the Redemption of Israel.” Religious ceremonies were restored and a new high priest appointed. A highly placed officer wrote to colleagues requesting ritual necessaries for a festival; subordinates of Bar Kokhba, they were commanders (apparently) at En-gedi, an oasis on the shore of the Dead Sea.
Soumaios to Ionathes, son of Baianos, and to Masabala, greetings. Since I have sent Agrippa to you, hurry up and send me stems of palms and citrons and they will be set up for the Festival of the Tabernacle of the Jews. Don’t do anything else. This was written in Greek because [a name is lost] could not be found to write it in Hebrew. Let him [i.e., Agrippa] return quickly because of the festival. Don’t do anything else. Soumaios. Farewell.
The letter, with its needless repetition of the phrase “Don’t do anything else,” speaks eloquently of the excitement, the urgency, and, implicitly, the optimism of a revolutionary moment.
A note from the prince of Israel himself reveals a ruthless touch. Its subject is a certain landowner, wealthy but uncooperative. The produce from his orchards and his livestock would be of material benefit to the rebel cause.
Shim’on Bar Kosiba to Yehonatan son of Ba’ ay an, and to Masabala, son of Shim’ on, that you will send to me Eleazar’ son of Hitta immediately, before the Sabbath.
If Eleazar was found and delivered, he would have had a distinctly uncomfortable interview. One rather hopes that he smelled trouble and made himself scarce.
Another letter suggests Yehonatan and Masabala were not altogether dependable officers. Bar Kokhba ordered them to send him reinforcements. “And if you shall not send them, let it be known to you, that you will be punished.”
Bar Kokhba’s approach to religion was rigorously exclusive and he had no time for Christians. The church fathers returned the compliment. Justin, writing contemporaneously, claimed: “In the present war it is only the Christians whom Barchochebas [i.e., Bar Kokhba], the leader of the rebellion of the Jews, commanded to be punished severely if they did not deny Jesus as the Messiah and blaspheme him.”
Jerome goes further: “Barcocheba, leader of a party of the Jews, because the Christians are not willing to help him against the Roman army, murders them with every sort of torture.” Christians regarded Bar Kokhba as a butcher, a bandit, and a con man. In order to meet a prophecy that the Messiah breathed fire, Jerome accused him of “fanning a lighted blade of straw in his mouth with puffs of breath so as to give the impression that he was spewing forth flames.”
If we can generalize from names in the discovered papyri and the location of coin finds, the new Jewish state was of limited extent. It controlled at least a territory running south of Jerusalem and along the Dead Sea and extending to within eighteen miles of the Mediterranean. There may have been pockets of insurgent activity farther north and on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. However, Bar Kokhba failed to capture the abomination of desolation that was Aelia Capitolina. Rebel coins have been found in many other places in Judaea but none there.
Eventually the regrouped and reinforced Romans returned to the fight. Tineius Rufus wreaked vengeance for his early defeat, if we can trust hysterical Talmudic sources. Eusebius records:
When military aid had been sent him by the emperor, [Tineius Rufus] moved out against the Jews, treating their madness without mercy. He destroyed in heaps thousands of men, women, and children, and under the law of war, enslaved their land.
The hapless rabbi Aqiba fell into Roman hands. Apparently he was flayed alive. He is said to have endured the punishment with composure, but his messiah was unable to save him.
Hadrian hired the services of the architect and engineer Apollodorus of Damascus, builder of the stone bridge across the Danube and designer of many of Trajan’s buildings in Rome, despite their being reputed to be on bad terms. Apollodorus was an expert on siegecraft, and in an epistolary preface to his classic text on the subject, Poliorcetica, he addressed an emperor who needed his advice: “I am honored that you think me worthy of sharing your concern in this matter.” He writes that although he is not familiar with the terrain in question he has been invited to supply designs for siege works to be used against elevated fortified positions—heights rather than cities.
Apollodorus lists devices suitable for employing against a hill fort; these included defenses against heavy objects, such as wagons and barrels that could be rolled down a hill onto attackers; screens to protect an assault force against missiles as it made for the top; and techniques for undermining a wall, ramming a gate, or using assault ladders.
The emperor in question is most likely to have been Hadrian, for the task Apollodorus describes exactly fits the challenge facing the Romans in Judaea. When Julius Severus eventually arrived, he adopted the only rational tactic to subdue a lawless countryside speckled with guerrilla groups. As Vespasian had done before him, he proceeded slowly and methodically, taking and securing every hill and strongpoint and destroying everything he encountered before he advanced farther.
The Romans had assembled overwhelming force. It is impossible to gauge how many troops took part in the campaign, but a best estimate indicates that the number of legions, either with a complete complement or represented by sizable vexillationes, or detachments, was twelve or thirteen (albeit not necessarily present at the same time). This was a disproportionately huge deployment for tiny Judaea, but nothing was to be left to chance.
Bar Kokhba responded vigorously, if we can trust Talmudic tales. It was said that “he would catch missiles from the enemy’s catapults on one of his knees and hurl them back, killing many of the foe.” This can be interpreted as meaning that the rebels acquired some Roman artillery and put it to good use.
However, letters have been found which suggest that loyalty to the prince of Israel was beginning to wear thin. In one of them, the unsatisfactory duo Yehonatan and Masabala continued to disappoint. “In comfort you sit, eat, and drink from the property of the House of Israel,” he wrote angrily, “and care nothing for your brothers.”
The endgame approached. The civilian Jewish population, not only in Judaea but also in Arabia, grew desperate. Whether sympathetic to the rebel cause or not, everyone was caught up in the approaching catastrophe. Well-to-do families, together with their gold and silver, hid in the insurgents’ network of tunnels and in caves. That some failed to survive their ordeal is confirmed by the discovery of cooking utensils, correspondence, and human remains in caves at Wadi Murabba’ and Nahal Hever.
Bar Kokhba’s final redoubt was the fortress of Betar, six miles south-West of Jerusalem. We do not have the details, but Apollodorus’ advice on siegecraft was good. A fragmentary letter evokes the despair of total defeat: “… till the end … they have no hope … my brothers in the south … of these were lost by the sword.”
In November or December 135 Betar fell. According to Eusebius, the siege lasted a long time, but eventually “the rebels were driven to final destruction by famine and thirst and the instigator of their madness paid the penalty he deserved.” Bar Kokhba’s head was taken to Hadrian (or perhaps to Severus). Dio reports that 50 of the most important strongholds of the Jews had been captured, 985 villages razed, and 580,000 Jews killed. A hyperbolic rabbinical tradition had it that gentiles fertilized their vineyards for seven years with the blood of I
srael without using manure.
The Jewish state lasted three years, before the dream of liberty was extinguished. The man whose nom de guerre was Shim’on bar Kokhba, Son of the Star, was renamed by embittered survivors as they contemplated the ruins of Judaea; he was now Shim’on bar Kozeba, Son of the Lie.
The emperor determined to root out Judaism. So many prisoners were put up for auction at Hebron and Gaza that each fetched no more than the value of a horse. Judaea was, in effect, depopulated of Jews either by death or enslavement, and any few who remained were forbidden to enter the district around Jerusalem. This was to prevent them from even seeing, let alone visiting, their ancestral capital. The teaching of Mosaic law was banned, as was the ownership of scrolls (the essential medium on which the scriptures and rabbinical commentaries were written).
The building of Aelia Capitolina proceeded apace and an equestrian statue of Hadrian, still in place more than a century later, was erected on the site of the Holy of Holy. Pagan shrines were built over Jewish places of worship. By the city gate for the Bethlehem road, a marble sow was erected, insultingly offensive to Jews and denoting their subjection to Roman power. Judaea was abolished as a territorial entity. It was added to Galilee and the enlarged and purified province was known as Syria Palaestina, the first time the term Palestine was ever employed. It was to be as if the chosen people had never existed.
Hadrian was acclaimed imperator for the first time in his reign, a title adopted by an emperor only after a signal victory, and his three chief generals, Severus and the governors of Syria and Arabia, were granted triumphal honors, ornamenta triumphalia, the highest military honor to which they could aspire. The emperor was unusually parsimonious with such titles, and his generosity on this occasion signals the shock that had rocked the empire. It had taken a huge effort to put down the revolt.
For Hadrian, his victory was in part a defeat. His policy was to attract the fullest possible consent to Roman rule, to entice provincial elites to join him in government, to recast the empire as a commonwealth of equals. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this approach, but, for all that, the revolt had exposed its falsity. The final guarantee of the pax Romana was the brute force of the legions. This, in turn, was a reminder of the implicit fragility of the imperial system. If the army were ever to fail, what would then preserve Rome’s dominion?
When the rabbinical authors mention the name of Hadrian they often add the phrase “May his bones rot!” No wonder, for it was now clear that, after recurrent revolts at the end of Nero’s reign and then at the end of Trajan’s, the Jews would never again give Rome any trouble.
XXIV
NO MORE JOKES
In the spring of 134 Hadrian returned to Rome from the east, probably revisiting the Dacian provinces en route. The war in Judaea was by no means over, but he had made all the necessary arrangements and he had confidence in his generals. That dependably undependable client king Pharasmenes stirred up trouble for the Parthians by encouraging a neighboring people, the fierce Alani, to invade their empire as well as the Roman province of Cappadocia; the Parthian king complained to Hadrian, but luckily the governor, Arrian, was on hand. He deployed a Roman force with masterly skill to deter the incursion; being a writer as well as a man of action, he wrote a book on the subject, which is the fullest record of the Roman army in the field to have survived.
Despite these alarms, coins celebrating the emperor’s adventus breathed optimism. In one series, a galley rides on the waves with the goddess Minerva in the prow brandishing a javelin and holding a spear: underneath, a legend reads Felicitas Aug, “the emperor’s happiness.” Other coins from this time boast of Mars the Avenger and Rome holding a statuette of Victory.
The emperor’s brother-in-law, Servianus, was still vigorous in his ninth decade. After a long, resented wait, he had been appointed to serve as consul ordinarius this year for the third time (in April he handed over, as was usual, to a suffectus). This was a high honor, which, despite a history of chilly relations with the emperor, he owed to being a leading member by marriage of the imperial family. Paulina, his wife and Hadrian’s sister, had died a few years previously. Nothing is heard of his daughter and son-in-law. Servianus’ grandson Pedanius Fuscus was now in his late teens and, via his grandmother, was the only adult male linked by blood to Hadrian. For so long as the emperor did not adopt someone else, he was entitled to regard himself as the heir presumptive. He was probably in the imperial entourage, where an eye could be kept on him.
As previously noted, the only other senator to have held a third consulship was Annius Verus, and we can take it that Hadrian was looking forward warmly to seeing his loyal old friend’s grandson again. Little Marcus, his verissimus, was now thirteen years old. It was six years that the emperor had been away, a very long period in the life of a child. It would be a pleasant task to find out how he had developed.
Always serious-minded, the boy proved to be a hardworking pupil when his elementary education began at the age of seven. His maternal great-grandfather Catilius Severus was city prefect and an important man at court. However, he found time to guide the boy’s schooling; Marcus recalled gratefully in later life that he was “allowed to dispense with attendance at schools and to enjoy good teachers at home.” Two family slaves or freedmen taught him the rudiments of Greek and Latin. Specialists gave him a grounding in the arts—literature, music (mainly singing), and geometry.
A tutor looked after Marcus’ moral formation, and seems to have instilled worthy but slightly dull values in the growing teenager. He was taught “not to side with the Greens or the Blues at the chariot races, or to back Thracian [swordsmen] or Samnite [heavy-armed] gladiators; to tolerate pain and limit my needs; to work with my own hands and mind my own business and not to listen to malicious gossip.”
A year or so before Hadrian’s return to Italy, Marcus entered his secondary education under various grammatici. But his most influential teacher was his art master, Diognetus, from whom he learned not only painting but the rudiments of philosophy. He wrote dialogues in the manner first established by Plato and “set my heart on the pallet bed and coverlet of animal skins, and everything else that tallied with the Greek [philosophical] system.” In fact, according to the Historia Augusta, Marcus would have preferred to sleep on the ground, were it not for his mother’s veto.
Diognetus also imparted a subversive principle that presumably would have annoyed Hadrian had he learned about it. This was “not to give credence to the claims of miracle-mongers and magicians and such matters.”
Marcus sounds as if he was becoming rather priggish, but the emperor liked what he saw of him. This may have had something to do with the fact that he was a nice-looking boy, as a bust of him in his teens shows. More to the point, Hadrian believed he could foresee an intelligent and responsible adult in the making.
During the emperor’s absence, building work in Rome had proceeded busily. The spectacular temple of Venus and Rome was dedicated in 135. Hadrian was very proud of the result. According to Dio Cassius, he invited Apollodorus to offer his comments. Hadrian bore him a grudge, because years before he had interrupted with some smart remark a conversation between Apollodorus and Trajan about a building project. The architect had snapped back at Hadrian, who was practicing his draftsmanship at the time: “Go away, and get back to your drawing exercises. You don’t understand any of this.”
The emperor hoped that this time Apollodorus would compliment him, but he was disappointed. The architect remarked that the temple
ought to have been built on high ground and that the earth should have been excavated beneath it, so that it might have stood out more conspicuously on the Sacred Way from its higher position … Second, in regard to the statues [of Venus and Rome], he said that they had been made too tall for the height of the
cella
[the temple’s inner chamber]. “For now,” he said, “if the goddesses wish to get up and go out, they will be unable to do so.”
Rome was still a construction site. On the right bank of the river the emperor’s huge mausoleum, long planned, was rising from the ground. A bridge connecting it to the Campus Martius had already been constructed. The tomb itself was similar to that of Augustus, which was full. Nerva had been squeezed in there and Trajan’s remains lay at the foot of his column; the dynasty needed a long-term replacement. The design was a large drum rising from a square base and faced with marble. It probably supported a superstructure decorated with statues and surmounted by a colonnaded tower, on top of which stood a colossal four-horsed chariot.
The emperor was wise to plan his final resting place, for he was feeling unwell. He suffered from recurrent and increasingly copious nosebleeds. He remained in or near Rome, presumably spending most of his time at the villa complex at Tibur, where there was the construction of the temple of Antinous to superintend. The text on the obelisk there included a prayer from Osirantinous to Ra-Harachte, a union of the sun god Ra and Horus, king of the heavens, that the emperor “live eternally, like Ra, / With a prospering and newly risen age!”