The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  “For what reason?” Petronius pointed with some dismay at the inoffensive black statue of the new god. “For a piece of stone you would die?”

  “A false god must not enter our land,” Yigal said.

  Petronius swallowed. He knew that Caesar Caligula was no god. He also knew that Caligula had become a false god only because he had murdered his predecessor, Tiberius. And he suspected that before long Caligula himself would have to be murdered. The man’s excesses—killing decent citizens so that he could sleep with their wives for one night, then sending the women into prostitution and slavery—these things would have to be stopped, but in the meantime Caligula was emperor and he was also god. To defy him in any way or to allow the Jews to defy him would mean death for all. “I am going to raise my arm,” the irritated general warned. “When it falls we shall march forward, and if any Jew lies in our way … Centurions, cut them to pieces!”

  The Roman general, backed by an enormous might, stood in the sunlight facing the two inconsequential Jews, one a helper at an olive press, the other a farmer with no lands of his own, and he raised his right arm, holding in the air an ebony baton. About his arm muscle and his forearm he wore military bands of gold, and he made an imposing picture as he stood with the baton aloft. He seemed to be counting, but his voice could not be heard, for from the recumbent Jews opposing him came a mumble of prayer broken by an old man who whispered in a clear, soft voice, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” It was apparent to all that in defense of this basic doctrine—that there was and could be only one God, unbroken and undistributed—the Jews were prepared to die.

  The centurions raised their swords. The slaves stepped aside, holding Caligula aloft in the brilliant sunlight, and for a long, long moment General Petronius wavered. With his arm raised he looked at Yigal and Naaman, who would be the first to die, and he saw that they had no intention of ordering their people to move aside. Indeed, each of the Jews was repeating the prayer which the old man was whispering.

  “Bring these two back to the city,” Petronius commanded. Keeping his arm aloft he turned his back on the huddled Jews and ordered his men to follow him. Then slowly he lowered his arm, striking his right leg with the baton seven times. Behind him, in the plain, he could hear the Jews chanting, not a song of victory but of praise.

  Inside the city Petronius told Yigal, “We’ll starve your Jews into common sense. They’ll commit their own suicide.” And he threw a cordon about the Jews, allowing none to leave the plain, and all through the blazing day the Jews lay in the sun while slaves dragged out from the city walls a gigantic statue of Caesar Caligula, placing it before the thirsty mob. In the cold night that followed, the watching troops could hear children crying as the benevolent visage of Caligula beamed down upon them in the moonlight. When dawn came there was no relief from the torrid sun, and the old man who had whispered the prayer died with its words still on his lips. Children fainted.

  At four that afternoon, when the punishment was most terrible, General Petronius led Yigal and Naaman to the scene and asked if they would now order their Jews to disband. “We have come here to die,” Yigal said simply. Petronius then directed a slave to give Yigal a drink of cold water, and as the Jew drank under duress, standing in the shadow of the great statue, Petronius cried to the prostrate Jews, “See, he doesn’t suffer. He has plenty of water.” With his own hands he poured the remainder on the dry ground at the god’s feet, where it was immediately absorbed by the parched earth. Kicking the dust Petronius shouted, “Do not listen to this fool. Go home. Go home.”

  No one moved, and the third cold night came with neither food nor water, and on the next day a child died. Then Petronius began to feel his own throat parching as if it were afire. For some time he fought against this strangling sensation, then made his decision. “Tell the slaves to bring the statue back,” he ordered. When this was done he took Yigal and Naaman to the city gates. “Lead your Jews home,” he said quietly, “and three days from now assemble all Jewish leaders in Galilee to meet with me in Tiberias. There we shall decide what to do.”

  So Yigal left the walls of Ptolemais and walked like a man in a daze out to the plain where the Jews of Makor were near death; and as he saw each dusty face—Shlomo, with whom he had played as a boy; Asher, whose sister he had married; Beruriah, who had borne his children—he wanted to kneel before each one, for these simple people by their faith had turned back the full might of the Roman legions. He could not speak, but then he heard a rustling sound and the cry of children, for General Petronius had sent his slaves out from the walls with Buckets of water and food. No adults were allowed to touch the rations but children were to be kept alive, by orders of the Roman general.

  Three days later the leaders of the Jews in Galilee assembled in Tiberias—that dazzling new city recently built on the shores of the Sea of Galilee by Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great—and there General Petronius laid before them his problem. Of course, Yigal and Naaman were not present, for in Makor they were not considered leaders of the Jews. Their place was taken by cautious Simeon, accompanied by Amram and other elders from Makor, but from surrounding villages did come several vigorous young men like Yigal, and all listened as the Roman general pleaded for understanding and compliance: “I am a soldier, and I am bound to obey the law of my emperor. If I break it and permit you to bar the statues from your land I will be executed. Then it will be Caesar Caligula himself who will make war on you, not I. He will not send water to your dying children. He will kill every Jew in Judaea.”

  “He will have to,” one of the younger Jews answered, and the crowd shouted its approval.

  “Are you ready to fight even Caesar?” Petronius asked.

  “We shall die … all of us will die … before we allow his statues to enter.”

  On and on the discussions went, and in spite of all Roman threats the Jews remained adamant. Petronius appealed to their self-interest: “Don’t you want to form a helpful part of this great empire?” He cited economics: “What kind of farmer allows his fields to lie idle in the sowing season?” He discussed theology: “Other nations in the empire accept Caligula as their god while in secret they honor their ancient deities. Can’t you do the same?” And because he was a man of honor, trained in the philosophies of Greece and on the field of battle, he sometimes betrayed his position by speaking as a humanist: “Would you force me to slay women and children—which I must do if you refuse any further?” And when he said this the Jews knew that he had already decided not to slaughter the multitude, even though he himself might not yet realize that he had reached this conclusion.

  Each morning this worried gentleman—for Petronius was that in the most significant sense of the word—ate a light breakfast, stood on his palace balcony to study the glorious mountains that surrounded the Sea of Galilee, then went below to conduct his arguments with the stubborn Jews. At noon he ate lunch with his centurions and in the afternoon went on foot to the refreshing hot baths that made Tiberias such a pleasure, and in those bubbling mineral waters that welled up from some deep volcanic disturbance he would lie and try to forget the dilemma in which Caesar Caligula had placed him. He prayed that some miracle might occur to solve the problem for him: The overdue dagger of the assassin might find its way to the tyrant’s heart. In the hot baths Petronius muttered such prayers. But no solution came.

  Finally at one meeting he shouted at the Jews, “For weeks you meet with me and don’t even have the grace to bring before me the man who started all this.” He dispatched Roman messengers to fetch Yigal from Makor, and when the young Jew reached Tiberias, Petronius took him to the hot baths, which an ordinary workman like Yigal could never otherwise have seen, and the Roman laughed when the young Jew refused to undress. “I’ve seen circumcisions before,” Petronius joked, and he persuaded Yigal to enter the bath; and there the two men talked with neither the panoply of glory nor the conceit of individual honor.

  “Young man,” Petronius plea
ded, “if you Jews obstruct me now, you will have to face Caesar Caligula later. He will be a hideous opponent. He will burn you alive as if you were men of straw. Or crucify you by dozens on every hill.”

  “Then we shall die,” Yigal said.

  The two men left the steaming waters and were attended by slaves, and when they were dressed again, Petronius said, “Please, consider what you are doing.”

  “We can do nothing else,” Yigal replied.

  “You damned Jews!” Petronius exploded, and with a mighty blow of his fist he knocked the frail workman to the floor. But as soon as he had done so he stooped and gathered the stunned Jew in his arms. “Forgive me,” he whispered. “These meetings are driving me mad.” He helped Yigal to his feet and brushed his garments. “Is there no hope of a settlement?” he pleaded.

  In the marble dressing room of the Herodian baths Yigal replied, “You will have to kill every Jew in Galilee, after that Sebaste, and then Jerusalem.”

  That evening Petronius assembled the negotiators at an inn near the lake—that marvelous body of water so deep in the earth, so crowded by mountains on each side, yet so sweet and marked by repose—and he said, “Jews of Galilee, your crops must be sown. No land of the Roman empire can lie idle in the sowing season. I am therefore sending you home to plant your fields.” The Jews greeted this with suspicion, for so far he had made no offer to withdraw the statues, and this could be a trick. Then the great general lowered his head and said in a whisper scarce heard above the waves of Galilee, “The statues I will take away. With the help of your god I shall try to persuade Caesar Caligula that he cannot override the will of his Jews in Galilee. Romans cannot murder an entire population.” He rose, straightened his battle dress and asked for his baton. Then, in full imperial dignity, he said, “If I fail, I perish. But I shall die gladly if by my action I save so many men of honor.” And he embraced Yigal.

  That night he struck his camp in Tiberias, as if he could not bear to sleep again in that obstinate place. Bivouacking in the countryside like a general at war, he rose before dawn and marched back to Ptolemais, but as he came down the Damascus road and spotted the walled town of Makor nestling beneath its mountain, he stopped to study the zigzag gate and the white walls of the gymnasium, and against this background he visualized Yigal. “The most obdurate man I’ve ever confronted,” he growled.

  And then a torment of humiliation possessed him, a full general of Rome repulsed by an olive worker, and he cried, “How did such a town defeat three Roman legions? I should put to death every Jew inside those walls and erect ten statues of Caligula to be worshiped by their ghosts.” Behind him he could hear the marching feet of the two legions retreating with him and in that burning moment he decided to turn them loose on the undefended town. “Centurions!” he shouted. “We’ll teach a gang of Jews to abandon their fields!”

  But as the men marched forward he looked at the fields where women had begun to plow and their men to sow, and at the olive grove where work had been resumed, and in these fields of Makor he saw the type of sturdy peasant who had once made Rome strong: men and women who loved freedom, who worshiped their own god in their own obstinate way, who paid their taxes and fed the empire. For a moment he visualized his own farm in Istria and remembered the satisfaction he had known working its fields, and to his centurions he said quietly, “Proceed to Ptolemais.” It was in this manner that Makor through its reliance on the one God vanquished the full power of the Roman empire.

  A man can read ten thousand pages of history and find only the corruption of power and the defeat of hope, but occasionally he will come upon an adventure like that of General Petronius, who, because he was at heart a Greek philosopher, refrained from destroying Makor and returned to the port city of Ptolemais, where he crated the statues of Caligula and marched his legions aboard ships for transportation back to Antioch. There he composed his report to Caesar Caligula: “Mighty God, Spirit of Power, Light of the World, in pursuit of Your august instructions I invaded Judaea on schedule, but at Ptolemais I found five hundred Jews offering themselves to be sacrificed rather than permit statues of the new god, Caligula, to enter their territories. At Tiberias, I consulted with the leaders of the district and satisfied myself that in order to place the god Caligula’s statue in the temple at Jerusalem, I would have to kill every Jew in the Galilee. For generations Your granary would lie barren. The name of Rome would be cursed forever. Unless You wish, August One, to kill on a scale not yet seen in our empire, I must beg You to withdraw your instructions to me. You must allow the Jews to worship as they have in the past.”

  The dispatch reached Caligula at an evil moment. He raged at the contempt of the Jews and at the pusillanimity of his Syrian general. By swift messengers he sent news to Antioch that the Jews must be completely destroyed and that Petronius must commit suicide; but on the day his messengers sailed from Podi the patriots of Rome rose up and murdered their vile emperor, as they had known for some months that they must. So another messenger was dispatched by another boat to Syria, commending Petronius and annulling the order of execution, but none dared hope that this reprieving news could reach Antioch before the general was dead.

  Sailing across the same sea, eastward from Rome, the competing ships—one bearing death, the other life—traversed the same waters; and unexpected storms caught the ship of death and held it prisoner for three months, while the ship of life sailed calmly to port, informing General Petronius of Caligula’s murder and his own salvation.

  Thus Petronius and Makor were saved, but Rome was not, for it continued to fall into the hands of degenerate emperors, and murder became the accepted preamble to nomination. In 37 C.E. the tyrant Tiberius had been smothered, only to be succeeded by a worse tyrant, Caligula. Now in 41 C.E. Caligula was murdered, to be followed by Claudius, husband of the incredible Messalina, and both of them had to be murdered for the welfare of the state and public decency; but they were followed in 54 C.E. by the worst tyrant of all, Nero, who having kicked his pregnant wife to death turned his demented attention to the distant Jews at the edge of his empire. “What is this you say about a Jewish rebellion?” he asked, and his generals explained.

  Under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, they said, there had been disturbances over the gaudy flags carried by the legions when they served in Jerusalem: golden eagles attached to these flags were worshiped by the Roman soldiers, and Jews insisted that these idols be removed before entering the Holy City. Additional difficulties had arisen because of a crucifixion which Pilate seemed to have bungled. There was also the matter of Paul of Tarsus, a very troublesome Jew, who claimed that his god had spoken to him on the Damascus road and who was stirring up trouble among both Jews and pagans. But primarily, the generals reported, the Jews of Jerusalem were talking of the establishment of their god’s kingdom and were beginning to grow contemptuous of Roman rule. “They are openly challenging us,” the generals reported, “and the source of their strength is their temple, from whence all agitation stems.”

  “Has there been fighting?” Nero asked, and he was told that in November of the year 66 Jewish zealots had driven all Roman forces from Jerusalem and had actually slain more than six thousand Roman troops in doing so. The bull-necked emperor gave two simple commands: “Destroy Jerusalem. Level the temple.”

  It was no ordinary general to whom Nero delivered these instructions for his final solution to the Jewish problem. He chose no Petronius weighed down by the moral burden of Greek philosophy and susceptible to the pleas of Jews devoted to their god; Nero picked the heavy, plodding fifty-seven-year-old commoner, Vespasian, who would be assisted by his energetic son Titus. They would be given the Fifth Legion Macedonia and the Tenth Legion Fretensis, two of the best-known fighting teams in the world, composed not of mercenaries but of free citizens of the Roman empire. And one of the first things Vespasian did upon assuming command was to send Titus to Egypt to pick up the Fifteenth Legion Apollinaris as well, a mercenary unit trained for desert-
type warfare under the command of a flint-hard strategist, Trajan.

  At Antioch this crushing army assembled—the Fifth and Tenth, plus twenty-three cohort divisions, six wings of cavalry, and auxiliary troops from commanding kingdoms, plus engineers, workmen, slaves and servants—a total of nearly fifty thousand hardened men. Swiftly Vespasian marched to Ptolemais, where he was joined by Titus and Trajan, who had brought the Fifteenth Legion, rested after its long inactivity in Egypt.

  As he stood poised with this overwhelming force Vespasian was one of the strong generals of Roman history: when required, he could be adamant, as he had proved against the Germans; or conciliatory, as he had shown when serving as military commander in Britain; or a ruthless tactician, as he had demonstrated in Africa. He was stubborn, big of body, heavy of face and generous of mind. His troops idolized him and would in the end make him the first decent emperor Rome had known in half a century; he was a man who had learned to respect both allies and adversaries and to treat each with honor. He was, perhaps, that spring of 67 as he waited in Ptolemais, the outstanding Roman of his generation, the poor son of a poor farmer, a man who had risen to extraordinary heights solely because of his unimpeachable character. Compared to men like Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, this leather-hard general was indeed a god, but such claims were a foolishness he would not indulge in.

  Nor did he engage in intrigue, but he did realize that even though he was then nearly sixty and Nero only thirty, the emperor had already given so many signs of derangement that he might one day have to be strangled, and if Vespasian could crush the Jews quickly he could well be in line for the purple when Nero vanished. He therefore directed his centurions to sweep directly toward Jerusalem, basing his future upon the chances of a swift triumph. Yet as he studied his maps he saw the same ominous fact that had faced many other would-be conquerors of the Jewish kingdom: to get at Jerusalem he would first have to pass through the Galilee, that ancient home of warriors and determined men; and to enter the Galilee he would have to subdue the little walled town of Makor.