Pharisees, was carried in a coffin outside the walls of Jerusalem by his
disciples, and was brought to the Roman camp, where he hailed Vespasian
as Emperor and Caesar, and thereby gained his favor. If not apocryphal,
the event must have happened in 69 C.E., when the Roman commander was
generally expected to aim at the Imperial throne, then the object of
strife between rival commanders. The rabbi belonged to the peace party,
and from the beginning had opposed the war. And though his action was
disapproved by the later generations, it was justified by his subsequent
conduct; for it was he who, by founding the famous college at Jabneh,
kept alive the Jewish spirit after the fall of the nation. For him
surrender was a valid means to the preservation of the nation. The
action of Josephus hardly bears the same justification. His desire for
self-preservation was natural enough, but his manner of effecting it was
not honorable. He was a general who, having taken a lead in the struggle
for independence, had seen all his men fall, and had at the end invited
the last of his comrades to kill each other, and he saved his life by
sacrificing his honor. His mind was from the beginning of the struggle
subjugated to Rome, but unhappily he accepted the most responsible post
in the national defense and betrayed it. His address to Vespasian was
mere flattery, designed to impose on a superstitious man's credulity;
for the ear of Vespasian, says Merivale, "was always open to pretenders
to supernatural knowledge." Lastly Josephus used his safety, not for the
purpose of preserving the Jewish heritage, but for personal ends. He
became a flunkey of the Flavian house, and straightway started on the
transformation from a Jewish priest and soldier into a Roman courtier
and literary hireling. Hard circumstances compelled him to choose
between a noble and an ignoble part, between heroic action and weak
submission. He was a mediocre man, and chose the way that was not heroic
and glorious. Posterity gained something by his choice; his own
reputation was fatally marred by it.
III
THE LIFE OF JOSEPHUS FROM THE TIME OF HIS SURRENDER
Josephus was little more than thirty years old at the time of his
surrender. At an age when men usually begin to realize their ambition
and ideal, his whole life's course was changed: he had to abandon all
his old associations, and accommodate himself to a different and indeed
a hostile society. Henceforth he was a liege of the Roman conqueror, and
had to submit to be Romanized not only in name but in spirit. His
condition was indeed a thinly-disguised servitude. The Romans were an
imperious as well as an Imperial people, and though in some
circumstances they were ready to spare the lives of those who yielded,
they required of them a surrender of opinion and an abasement of soul.
For the rest of his years, which comprehended the whole of his literary
activity, Josephus was not therefore a free man. He acted, spoke, and
wrote to order, compelled, whenever called upon, to do the will of his
masters. His legal condition was first that of a _libertus_ (a freedman)
of Vespasian, and as such he owed by law certain definite obligations to
his patron's family. But the moral subservience of the favored prisoner
of a subjugated people must have been a far profounder thing than the
legal obligation arising from his status; and this enforced moral and
mental subservience is a cardinal point to be remembered in forming a
judgment upon Josephus. His expressed opinions are often not the
revelation of his own mind, but the galling tribute which he was
compelled to pay for his life. And apart from the involuntary and
undeliberate adoption of Roman standards, which, living isolated from
Jewish life in Rome, he could not escape, he had in writing, and no
doubt in conversation, deliberately and consciously to assume the
deepest-seated of the Roman prejudices towards his own people. Liberty
has been defined as the power of a man to call his soul his own. And in
that sense Josephus emphatically did not possess liberty. We must be on
our guard, therefore, against regarding him as an independent historian,
much less as writing from an independent Jewish point of view. From the
time of his surrender till his death he lived and wrote as the client of
the Flavian house, and all his works had to pass the Imperial
censorship.
His domestic life is characteristic of his subservience. At the bidding
of Vespasian, when in the Roman camp at Caesarea, he divorced his first
wife, who was locked up in Jerusalem during the siege. Though by Jewish
law it was forbidden to a priest to marry a captive woman, he took as
his second wife a Jewess that had been brought into the Roman camp.
Having no children by her, he divorced her after a year, and married
again at Alexandria. By his third wife he had three sons, but with a
Roman's carelessness of the marriage bond he divorced her late in life,
and married finally a noble Jewess of Crete, by whom he had two more
sons, Justus and Simon Agrippa. His last two wives, be it noted, came
from Hellenistic-Jewish communities, and were doubtless able to assist
him in acquiring Greek.
The public as well as the domestic life of Josephus was controlled by
the Roman commander. Till the end of the Jewish struggle it followed the
progress of the Roman arms. He continued to play an active part in the
war, not, however, as a leader of the Jews, but as the adviser of their
enemies. He was attached to the staff of Titus, and after witnessing the
fall of the two fortresses of Galilee, Gamala and Gischala, which held
out bravely under John after the capture of Jotapata, he accompanied the
Roman at the end of the year 68 to Alexandria. There he spent a year,
till a change of fortune came to him.
During the year 68, Vespasian captured the two chief cities which the
Jewish national party held to the east side of the Jordan, Gadara and
Gerasa. He then prepared to lay siege to Jerusalem. But hearing of the
death of Nero and of the chaos at Rome that followed it, he stayed
operations to await events in Italy. In the following year, largely by
the aid of the Jewish apostate Tiberius Alexander, he secured the
allegiance of all the Eastern legions, and was proclaimed Emperor. Three
other generals laid claim to the same dignity, under the same title of
armed force, but in the end Vespasian's friends in Italy made themselves
masters of Rome, and he repaired himself to the capital and donned the
purple. Josephus was rewarded with his complete freedom, and assumed
henceforth the family name of his Imperial patrons. When, at the end of
the year 69, Titus was appointed by his father to finish the war, he
accompanied him back to Palestine. In the eighteen months' respite that
had been vouchsafed to them, the Jews had spent their energy and
undermined their powers of resistance by internecine strife. According
to the account in the _Wars_, which unfortunately is the only full
record we have of events, John of Gischala, fleeing to Jerusalem after
the fall of the Galilean fortresses, roused the Zealots against the high
priest Ananias, who was directing the Jewish policy towards submission
to Rome. Ananias, who was of the same party as Josephus, seems to have
come to the conclusion that resistance was hopeless, and he was anxious
to make terms. John called in to his aid the half-savage Idumeans, who
had joined the Jewish rebellion against Rome. They entered the city,
and, possessing themselves of the Temple mount, spread havoc. The Temple
itself ran with blood, and 8500 dead bodies, among them that of the high
priest, defiled its precincts.[1] Josephus, who, to suit the Roman
taste, identifies religion and ritual, declares that the fall of the
city and the ruin of the nation are to be dated from that day, and upon
Ananias he passes a eulogy that is likewise written with an eye to Roman
predilections:
"He was a prodigious lover of liberty and of democracy; he ever
preferred the public welfare before his own advantage, and he was
thoroughly sensible that the Romans were invincible. And I cannot but
think that it was because God had doomed the city to destruction on
account of its pollution, and was resolved to purge His sanctuary with
fire, that He cut off thus its great protector."
[Footnote 1: B.J. IV. vi. 1.]
For the better part of a year, according to our historian, the Zealots
maintained a reign of terror, and the various parties fought against one
another in the Holy City as fiercely as the Girondists and Jacobins of
the French Revolution. But on the approach of Titus they abandoned their
strife and united to resist the foe. The Roman general brought with him
four legions, the fifth, tenth, twelfth, and fifteenth, besides a large
following of auxiliaries, and his whole force amounted to 80,000 men. As
head of his staff came Tiberius Alexander, the renegade nephew of Philo
and formerly procurator of Judea. Josephus also was on the besieger's
staff--possibly he was an officer of the body-guard (_praefectus
praetorio_)--and was employed to bring his countrymen to reason. Himself
convinced, almost from the moment when he took up arms, of the certainty
of Rome's ultimate victory, and doubly convinced now, partly from
superstitious fatalism, partly from a need for extenuating his own
submission, he wasted his eloquence in efforts to make them surrender.
He knew that within the besieged city there was a considerable
Romanizing faction (including his own father), and either he believed,
or he had to pretend to believe, that he could bring over the mass to
their way of thinking. On various occasions during the siege he was sent
to the walls to summon the defenders to lay down their arms. He enlarged
each time on the invincible power of Rome, on the hopelessness of
resistance, on the clemency of Titus if they would yield, and on the
terrible fate which would befall them and the Temple if they fought to
the bitter end. What must have specially aroused the fury of the Zealots
was his insistence that the Divine Providence was now on the side of the
Romans, and that in resisting they were sinning against God. It is
little wonder that on one occasion when making these harangues he was
struck by a dart, and that his father was placed in prison by the
Zealots. Indeed it says much for the tolerance of those whom he
constantly reviles as the most abandoned scoundrels and the most cruel
tyrants that they did not do him and his family greater hurt.
Titus, after beating back desperate attacks by the Jews, fixed his camp
on Mount Scopas, by the side of the Mount of Olives, to the north of the
city, and, abandoning the idea of taking the city fortress by storm,
prepared to beleaguer it in regular form. The Jews were not prepared for
a siege. Josephus and the Rabbis[1] agree that the supplies of corn had
been burnt by the Zealots during the civil disturbances; and as the
arrival of Titus coincided with the Passover, myriads of people, who had
come up from all parts of the country and the Diaspora to celebrate the
festival, were crowded within its walls. It is estimated that their
number exceeded two and a half million. The capital was a hard place to
capture. Josephus, following probably a Roman authority, gives an
account of the fortifications of Jerusalem from the point of view of the
besieger, which is confirmed in large part by modern research.[2] On the
southeast and west the city was unapproachable by reason of the sheer
ravines of Kedron and Hinnom, overlooked by almost perpendicular
precipices, which surrounded it. It was vulnerable therefore only on the
north, where the two heights on which it was built were connected with
the main ridge of the Judean hills; and here it was fortified with three
walls. The outermost, which was built by Agrippa I, encompassed the new
quarter of Bezetha, which lay outside the Temple mount to the northeast.
The second wall encompassed the part of the city on the Temple Mount and
reached as far as the Tower of Antonia, which overlooked and protected
the Temple. The third or innermost wall was the oldest, and encompassed
the whole of the ancient city where it was open, including the hill Acra
or Zion on the southeast, which was divided from Mount Moriah by the
cleft known as the Tyropoeon, or cheese-market. Beyond this hill there
was another eminence sloping gradually to the north, till it dropped
into the valley of Jehoshaphat with an escarpment of two hundred feet.
[Footnote 1: Comp. Abot de Rabbi Nathan, vi., ed. Schechter, p. 32.]
[Footnote 2: B.J. V. iv. 1.]
Thus the rampart surrounded the two hills with a continuous line of
defense, and the three quarters of the city were separated from each
other by distinct walls, so that each could hold out when the other had
fallen. The walls were strengthened with several towers, of which the
most important were Psephinus, on the third wall at the northwest
corner, Hippicus, on the old wall, which was opposite Phasaelus, and
Mariamne. But the strongest, largest, and most beautiful fortress in
Jerusalem was the Temple itself. It was not merely the visible center of
Judaism, it was the citadel of Judea. As each successive court rose
higher than the last, the "Mountain of the House" itself stood on the
highest point of the inclosure. The Temple was guarded by the tower of
Antonia, situated at the corner of the two cloisters, upon a rock fifty
cubits high, overlooking a precipice. Like the other towers, Antonia was
built by Herod, and manifested his love of largeness and strength.
Within these fortifications there were eleven thousand men under Simon,
and not more than thirty thousand trained soldiers under John, to pit
against eighty thousand Roman veterans; but of the two and a half
million people who, it is calculated, were shut up in the city,
thousands were ready at any moment to sally upon the besiegers and lay
down their lives for their beloved sanctuary.
Within the city, however, there were also a number of persons wavering
in their desire for resistance and anxious to find a favorable
opportunity of going over to the Romans. The leaders of the
high-priestly party had been killed by the Zealots, but their followers
remained to hamper the defense of the city. If Josephus is to be
believed, during the respite of the Passover festival at the beginning
of the siege, while the Romans were preparing their approaches and siege
works, the party strife again broke out. Eleazar opened the gates of the
Temple to admit the people for the festival, but John, taking
treacherous advantage of the opportunity, led his men in with arms
concealed beneath their garments, put his opponents to the sword, and
seized the sanctuary. Josephus further represents that throughout the
siege Simon and John, while resisting the Romans and defending different
parts of the walls, were still engaged in their internecine strife, "and
did everything that the besiegers could desire them to do."[1]
[Footnote 1: B.J. V. vi.]
The story has not the stamp of probability, and it is more likely that
Josephus is distorting the jealousies of the two commanders into the
dimensions of civil strife. Anyhow, the resistance which the Jews
offered to the Romans showed the stubbornness of despair, or what the
historian calls "their natural endurance in misfortune." At every step
the legionaries were checked; in pitching their camp, in making their
earthworks, in bringing up their machines; and frequently desperate
sallies were made by the defenders upon the Roman entrenchments.
Nevertheless, after fifteen days the first wall was captured, and in
five days more the second was taken. By a desperate sally the besieged
recovered it for a little, but were again driven back by superior
numbers and force. Josephus is fond of contrasting the different tempers
of the two armies: on the one side power and skill, on the other
boldness and the courage born of despair; here the habit of conquering,
there intense national ardor.
After the capture of the second wall, he was sent to parley with the
besieged, and urged, as he had done before, the invincible power of his
masters.[1] "And evident it is," he added with his renegade's theology,
"that fortune is on all hands gone over to them, and that God, who has
shifted dominion from nation to nation, is now settled in Italy."[2]
When his address was received with scorn, he proceeded, according to his
account, to lecture the people from their ancient history, in order to
prove that they had never been successful in aggressive warfare. "Arms
were never given to our nation, but we are always given up to be fought
against and taken." The Zealots' desecration of the Temple deprived them
of Divine help, and it was madness to suppose that God would be
well-disposed to the wicked. Had He not shown favor to Titus and
performed miracles in his aid? Did not the springs of Siloam run more
plentifully for the Roman general? All his appeals had no effect, and
though some faint-hearted persons deserted, the multitude held firm, and
the siege was pressed on more vigorously than ever. A wall of
circumvallation was built round the city, and the horrors of starvation
increased daily. Between the months of Nisan and Tammuz one hundred and
fifty thousand corpses were carried out of the town.[3] Josephus
expatiates on the terrible suffering, and again and again he denounces
the iniquity of the Zealots, who continued the resistance. "No age had a
generation more fruitful in wickedness; they confessed that they were
the slaves, the scum, the spurious and abortive offspring of our
nation." John committed the heinous sacrilege of using the oil preserved
in the Temple vessels for the starving soldiers. "I suppose," says the
ex-priest writing in the Roman palace, "that had the Romans made any
longer delay in attacking these abandoned men, the city would either
have been swallowed up by the ground opening on them, or been swept away
by a deluge, or destroyed as Sodom was destroyed, since it had brought
forth a generation even more godless than those that suffered such
punishments."[4]
[Footnote 1: B.J. V. ix. 3.]
[Footnote 2: We are reminded of the saying of Rabbi Akiba some
half-century later. When asked where God was to be sought now that the
Temple was destroyed, he replied, "In the great city of Rome" (Yer.
Taanit, 69a). But the Rabbinical utterance had a very different meaning
from the plea of Josephus.]
[Footnote 3: B.J. V. xiii. 7.]
[Footnote 4: B.J. V. x. and xiii.]
Famine and weariness were breaking down the strength of the Jews, and,
after fierce resistance, the tower of Antonia was captured and razed to
the ground. Josephus adds another chapter to detail the horrors of the
famine, in which he recounts the story of the mother eating her child,
which occurs also in the Midrash.[1] The Romans, he tells us, were
filled with a religious loathing of their foes on account of their sins
in violating the Temple and eating forbidden food, and Titus excused
himself for the sufferings he caused, on the ground that, as he had
given the Jews the chance of securing peace and liberty, they had
brought the evil on themselves. Slowly but surely the Romans gained a
footing within the Temple precinct; inch by inch John was driven back,
and on the Ninth of Ab the sanctuary was stormed. A torch, hurled
probably by the hand of Titus (see below, p. 128), set the cloisters
alight, and the fire spread till the whole house was involved. The
crowning catastrophe, the burning of the Holy of Holies, happened on the
following day.
[Footnote 1: Ekah R. 65a.]
Josephus remained in the Roman camp throughout the siege, advising Titus
at each step how he might proceed. After the fall of the Temple he
witnessed the last desperate struggle, when a half-starved remnant of
the defenders "looked straight into death without flinching." A great
modern writer sees in this unquenchable passion of the Zealots for
liberty a sublime type of steadfastness[1]; but Josephus, who after the
fall of the Temple had made another unavailing effort to persuade them
to lay down their arms, again pours forth his abuse upon those who
fought against the sacred might of Rome. Over a million had perished in
the siege, and less than one hundred thousand were captured, of whom
only forty thousand were preserved. His favor with Titus enabled him to
redeem from captivity his brother and a large number of his friends and
acquaintances and one hundred and ninety women and children.[2] His own
estates near Jerusalem having been taken for a military colony, he
received liberal compensation in another part of Judea. From the victor
he also obtained a scroll of the law.
[Footnote 1: George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such.]
[Footnote 2: Vita, 75.]
It is not certain whether he accompanied "the gentle Titus" through
Syria after the fall of the city and the razing of its walls. The
victor's progress was marked at each stopping-place by the celebration
of games, where thousands of young Jewish captives were made to kill
each other, "butchered to make a Roman holiday" and feast the eyes of
the conqueror and the Herodian ally and his spouse. But he certainly
witnessed at Rome the triumph of the Flavii, father and son, and gazed
on the shame of his country, when its most holy monuments were carried
by the noblest of the captives through the streets amid the applause and
ribald jeers of a Roman crowd. Josephus enlarges with apparent apathy on
the procession, which is commemorated and made vivid down to our own day
by the arch in the Roman Forum, through which no Jew in the Middle Ages
would pass. He records, too, that Vespasian built a Temple of Peace, in
which he stored the golden vessels taken from the Jewish sanctuary, and
put up the whole of Judea for sale as his private property.[1] Josephus
himself was housed in the royal palace, and it does not appear that he
ever returned to Palestine. The tenth legion had been left on the site
of Jerusalem as a permanent Roman garrison, and a fortified camp was
built for it on the northern hill. "The legions swallowed her up and
idolaters possessed her." _A chacun selon ses oeuvres_ is the comment of
Salvador, the Franco-Jewish historian (fl. 1850), comparing the gilded
servitude of Josephus with the fate of the patriots of Jerusalem; and
another recent historian, Graetz, has contrasted the picture of Jeremiah
uttering his touching laments over the ruins at the fall of the first
Temple with the position of Josephus pouring out his fulsome adulation
of the destroyer at the fall of the second.
[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. vi. 6.]
Henceforth Josephus lived, an exile from his country and his countrymen,
in the retinue of the Caesars, and entered on his career as his people's
historian. But he was never allowed to forget his dependence. His first
work was an account of the Roman war, in which he vilified the patriots
to extenuate his own surrender and his master's cruelty. It is true that
he afterwards composed an elaborate apology for his people in the form
of a history in twenty volumes, which may be considered as a kind of
palliation for the evil he had done them in action. It was more possible
to refute the Roman prejudices based on utter ignorance of Jewish
history, than the prejudices based on their narrowness of mind. But even
here the writer has often to accommodate himself to a pagan standpoint,
which could not appreciate Hebrew sublimity. When he wrote the
_Antiquities_, his mind was already molded in Greco-Roman form, and
where he seeks to glorify, he not seldom contrives to degrade. His works
are a striking example of inward slavery in outward freedom, for by dint
of breathing the foreign atmosphere and imbibing foreign notions he had
become incapable of presenting his people's history in its true light.
He had been granted full Roman citizenship, and received a literary
pension. Still he was not loved by other courtiers as worthy as himself,
and he had frequently to defend himself against the charges of his
enemies. In the reign of Vespasian, after the Zealot rising in Cyrene
had been put down, the leader, Jonathan, who was brought as a prisoner
to Rome, charged Josephus before the Emperor with having sent him both
weapons and money. The story was not believed, and the informer was put
to death. After that, Josephus relates, "when they that envied my good
fortune did frequently bring censure against me, by God's Providence I
escaped them all."