TROUBLES IN THE EAST
We have seen that in the year 190 B.C. a new thing happened in Asia
Minor--Roman legions appeared there for the first time in history.
It was an appearance which was a sign of what was sure to come, that
Rome, when it pleased her to do so, would conquer all that country.
Conquer it all, and subdue it to her own power, in course of time she
did. The last people that she succeeded in perfectly subduing were
the Jews.
Judæa, at the date of the arrival in Asia of the legions, was held as
a province of the kingdom of Syria by one of the dynasty of Seleucus.
Seleucus and his Court were, practically, Grecian. Antioch, the
capital of Syria (several of the Seleucid kings were called
Antiochus), was practically a Greek city. The influence of Greek
thought began to flow into Judæa and Jerusalem more and more from
Syria and the north, and we have seen already how it flowed in from
Egypt and Alexandria. It brought in strange knowledge, strange
speculations and, so far as the Greeks troubled themselves about
religion, a strange religion. We have seen from of old how intensely
the Jews were devoted to their own religion, and how they retained it
in exile and in persecution. A very large number of them held to it
fiercely now against all these new ideas that the Greeks were
bringing in.
So, all through the hundred years that follow, the {204} story of the
Jews is the story of a series of struggles for the mastery in
Jerusalem between the party that favoured the Greek new ways and the
party faithful to the old Jewish ways. The latter came to be called
Pharisees and the former are represented by the Sadducees, as you
read of them in the Bible.
Besides this cause of unrest, there was still constantly trouble
between Syria and Egypt. The fact that both were overshadowed
equally by the growing power of Rome did not prevent them quarrelling
about their own claims in Palestine. And Judæa, as ever of old, lay
between the two rivals. Judæa knew little peace in these days of the
so-called _Pax Romana_.
[Sidenote: Fortitude of the Jews]
The insults which the national religion and laws suffered from the
"Gentiles," as the Jews called the Greeks and all who were not of
their own race and way of thinking, roused their great resentment.
The fighting between the parties was fierce. There was one moment in
the story when the Jews under those great fighters, the Maccabees,
became really the strongest power, so long as Rome did not care to
exert her power, in all that region--stronger than Syria, of which
she had lately been a mere province. She had power as extensive as
Solomon had wielded when king of Israel and Judah united. But it did
not endure. The rivalry between the two parties within Judæa itself
weakened her. At the date of Pompey's coming to Syria, about a
hundred years later than the first coming of the legions, Judæa was
again in subjection to Syria, and Syria herself was made into a Roman
province. Judæa, like the rest of the world, turned her eyes to Rome
as mistress of them all; but, of them all, the eyes of Judæa
expressed, probably, the least obedience and submission, the
strongest purpose of resistance.
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It is this strength of resistance that has made the Jews, in spite of
all the calamities that they have continually had to endure all
through the course of our story, still play such an active and large
part in it. All read with reverence the same sacred Book. Even
those Jews that had been scattered, and had settled far from
Jerusalem, looked up to Jerusalem as their capital city. The Temple
of their great God was there. They received and obeyed orders from
there. They went up there to great feasts and religious ceremonies.
There were very many Jews in the many Greek cities of Asia Minor,
very many in Egypt, many in Cyprus and other islands, many in Greece
itself. Although Judæa was a small subject state when Pompey saw it,
and had an official appointed by Rome as its ruler, it was important
to him to have the favour of the Jews on his side, just because they
were so far and widely dispersed and could exercise influence in so
many lands.
At first, in the struggle between Cæsar and Pompey, the favour of the
Jews had been given to Pompey. Probably they were disposed to fight
for the side that they thought most likely to win, so as to get some
future favours for themselves in return. As a matter of fact, both
Greeks and Romans were so little concerned with religious things
that, except for insulting the Jewish customs by their indifference,
they showed very little hostility to them.
When Cæsar went to Egypt he gave the Jews every opportunity of
worshipping God in their own way and living their peculiar life in
the manner that pleased them. The official appointed by Rome to
govern Judæa at this time was Antipater, a native of the neighbouring
land of Idumæa, and his son, who {206} succeeded him in the
governorship, was called Herod, Herod the Great, who ruled, with the
title of king (though he was only a king by leave of Rome, and king
of a country paying tribute to Rome), until the year 4 B.C. We are
just coming now to the Christian Era, as we call it. The years will
then no longer grow fewer and fewer as they come to the year of the
birth of Christ; but more and more as they mount up away from that
date.
In the early days of the rule of Herod in Judæa, that is, about the
year 40 B.C., there came a new danger on the land. Those Parthians,
whom Julius Cæsar had defeated, swarmed back again, on their horses,
across the Euphrates, and swept over a great part of the country.
Herod implored the help of Rome, and not in vain; but Julius Cæsar
was no longer the world's master then. He had been dead for several
years.
You must, I am sure, remember that scene in the Senate-house in
Rome--if you do not remember reading it in any history book you will
have heard of it from Shakespeare's play of Julius Cæsar--how his
best friends clustered round him, and the dearest of all gave him a
fatal dagger-stroke. "_Et tu, Brute!_" he exclaimed, as even Brutus,
his most intimate friend, dealt a death blow.
The assassins of Cæsar asserted that they did the foul deed for the
good of the State, to rid Rome of the tyranny of the dictator. That
may have been the real reason of some of them. Others may have been
thinking of their own advantage and how they might advance if they
put such a big man as Cæsar out of the way. But whatever their
intentions were, the effect on the State was terrible.
The great orator, Cicero, had hopes that the {207} Republic might be
restored, that the rule of one man might be ended and the good old
days come back again. But the people in Rome were not such as they
had been in those good old days when they followed the good old
customs. It is no wonder that they had changed.
See what had happened. Rome had conquered the world. Masses of
wealth from the conquered provinces had been brought to her and were
constantly coming in. The rich men had their splendid houses and
villas. They vied with each other in giving feasts and
entertainments to the populace, in order to gain the votes of the
people and to be elected to high positions, at home or abroad, in
which they could make large fortunes by receiving bribes or by taxing
the provinces. All their old ideas of what it was right to do had
been upset by the Greek thought that prevailed through all the world
that was at all educated. There was no respect for the laws, and
they had no religion that made any difference to their conduct.
[Sidenote: Octavius and Antony]
Therefore, when Cæsar was killed, and his power to dictate and to
make the laws obeyed went, at once there was terrible lawlessness,
several parties in the city trying to get the power into their hands.
Cæsar had been appointed dictator for life, but no arrangement had
been made about what should happen at his death. So it went for the
space of two years or so, and out of all the troubles of these two
years we find a state of things coming about very like that which
happened before, when Pompey and Cæsar were the two most powerful
men--powerful, because each had legions willing to obey him. There
was a third at that time, Crassus, powerful in his wealth. Two men
now again came to the front, each with military forces at his
back--Octavius and Antony. There was a third, of less {208} power,
Lepidus. Pompey and Cæsar had been friends at first, and were joined
together to rule the affairs of Rome. Afterwards they fell fighting,
with the result that you know--the complete victory of Cæsar.
Crassus had been killed, fighting in the East; and that was the end
of that which was called the first Triumvirate.
Antony, the nephew and the friend of Cæsar, had designs of succeeding
to his power, but almost at the outset he found Octavius, who was
Cæsar's grand-nephew, opposing him. Antony had been Consul, with
Cæsar, in 44 B.C. Now he had command of legions in the north of
Italy, and when he went to take up that command he found Brutus,
Cæsar's assassin, holding possession of a town called Mutina, which
he refused to give up. Antony attacked him. The Senate took the
side of Brutus and sent Octavius up in command of some of the legions
to oppose Antony. Antony was defeated before the town that he was
besieging, and fled.
He fled, but he still had his army. He was joined by Lepidus, who
brought with him a strong army from the south. Octavius may have
thought this combined force too formidable for him, but whatever his
reason was he made friends with Antony, whom he had lately been
fighting, and with Lepidus, and the Senate seems to have approved of
their combination. Perhaps they were so strong that they had no
choice, but were obliged to seem to approve. And so what is called
the second Triumvirate came into existence.
Brutus and Cassius, who were trying to bring back the old republican
ways of Government, still held out; but they were defeated at the
famous battle of Philippi, and the Triumvirate had all power in the
Roman world.
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They proceeded to map out that world in pieces, so that each should
take his portion. To Lepidus, as perhaps the least important, was
given Africa; to Antony went Egypt and the East. Octavius seems to
have had the best of the bargain from the start, with the home
legions and Italy, Greece and Spain, together with Gaul that Cæsar
had conquered, for his own. Antony married Octavia, who was sister
of Octavius; so it all looked a very good arrangement.
But just as trouble had crept in between the chief men of the first
Triumvirate, so too with this second.
Antony was not a very prudent man, and Octavius was. Antony had the
most troublesome frontier to defend, for to the east was that country
of the Parthians who had come upon Judæa. Herod's appeal for help
was heard by the Triumvirate. It was Antony's special task to deal
with them; and, for the time being, he dealt with them successfully,
though he did not march against them himself. But one of his
generals took the field and drove them back over the Euphrates,
whence they had come.
That was not by any means the end of these Parthians, however. We
have seen how they fought--charging down on the legions, shooting a
flight of arrows, then off again, and again coming back to perform
the same manœuvres. Just as they did in each particular battle of
a war, so they did in the war itself, as a whole. If the war went
against them, away they went, over the Euphrates and as far east as
the Romans cared to pursue. They must have known that the Romans
would not go on pursuing for ever, farther and farther from their
base. And the Parthians had all Asia to retreat into.
So they retreated, and left Judæa and Herod in {210} peace, but a
very few years later they were making trouble again, and this time
Antony himself led an army against them, into Parthia itself, and met
with a disastrous defeat. And now Octavius, who had been making his
own power very firm in Rome and Italy all this while, thought the
time was come when he might declare war against Antony--his
brother-in-law, and until lately his friend.
Antony had given him much cause. You will remember that Queen
Cleopatra whom Cæsar had put on the Egyptian throne beside Ptolemy.
Cæsar had fallen in love with her. Antony fell in love with her too.
For her sake he divorced and sent back Octavia, his wife, to her
brother, Octavius, at Rome. He assumed all the airs of an Eastern
despotic ruler, with Cleopatra as his queen. A great many of his own
people and friends and servants were disgusted by this. Probably the
support that they had given him was not given very whole-heartedly.
Certainly Octavius could easily find an excuse for making war on him,
for Antony's ideas of government were not at all such as agreed with
the Romans' idea of how government should be conducted by a Roman
citizen.
The deciding battle between the two was a sea-fight off Actium.
Cleopatra was there, but even she does not seem to have fought very
bravely for Antony. She turned out of the fight before it was really
decided, and fled, with her ships, to Egypt. Her flight probably did
decide the result, and Antony, with such ships as could escape, went
to Egypt after her. Octavius did not pursue them at once, but a year
later he went to Egypt, and, rather than face his coming, Antony and
Cleopatra committed suicide.
[Sidenote: Octavius victorious]
Several years before this, Octavius had dealt with {211} the other
man of the Triumvirate, Lepidus. Lepidus, like Antony, seems to have
acted just as if he wished Octavius to have a good excuse for getting
rid of him, or of his power. He came to Sicily from Africa,
apparently at Octavius' bidding; and when he tried, or was accused of
trying, to gain possession of Sicily for himself, Octavius replied by
defeating his forces, taking Lepidus himself to Italy, and, with more
magnanimity than conquerors often show, allowing him to retain his
high office of Pontifex Maximus.
He could well afford to be generous, for he was now Master of the
World; master as not even his grand-uncle Cæsar, by whom he had been
adopted as a son, had been world-master. Cæsar was assassinated in
the very year following his election as dictator. Octavius put down
his last rival, Antony, at Actium in 31 B.C., and his world-mastery
endured until his death in 14 A.D.
I have said that Octavius was a very prudent man. He wished all the
old forms of republican government to go on just as they had before.
And so they did go on, but Octavius must have known, and everybody
else must have known, that they went on just because he allowed them
to do so, that he could stop them or alter them at any moment if he
pleased, that the government was in form republican--government by
persons elected by the people--but that it really was government by
one man. And far better it should be so. The other way had been
tried and had failed terribly; it had resulted in fearful
lawlessness. Now the Pax Romana, that peace of the world under the
controlling power of Rome, really did begin to be something like a
real fact. It had been very much of a fiction up to now. Of course
there were troubles on the frontier. {212} Those Parthians, who had
defeated Antony, had to be dealt with; and they were dealt with, and
that disgrace to the Roman arms was wiped out.
I am not sure that the most troublous spot in all the Empire of Rome
was not that little kingdom of Judæa (sometimes it was a kingdom,
under a petty king like Herod, but oftener it was under a Roman
governor who had the title of procurator), which never seems to have
been able to rest for long together.
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