THE DARKNESS THICKENS.
Azariah had read the signs of the times aright. The darker days had come,
days so full of trouble that the unhappy people looked back to the past
that had seemed so sad and gloomy as to a time of rest. Things had not
been going well with King Antiochus, for the Romans had driven him out of
Egypt, and in his rage and fear he turned against his Jewish subjects with
greater ferocity than ever. One of his motives was the brutal desire to
wreak upon the feeble the vengeance which he could not exact from the
strong; the other was a genuine fear lest he should lose another province
as he had already lost Egypt. He saw that the policy of Rome was to stir
up against him the national spirit of subject peoples, and he knew well
enough that in the Jews, crushed though they had been by oppression and
massacre, this national spirit was not by any means dead. Accordingly he
set himself with relentless ferocity to extinguish it. Everything
distinctive of the people was to be rooted out; that done they might
become really submissive; there would be no more a land of the Jews, but
simply a province of Southern Syria.
The first thing, he conceived, would be to strike such terror into the
hearts of the people that there should be no thought among them of
resistance. For such a purpose nothing could be more effective than
another massacre such as that which had already been perpetrated two years
before under his own eyes: only this, he determined, should be more
complete. He perceived with a devilish ingenuity that his orders would be
more relentlessly carried out if he entrusted their execution to some one
else, than if he were personally present. Appeals might be made to him to
which he might yield out of sheer weariness, whereas a lieutenant, if he
were only hard-hearted enough, would simply fall back upon the orders
which he had received, and refuse all responsibility save that of seeing
that these were fully carried out.
Such a lieutenant he knew that he possessed in the person of a certain
Apollonius, a Cretan mercenary, who had already given proofs enough that
he was about as little troubled as any man could be with a conscience or
with feelings of compassion. To Apollonius, accordingly, the commission
was entrusted, and he proceeded to execute it in a particularly brutal and
treacherous way.
He marched to Jerusalem, taking with him a picked force of some five
thousand men—picked, it may be said, quite as much for their unscrupulous
and ferocious character, as for their strength and skill in arms. There
would have been, in any case, little chance of resistance, but, to make
his task the easier of accomplishment, he had so timed his coming that he
approached the city two or three hours before the end of the Sabbath.
Secret orders had been sent to Philip, the Phrygian, that he was to relax
the severity of his rule; and the people had begun to breathe again after
a long period of repression. The Temple was still shut, or virtually shut,
but the synagogues were open, and were indeed frequented by throngs of
fervent worshippers.
It wanted a couple of hours to sunset when the news ran through the city
that an armed force was approaching the walls. The first feeling aroused
by the tidings was naturally one of alarm. The appearance of the soldiers,
however, was such as to disarm all apprehensions. In the first place they
were more like a crowd of men who happened to be carrying arms than an
army. They were not marching in ranks, or indeed keeping any kind of
order. A multitude of country-folk could be seen mingled among them,
soldiers and civilians walking side by side in the most friendly and
unconstrained fashion. Some of the new comers recognized old acquaintances
among the townsfolk, and introduced their comrades to them; and though
some of the sterner sort stood rigidly aloof, there were quite enough
among the inhabitants of Jerusalem to give the visitors a general welcome.
Apollonius himself, a conspicuous figure as he rode on his white charger
up and down the streets of the city, was noticeably busy in renewing old
acquaintanceships and making new ones.
And then in a moment the whole scene was changed. A soldier and a citizen
were standing on the wall, talking and laughing together, and that in a
place where they could be seen by all observers. Suddenly, without there
having been even the slightest sign of a quarrel, the soldier was seen to
plunge his sword into the side of his companion. It was a preconcerted
signal. The wretched inhabitants, who would have been defenceless in any
case, were taken absolutely off their guard, and had but slender chances
of escape. How many hundreds, possibly thousands, perished cannot be
guessed. But the massacre was more general, more pitiless than that which
had devastated the city two years before. Apollonius’s “picked” men showed
themselves altogether worthy of his choice, so brutal and bloodthirsty
were they. And Apollonius himself was to be seen everywhere urging his men
to make short work with these “pestilent Jews,” as he called them, and not
unfrequently striking a blow himself. He earned on that day such hatred
that thereafter there was not to be found a Jew, save among the vilest
renegades and traitors, but uttered a curse when his name was mentioned.
Of course the soldiers had to be paid for their bloody day’s work, and
they were paid by the plunder of the city. The houses were stripped, and
the plunderers, when they had carried away everything that had roused
their cupidity, often, out of sheer wantonness, completed the work of
devastation, by setting fire to the desolated houses. Altogether Jerusalem
presented such a spectacle as had not been seen since the days of the
Babylonian conquest.
The spirit of the people having been, as it would seem, thus effectually
broken for the present, it remained to provide against its possible
revival in the future.
Long gaps were made in the line of wall, so long that it took not a few
days to make them, and would certainly require as many weeks to repair.
The town thus made defenceless was further overawed by the erection of a
fort in the City of David, this fort being held by a strong garrison of
Greeks and Asiatic mercenaries.
The means of repression thus provided, the next thing was to extinguish
all that was characteristic of the national life. First, the great centre
of that life, the Temple, was formally desecrated. Already it had been
subjected to such indignities that the pious Jew could scarcely bear to
enter its precincts. But the final horror, the “abomination of
desolation,” was yet to come. On the 15th of the month Chisleu (December)
an altar of a Greek pattern, and consecrated to the Olympian Zeus, was
placed on the great altar of sacrifice, and ten days afterwards a huge sow
was slaughtered on this. Her blood, caught after the Greek fashion in a
bowl, was sprinkled on the altar of incense and on the mercy-seat within
the Holy of Holies—a hideous mockery of the sprinkling which the Law
enjoined to be performed once in every year. From the animal’s flesh a
mess of broth was prepared, and this was sprinkled on the copies of the
Law. The Temple, thus dishonoured, was as if it had ceased to be.
The meeting-houses, in which, as we have seen, the people had found a
substitute for the Temple worship, were summarily closed. An edict was
issued commanding that every one who possessed a copy of the Law, or of
any one of the sacred books, should give it up without loss of time. To
call in cupidity to the aid of fear in enforcing this edict, the King’s
officers were instructed to pay a reasonable price for the manuscripts
thus produced. It was made a capital offence to read or to recite any part
of the proscribed writings. Then the practice of circumcision was
forbidden. Death was to be the penalty for all who should take any part in
performing this rite—for the circumciser, the mother, the father, even the
babe itself.
And then to the policy of repression Antiochus added the policy of bribery
and temptation. Their own worship forbidden, the Jews were to be allured
by the seductions of the worship of their masters. Hitherto little had
been done in this way. Insults indeed, had been heaped upon the people;
but little attempt had been made to attract them. The Temple gates, closed
for more than a year, were again thrown open; and the courts, long silent,
resounded with the mirth of sacrificial banquets and the gaiety of
festivals. Not only all the splendours, but all the impure pleasures of
heathen worship were called in to assist the attempt that was being made
to sap what was left of the faith of the people.
Antiochus, who, for all his wrath at Jewish obstinacy, could not help
feeling a certain respect for it, took the trouble to send among the
people a missionary, if he may be so called, who was to instruct them in
the new religion which their King was so anxious to impose upon them.
Theopompus, or Athenæus, to use the name which was commonly given him from
his birthplace, was a follower of the philosophy of Epicurus. He had held
a subordinate post, as lecturer in geometry, in the famous school of the
Garden, but had found his modest income insufficient to meet his somewhat
expensive tastes. If he had had but a tolerable competence, Athenæus would
have made an ideal Epicurean. He was devoted to pleasure, but there was
nothing unseemly or extravagant about his devotion. For the foolish people
who ruined their constitutions and emptied their purses by exhausting
excesses he had a genuine contempt. “Give me,” he would say, “a decent
sufficiency of ‘outside things,’ and I am content.” As he had a fair
smattering of culture, and a real acquaintance with geometry, and had a
venerable appearance which happily hit the mean between hilarity and
austerity, he might have been, but for a chronic want of money, a real
success among the somewhat _dilettante_ philosophers of Athens. But
circumstances were against him. Poverty did not ill become an Academic,
and positively set off a Stoic; but an Epicurean seemed to have missed his
vocation if he could not be always handsomely dressed and able to give
elegant entertainments to his friends. Athenæus, who liked above all
things to be on good terms both with himself and with every one else, felt
this very acutely, and he was proportionately delighted when the Syrian
King proposed to him that he should go as a teacher, not without a
handsome salary, of Greek religion and Greek culture.
His success was not encouraging. In the first place he had a difficulty in
making himself understood. The pure Attic Greek on which he prided himself
was strange to the ears of his new audience, and he could not bring
himself to descend to the barbarous dialect to which they were accustomed.
And when he was seriously called to account in the matter of his belief he
found himself involved in difficulties from which he saw no way of escape.
At Athens religion was politely ignored. The common people must, of
course, have their gods and goddesses; and the wise man, if he were
prudent, would say nothing—anyhow in public—to disturb their belief; but
within the privileged walls of the schools the names of Zeus and Athené
and Apollo were never so much as mentioned, except, perhaps, in the course
of some antiquarian discussion.
Among his new disciples, as he would fain have reckoned them, Athenæus
found a very different temper. They were terribly in earnest; abstractions
and phrases did not satisfy them; they pushed their questions home in a
very perplexing way.
One day at the conclusion of a lecture, the customary invitation to the
audience to put any questions that might occur to them was accepted by a
young man who sat on one of the front benches.
“I would ask you, venerable sir,” he said, “some questions about the gods
of your religion.”
“Speak on,” replied Athenæus, with his usual courtesy; “I shall be
delighted to satisfy you to the best of my power.”
“Are we to believe the stories that are told us in this book?” and he held
up, as he spoke, a little volume of popular mythology, filled from
beginning to end with tales that, to say the least, were not edifying.
“For, if these be true, these divine beings were such as would be banished
from the society of all honest men and women. They are thieves,
adulterers, murderers. It would be a thousand times better to have no gods
at all than such as these.”
“You are right, sir,” said the lecturer; “these stories are for the
ignorant only, at least in their outward meaning, though they have an
inner meaning also, which I will take some fitting occasion to expound.
But not such are the gods whom we worship.”
“Will you tell us something of them?” continued the questioner.
“Willingly, for they are such that the wisest of men need not be ashamed
of them. They dwell in some remote region, serene and happy. Wrath they
feel not, nor sorrow, nor any of the passions that disturb the souls of
men.”
“And do they care for our doings upon earth?”
“How so? They neither love nor hate; and both they must do, I take it, did
they concern themselves with human affairs.”
“What profit, then, is there in them? How are men the better for their
being?”
“That I know not; only that it is part of the order of things that they
must be.”
“Far be it from me,” exclaimed the young Jew, “to exchange for such idle
existences the God of my fathers! He may smite us in His anger till we are
well-nigh consumed, but at least He cares for us. He led our fathers
through the sea and through the wilderness in the days of old. He has
spoken to us by the prophets, and He has made His Presence to be seen in
His Temple; and though He has hidden His face from us for a time, yet He
will repent Him of His wrath, and devise the means by which He shall
recall His banished unto Him. No, we will not change our God for yours!”
A loud murmur of assent went round the benches when the speaker sat down,
and Athenæus felt that he had made but small way with his audience.
Finding his theology and philosophy but ill received, Athenæus bethought
him of what seemed a more hopeful method of proselytizing. Could not a
specially powerful attraction be found in the festival of Dionysus, the
wine-god? Vintage feasts, he reflected, are common to every country where
wine is produced, and it would not be difficult to ingraft the Greek
characteristics on a celebration to which the Jews were already
accustomed. Some of the less scrupulous might be tempted to take part in
such a festival, a beginning would be made, and more would follow in due
time. How the scheme prospered will be told in the next chapter.