Romans besiege Jerusalem
The gates of Jerusalem remained open to Jewish pilgrims, so religious fanatics, battle-hardened cut-throats and thousands of refugees poured into the city, where the rebels expended their energies in gang warfare, orgiastic pleasure-seeking and vicious witch-hunts for traitors.
Young, brash brigands now challenged the rule of the priests. They seized the Temple, overthrowing the high priest himself, electing by lot in his stead a ‘mere rustic’. Ananus rallied the Jerusalemites and attacked the Temple, but he hesitated to storm the inner courts and Holy of Holies. John of Gischala and his Galilean fighters saw an opportunity to win the entire city. John invited in the Idumeans, that ‘most barbarous and bloody nation’ from south of Jerusalem. The Idumeans broke into the city, stormed the Temple, which ‘overflowed with blood’, and then rampaged through the streets, killing 12,000. They murdered Ananus and then his priests, stripped them and stamped on the naked bodies, before tossing them over the walls to be eaten by dogs. ‘The death of Ananus’, says Josephus, ‘was the beginning of the destruction of the city.’ Finally, laden with booty and sated with blood, the Idumeans left a Jerusalem dominated by a new strongman, John of Gischala.
Even though the Romans were not far away, John gave free rein to his Galileans and Zealots to enjoy their prizes. The Holy House became a bawdy-house; but some of John’s supporters soon lost faith in this tyrant and defected to the rising power outside the city, a young warlord named Simon ben Giora, ‘not as cunning as John but superior in strength and courage’. Simon ‘was a greater terror to the people than the Romans themselves’. The Jerusalemites, hoping to save themselves from one tyrant, invited in a second – Simon ben Giora – who soon occupied much of the city. But John still held the Temple. Now the Zealots rebelled against him, seizing the Inner Temple so that, in the words of Tacitus, ‘there were three generals, three armies’ fighting each other for one city – even though the Romans were getting closer. When nearby Jericho fell to Vespasian, all three Jewish factions ceased fighting each other and worked to fortify Jerusalem, digging trenches and strengthening Herod Agrippa I’s Third Wall in the north. Vespasian prepared to besiege Jerusalem. But then all at once he stopped.
Rome had lost its head. On 9 June 68, Nero, beset by rebellions, committed suicide with the words: ‘What an artist the world is losing in me!’ In quick succession, Rome acclaimed and destroyed three emperors while three False Neros arose and foundered in the provinces – as if one real one had not been enough. Finally, the legions of Judaea and Egypt hailed Vespasian as their own emperor. The Muleteer remembered Josephus’ prophecy and freed him, granting him citizenship and appointing him as his adviser, almost his mascot, as he conquered first Judaea – and then the world. Berenice pawned her jewels to help fund Vespasian’s bid for the throne of Rome: the Muleteer was grateful. The new emperor headed via Alexandria to Rome and his son Titus, commanding 60,000 troops, advanced on the Holy City, knowing that his dynasty would be made or broken by the fate of Jerusalem.
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When Queen Salome died, her sons fought. Hyrcanus II was defeated near Jericho by his brother Aristobulos II. The brothers were reconciled, embracing before the Jerusalemites in the Temple, and Aristobulos became king. Hyrcanus retired, but he was advised and controlled by a cunning outsider, Antipater. This Idumean potentate* was the future. His son would become King Herod. Their talented and depraved family would dominate Jerusalem for over a century and essentially create the Temple Mount and Western Wall as they are today.
Antipater helped Hyrcanus flee to Petra, the ‘rose red city half as old as time’, the Nabataean Arab capital. King Aretas (Harith in Arabic), fabulously rich from the Indian spice trade and related to Antipater’s Arab wife, helped them defeat King Aristobulos, who fled back to Jerusalem. The Arab king gave chase, besieging Aristobulos in the fortified Temple Mount. But all this sound and fury signified nothing, because to the north Pompey was setting up headquarters in Damascus. Gnaeus Pompeius, the most powerful man in Rome, was a maverick commander who without official position had led his private army to victory in the Roman civil wars in Italy, Sicily and North Africa. He had celebrated two Triumphs and won vast wealth. He was a cautious general with a cherubic face – ‘nothing was more delicate than Pompey’s cheeks’ – but this was deceptive: Pompey was, wrote the historian Sallust, ‘honest in face, shameless in heart’, and his early sadism and greed in the civil wars had earned him the nickname ‘the young butcher’. Now he had established himself in Rome but the laurels of a Roman strongman required constant refreshment. His nickname ‘Magnus’ – the Great – was at least partly sarcastic. As a boy he had worshipped Alexander the Great, and his Homeric, heroic kingship, along with the unconquered provinces and prizes of the East, would henceforth prove irresistible to every Roman oligarch on the make.
In 64 BC, Pompey terminated the Seleucid kingdom, annexed Syria and was happy to mediate between the warring Jews. Delegations arrived from Jerusalem representing not only both the feuding brothers but also the Pharisees, who begged Pompey to rid them of Maccabeans. Pompey ordered both princes to await his judgement, but Aristobulos, who had not quite grasped the steely power of Rome, rashly double-crossed him.
Pompey swooped on Jerusalem. He captured Aristobulos, but the Maccabean’s retainers occupied the fortified Temple Mount, breaking down the bridge that linked it to the Upper City. Pompey, encamped north of the Bethesda Pool, besieged the Temple for three months, using catapults to bombard it. Once again taking advantage of Jewish piety – it was the Sabbath and a fast – the Romans stormed the Temple from the north, cutting the throats of the priests who guarded the altar. Jews set alight their own houses; others threw themselves from the battlements. Twelve thousand were killed. Pompey destroyed fortifications, abolished the monarchy, confiscated most of the Maccabean kingdom and appointed Hyrcanus as high priest, ruling just Judaea with his minister Antipater.
Pompey could not resist the opportunity of seeing inside the famous Holy of Holies. The Romans were intrigued by Eastern rites yet proud of their many gods and disdainful of the primitive superstition of Jewish monotheism. The Greeks sneered that the Jews in secret worshipped a golden ass’s head or fattened up a human sacrifice to cannibalize later. Pompey and his entourage entered the Holy of Holies, an unspeakable sacrilege given that even the high priest visited it only once a year. The Roman was probably only the second gentile (after Antiochus IV) ever to penetrate the Sanctuary. Yet he respectfully examined the golden table and the holy candelabra – and realized that there was nothing else there, no godhead, just an intense sanctity. He stole nothing.
Pompey hurried back to Rome to enjoy the Triumph celebrating his Asian conquests. Hyrcanus meanwhile was tormented by the rebellions of Aristobulos and his sons, but the real ruler, his minister Antipater, possessed a genius for winning support in Rome which was now the source of all power. However, even that most serpentine of politicians was challenged by the twists of Roman politics. Pompey was forced to share power in a triumvirate with two other leaders, Crassus and Caesar, the latter soon to make his name conquering Gaul. In 55 BC, Crassus, the next Roman oligarch looking for glory in the east, arrived in Syria, keen to equal the conquests of his rivals.
Crassus, known in Rome as Dives, the Rich Man, was notorious for his avarice and cruelty. He had added victims to the Roman dictator Sulla’s death-lists purely to seize their money, while he had celebrated his suppression of the Spartacus rebellion by crucifying 6,000 slaves along the Appian Way. Now he planned an expedition to throw back the new Parthian kingdom that had replaced the Persians and Seleucids in today’s Iraq and Iran.
Crassus funded his invasion by raiding the Temple in Jerusalem, whence he stole 2,000 talents untouched by Pompey and the ‘beam of solid gold’ in the Holy of Holies. But the Parthians annihilated Crassus and his army. The Parthian king Orad II was watching a Greek play when Crassus’ head was tossed on stage. Orad had molten gold poured into Crassus’ mouth, saying, ‘Be satisfied now with thy life’s desire.’
Now Rome’s two strongmen, Caesar and Pompey, competed for supremacy. In 49 BC, Caesar crossed the Rubicon from Gaul and invaded Italy, defeating Pompey eighteen months later. Pompey fled to Egypt. Elected dictator of Rome, Caesar gave chase, arriving in Egypt two days after the Egyptians had murdered Pompey. He was horrified yet relieved to receive Pompey’s pickled head as a welcoming gift. He had campaigned in the East thirty years earlier. Now he found Egypt divided in a vicious struggle between King Ptolemy XIII and his sister-wife Cleopatra VII to secure for Rome the richest prize of the East: Egypt. But he could not have foreseen how this young queen, deposed from the throne and in desperate straits, would shape his will to her own ends.
Cleopatra demanded a secret audience with the master of the Roman Empire. This accomplished impresario of sexual-political pantomime had herself carried into Caesar’s palace wrapped in a laundry bag (not a carpet) – perhaps divining that he was susceptible to such theatrical excitement. Gaius Julius Caesar, battleworn and grizzled, was fifty-two and self-conscious about his balding pate. But this astounding if somewhat chilling life-force, possessed of all the talents of war, letters and politics, and the remorseless energy of a younger man, was also a sexual adventurer who had slept with the wives of both Crassus and Pompey. Cleopatra was twenty-one: ‘her beauty was absolutely not without parallel but her physical attractions, combined with her persuasive charm and the aura she projected’ exerted a powerful fascination, even if, as coins and statues suggest, she possessed the aquiline nose and pointed chin of her forebears. She had a kingdom to reclaim and a peerless lineage to live up to. Both Caesar and Cleopatra were keen practitioners of the adventurous school of politics. They embarked on an affair – she soon bore him a child, Caesarion – but, more importantly, he was now committed to back her.
Caesar soon found himself trapped in Alexandria as the Egyptians rose against Cleopatra and her Roman patron. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Antipater, Pompey’s ally, saw a chance of redeeming himself with Caesar. He marched on Egypt with 3,000 Jewish troops, persuaded the Egyptian Jews to back him, and attacked Caesar’s opponents. Caesar triumphed and restored Cleopatra. Before returning to Rome, the grateful Caesar reappointed Hyrcanus as high priest and ethnarch – ruler – of the Jews and let him repair Jerusalem’s walls, but he granted all the power to Antipater as procurator of Judaea with his sons as the local tetrarchs: the elder one, Phasael, ran Jerusalem; the younger, Herod, got Galilee.
Herod, aged just fifteen, immediately showed his mettle when he hunted down and killed a band of fanatical religious Jews. In Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin were incensed by young Herod’s unauthorized killings and summoned him for trial. However, the Romans appreciated that Antipater and his sons were the sort of allies required to govern this turbulent people. The Roman governor of Syria ordered Herod’s acquittal and awarded him greater powers.
Herod was already exceptional. He was, wrote Josephus, ‘blessed with every gift of looks, body and mind’. Named to be a hero, he was sophisticated enough to charm and impress the pre-eminent Romans of the era. He was sexually voracious – or, as Josephus put it, ‘slave to his passions’ – yet he was not crude. He had taste in architecture, was highly educated in Greek, Latin and Jewish culture and, when not busy with politics and pleasure, he enjoyed debates on history and philosophy. Yet power always came first and this craving would poison every relationship he had. Son of a second-generation Idumean convert to Judaism and an Arab mother (hence his brother was called Phasael – Faisal), Herod was a cosmopolitan who could play the Roman and the Greek and the Jew. But the Jews never quite forgave his mongrel origins. Raised in a rich but vigilant and ruthless household, he would see the destruction of his closest family and sense the fragility of power and the facility of terror. He grew up using death as a political tool: paranoid, over-sensitive, almost hysterical, this tough teenager, a ‘man of great barbarity’ as well as sensitivity, played to survive and dominate at all costs.
After Caesar was assassinated in 44, Cassius (who was one of his killers) arrived to govern Syria. Herod’s father Antipater switched sides. But the somersaults of intrigue finally caught up with him, and he was poisoned by a rival, who managed to occupy Jerusalem – until Herod had him murdered. Soon afterwards, Cassius and his fellow assassin Brutus were defeated at Philippi. The victors were Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son Octavian, twenty-two years old, and the swashbuckling general Mark Antony. They split the empire, Antony receiving the East. As Antony processed towards Syria, two young potentates, with radically opposite interests, rushed to meet the Roman strongman. One wanted to restore the Jewish kingdom, the other to swallow it into her ancestral empire.
