* This, it has justly been observed, was almost certainly ‘a piece of vindictive gossip’ (Fortenbaugh and Schütrumpf, p. 315).
† The first use of the word is traditionally ascribed to Pythagoras, but in fact it seems to have originated with Plato.
II
JERUSALEM
63
BC
: J
ERUSALEM
A violent shuddering of masonry, the collapse of an entire tower, and a great rent was left in the line of fortifications. As the dust cleared, so legionaries were already piling into the gap. Officers, eager to secure the glory of the feat for themselves, led their men over the mounds of rubble, scrambling up through the breach. Eagles – the battle-standards of the Roman army – bobbed over the fray. The defenders, whose obduracy and courage had been powerless in the final reckoning to stop the advance of Pompey’s battering rams, knew themselves doomed. Many chose to torch their own homes rather than leave them to be looted by their conquerors; others to hurl themselves from the battlements. Some twelve thousand in all, when the work of killing was finally done, lay littered as corpses across the city. ‘Roman casualties, though, were very light.’1 Pompey was an efficient general. Four years had passed since his meeting with Posidonius, and in that time he had swept the Mediterranean clear of pirates, humbled a succession of Near Eastern potentates, and brought their kingdoms directly under the sway of Rome. Now, after a three-month siege, he had added another victory to his stunning roster of battle-honours. Jerusalem was his.
The city, distant as it was from the sea, and isolated from major trade routes, was in many ways a backwater. Judaea, the kingdom of which it was the capital, ranked as very much a second-rate power. To Pompey, a man who had swaggered his way around much of the Mediterranean, it could hardly help but seem a bit lacking in glamour. Nevertheless, Jerusalem was not entirely without interest. Its conqueror, who had a connoisseur’s fascination with monumental architecture, and viewed the oddities of defeated peoples as so much grist to his own fame, took considerable delight in the exotic. The Jews, for all that they looked and dressed much like other people, were renowned for their peculiarities. They refused to eat pork. They circumcised their sons. They rested every seventh day, to mark what they termed the Sabbath. Most perversely of all, they refused to pay respects to any god save for the single one they acknowledged as their own. Even the dues of worship demanded by this jealous and exacting deity were liable to seem to Greeks or Romans bizarrely exclusive. In all the world, there stood only a single shrine regarded by the vast majority of his devotees as legitimate. The Jewish Temple, raised on a plateau of rock named Mount Moria on the eastern flank of Jerusalem, had for centuries dominated the skyline of the city. Naturally enough – now that the siege had been concluded – Pompey was keen to pay it a visit.
In truth, his attention had been fixed on the Temple complex ever since he first appeared with his legions before the walls that surrounded it. Long after the rest of Jerusalem had surrendered, defenders there had persisted in defying him; and now the great rock on which it stood was piled with bodies and sticky with blood. That Jews might be dogmatic in their eccentric beliefs was something of which Pompey was well aware; for the refusal of his opponents to fight on the Sabbath had greatly eased the task of his engineers in constructing their siege works. Now, though, the Temple was secured; and Pompey, as he approached its gateways, did so in a spirit of respect as well as of curiosity. That the Jews gave their god a barbarous name and ascribed perplexing commandments to him did not mean that he was any less worthy of reverence for that. To scholars learned in the study of the heavens, it appeared plain that ‘the Jews worshipped the supreme god – who was to be identified with the king of all the gods’.2 Jupiter, the Romans called him – just as the Greeks knew him as Zeus. This practice, of identifying the gods worshipped in one land with those honoured in another, was a venerable one. For a millennium and more, diplomats had depended upon it to render practicable the very concept of international law. How, after all, were two powers to agree a treaty without invoking gods that both parties could acknowledge as valid witnesses to their covenant? Different rites might be practised in different cities; but Pompey, like other conquerors before him, never doubted that more united the various peoples of the world in their worship of the gods than divided them. Why, then, should he not inspect the Temple?
‘It was as a victor that he claimed the right to enter it.’3 That the Jews, jealous of the sanctity of their shrine, banned outsiders was hardly a consideration fit to perturb the conqueror of Jerusalem. His men, in capturing the Temple, had already stormed its outer courtyard. The priests, surprised as they were pouring libations and burning incense, had not so much as paused in their rites. Throughout the entire siege, twice a day, once in the morning and once at twilight, trumpets had sounded: the signal for the burning of a lamb on a great square altar. Now, though, piled up in the outer courtyard, priests lay slaughtered; and it was their blood, borne on the water that gushed from the base of the altar, that was being sluiced away. Pompey could not help but admire their fortitude in the face of death; but nothing about their ministrations would have struck him as particularly deserving notice. Sacrifices were practised across the Mediterranean, after all. The mystery for which the Temple was notorious awaited Pompey deep within the complex: a chamber treasured by the Jews as the single holiest place in the world. With such reverence did they regard this room that no one was permitted to enter it except for their high priest – and even then only once a year. To Greek scholars, the question of what might be found within this ‘Holy of Holies’ was a tantalising one. Posidonius, never knowingly without a theory, claimed that it contained a golden ass’s head. Others believed that it held ‘the stone image of a man with a long beard sitting on a donkey’.4 Others yet reported that it served as the prison of a Greek captive, who, after a year of being fattened up, would then, amidst awful solemnity, be sacrificed and devoured. Pompey, pausing before the curtain that screened the room from a treasure-filled antechamber, could have no certain idea what lay beyond.
In the event, he found only emptiness. There was no statue in the chamber, no image of any kind, and certainly no fattened prisoner – just a bare block of stone. Yet Pompey, although bemused, left not unimpressed by what he had seen. He refrained from stripping the Temple of its treasures. He ordered its custodians to scrub the complex clean of the marks of battle, and permitted them to perform the daily sacrifices. He appointed a new high priest. Then, freighted with prisoners, he departed Jerusalem, bound for a hero’s welcome back in Rome. Pompey could reflect with double satisfaction on his achievements in Judaea. The Jews had been roundly defeated, the boundaries of their kingdom redrawn in accord with Roman interests, and a swingeing tribute imposed. Simultaneously, due respect had been paid to their god. Pompey could bask in the assurance that he had fulfilled his duty, not just to Rome, but to the cosmos. Taking ship for home, he stopped off in Rhodes, where for a second time he called on Posidonius, presenting to the philosopher a living reassurance that the forging of a universal dominion, one that reflected the timeless order of the heavens, was proceeding apace. Posidonius, refusing to let an attack of arthritis deny him the chance to grandstand, signified approval of his visitor by delivering an oration from his sickbed. His theme, explored amid numerous flamboyant groans: ‘only what is honourable is good’.5