In 64, Rome caught fire. Nero probably oversaw the fire-fighting and he opened his gardens to those who had lost their homes. But conspiracists claimed that Nero had started the fire to enable him to build a larger palace and that he had neglected to fight the fire because he was plucking on his lyre. Nero blamed the fast-spreading semi-Jewish sect, the Christians, many of whom he caused to be burned alive, torn to pieces by wild animals or crucified. Among his victims were two arrested in Jerusalem years earlier: Peter was said to have been crucified head down; Paul beheaded. Nero’s anti-Christian pogrom earned him his place in the Christian Book of Revelation, the last in the canon of what became the New Testament: Satan’s ‘beasts’ are Roman emperors and 666, the number of the beast, probably a code for Nero.*
The ‘exquisite tortures’ he devised for the Christians did not save Nero. At home, he kicked his pregnant empress Poppaea in the stomach, accidentally killing her. As the emperor killed enemies real and imagined while promoting his acting career, his latest procurator in Judaea, Gessius Florus, ‘ostentatiously paraded his outrages upon the nation’. The catastrophe started in Caesarea: Syrian Greeks sacrificed a cockerel outside a synagogue; the Jews protested. Florus was bribed to support the gentiles and then marched down to Jerusalem, demanding a tax of seventeen talents from the Temple. When he appeared at the Praetorium in the spring of 66, Jewish youths collected pennies and tossed them at him. Florus’ Greek and Syrian troops attacked the crowds. Florus demanded that the Temple grandees hand over the hooligans, but they refused. His legionaries ran amok, ‘plunged into every house and slaughtered the inhabitants’. Florus flagellated and crucified his prisoners, including Jewish grandees who were Roman citizens. This was the last straw: the Temple aristocrats could no longer count on Roman protection. The brutality of Florus’ local auxiliaries inflamed Jewish resistance. As his cavalry clattered through the streets with ‘a degree of madness,’ they even attacked King Agrippa’s sister, Queen Berenice. Her guards bundled her back into the Maccabean Palace but she resolved to save Jerusalem.54
JEWISH WARS: THE DEATH OF JERUSALEM
AD 66–70
BERENICE THE BAREFOOT QUEEN: REVOLUTION
Berenice walked barefoot to the Praetorium herself – the same route Jesus would have taken from Herod Antipas back to Pilate thirty years earlier. The beautiful Berenice – daughter and sister of kings, and twice a queen – was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to thank God for her recovery from an illness, fasting for thirty days and shaving her head (surprising in this Romanized Herodian). Now she threw herself before Florus and begged him to stop, but he wanted vengeance and booty. As his reinforcements approached Jerusalem, the Jews were divided between those keen on reconciliation with the Romans and the radicals who were preparing for war, perhaps in the hope of winning a limited independence under Roman suzerainty.
The priests in the Temple paraded the holy vessels, sprinkling the dust of mourning in their hair, in a bid to restrain the young rebels. The Jews marched out peacefully to greet the Roman cohorts, but on Florus’ instructions the cavalry rode them down. The crowds ran for the gates but many suffocated in the stampede. Florus then charged towards the Temple Mount, hoping to seize the commanding Antonia Fortress. In response the Jews bombarded the Romans with spears from the rooftops, occupied the Antonia and cut down the bridges that led into the Temple, turning it into a fortress of its own.
Just as Florus left, Herod Agrippa arrived from Alexandria. The king called an assembly of the Jerusalemites in the Upper City beneath his Palace. As Berenice listened from the safety of the roof, Agrippa begged the Jews to stay the rebellion: ‘Don’t venture to oppose the entire empire of the Romans. War, if it be once begun, is not easily laid down. The power of the Romans is invincible in all parts of the habitable earth. Have pity, if not on your women and children, yet upon this metropolis – spare the Temple!’ Agrippa and his sister wept openly. The Jerusalemites shouted that they wished only to fight Florus. Agrippa told them to pay their tribute. The people agreed and Agrippa led them to the Temple to arrange these peaceful gestures. But on the Temple Mount, King Agrippa insisted the Jews obey Florus until a new procurator arrived, outraging the crowd all over again.
The priests, including Josephus, met in the Temple and debated whether to stop the daily sacrifice to the Roman emperor that signified loyalty to Rome. This decisive act of rebellion was approved – ‘the foundation of war with the Romans’, wrote Josephus, who himself joined the revolt. As the rebels seized the Temple and the moderate grandees took the Upper City, the Jewish factions bombarded each other with slingshot and spears.
Agrippa and Berenice left Jerusalem, sending 3,000 cavalry to back the moderates, but it was the extremists who triumphed. The Zealots, a popular party based around the Temple, and the Sicarii, the dagger-wielding brigands, stormed the Upper City and drove out King Agrippa’s troops. They burned the palaces of the high priest and the Maccabees as well as the archives where debts were recorded. For a short moment, their leader, a ‘barbarous, cruel’ warlord ruled Jerusalem until the priests assassinated him and the Sicarii escaped to the Masada fortress near the Dead Sea and played no further part until Jerusalem had fallen.
The priests were back in nominal control but from now on, the factions in Jerusalem and their warlords, often provincial opportunists and local adventurers as well as religious fanatics, embarked on a savage and chaotic Jewish civil war. Even Josephus, our sole source, fails to clarify who formed these factions and what they believed. But he traces the strain of religious anti-Roman zealotry all the way back to the Galilean rebellions after Herod the Great’s death: ‘they have a passion for liberty, which is almost unconquerable since they are convinced God alone is their leader’. They ‘sowed the seed from which sprang life’. During the next few years, he says, Jew fought Jew ‘in a perpetual slaughter’.
The Roman garrison of 600, still holding Herod the Great’s Citadel, agreed to give up their arms in return for safe passage out of the city but these Syrians and Greeks who had massacred so many innocent Jews were then ‘savagely butchered’. King Agrippa abandoned his attempts to mediate and threw in his hand with Rome. In November 66, the Roman Governor of Syria, backed by Agrippa and allied kings, marched down from Antioch and fought his way into Jerusalem. Yet he abruptly retired, perhaps having been bribed, and his retreat under ferocious Jewish attack cost the lives of more than 5,000 Roman soldiers, and the eagle of a legion.
The die was cast. Roman pride had to be avenged. The rebels chose the former high priest, Ananus, as the leader of independent Israel. He strengthened the walls, while the city echoed to the hammering and forging of armour and weapons. He also appointed generals, among them Josephus, the future historian, who now left the city as the commander of Galilee, where he found himself fighting a warlord, John of Gischala, more viciously than either of them fought the Romans.
The new Jewish coins celebrated ‘The Freedom of Zion’ and ‘Jerusalem the Holy’ – yet it seemed this was a liberation that not many had wanted and the city waited like ‘a place doomed to destruction’. Nero was in Greece to perform his songs and compete in chariot-races in the Olympic Games (he won even though he fell out of his chariot), when he heard that Israel had rebelled.
JOSEPHUS’ PROPHECY: THE MULETEER AS EMPEROR
Nero feared victorious generals, so he chose as the commander of his Jewish War a dogged veteran from his own entourage. Titus Flavius Vespasianus was in his late fifties and often annoyed the emperor by falling asleep during his theatrical performances. But he had made his name in the conquest of Britain and his nickname – The Muleteer – revealed his unglamorous dependability and the fortune he had made by selling mules to the army.