Читать онлайн "Jews and Greeks in ancient Cyrene" - Эпплбаум Шимон - RuLit

The written tradition is now perhaps reinforced by evidence furnished by archaeological research. The fifth campaign of excavation in the ancient tell of Jaffa near the Church of Saint Peter revealed an occupation-stratum belonging to the beginning of the 2nd century A.D. (Stratum V). We cite here the account of the excavator, Dr. Ya’akov Kaplan:[1643] “To the fifth occupation stratum, dated in the beginning of the 2nd century C.E., belonged part of the cellar of a building for whose erection the builders had dug deep into the older strata; two of its walls, the southerly and the easterly, were found built in the form of a stout retaining wall. Numerous signs of burning and soot seen on the cellar floor and on the surrounding walls, were apparently the result of the destruction of the building. The floor also yielded much pottery, stone objects, a bronze jug and a hoard of bronze and silver coins. Examination of the finds, including a Greek inscription, leads to the conclusion that the building was destroyed by fire in the time of the Emperor Trajan, and this destruction is perhaps to be connected with the Jewish rebellion in north Africa (115-117 C.E.). As is well known, we possess only hints that the Jews of Palestine joined the rising.” Finds in the same stratum included three stone moulds for casting metal weights, stamped in Greek with the name of the agoranomos Judah, who served in this post in the ninth (?) year of Trajan’s reign (106/107).[1644]

It occasions no surprise that the rising may have affected Jaffa, which was a harbour-city possessing close connections with the Diaspora centres,[1645] and the population of which was mixed, including Jews from Egypt and Libya, as the epitaphs of the cemetery at Abbu Kabir evidence. It is enough to mention the inscription of a Jew of the Libyan Pentapolis,[1646] of another with a distinctively Libyan name,[1647] and of Jews from Egypt and Alexandria.[1648] Jaffa had suffered heavily in the war of the destruction (66-73) and from the subsequent punitive action of the Roman army,[1649] yet as early as Trajan’s reign the Jaffa Jewish community had its own agoranomos,[1650] and a numerous Jewish population had again taken root in the port. Most of its known epitaphs doubtless belong to the later Roman and Byzantine period,[1651] but the occupational structure they reflect points to a predominantly proletarian community.[1652] It may be assumed that it possessed a similar composition in the early 2nd century and its members doubtless responded readily to extremist influence.

The second item of archaeological evidence that invites consideration is from Gerasa, in Transjordan, the Decapolis city on the border of the province of Arabia. The structure of the triumphal arch of Hadrianic date (A.D. 130) south of the village of Jerasli, incorporated fragments of a Doric frieze and a Corinthian capital derived from a demolished building. The frieze fragments bore the carved figures of an amphora and a bird, while between the volutes of the capital appeared the figure of a menorah (candelabrum) with seven branches.[1653] The stylistic details of the frieze (the absence of regulae and guttae) were found by Dettweiler, who published the material,[1654] to be paralleled mainly among hel-lenistic Jewish monuments of the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C., also in synagogues of the Severan epoch. The building had been destroyed, in his opinion, when Vespasian’s commander L. Annius captured and burned the city in A.D. 68.[1655] But as several scholars have remarked, the settlement called Gerasa then attacked by the Romans was not Gerasa in Transjordan, since earlier in the war the Jews themselves had attacked the Decapolis town,[1656] while Josephus states that the latter’s citizens had protected their Jewish inhabitants.[1657] These two reports therefore testify that Gerasa of the Decapolis was neither a centre of revolt nor hostile to Rome, hence there is no reason to identify it with the place burnt by L. Annius. If so, we are obliged to seek another occasion when the Jewish public building at Gerasa was destroyed on the evidence of the remains reused in Hadrian’s arch. The appropriate setting for the destruction might well have been the rebellious ferment in Judaea in the years 116-118.

4. The Course of the Rebellion[1658]

Fuks has devoted a brief investigation to the Greek and Latin terms used by ancient documents in relation to the Jewish rebellion.[1659] The sources use the following terms: στάσις,[1660] θόρυβος,[1661] ἔφοδος,[1662] τάραχος,[1663] tumultus[1664] and πόλεμος.[1665] The first four terms appear in contemporary documents. The word στάσις denotes, of course, any collision between two classes or groups in a given state. The meaning of θόρυβος is any undefined civil disorder, while ἔφοδος simply means an attack. But τάραχος (or ταραχή) was used as a synonym of the Latin word tumultus,[1666] and the inscriptions at Cyrene show that this term was the official Roman description of the revolt of 115-117. The word πόλεμος, as Fuks has observed, appears once almost contemporarily with the revolt, in Appian; forty years after it, in Artemidorus Daldianus in the 2nd century, also in a Cyrenean inscription at the end of the same century — and it is used by the inhabitants of Oxyrhinchos in the year 199/200.[1667] Its absence from Latin sources may not be due to chance, since tumultus denotes a graver situation and event than simple war; Cicero writes:[1668] “There can be a war without a tumultus, but there cannot be a tumultus without a war. For this reason our ancestors spoke of a tumultus Italicus because it occurred at home, and of a tumultus Gallicus because it was very close to Italy. What is more it can be understood that a tumultus is graver than a bellum (war), because in wartime military furlough is still legal, but in a tumultus it is not.”[1669] Livy says:[1670] “...The Boii also had set their faces to rebellion. Therefore the Senate proclaimed the existence of a tumultus... This situation is defined by Forcel-lini:[1671] “The name tumultus was applied by the Romans to any sudden war which seriously alarmed the city due to the magnitude of the danger and the nearness of the enemy.” Cagnat wrote of such a situation: “A critical situation caused by an internal rising or a sudden attack by the enemy. When the country was thus endangered, the Senate proclaimed a tumultus, and all activities public and private ceased for the time being... and every man put on military uniform... all citizens were summoned... to take up arms.”[1672]