Antiochus IV tried to add Egypt to his empire. He successfully conquered Egypt but the Romans foiled his plan—and the Jews of Judaea rebelled at his rear. The furious Antiochus, who took for himself the name Epiphanes (meaning the manifestation of a divine being), decided to crush the Jewish religion. He issued a series of decrees banning Judaism in all its manifestations. Observance of the Torah, the laws of keeping kosher, the practice of circumcision—all were forbidden on pain of death. In 168 BC the Jewish Temple, the holiest place in Jerusalem, was forcibly converted to a shrine to Zeus, while troops patrolled the streets and the countryside to make sure the Judeans were now worshipping Hellenic gods. Antiochus himself entered the Temple and sacrificed pigs on its altar.
Many Judaeans did comply with the new laws, while a minority fled. It was old Mattathias, a priest at the hill town of Modin, who initiated active resistance by lashing out at a Jew complying with the new orthodoxies and killing a soldier of the evil empire. With his five sons, Mattathias retreated to Jordan to marshal his Jewish forces into a formidable guerrilla army. People flocked to join them from across Judaea, rightly sensing that in these men they had found the champions of their faith.
The events of 168–164 BC are testimony to their bravery and leadership. Having dispensed with the essentially suicidal refusal to fight on the Sabbath (a prick of conscience that had ensured early defeats for them), the rebels achieved dazzling victories against the Seleucids and the Jewish “collaborators” ranged against them. Much of this success was thanks to the inspired leadership of the eldest son Judah, dubbed Maccabeus (“The Hammer”) before the name was applied to the family as a whole. The Maccabeans inflicted a series of crushing defeats on better-equipped troops who vastly outnumbered them.
Within three years the Maccabees had taken Jerusalem, and in 164 BC the now more accommodating Antiochus died and his successor sued for peace (albeit a temporary one). Vitally, Jewish freedom of worship was restored. The Temple was cleansed and rededicated in December 164 BC. Even though the oil for the Temple lamp had run out, the lamp remained alight for eight days, a miracle that inspired the joyful Hanukkah Festival of Lights, in which Jews still celebrate religious freedom from tyranny.
Having won the right to practice their religion, the Maccabees fought on for the political freedom that would protect it. The result was the creation of an independent Jewish state, with Mattathias’ descendants at its head. Fighting to drive the Syrian empire out of Judaea, Judah was killed in battle. His successor, Jonathan “the cunning,” secured his brother’s military achievements with diplomacy. As dynastic struggle and civil war consumed the Seleucid empire, Jonathan’s astute appraisal of the political balance, and judicious offers of support, secured him substantial territorial gains. But the Seleucids tried to re-conquer Judaea: Jonathan was tricked, captured and killed. In 142 BC Simon the Great, the youngest and by now the only surviving son of Mattathias, negotiated the political independence of Judaea. It was the culmination of all his family had fought for. A year later, by popular decree, he was invested as hereditary leader and high priest of the state. This marked the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty, which took its title from Mattathias’ family name. For the next century and a half, the Maccabees ruled an independent Jewish kingdom as kings and high priests, conquering an empire that soon extended to much of today’s Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. Gradually the family’s gifts weakened and they became Hellenic tyrants—until Rome imposed its will on the Middle East.
The Maccabees represent nobility, courage and freedom, as well as the audacity to resist an empire and the right of all to worship as they wish. In a David-and-Goliath struggle, the first recorded holy war, a small band of warriors succeeded in defeating the mighty phalanxes of an arrogant despot.
CICERO
106–43 BC
There was a humanity in Cicero, a something almost of Christianity, a stepping forward out of the dead intellectualities of Roman life into moral perceptions, into natural affections, into domesticity, philanthropy, and conscious discharge of duty …
Anthony Trollope, in the introduction to his Life of Cicero (1880)
Cicero was a supreme master of the spoken word whose stirring calls in defense of the Roman republic finally cost him his life. In his own day he was uncontested as Rome’s finest orator, a statesman whose devotion and loyalty to the republic was unquestioned. He was also a man of exceptional intellect and refinement who has exerted an enduring influence on Western civilization.
In spite of being a novus homo (“new man”)—none of his ancestors had attained the highest offices of state—Marcus Tullius Cicero went on to become one of Rome’s leading statesmen. A brilliant youth who studied under the best minds of the day, he entered the law as a route to politics. He rose swiftly and was renowned for the brilliance of his mind and his dazzling oratorical skills.
Cicero was never troubled by false modesty, but the Roman people generally shared his high opinion of himself. An outsider to the patrician-dominated political system, he won election to the highest offices of state, in each case at the earliest permitted age. In 63 BC, after reaching the pinnacle of political preferment, the consulship, he quickly established himself as a national hero. Discovering the Catiline conspiracy, a patrician plot to overthrow the republic, Cicero successfully swayed the senate into decreeing the death penalty for the conspirators, trouncing Julius Caesar in debate in the process. When he announced their execution to the crowds with just one word, vixerunt (“their lives are done”), Cicero was hailed with tumultuous rapture as pater patriae—“father of the country.”
In the space of a few sentences he could move juries and crowds from laughter to tears, anger or pity. Using simple words he could expose the heart of a complex matter, but if required he could befuddle his audience with rhetoric, winning cases by, as he put it, “throwing dust in the jurymen’s eyes.” His renowned declaration “Civis romanus sum” (“I am a Roman citizen”) has come to encapsulate the defense of a citizen’s rights against the overbearing power of the state. Cicero’s highly distinctive speaking style transformed the written language. His ability to layer clause upon clause while maintaining his argument’s clear line became the model for formal Latin.
A century after Cicero’s death, Plutarch eulogized him as the republic’s last true friend. In a time of civil unrest Cicero harked back to a golden age of political decorum. Idealistic yet consistent, he was convinced that virtue in public life would restore the republic to health. Refusing to be involved in political intrigue that might undermine the system, he rejected Caesar’s offer to join him in the so-called First Triumvirate of 60 BC. Cicero played no part in Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, but he seized on the end of his dictatorship to vigorously re-enter politics. Over the following months, taking his lead from the renowned Athenian orator Demosthenes, Cicero delivered the Philippics, a series of fourteen coruscating orations against the tyranny of Caesar and against his faithful henchman Mark Antony. It was a magnificent, if ultimately forlorn, cry for political freedom.
After Caesar as dictator had encouraged the staunch republican to refrain from politics, Cicero turned to philosophy to keep himself amused. As a youth he had been tutored by the famous Greek philosophers of the day. His knowledge, as broad as it was deep, was unmatched in Rome. Cicero’s treatise on the value of philosophy, Hortensius, was practically required reading in late antiquity. St. Augustine credited it as instrumental in his conversion. The early Catholic Church deemed Cicero a “righteous pagan.”