151 “Leuke Kome in the land of the Nabataeans,” says Strabo under Tiberius, xvi. 4, 23, p. 780, “is a great place of trade, whither and whence the caravan-traders (καμηλέμποροι) go safely and easily from and to Petra with so large numbers of men and camels that they differ in nothing from encampments.” The Egyptian merchant also, writing under Vespasian, in his description of the coasts of the Red Sea (c. 19), mentions “the port and the fortress (φρούριον) of Leuce Come, whence the route leads towards Petra to the king of the Nabataeans Malichas. It may be regarded as the emporium for the goods conveyed thither from Arabia in not very large vessels. Therefore there is sent thither (ἀποστέλλεται) a receiver of the import-dues of a fourth of the value, and for the sake of security a centurion (ἑκατοντάρχης) with men.” As one belonging to the Roman empire here mentions officials and soldiers, these can only be Roman; the centurion does not suit the army of the Nabataean king, and the form of tax is quite the Roman. The bringing a client-state within the sphere of imperial taxation occurs elsewhere, e.g. in the regions of the Alps. The road from Petra to Gaza is mentioned by Plin. H. N. vi. 28, 144.

152 Waddington, 2196; Ἀδριανοῦ τοῦ καὶ Σοαίδου Μαλέχου ἐθνάρχου στρατηγοῦ νομάδων τὸ μνημεῖον.

153 Epiphanius, Haeres. li. p. 483, Dind., sets forth that the 25th December, the birthday of Christ, had already been festally observed after an analogous manner at Rome in the festival of the Saturnalia, at Alexandria in the festival (mentioned also in the decree of Canopus) of the Kikellia, and in other heathen worships. “This takes place in Alexandria at the so-called Virgin’s shrine (Κόριον) ... and if we ask people what this mystery means, they answer and say that to-day at this hour the Virgin has given birth to the Eternal (τὸν αἰῶνα). This takes place in like manner at Petra, the capital of Arabia, in the temple there, and in the Arabic language they sing the praise of the Virgin, whom they call in Arabic Chaamu, that is the maiden, and Him born of her Dusares, that is the Only-begotten of the Lord.” The name Chaamu is perhaps akin to the Aumu or Aumos of the Greek inscriptions of this region, who is compared with Ζεὺς ἀνίκητος Ἥλιος (Waddington, 2392–2395, 2441, 2445, 2456).

154 This is said apart from the remarkable Arabo-Greek inscription (see below) found in Harrân, not far from Zorava, of the year 568 A.D., set up by the phylarch Asaraelos, son of Talemos (Waddington, 2464). This Christian is a precursor of Mohammed.

155 Αὐσονίων μούσης ὑψινόου πρύτανις, Kaibel, Epigr. 440.

156 According to the Arabian accounts the Benu Sâlih migrated from the region of Mecca (about 190 A.D., according to the conjectures of Caussin de Perceval, Hist. des Arabes, i. 212) to Syria, and settled there alongside of the Benu-Samaida, in whom Waddington finds anew the φυλὴ Σομαιθηνῶν of an inscription of Suwêda (n. 2308). The Ghassanids, who (according to Caussin, about 205) migrated from Batn-Marr likewise to Syria and to the same region, were compelled by the Salihites, at the suggestion of the Romans, to pay tribute, and paid it for a time, until they (according to the same, about the year 292) overcame the Salihites, and their leader Thalaba, son of Amos, was recognised by the Romans as phylarch. This narrative may contain correct elements; but our standard authority remains always the account of Procopius, de bello Pers. i. 17, reproduced in the text. The phylarchs of individual provinces of Arabia (i.e. the province Bostra; Nov. 102 c.) and of Palestine (i.e. province of Petra; Procop. de bello Pers. i. 19), are older, but doubtless not much. Had a sheikh-in-chief of this sort been recognised by the Romans in the times before Justinian, the Roman authors and the inscriptions would doubtless show traces of it; but there are no such traces from the period before Justinian.

157 [This statement and several others of a kindred tenor in this chapter appear to rest on an unhesitating acceptance of views entertained by a recent school of Old Testament criticism, as to which it may at least be said: Adhuc sub iudice lis est.—TR.]

158 Whether the legal position of the Jews in Alexandria is warrantably traced back by Josephus (contra Ap. ii. 4) to Alexander is so far doubtful, as, to the best of our knowledge, not he, but the first Ptolemy, settled Jews in masses there (Josephus, Arch. xii. 1.; Appian, Syr. 50). The remarkable similarity of form assumed by the bodies of Jews in the different states of the Diadochi must, if it is not based on Alexander’s ordinances, be traced to rivalry and imitation in the founding of towns. The fact that Palestine was now Egyptian, now Syrian, doubtless exercised an essential influence in the case of these settlements.

159 The community of Jews in Smyrna is mentioned in an inscription recently found there (Reinach, Revue des études juives, 1883, p. 161): Ῥουφεῖνα Ἰουδαί(α) ἀρχισυναγωγὸς κατεσκεύασεν τὸ ἐνσόριον τοῖς ἀπελευθέροις καὶ θρέμ(μ)ασιν μηδένος ἄλ(λ)ου ἐξουσίαν ἔχοντος θάψαι τινά εἰ δέ τις τολμήσει, δώσει τῷ ἱερωτάτῳ ταμείῳ (δηναρίους) ͵αφ, καὶ τῷ ἔθνει τῶν Ἰουδαίων (δηναρίους) ͵α. Ταύτης τῆς ἐπιγραφῆς τὸ ἀντίγραφον ἀποκεῖται εἰς τὸ ἀρχεῖον. Simple collegia are, in penal threats of this sort, not readily put on a level with the state or the community.

160 If the Alexandrian Jews subsequently maintained that they were legally on an equal footing with the Alexandrian Macedonians (Josephus, contra Ap. ii. 4; Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 7) this was a misrepresentation of the true state of the case. They were clients in the first instance of the Phyle of the Macedonians, probably the most eminent of all, and therefore named after Dionysos (Theophilus, ad Autolycum, ii. 7), and, because the Jewish quarter was a part of this Phyle, Josephus in his way makes themselves Macedonians. The legal position of the population of the Greek towns of this category is most clearly apparent from the account of Strabo (in Josephus, Arch. xiv. 7, 2) as to the four categories of that of Cyrene: city-burgesses, husbandmen (γεωργοί), strangers, and Jews. If we lay aside the metoeci, who have their legal home elsewhere, there remain as Cyrenaeans having rights in their home the burgesses of full rights, that is, the Hellenes and what were allowed to pass as such, and the two categories of those excluded from active burgess-rights—the Jews, who form a community of their own, and the subjects, the Libyans, without autonomy. This might easily be so shifted, that the two privileged categories should appear as having equal rights.

161 Pseudo-Longinus, περὶ ὕψους, 9: “Far better than the war of the gods in Homer is the description of the gods in their perfection and genuine greatness and purity, like that of Poseidon (Ilias, xiii. 18 ff.). Just so writes the legislator of the Jews, no mean man (οὐχ ὁ τυχὼν ἀνήρ), after he has worthily apprehended and brought to expression the Divine power, at the very beginning of the Laws (Genesis, i. 3): ‘God said’—what? ‘Let there be light, and there was light; let the earth be, and the earth was.’”

162 The Jew Philo sets down the treatment of the Jews in Italy to the account of Sejanus (Leg. 24; in Flacc. 1), that of the Jews in the East to the account of the emperor himself. But Josephus rather traces back what happened in Italy to a scandal in the capital, which had been occasioned by three Jewish pious swindlers and a lady of rank converted to Judaism; and Philo himself states that Tiberius, after the fall of Sejanus, allowed to the governors only certain modifications in the procedure against the Jews. The policy of the emperor and that of his ministers towards the Jews was essentially the same.

163 Agrippa II., who enumerates the Jewish settlements abroad (in Philo, Leg. ad Gaium, 36), names no country westward of Greece, and among the strangers sojourning in Jerusalem, whom the Book of Acts, ii. 5 f., records, only Romans are named from the West.

164 Antipater began his career as governor (στρατηγός) of Idumaea (Josephus, Arch. xiv. 1, 3), and is there called administrator of the Jewish kingdom ὁ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἐπιμελητής (Joseph. Arch. xiv. 8, 1), that is, nearly first minister. More is not implied in the narrative of Josephus coloured with flattery towards Rome as towards Herod (Arch. xiv. 8, 5; Bell. Jud. i. 10, 3), that Caesar had left to Antipater the option of himself determining his position of power (δυναστεία), and, when the latter left the decision with him, had appointed him administrator (ἐπίτροπος) of Judaea. This is not, as Marquardt, Staatsalth. v. 1, 408, would have it, the (at that time not yet existing) Roman procuratorship of the imperial period, but an office formally conferred by the Jewish ethnarch, an ἐπιτροπή, like that mentioned by Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 6. In the official documents of Caesar’s time the high priest and ethnarch Hyrcanus alone represents the Jews; Caesar gave to Antipater what could be granted to the subjects of a dependent state, Roman burgess-rights and personal immunity (Josephus, Arch. xiv. 8, 3; Bell. Jud. i. 9, 5), but he did not make him an official of Rome. That Herod, driven out of Judaea, obtained from the Romans a Roman officer’s post possibly in Samaria, is credible; but the designations στρατηγὸς τῆς Κοίλης Συρίας (Josephus, Arch. xiv. 9, 5, c. 11, 4), or στρατηγὸς Κοίλης Συρίας καὶ Σαμαρείας (Bell. Jud. i. 10, 8) are at least misleading, and with as much incorrectness the same author names Herod subsequently, for the reason that he is to serve as counsellor τοῖς ἐπιτροπεύουσι τῆς Συρίας (Arch. xv. 10, 3), even Συρίας ὅλης ἐπίτροπον (Bell. Jud. i. 20, 4), where Marquardt’s change, Staatsalth. v. i. 408, Κοίλης destroys the sense.

165 In the decree of Caesar in Josephus, Arch. xiv. 10, 5, 6, the reading which results from Epiphanius is the only possible one; according to this the land is freed from the tribute (imposed by Pompeius; Josephus, Arch. xiv. 4, 4) from the second year of the current lease onward, and it is further ordained that the town of Joppa, which at that time passed over from Roman into Jewish possession, should continue indeed to deliver the fourth part of field-fruits at Sidon to the Romans, but for that there should be granted to Hyrcanus, likewise at Sidon, as an equivalent annually 20,675 bushels of grain, besides which the people of Joppa paid also the tenth to Hyrcanus. The whole narrative otherwise shows that the Jewish state was thenceforth free from payment of tribute; the circumstance that Herod pays φόροι from the districts assigned to Cleopatra which he leases from her (Arch. xv. 4, 2, 4, c. 5, 3) only confirms the rule. If Appian, B. C. v. 75, adduces among the kings on whom Antonius laid tribute Herod for Idumaea and Samaria, Judaea is not absent here without good reason; and even for these accessory lands the tribute may have been remitted to him by Augustus. The detailed and trustworthy account as to the census enjoined by Quirinius shows with entire clearness that the land was hitherto free from Roman tribute.

166 In the same decree it is said: καὶ ὅπως μηδεὶς μήτε ἄρχων μήτε στρατηγὸς ἢ πρεσβευτὴς ἐν τοῖς ὄροις τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἀνιστᾷ ("perhaps συνιστᾷ" Wilamowitz) συμμαχίαν καὶ στρατιώτας ἐξιῇ (so Wilamowitz, for ἐξείη) ἢ τὰ χρήματα τούτων εἰσπράττεσθαι ἢ εἰς παραχειμασίαν ἢ ἄλλῳ τινὶ ὀνόματι, ἀλλ' εἶναι πανταχόθεν ἀνεπηρεάστους (comp. Arch. xiv. 10, 2: παραχειμασίαν δὲ καὶ χρήματα πράττεσθαι οὐ δοκιμάζω). This corresponds in the main to the formula of the charter, a little older, for Termessus (C. I. L. i. n. 204): nei quis magistratu prove magistratu legatus ne[ive] quis alius meilites in oppidum Thermesum ... agrumve ... hiemandi caussa introducito ... nisei senatus nominatim utei Thermesum ... in hibernacula meilites deducantur decreverit. The marching through is accordingly allowed. In the Privilegium for Judaea the levy seems, moreover, to have been prohibited.

167 This title, which primarily denotes the collegiate tetrarchate, such as was usual among the Galatians, was then more generally employed for the rule of all together, nay, even for the rule of one, but always as in rank inferior to that of king. In this way, besides Galatia, it appears also in Syria, perhaps from the time of Pompeius, certainly from that of Augustus. The juxtaposition of an ethnarch and two tetrarchs, as it was arranged in the year 713 41 B.C. Judaea, according to Josephus (Arch. xiv. 13, 1; Bell. Jud. i. 12, 5), is not again met with elsewhere; Pherores tetrarch of Peraea under his brother Herodes (Bell. Jud. i. 24, 5) is analogous.

168 The statement of Josephus that Judaea was attached to the province of Syria and placed under its governor (Arch. xvii fin.: τοῦ δὲ Ἀρχελάου χώρας ὑποτελοῦς προσνεμηθείσης τῇ Σύρων; xviii. 1, 1: εἰς τὴν Ἰουδαίων προσθήκην τῆς Συρίας γενομένην; c. 4, 6) appears to be incorrect; on the contrary, Judaea probably formed thenceforth a procuratorial province of itself. An exact distinction between the de iure and de facto interference of the Syrian governor may not be expected in the case of Josephus. The fact that he organised the new province and conducted the first census does not decide the question what arrangement was assigned to it. Where the Jews complain of their procurator to the governor of Syria and the latter interferes against him, the procurator is certainly dependent on the legate; but, when L. Vitellius did this (Josephus, Arch. xviii. 4, 2), his power extended in quite an extraordinary way over the province (Tacitus, Ann. vi. 32; Staatsrecht, ii. 822), and in the other case the words of Tacitus, Ann. xii. 54: quia Claudius ius statuendi etiam de procuratoribus dederat, show that the governor of Syria could not have pronounced such a judgment in virtue of his general jurisdiction. Both the ius gladii of these procurators (Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 8, 1: μέχρι τοῦ κτείνειν λαβὼν παρὰ τοῦ Καίσαρος ἐξουσίαν, Arch. xviii. 1, 1; ἡγησόμενος Ἰουδαίων τῇ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἐξουσίᾳ) and their whole demeanour show that they did not belong to those who, placed under an imperial legate, attended only to financial affairs, but rather, like the procurators of Noricum and Raetia, formed the supreme authority for the administration of law and the command of the army. Thus the legates of Syria had there only the position which those of Pannonia had in Noricum and the upper German legate in Raetia. This corresponds also to the general development of matters; all the larger kingdoms were on their annexation not attached to the neighbouring large governorships, whose plenitude of power it was not the tendency of this epoch to enlarge, but were made into independent governorships, mostly at first equestrian.

169 According to Josephus (Arch. xx. 8, 7, more exact than Bell. Jud. ii. 13, 7) the greatest part of the Roman troops in Palestine consisted of Caesareans and Sebastenes. The ala Sebastenorum fought in the Jewish war under Vespasian (Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 12, 5). Comp. Eph. epigr. v. 194. There are no alae and cohortes Iudaeorum.

170 The revenues of Herod amounted, according to Josephus, Arch. xvii. 11, 4, to about 1200 talents, whereof about 100 fell to Batanaea with the adjoining lands, 200 to Galilee and Peraea, the rest to the share of Archelaus; in this doubtless the older Hebrew talent (of about £390) is meant, not, as Hultsch (Metrol.², p. 605) assumes, the denarial talent (of about £260), as the revenues of the same territory under Claudius are estimated in the same Josephus (Arch. xix. 8, 2), at 12,000,000 denarii (about £500,000). The chief item in it was formed by the land-tax, the amount of which we do not know; in the Syrian time it amounted at least for a time to the third part of corn and the half of wine and oil (1 Maccab. x. 30), in Caesar’s time for Joppa a fourth of the fruit (p. 175, note), besides which at that time the temple-tenth still existed. To this was added a number of other taxes and customs, auction-charges, salt-tax, road and bridge moneys, and the like; it is to these that the publicans of the Gospels have reference.

171 On the marble screen (δρύφακτος), which marked off the inner court of the temple, were placed for that reason tablets of warning in the Latin and Greek language (Josephus, Bell. Jud. v. 5, 2; vi. 2, 4; Arch. xv. 11, 5). One of the latter, which has recently been found (Revue Archéologique, xxiii. 1872, p. 220), and is now in the public museum of Constantinople, is to this effect: μήθ' ἕνα ἀλλογενῆ εἰσπορεύεσθαι ἐντὸς τοῦ περὶ τὸ ἱερὸν τρυφάκτου καὶ περιβόλου. ὃς δ' ἂν ληφθῆ, ἑαυτῷ αἴτιος ἔσται διὰ τὸ ἐξακολουθεῖν θάνατον. The iota in the dative is present, and the writing good and suitable for the early imperial period. These tablets were hardly set up by the Jewish kings, who would scarcely have added a Latin text, and had no cause to threaten the penalty of death with this singular anonymity. If they were set up by the Roman government, both are explained; Titus also says (in Josephus, Bell. Jud. vi. 2, 4), in an appeal to the Jews: οὐχ ἡμεῖς τοὺς ὑπερβάντας ὑμῖν ἀναιρεῖν ἐπετρέψαμεν, κἂν Ῥωμαῖός τις ᾖ;—If the tablet really bears traces of axe-cuts, these came from the soldiers of Titus.

172 The special hatred of Gaius against the Jews (Philo, Leg. 20) was not the cause, but the consequence, of the Alexandrian Jew-hunt. Since therefore the understanding of the leaders of the Jew-hunt with the governor (Philo, in Flacc. 4) cannot have subsisted on the footing that the Jews imagined, because the governor could not reasonably believe that he would recommend himself to the new emperor by abandoning the Jews, the question certainly arises, why the leaders of those hostile to the Jews chose this very moment for the Jew-hunt, and above all, why the governor, whose excellence Philo so emphatically acknowledges, allowed it, and, at least in its further course, took personal part in it. Probably things occurred as they are narrated above: hatred and envy towards the Jews had long been fermenting in Alexandria (Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 9; Philo, Leg. 18); the abeyance of the old stern government, and the evident disfavour in which the prefect stood with Gaius, gave room for the tumult; the arrival of Agrippa furnished the occasion; the adroit conversion of the synagogues into temples of Gaius stamped the Jews as enemies of the emperor, and, after this was done, Flaccus must certainly have seized on the persecution to rehabilitate himself thereby with the emperor.

173 When Strabo was in Egypt in the earlier Augustan period the Jews in Alexandria were under an Ethnarch (Geogr. xvii. 1, 13, p. 798, and in Josephus, Arch. xiv. 7, 2). Thereupon, when under Augustus the Ethnarchos or Genarchos, as he was called, died, a council of the elders took his place (Philo, Leg. 10); yet Augustus, as Claudius states (Josephus, Arch. xix. 5, 2), “did not prohibit the Jews from appointing an Ethnarch,” which probably is meant to signify that the choice of a single president was only omitted for this time, not abolished once for all. Under Gaius there were evidently only elders of the Jewish body; and also under Vespasian these are met with (Josephus, Bell. vii. 10, 1). An archon of the Jews in Antioch is named in Josephus, Bell. vii. 3, 3.

174 Apion spoke and wrote on all and sundry matters, upon the metals and the Roman letters, on magic and concerning the Hetaerae, on the early history of Egypt and the cookery receipts of Apicius; but above all he made his fortune by his discourses upon Homer, which acquired for him honorary citizenship in numerous Greek cities. He had discovered that Homer had begun his Iliad with the unsuitable word μῆνις for the reason that the first two letters, as numerals, exhibit the number of the books of the two epics which he was to write; he named the guest-friend in Ithaca, with whom he had made inquiries as to the draught-board of the suitors; indeed he affirmed that he had conjured up Homer himself from the nether world to question him about his native country, and that Homer had come and had told it to him, but had bound him not to betray it to others.

175 The writings of Philo, which bring before us this whole catastrophe with incomparable reality, nowhere strike this chord; but, apart even from the fact that this rich and aged man had in him more of the good man than of the good hater, it is obvious of itself that these consequences of the occurrences on the Jewish side were not publicly set forth. What the Jews thought and felt may not be judged of by what they found it convenient to say, particularly in their works written in Greek. If the Book of Wisdom and the third book of Maccabees are in reality directed against the Alexandrian persecution of the Jews (Hausrath, Neutestam. Zeitgesch. ii. 259 ff.)—which we may add is anything but certain—they are, if possible, couched in a still tamer tone than the writings of Philo.

176 This is perhaps the right way of apprehending the Jewish conceptions, in which the positive facts regularly run away into generalities. In the accounts of the Anti-Messias and of the Antichrist no positive elements are found to suit the emperor Gaius; the view that would explain the name Armillus, which the Talmud assigns to the former, by the circumstance that the emperor Gaius sometimes wore women’s bracelets (armillae, Suetonius, Gai. 52), cannot be seriously maintained. In the Apocalypse of John—the classical revelation of Jewish self-esteem and of hatred towards the Romans—the picture of the Anti-Messias is associated rather with Nero, who did not cause his image to be set up in the Holy of Holies. This composition belongs, as is well known, to a time and a tendency, which still viewed Christianity as essentially a Jewish sect; those elected and marked by the angel are all Jews, 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes, and have precedence over the “great multitude of other righteous ones,” i.e. of proselytes (ch. vii.; comp. ch. xii. 1). It was written, demonstrably, after Nero’s fall, and when his return from the East was expected. Now it is true that a pseudo-Nero appeared immediately after the death of the real one, and was executed at the beginning of the following year (Tacitus, Hist. ii. 8, 9); but it is not of this one that John is thinking, for the very exact account makes no mention, as John does, of the Parthians in the matter, and for John there is a considerable interval between the fall of Nero and his return, the latter even still lying in the future. His Nero is the person who, under Vespasian, found adherents in the region of the Euphrates, whom king Artabanus acknowledged under Titus and prepared to reinstate in Rome by military force, and whom at length the Parthians surrendered, after prolonged negotiations, about the year 88, to Domitian. To these events the Apocalypse corresponds quite exactly.

On the other hand, in a writing of this character no inference as to the state of the siege at the time can possibly be drawn, from the circumstance that, according to xi. 1, 2, only the outer court, and not the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Jerusalem was given into the power of the heathen; here everything in the details is imaginary, and this trait is certainly either invented at pleasure or, if the view be preferred, possibly based on orders given to the Roman soldiers, who were encamped in Jerusalem after its destruction, not to set foot in what was formerly the Holy of Holies. The foundation of the Apocalypse is indisputably the destruction of the earthly Jerusalem, and the prospect thereby for the first time opened up of its future ideal restoration; in place of the razing of the city which had taken place there cannot possibly be put the mere expectation of its capture. If, then, it is said of the seven heads of the dragon: βασιλεῖς ἑπτά εἰσιν· οἱ πέντε ἔπεσαν, ὁ εἷς ἐστιν, ὁ ἄλλος οὔπω ἦλθεν, καὶ ὅταν ἔλθη ὀλίγον αὐτὸν δεῖ μεῖναι (xvii. 10), the five, presumably, are Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, Nero, the sixth Vespasian, the seventh undefined; “the beast which was, and is not, and is itself the eighth, but of the seven,” is, of course, Nero. The undefined seventh is incongruous, like so much in this gorgeous, but contradictory and often tangled imagery; and it is added, not because the number seven was employed, which was easily to be got at by including Caesar, but because the writer hesitated to predicate immediately of the reigning emperor the short government of the last ruler and his overthrow by the returning Nero. But one cannot possibly—as is done after others by Renan—by including Caesar in the reckoning, recognise in the sixth emperor, “who is,” Nero, who immediately afterward is designated as he who “was and is not,” and in the seventh, who “has not yet come and will not rule long,” even the aged Galba, who, according to Renan’s view, was ruling at the time. It is clear that the latter does not belong at all to such a series, any more than Otho and Vitellius.

It is more important, however, to oppose the current conception, according to which the polemic is directed against the Neronian persecution of the Christians and the siege or the destruction of Jerusalem, whereas it is pointed against the Roman provincial government generally, and in particular against the worship of the emperors. If of the seven emperors Nero alone is named (by his numerical expression), this is so, not because he was the worst of the seven, but because the naming of the reigning emperor, while prophesying a speedy end of his reign in a published writing, had its risk, and some consideration towards the one “who is” beseems even a prophet. Nero’s name was given up, and besides, the legend of his healing and of his return was in every one’s mouth; thereby he has become for the Apocalypse the representative of the Roman imperial rule, and the Antichrist. The crime of the monster of the sea, and of his image and instrument, the monster of the land, is not the violence to the city of Jerusalem (xi. 2)—which appears not as their misdeed, but rather as a portion of the world-judgment (in which case also consideration for the reigning emperor may have been at work)—but the divine worship, which the heathen pay to the monster of the sea (xiii. 8: προσκυνήσουσιν αὐτὸν πάντες οἱ κατοικοῦντες ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς), and which the monster of the land—called for that reason also the pseudo-prophet—demands and compels for that of the sea (xiii. 12: ποιεῖ τὴν γῆν καὶ τοὺς κατοικοῦντας ἐν αὐτῇ ἵνα προσκυνήσουσιν τὸ θηρίον τὸ πρῶτον, οὗ ἐθεραπεύθη ἡ πληγὴ τοῦ θανάτου αὐτοῦ); above all, he is upbraided with the desire to make an image for the former (xiii. 14: λέγων τοῖς κατοικοῦσιν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, ποιῆσαι εἰκόνα τῷ θηρίῳ ὃς ἔχει τὴν πληγὴν τῆς μαχαίρης καὶ ἔζησεν, comp. xiv. 9; xvi. 2; xix. 20). This, it is plain, is partly the imperial government beyond the sea, partly the lieutenancy on the Asiatic continent, not of this or that province or even of this or that person, but generally such representation of the emperor as the provincials of Asia and Syria knew. If trade and commerce appear associated with the use of the χάραγμα of the monster of the sea (xiii. 16, 17), there lies clearly at bottom an abhorrence of the image and legend of the imperial money—certainly transformed in a fanciful way, as in fact Satan makes the image of the emperor speak. These very governors appear afterwards (xvii.) as the ten horns, which are assigned to the monster in its copy, and are here called, quite correctly, the “ten kings, which have not the royal dignity, but have authority like kings;” the number, which is taken over from the vision of Daniel, may not, it is true, be taken too strictly.

In the sentences of death pronounced over the righteous, John is thinking of the regular judicial procedure on account of the refusal to worship the emperor’s image, such as the Letters of Pliny describe (xiii. 15: ποιήσῃ ἵνα ὅσοι ἐὰν μὴ προσκυνήσωσιν τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ θηρίου ἀποκτανθῶσιν, comp. vi. 9; xx. 4). When stress is laid on these sentences of death being executed with special frequency in Rome (xvii. 6; xvii. 24), what is thereby meant is the execution of sentences wherein men were condemned to fight as gladiators or with wild beasts, which often could not take place on the spot where they were pronounced, and, as is well known, took place chiefly in Rome itself (Modestinus, Dig. xlviii. 19, 31). The Neronian executions on account of alleged incendiarism do not formally belong to the class of religious processes at all, and it is only prepossession that can refer the martyrs’ blood shed in Rome, of which John speaks, exclusively or pre-eminently to these events. The current conceptions as to the so-called persecutions of the Christians labour under a defective apprehension of the rule of law and the practice of law subsisting in the Roman empire; in reality the persecution of the Christians was a standing matter as was that of robbers; only such regulations were put into practice at times more gently or even negligently, at other times more strictly, and were doubtless on occasion specially enforced from high quarters. The “war against the saints” is only a subsequent interpolation on the part of some, for whom John’s words did not suffice (xiii. 7). The Apocalypse is a remarkable evidence of the national and religious hatred of the Jews towards the Occidental government; but to illustrate with these colours the Neronian tale of horrors, as Renan does in particular, is to shift the place of the facts and to detract from their depth of significance. The Jewish national hatred did not wait for the conquest of Jerusalem to originate it, and it made, as might be expected, no distinction between the good and the bad Caesar; its Anti-Messias is named Nero, doubtless, but not less Vespasian or Marcus.

177 The circumstance that Suetonius (Claud. 25) names a certain Chrestus as instigator of the constant troubles in Rome, that had in the first instance called forth these measures (according to him the expulsion from Rome; in contrast to Dio, lx. 6) has been without sufficient reason conceived as a misunderstanding of the movement called forth by Christ among Jews and proselytes. The Book of Acts xviii. 2, speaks only of the expulsion of the Jews. At any rate it is not to be doubted that, with the attitude at that time of the Christians to Judaism, they too fell under the edict.

178 The Jews there at least appear later to have had only the fourth of the five wards of the city in their possession (Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 8). Probably, if the 400 houses that were razed had been given back again to them in so striking a manner, the Jewish authors Josephus and Philo, who lay stress on all the imperial marks of favour shown to the Jews, would not have been silent on the subject.

179 The question was, apparently, whether the gift of the tenth sheaf belonged to Aaron the priest (Numb. xviii. 28), to the priest generally, or to the high-priest (Ewald, Jüd. Gesch. vi.³ 635).

180 It is nothing but an empty fancy, when the statesman Josephus, in his preface to his History of the war, puts it as if the Jews of Palestine had reckoned on the one hand upon a rising of the Euphrates-lands, on the other hand, upon the troubles in Gaul and the threatening attitude of the Germans and on the crises of the year of four emperors. The Jewish war had long been in full course when Vindex appeared against Nero, and the Druids really did what is here assigned to the Rabbis; and, however great was the importance of the Jewish Diaspora in the lands of the Euphrates, a Jewish expedition from that quarter against the Romans of the East was almost as inconceivable as from Egypt and Asia Minor. Doubtless some free-lances came from thence, as e.g. some young princes of the zealously Jewish royal house of Adiabene (Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 19, 2; vi. 6, 4), and suppliant embassies went thither from the insurgents (ib. vi. 6, 2); but even money hardly flowed to the Jews from this quarter in any considerable amount. This statement is characteristic of the author more than of the war. If it is easy to understand how the Jewish leader of insurgents and subsequent courtier of the Flavians was fond of comparing himself with the Parthians exiled at Rome, it is the less to be excused that modern historical authorship should walk in similar paths, and in endeavouring to apprehend these events as constituent parts of the history of the Roman court and city or even of the Romano-Parthian quarrels, should by this insipid introduction of so-called great policy obscure the fearful necessity of this tragic development.

181 Josephus (Arch. xx. 8, 9), makes him indeed secretary of Nero for Greek correspondence, although he, where he follows Roman sources (xx. 8, 2), designates him correctly as prefect; but certainly the same person is meant. He is called παιδαγωγός with him as with Tacitus, Ann. xiii. 2: rector imperatoriae iuventae.

182 It is not quite clear what were the arrangements for the forces occupying Syria after the Parthian war was ended in the year 63. At its close there were seven legions stationed in the East, the four originally Syrian, 3d Gallica, 6th Ferrata, 10th Fretensis, 12th Fulminata, and three brought up from the West, the 4th Scythica from Moesia (I. 213), the 5th Macedonica, probably from the same place (I. 219; for which probably an upper German legion was sent to Moesia I. 132), the 15th Apollinaris from Pannonia (I. 219). Since, excepting Syria, no Asiatic province was at that time furnished with legions, and the governor of Syria certainly in times of peace had never more than four legions, the Syrian army beyond doubt had at that time been brought back, or at least ought to have been brought back, to this footing. The four legions which accordingly were to remain in Syria were, as this was most natural, the four old Syrian ones; for the 3d had in the year 70 just marched from Syria to Moesia (Suetonius, Vesp. 6; Tacitus, Hist. ii. 74), and that the 6th, 10th, 12th belonged to the army of Cestius follows from Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 9, c. 19, 7; vii. 1, 3. Then, when the Jewish war broke out, seven legions were again destined for Asia, and of these four for Syria (Tacitus, Hist. i. 10), three for Palestine; the three legions added were just those employed for the Parthian war, the 4th, 5th, 15th, which perhaps at that time were still in course of marching back to their old quarters. The 4th probably went at that time definitively to Syria, where it thenceforth remained; on the other hand, the Syrian army gave off the 10th to Vespasian, presumably because this had suffered least in the campaign of Cestius. In addition he received the 5th and the 15th. The 5th and the 10th legions came from Alexandria (Josephus, Bell. Jud. iii. 1, 3, c. 4, 2); but that they were brought up from Egypt cannot well be conceived, not merely because the 10th was one of the Syrian, but especially because the march by land from Alexandria on the Nile to Ptolemais through the middle of the insurgent territory at the beginning of the Jewish war could not have been so narrated by Josephus. Far more probably Titus went by ship from Achaia to Alexandria on the Gulf of Issus, the modern Alexandretta, and brought the two legions thence to Ptolemais. The orders to march may have reached the 15th somewhere in Asia Minor, since Vespasian, doubtless in order to take them over, went to Syria by land (Josephus, Bell. Jud. iii. 1, 3). To these three legions, with which Vespasian began the war, there was added under Titus a further one of the Syrian, the 12th. Of the four legions that occupied Jerusalem the two previously Syrian remained in the East, the 10th in Judaea, the 12th in Cappadocia, while the 5th returned to Moesia, and the 15th to Pannonia (Josephus, Bell. Jud. vii. 1, 3, c. 5, 3).

183 To the three legions there belonged five alae and eighteen cohorts, and the army of Palestine consisting of one ala and five cohorts. These auxilia numbered accordingly 3000 alarians and (since among the twenty-three cohorts ten were 1000 strong, thirteen 720, or probably rather only 420 strong; for instead of the startling ἑξακοσίους we expect rather τριακοσίους ἑξάκοντα) 16,240 (or, if 720 is retained, 19,360) cohortales. To these fell to be added 1000 horsemen from each of the four kings, and 5000 Arabian archers, with 2000 from each of the other three kings. This gives together—reckoning the legion at 6000 men—52,240 men, and so towards 60,000, as Josephus (Bell. Jud. iii. 4, 2) says. But as the divisions are thus all calculated at the utmost normal strength, the effective aggregate number can hardly be estimated at 50,000. These numbers of Josephus appear in the main trustworthy, just as the analogous ones for the army of Cestius (Bell. Jud. ii. 18, 9); whereas his figures, resting on the census, are throughout measured after the scale of the smallest village in Galilee numbering 15,000 inhabitants (Bell. Jud. iii. 3, 2), and are historically as useless as the figures of Falstaff. It is but seldom, e.g. at the siege of Jotapata, that we recognise reported numbers.

184 This arch was erected to Titus after his death by the imperial senate. Another, dedicated to him during his short government by the same senate in the circus (C. I. L. vi. 944) specifies even with express words as the ground of erecting the monument, “because he, according to the precept and direction and under the superintendence of his father, subdued the people of the Jews and destroyed the town of Hierusolyma, which up to his time had either been besieged in vain by all generals, kings, and peoples, or not assailed at all.” The historic knowledge of this singular document, which ignores not merely Nebuchadnezzar and Antiochus Epiphanes, but their own Pompeius, stands on the same level with its extravagance in the praise of a very ordinary feat of arms.

185 The account of Josephus, that Titus with his council of war resolved not to destroy the temple, excites suspicion by the manifest intention of it, and, as the use made of Tacitus in the chronicle of Sulpicius Severus is completely proved by Bernays, it may certainly well be a question whether his quite opposite account (Chron. ii. 30, 6), that the council of war had resolved to destroy the temple, does not proceed from Tacitus, and whether the preference is not to be given to it, although it bears traces of Christian revision. This view further commends itself through the fact that the dedication addressed to Vespasian of the Argonautica of the poet Valerius Flaccus celebrates the victor of Solyma, who hurls the fiery torches.