FPUScholarWorks When they make a desert, they call it peace: the timing of Judean and Roman identity formation in the first century. Author(s): Honora Howell Chapman. Source: Pacific Journal 7 (2012): 1-17. Publisher: Fresno Pacific University. Stable URL: http://hdl.handle.net/11418/536 FPUScholarWorks is an online repository for creative and scholarly works and other resources created by members of the Fresno Pacific University community. FPUScholarWorks makes these resources freely available on the Web and assures their preservation for the future. When They Make a Desert, They Call it Peace: The Timing of Judean and Roman Identity Formation in the First Century HONORA HOWELL CHAPMAN Introduction Timing is everything, according to the old adage. Yet in the fi eld of classical studies there is a real hesitation to see a correspondence between the Judean rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E. and the literature and monuments produced at Rome subsequently, except when a Roman author explicitly mentions the ru- ined city of Jerusalem or one of its refugees (such as the Judean priest and gen- eral turned historian, Josephus), or when discussing the Arch of Titus, which displays obvious artifacts from the temple in Jerusalem. More subtle echoes of the effects of this war are diffi cult to prove when doing analysis of the Ro- man texts, since classics scholars are less apt to apprehend veiled references to Judean affairs in any text, especially canonical works such as the writings of Tacitus. It is as if classicists today were channeling Tertullian, with a slight al- teration: “What indeed has Rome [instead of ‘Athens’] to do with Jerusalem?”1 A lot, it turns out, and timing is everything. Tacitus’s most famous phrase about Roman imperialism, “When they make a desert, they call it peace,” offers an excellent opportunity to analyze how tim- ing might, partially at least, explain its inspiration and meaning. This senatorial historian survived the murderous reign of Domitian towards the end of the fi rst century to enjoy the relative calm and success of the empire under Nerva and Trajan at the very end of the fi rst into the early part of the second century. The war in Judea lingered as a memory throughout the careers of all three of these emperors, with Domitian commemorating the triumph of his dead brother Titus, the conqueror of Jerusalem, on the famous Arch, while also allowing strip-searches of men to see if they were Judean and thus liable to pay the post- war tax. Nerva, however, advertised on coins that he was rescinding the power of false accusations made against people in order to force them to pay the 1 Pacifi c Journal post-war tax into the Fiscus Iudaicus, while Trajan eventually had to deal with a rebellion involving Judeans in Cyrene in 116 C.E. that echoed the troubles of decades before. Tacitus surely experienced the events related to the Judeans fi rst-hand at Rome, where he served as a senator from the time of Domitian’s father, Vespasian, and wrote his fi ve works. In one of these, his Histories, he displays his knowledge about the Judean people and their mores at the begin- ning of Book Five, but sadly the text is abruptly lost during his description of the siege of Jerusalem and the counterpart revolt of Civilis in Germany2 . Suf- fi ce it to say that Tacitus lived through these times and clearly recognized that the Judeans, whom we nowadays call the Jews, were part of the history of his own people, the Romans3 . It is in his earliest text that we fi nd Tacitus’s denunciation of Roman impe- rialism, a biography of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Iulius Agricola, published around 98 C.E.4 The scene comes when Agricola is leading a military expedi- tion into modern day Scotland where he is about to encounter the local warriors at Mons Graupius. Tacitus allows the Caledonian chief Calgacus to rally the troops with a scathing indictment of Roman actions in Britain. The “cynical,” as Martin Goodman calls him, Roman senator is putting these words into the enemy’s mouth;5 there were no transcripts of any Caledonian speech, so we are left with a Roman senator creating a speech for an enemy character ranting in hyper-eloquent rhetoric against the Roman army. Calgacus states: Whenever I consider the origin of this war and the necessities of our position, I have a sure confi dence that this day, and this union of yours, will be the beginning of freedom to the whole of Britain….But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifl e the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; nei- ther the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among 2 When They Make a Desert, They Call it Peace men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; when they make a desert, they call it peace.6 “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” With such damning words the Roman historian Tacitus allows the enemy Caledonian chief Calgacus to sum up the devastating nature of Roman imperialism. Scholars of the text of the Ag- ricola, Ogilvie and Richmond, have supplied a fi ne commentary on this most famous Tacitean aphorism, citing the writings of Quintus Curtius on Alexander the Great’s actions in Asia, and Pliny the Elder on what the Roman military did not do in Ethiopia, as providing parallel lines and possibly inspiration.7 A. D. Bosworth more recently has argued for the sustained infl uence of Curtius as a source for this line among many others in Tacitus.8 Curtius and Pliny, however, do not pair the idea of making a desert with the concept of calling it peace. Instead of looking at these Latin literary sources alone, I would like to examine the timing and historical context of this aphorism with respect to how the Ro- mans monumentalized their wars, including the war in Judea. When commenting on this passage in the Agricola, Ogilvie and Richmond point to Augustus’s Ara Pacis, or Altar of Peace, and Roman coinage depicting Pax “as lately as A.D. 80” as physical representations for this line in Tacitus, though they never explain why coinage of Pax was minted in this era.9 We can expand a bit more with respect to the Augustan monuments to peace and then carry this through to the Flavian era and the construction of the Temple of Peace, a remarkable monument to the Judean war built with an eye towards the Augustan regime and as a way of solidifying a new Flavian dynasty’s hold on power. Diana Spencer has argued in her 2011 book, Roman Landscape, that Ro- mans of the early empire formed their identities as citizens through the cultiva- tion and manipulation of the land into landscape.10 We should take her argu- ment one step further and examine how Romans understood their power to destroy such landscapes in other regions as part of their identity formation. 3 Pacifi c Journal By monumentalizing Peace/Pax after the total destruction of an enemy and an enemy’s land, Romans reshaped landscape both at the site of battle and back home in the capital as well, bringing the conquests home, so to speak. The Judean historian Josephus’s account of the revolt in Judea is a primary witness to the Roman propensity to turn a place into a desert in the name of “peace.” For several years before and after the dedication of the Temple of Peace in 75 C.E., Josephus wrote his history of the war, articulating the effects of Roman military might in terms related to the landscape of Judea that we fi nd in Calgacus’s speech: the “desert” as an image of war’s destructive nature, es- pecially when waged by Romans. The desert, however, plays a different role in the Judean scriptural tradition and identity formation, one celebrating the des- ert as a place of prophecy and even salvation for the Judean people. Josephus melds his interpretation of this scriptural tradition with the ambivalent Roman vision of its imperial mission, as described later in Tacitus. This blend of cultur- al identities formed in landscape culminates in Josephus’s text out in the desert at Masada just as it does physically at the Temple of Peace in Rome. The tim- ing of this temple’s dedication and the publication of Josephus’s Judean War in the late 70’s to early 80’s have never been taken into account when discussing infl uences on Tacitus creating his most famous aphorism on imperialism.11 The time has come for a deeper examination of the historical context. Monumentalizing War and Peace12 When Titus Flavius Vespasianus gained control of Rome after defeating two internal enemies, his competitors in the Roman civil war of 69 and the Judeans in the east, the emperor faced a challenge quite similar to that of Octavian ex- actly one hundred years before: how to represent this double victory through monuments. In some respects, the ensuing pax Flavia was a response to, an emulation of, and perhaps even a competition with the historical precedent of the pax Augusta and its monuments.13 In a recent popularizing book, The Archaeology of War, the editors imply the similarity between Octavian and Vespasian when they cleverly embed a 4 When They Make a Desert, They Call it Peace feature box on monuments to the fi rst-century Judean War, the Arch of Titus and the Colosseum, into a chapter on “The Spoils of Actium” set up by Oc- tavian in Greece.14 In the main body of this chapter, the authors Murray and Petsas discuss a massive war memorial dedicated by Octavian in 29 B.C.E.