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The Impact of the Roman Army in the Province of Judaea/Syria Palaestina

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The Impact of the Roman Army in the Province of Judaea/Syria Palaestina THE IMPACT OF THE ROMAN ARMY IN THE PROVINCE OF JUDAEA/SYRIA PALAESTINA Hannah M. Cotton The impact of empire may include such matters as culture, language, religion, the imperial cult, law, etc. The army was always involved in the transmission of all of these. However, in the case of the province of Judaea/Syria Palaestina, we should stress rst and above all the antagonism, the disastrous clashes; all other forms of intercourse pale against the crude fact of the suppression twice, within the span of 70 years, of two major national and religious revolts—two great catastro- phes which changed the history of this province—indeed the entire course of Jewish history. The Romans could not have foreseen the existence of special prob- lems here, and indeed the integration of the province of Judaea into the Imperium Romanum was not different from that of other parts of the Roman Near East. Like the rest of the Roman Near East, so far as the Romans were concerned, Judaea came already into their sphere of in uence in the second century bce, that is long before its so-to-speak ‘of\ cial’ provincialisation.1 True, at the beginning there were ] uctuations between direct Roman and dynastic native rule, but there was nothing unique about this. Identical patterns can be discerned in the case of Commagene for example, as demonstrated recently by Michael Speidel, to the extent that here too opposing factions in the native population favoured direct Roman rule or their own dynasty.2 So far as the governor of Syria was concerned, there was no fundamental difference in status between Judaea as a client kingdom or as part of the province of Syria under its own prefect: the ultimate responsibility rested with the consular governor of the neighbouring province, even though the territory was administered separately or differently from 1 I subscribe to Israel Shatzman’s view expressed in great detail in ‘The Integration of Judaea into the Roman Empire’, Scripta Classica Israelica 18 (1999), 49ff. Thus what happened in 63 bce was in no way something ‘bearing on the new political reality’. 2 M.A. Speidel, ‘Early Roman Rule in Commagene’, Scripta Classica Israelica 24 (2005), 85ff. Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access 394 hannah m. cotton the rest of the province under his control.3 The praefectus of Judaea should be equated with these prefects of civitates and gentes, known to us solely from inscriptions in northern Spain and the lower Danube provinces, who had a few auxiliary units under their command. Spe- cial circumstances—like distrust of the local elites or some structural anomalies from the Roman perspective—called for the presence of a special functionary between the Syrian governor and the local units.4 There is no Josephus for these areas to esh out the lapidary evidence of the inscriptions. And the disparate character of the evidence, epi- graphic in the case of the praefecti civitatium or gentium, and literary in the case of the prefects of Judaea, seems to have blinded people to the similarity between them. The history of Judaea as an independent province may have begun in 44 ce with the death of Agrippa I, and the provincialisation of his kingdom. This time the territory in question was much larger than in 6 ce. Furthermore, under Claudius the equestrian procurator as a praesidial governor makes his appearance elsewhere in the Empire. Nonetheless, whereas the title praefectus is epigraphically attested for Pontius Pilatus, the title procurator or epitropos is not attested in an inscription for any of the equestrians serving as so-called governors in Judaea. We cannot be sure that a praesidial procurator ever made his appearance here. The his- tory of the independent province of Judaea may well begin only after the end of the revolt, unless (which is very likely) this has already taken place during the suppression of the revolt.5 If this is true, then it would prove that nothing short of a full scale revolt jolted the Romans into the realisation that this territory could neither be annexed to the province of Syria, nor made subordinate to the Syrian governor either as a prefecture or as a client kingdom, but had to be made into an independent province with its own governor. 3 See H.M. Cotton, ‘Some Aspects of the Roman Administration of Judaea/Syria- Palaestina’, in W. Eck, ed., Lokale Autonomie und römische Ordnungsmacht in den kaiserzeitlichen Provinzen vom 1.–3. Jh. Kolloquien des Historischen Kollegs (Munich 1999), 75ff. 4 E.g. the praefecti in Spain: CIL II 4616 = ILS 6948: praefectus Asturiae, tribunus mili- tum legionis secundae; CIL II 3271: praef. Gallaeciae; on the Danube and the Alps: CIL V 1838/9 = ILS 1349: primopilus leg. V Macedonic., praef. civitatium Treballiae, praef. civitatium in Alpibus Maritimis; CIL IX 3044 = ILS 2689: pra[ef(ectus)] Raetis Vindolicis valli[s P]oeninae et levis armatur(ae). On these early prefects see H. Zwicky, Zur Verwendung des Militärs in der Verwaltung der römischen Kaiserzeit (1944), 11ff. 5 Note the presence of a nancial procurator, Antonius Iulianus, in Titus’ war council during the siege of Jerusalem, Josephus, Bellum Iudaicum 6.238. Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access the roman army in the province of judaea 395 The need to keep a legion in Judaea led Vespasian to create here an altogether new kind of provincial organisation: the one-legion prov- ince, not by reduction,6 governed by a governor with praetorian rank in charge of the province as well as of the legion. Although the new arrangement is attested for the rst time in the titulature of the third governor, the conqueror of Masada, L. Flavius Silva, we may safely assume after Werner Eck’s restoration of the name and title of the sec- ond governor, Sex. Lucilius Bassus, in the inscription from Abu Gosh,7 that this was the arrangement from the very beginning. But even before the outbreak of the second revolt, at an unknown date in the early second century Judaea became a consular province,8 with two legions as well as three cavalry alae and twelve cohorts at the disposal of the governor, as a military diploma from 139 shows9—and all that in what was after all an exceedingly small province. We have come a long way as far as military force is concerned since the provincialisation of Judaea in 6 ce, when the prefect inherited the Herodian army numbering one cavalry ala and \ ve infantry cohorts.10 Their names, Kaisareis and Sebastenoi, indicate that they were locally recruited amongst the non-Jewish population of Caesarea and Sebaste and their territories ( Josephus, Antiquitates Iudaicae 20.176). At the out- break of the Great Revolt there were Roman units stationed at various places: at Ascalon (where a cohort and an ala are attested, Josephus, Bellum Iudaicum 3.12), Kypros, above Jericho, Machaerus (Bellum Iudaicum 2. 484–485), Masada (Bellum Iudaicum 2.408), perhaps also in Samaria (Bellum Iudaicum 3.309) and the Great Valley (known in English as the Jezreel Valley) ( Josephus, Vita 115). It is reasonable to assume that the presence of units in different key positions in the province was not just an emergency measure, but represents the current situation from the establishment of the province.11 6 B.E. Thomasson, ‘The One-Legion Provinces of the Roman Empire during the Principate’, Opuscula Romana IX 7 (1973), 61ff. 7 W. Eck, ‘Sextus Lucilius Bassus, der Eroberer von Herodium, in einer Bauinschrift von Abu Gosh’, Scripta Classica Israelica 18 (1999), 109ff. 8 H.M. Cotton and W. Eck, ‘Governors and their Personnel on Latin Inscriptions from Caesarea Maritima’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities VII 7 (2001), 215ff. 9 CIL XVI 87, 139 ce. 10 Josephus, Antiquitates Iudaicae 19.365; cf. Bellum Iudaicum 3.66. 11 H.M. Cotton and J. Geiger, Masada II: The Latin and Greek Documents ( Jerusalem 1989), 14. Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access 396 hannah m. cotton After the fall of Jerusalem, Josephus tells us: “Titus decided to leave the Tenth Legion, along with some squadrons of cavalry and com- panies of infantry, as the local garrison.”12 The legio X Fretensis which had belonged to the Syrian army since at least 6 ce, and perhaps even before, participated in the subjugation of the Galilee and was part of the force employed by Titus in the siege of Jerusalem. Its presence in Jerusalem is supported by the evidence of inscriptions, coins and brick stamp impressions. A newly published diploma from 90 ce identi es for us the ‘squadrons of cavalry and companies of infantry’ mentioned by Josephus as two alae and seven cohorts.13 They replaced the Kaisareis and Sebastenoi which were deported from the province (Antiquitates Iudaicae 19.366). Bearing in mind that military diplomata list only those units whose veterans are the subject of the constitution recorded in them, the nine units men- tioned in the diploma from 90 ce may not have constituted the entire auxiliary force in the province of Judaea at that time. However, two considerations buttress the assumption that we probably have here the full auxiliary force in Judaea at the time. First, the diploma records eight quingenary units (ca. 500 soldiers each) and one milliary unit, thus roughly a force of 5,000 soldiers which is more or less what one would have expected in a one-legion province, if it is true that the size of the auxiliary in a province was more or less commensurate with that of the citizen force.
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