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Home , Gamla, Gerasa (Judaea), Herodium, Roman governor, Roman province, Sicarii

THE IMPACT OF THE IN THE OF JUDAEA/ 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/, 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 . The Romans could not have foreseen the existence of special prob- lems here, and indeed the integration of the province of Judaea into the 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 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 : the ultimate responsibility rested with the consular governor of the neighbouring province, even though the was administered separately or differently from

1 I subscribe to Shatzman’s view expressed in great detail in ‘The Integration of Judaea into the ’, 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 of civitates and gentes, known to us solely from inscriptions in northern and the lower Danube , 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 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 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 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 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 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 : 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 ’ war council during the siege of , Josephus, Bellum Iudaicum 6.238.

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The need to keep a legion in Judaea led 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 , 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 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 and Sebaste and their ( 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 , (Bellum Iudaicum 2. 484–485), Masada (Bellum Iudaicum 2.408), perhaps also in (Bellum Iudaicum 3.309) and the Great Valley (known in English as the ) ( 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 ’, Opuscula Romana IX 7 (1973), 61ff. 7 W. Eck, ‘Sextus Lucilius Bassus, der Eroberer von , in einer Bauinschrift von Abu Gosh’, Scripta Classica Israelica 18 (1999), 109ff. 8 H.M. Cotton and W. Eck, ‘Governors and their Personnel on Inscriptions from ’, 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.

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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 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. Secondly, two more diplomata from 86 and 87 mention six and eight units respectively out of the nine units known from the diploma of 90.14 It is extremely unlikely that a unit which was stationed in the province at the time would not be mentioned in at least one of the three constitutions issued for this particular province in the course of the four years 86–90. As pointed out before, this entire force was doubled when the rank of the governor and of the province was raised from praetorian to consular sometime in the early years of , if not already under : perhaps already in 117. Lusius Quietus, who had put down the Jewish revolt in the eastern provinces,

12 Bellum Iudaicum 7.5. 13 Ala I Thracum Mauretana, Ala Veterana Gaetulorum, Cohors I Augusta Lusitanorum, Cohors I Damascena Armeniaca, Cohors I milliaria sagittariorum, Cohors I Thracum, Cohors II, Thra- cum, Cohors II Cantabrorum, Cohors III Callaecorum Bracaraugustanorum, see H.M. Cotton, W. Eck and B. Isaac, ‘Titus Pomponius Bassus, Governor of Judaea and a New Military Diploma from 90 ce’, Studies in Archaeology 2 (2003), 17–31. 14 CIL XVI 33 from 86 ce and an unpublished diploma from 87 ce.

Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access the roman army in the province of judaea 397 became the rst consular governor of Judaea for a short period.15 I resist the temptation to go into the causes for the ‘promotion’ of the province. This is likely to have been connected with the Jewish revolts in the diaspora in 115–117. All that needs to be said at this point is that by a process of trial and error—if one may thus describe the two revolts—the Romans discovered the unique problems presented by this province and addressed them by considerably increasing the military force stationed here. It is important to emphasise how great these two revolts were, by any standards. For the rst revolt, culminating in the siege of Jerusalem which lasted some ve months, the Romans marshalled four legions, with detachments (vexillationes) of two others, twenty infantry cohorts, eight mounted alae, and 18,000 men, supplied by four dependent kings. The victory was celebrated in a magni cent triumph and in a series of monuments which partly transformed the centre of . In a recent article Fergus Millar rightly emphasises that we should count as war records not only the two arches erected to Titus on top of the Veleia and in the Circus Maximus but also the two greatest monuments of the Flavian period, namely the Temple of Peace and the Colosseum.16 Thus the victory over the was monumentalised; it left an indelible imprint on the architecture of the of Rome. The Templum Pacis, displaying as it did among its other treasures also the spoils from the temple in Jerusalem, symbolised not merely an end to the civil wars of the long year 69, but the reestablishment of peace in the empire—thus rivalling ’ celebration of his two parallel achievements in the Augusti and the Temple of Victor. True, the Bar Kokhba revolt left no such monumental record on the public sphere in the city of Rome.17 However, even the ‘minimalists’ concede that in addition to the two legions of the Judaean garrison, at least seven more legions in full force or represented by vexillationes

15 Cotton and Eck 2001, op. cit. (n. 8), 222f. 16 ‘Last Year in Jerusalem: Monuments of in Flavian Rome’, in J. Edmondson, S. Mason, and J. Rives, eds., Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (Oxford 2005), 101ff. 17 Although the two fragmentary inscriptions, found not far from the Templum divi Vespasiani, certainly justify Werner Eck’s claim that they were displayed on monuments which presented Hadrian as Vespasian’s successor in Rome’s war against its Jewish rebels, see W. Eck, ‘Hadrian, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, and the Epigraphic Transmission’, in P. Schäfer, ed., The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered. Texts and Studies in Ancient 100 (Tübingen 2003), 165.

Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access 398 hannah m. cotton took part in suppressing the revolt. There must have been more, even if not all at the same time. Given the province’s size, this was a huge military force. Werner Eck’s ‘Roman point of view’ on the Bar Kokhba revolt should leave us in no doubt as to its magnitude. Let me quote from his conclusion:18 The Bar Kokhba revolt, with its initial heavy losses in manpower, must have dealt a heavy blow to Roman power, pride, and sense of security—all the more so since the war was not restricted to Judaea itself, but spilled over the borders into Arabia and perhaps also into Syria. The extraor- dinary measures taken by Hadrian to put down the revolt . . . vindicate the truthfulness of this claim. . . . Hadrian accepted for the rst time an im peratorial acclamation for a military victory; and no less than three senatorial generals who had contributed to this nal victory and thereby to the restoration of Roman pride and self-con dence, received excep- tional distinctions—the ornamenta triumphalia. A huge arch was erected near Tel Shalem, in the defeated province itself, probably by order of senatus populusque Romanus, to commemorate the victory. From the Roman perspective . . . the extraordinary measures and the exceptional distinctions bestowed on three senatorial generals prove more than anything else the gravity of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the reality of the threat. Finally, we may recall, the name of the province was changed from Judaea to Syria Palaestina. Our familiarity with the new name may have jaded us as to the signi cance of the change, but Eck rightly points out that although the Romans changed provinces’ names quite often, never before (or after) was an old name of a province changed as a corollary of a revolt.19 It was a kind of damnatio memoriae: Judaea was air-brushed out of the map of Roman provinces. Although the change of name was not due to demographic factors, the suppression of this revolt brought with it a dramatic reduction in the size of the Jewish population in the province. Dio’s numbers need not be exaggerated: “Fifty of their most important outposts and 985 of their most famous were razed to the ground and 580,000 men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those

18 W. Eck, ‘The Bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View’, Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999), 89. This has become the consensus nowadays, see P. Schäfer’s Preface to The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered 2003, op. cit. (n. 17), xx. 19 “Iudaea, derived from Iudaei, ceased to exist for the Roman government after the Bar Kokhba revolt. . . . The change of name was part of the punishment in icted on the Jews; they were punished with the loss of a name. This is the clear message of this exceptional measure, the one and only example of such a measure in the history of the empire”, Eck 1999, op. cit. (n. 18), 89.

Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access the roman army in the province of judaea 399 that perished by famine, disease and re was past nding out.”20 Nor need we doubt Dio’s summing up: “nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate.” Recent archaeological excavations and surveys con- ducted by the Israeli archaeologist Boaz Zissu21 in Judaea proper (i.e. the area covered by the Judaean Hills, the Shephela and the Judaean desert)—the very territory where an independent Jewish State survived for over three and a half years—attest major and profound destruc- tion in the wake of the revolt. The second revolt thus had long-term repercussions on the pattern of Jewish settlement in the province—far exceeding those of the so-called Great Revolt of 66–70 ce. To the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the rst revolt, a major dislocation had now been added: Judaea proper ceased to be populated by Jews and the centre of Jewish life moved to the Galilee. This presentation so far is quite rightly open to criticism: my associa- tion of Judaea/Syria Palaestina with the history of the Jewish people assumes a total overlap between the province and the Jewish ethnos who lived here. Such overlap did not exist even before the two revolts. As an aside I may point out that one of the problems encountered by the editors of the current project, the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP ), has been to de ne the territory from which inscriptions should be collected. During the time span covered by this multilingual corpus, that is the millenium between Alexander and Muhammad, the borders of the territory one has in mind were never static; moreover this area never coincided with any ancient Roman or Byzantine province, let alone matched the territory of any national or ethnic unit.22 Nonetheless, I am sure that it can be agreed that it is the more complex encounter between the Jewish people and the Roman army, as the spearhead of Roman government and civilisation, that is intriguing in this context, rather than the encounter between Rome and the other peoples who lived within the borders of what we may call the province of Judaea/Syria Palaestina. It can be safely assumed, although there is no de nite evidence at present for it,23 that Hadrian’s in 130 was celebrated in the Greek

20 69.14.3. 21 Boaz Zissu, ‘Rural Settlement in the Judaean Hills and Foothills from the End of the Period to the Bar Kokhba Revolt’, PhD thesis submitted to the Hebrew University in 2002. 22 On the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP) see Scripta Classica Israelica 18 (1999), 175f.; Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 127 (1999), 307f. 23 But see L. Di Segni, ‘A New Toponym in Southern Samaria’, Liber Annuus 44 (1994), 579–584; SEG XLIV, no. 1361; AE 1994, no. 1781. For a slightly revised edition see

Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access 400 hannah m. cotton of Judaea in a way not unlike what took place across the provincial border, in the city of in Arabia. The city erected a triumphal arch of the Emperor in accordance with the terms of the testament of one of its citizens, Flavius Agrippa. Three other statues of the emperor were raised in the city, two by the city itself ( ) and one by a private person—all dated by the 14th tribunician power to the year 130, and hence dedicated on the same occasion.24 Parallel examples of such a reception of an emperor on the move could be adduced from all over the empire.25 In sheer and signi cant contrast, for the Jewish people this visit spelled dire disaster; it shattered once and for all any hope of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, for on this occasion Hadrian decided on the foundation of —a pagan Roman on the site of Jerusalem. This act, to quote Martin Goodman’s deliberately provocative formulation, was the “ nal solution for Jewish rebelliousness”;26 it served as the direct cause for a second revolt, as Dio tells us: “At Jerusalem he founded a city in place of the one which had been razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and instead of the temple he raised a new temple to Jupiter.27 This brought on a war of no slight importance nor of brief duration for the Jews deemed it intolerable that foreign races should be settled in their city and foreign religious rites planted there.” (69.12.1–2) Nowhere is the con ict more extremely present and are the rivalling forces more sharply delineated than in the story of Masada, where

now L. Di Segni, ‘The Hadrianic Inscription from Southern Samaria (?)—A Palinode’, Liber Annuus 53 (2003) [2005], 335–340. However, as observed by P.-L. Gatier already on the occasion of the rst publication (‘Bulletin épigraphique’, Revue des Études Grec- ques 109 [1996], 649–650, no. 486), it would be hazardous to revise our view of the relationship between the imperial power and villages in Judaea solely on the basis of an inscription found in suspicious circumstances. 24 For the arch see C.B. Welles, ‘The Inscriptions’, in C.H. Kraehling, Gerasa, City of the (New Haven 1938), no. 58 and for the others, ibid., nos. 143–145; cf. W. Eck ‘Vier mysteriöse Rasuren in Inschriften aus Gerasa: Zum “Schicksal” des Statthalters Haterius Nepos’, in G. Paci, ed., . Miscellanea epigra ca in onore di Lidio Gasperini I (2000), 347–362. 25 Cf. H. Halfmann, Itinera principum. Geschichte und Typologie der Kaiserreichen im römischen Reich (Göttingen 1986), 129ff.; J. Lehnen, Adventus Principis. Untersuchungen zu Sinngehalt und Zeremoniell der Kaiserankunft in den Städten des Imperium Romanum (Frankfurt 1997), 85ff. 26 M. Goodman, ‘Trajan and the Origins of the Bar Kokhba War’, in Schäfer 2003, op. cit. (n. 17), 28; cf. M. Goodman, ‘Trajan and the Origins of Roman Hostility to the Jews,’ Past & Present 82 (2004), 3ff. 27 On the passage see Y. Eliav, ‘Hadrian’s Actions in the Jerusalem Temple Mount according to Cassius Dio and Xiphilini Manus’, JSQ 4 (1997), 125ff.; cf. now, idem, God’s Mountain. The Temple Mount inTime, Place and Memory (Baltimore 2005), 85ff.

Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access the roman army in the province of judaea 401 modern historiography turned the Jewish resistance and on the one hand and the Roman siege and conquest of the fortress on the other into symbols—indeed into a myth.28 The , a group of fanatical extremists (the term would be ‘terrorists’ nowadays), banned by the Jewish rebels themselves and forced to ee from Jerusalem in 6629—never to take part in the revolt again—came to represent the whole Jewish people, whereas the Roman siege has been turned into a most impressive engineering feat, one of the greatest sieges the Romans ever embarked on: the greater the siege, the more admirable the Jewish resistance and nal martyrdom. Eventually Edward Luttwak, taking the Roman point of view, gave the story of Masada a respectable ‘scienti c’ wrapping. In his study the siege and capture of Masada—extended to three years—became the capstone of Roman imperial strategy, the clue to Rome’s success and her long survival as a mighty world empire: Above all, the Romans clearly realized that the dominant dimension of power was not physical but psychological—the product of others’ per- ceptions of Roman strength rather than the use of this strength. And this realization alone can explain the sophistication of Roman strategy at its best. The in ad 70–73 [sic!] reveals the exceed- ingly subtle workings of a long-range security policy based on deter- rence. Faced with the resistance of a few hundred Jews on a mountain in the Judean desert, a place of no strategic or economic importance, the Romans could have insulated the rebels by posting a few hundred men to guard them . . . Alternatively, the Romans could have stormed the mountain fortress.30 The Romans did none of these things . . . Instead, at a time when the entire Roman army had a total of only twenty-nine legions to garrison the entire empire, one legion was deployed to besiege Masada, there to reduce the fortress by great works of engineering, including a huge ramp reaching the full height of the mountain. This was a vast and seemingly irrational commitment of scarce military manpower—or was it? The

28 See for example N. Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth. Collective Memory and Myth- making in Israel (Madison, Wisconsin 1995), with the review by J. Roth in Scripta Classica Israelica 17 (1998), 252ff. 29 On the sicarii and Masada see H.M. Cotton and J.J. Price, ‘Who Conquered Masada in 66 ce, and who lived there until the Fortress fell?’ Zion 55 (1990), 449–454 (Hebrew); D.R. Schwartz, ‘Once Again: Who Captured Masada? On Doublets, Read- ing Against the Grain, and What Josephus Actually Wrote’, Scripta Classica Israelica 24 (2005), 75ff. 30 E.N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third (Baltimore/London 1976), 3f.

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entire three-year operation [sic!], and the very insigni cance of its objec- tive, must have made an ominous impression on all those in the East who might otherwise have been tempted to contemplate revolt: the lesson of Masada was that the Romans would pursue rebellion even to mountain tops in remote deserts to destroy its last vestiges regardless of cost. There it is in a nutshell. However, grave doubts begin to gather as soon as we recall that Rome maintained complete and utter silence about this great victory, which can hardly be reconciled with a desire to transmit a message to its conquered peoples. No source apart from Josephus tells us about the siege of Masada and its fall. There are no inscriptions, no decorations for Roman soldiers who participated in this great siege, nothing at all. Even in the inscriptions from the home of the Roman general who conquered Masada, L. Flavius Silva, which recount his entire career31—not a word is said about the conquest of Masada. One may counter this with the observation that after the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple and the magni cent triumphal procession of 71 mentioned above, it was no longer possible or even desirable to celebrate the fall of Masada, but it was considered more prudent to play down as much as possible the fact that some cells of resistance had remained in Judaea after the fall of Jerusalem. As for the conqueror of Masada, L. Flavius Silva Nonius Bassus became ordinarius in 81 ce. A glance at the crowded con- sular Fasti under Vespasian and Titus makes it clear that his victory did not go unrewarded. Nonetheless, I do not believe in Luttwak’s grand lesson which Rome desired to teach its subject nations. Thus we should welcome Roth’s reassessment of the siege of Masada, which cuts the siege down to its real historical dimensions.32 This notion had been adumbrated earlier by several modern historians, but their caution and comments had disappeared from the books of history. Roth bases his conclusion that the siege could not have lasted for more than 8 weeks, perhaps merely 4 weeks, on known and veri able facts about the military capability of the Roman army in laying siege to cities and fortresses. These facts can be substantiated by Josephus’ own descriptions of the siege works in , and Jerusalem.

31 M.F. Fenati, Lucio Flavio Silva Nonio Basso e la Città di Urbisaglia (Macerata 1995). 32 J. Roth, ‘The Length of the Siege of Masada’, Scripta Classica Israelica 14 (1995), 87ff.

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We know the size of the Roman force which laid siege to Masada, both from Josephus as well as from the size and nature of the camps: the Tenth Legion numbered about 4800 soldiers and the auxiliary units about 3400—altogether 8200 soldiers—although I would suggest fewer since I cannot believe that the was completely stripped of its garrison—to which one must add local militia and Jewish slaves occupied with carrying supplies for the army. One can calculate with a great deal of accuracy—checking the results against information obtained from other sources—how long it would take such a force to put together the camps, the circumvallation, the ramp and the batter- ing ram. The Romans wanted to break down the casemate wall, not to starve the Jews into submission; they directed all their efforts to this main purpose. As Roth concludes: A combination of Josephus’ dramatic rhetoric and the striking topography of Masada (as well as perhaps the in uence of politics), have misled scholars on the length of the siege of Masada. A careful analysis of the narrative account, an understanding of the parameters of Roman engi- neering capabilities and the recognition that the siege ramp lies on top of a sloping natural spur suggest that the siege was a relatively short one.33 Cutting the siege down to a realistic size makes it commensurate with everything we know about the Roman army and its methods, its experience and its use of manpower. The conquest of Masada was a reaction to resistance to Roman rule on a local level; it was a lesson administered locally—not an expression of Roman grand strategy. Nor do I agree with Luttwak’s view of Josephus’ role: “And as if to ensure that the message was duly heard, and duly remembered, Josephus was installed in Rome where he wrote a detailed account of the siege, which was published in Greek, the acquired language of Josephus, and that of the Roman East.”34 The fact that the story of Masada makes the climax of the last book of the Jewish War,35 that the book was written in Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Near East, that it was presented to both Vespasian and Titus ( Josephus, Vita 361), and signed by the latter’s own hand (Vita 363)36 with the order to have it published, does

33 Roth 1999, op. cit. (n. 32), 110. 34 Luttwak 1976, op. cit. (n. 30), 4. 35 See S. Schwartz, ‘The Composition and Publication of Josephus’ Bellum Iudaicum Book 7,’ Harvard Theological Review 79 (1986), 373ff. 36 Cf. C.P. Jones, ‘Towards a Chronology of Josephus’, Scripta Classica Israelica 21

Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access 404 hannah m. cotton not turn Josephus into the spokesman of the Roman government. All that one can say is that it was a Jewish historian who qua Jew, and not qua spokesman of the Roman government, laid the foundations for the haunting and ominous myth of Masada. Subsequently, the story of Masada acquired a life of its own, but already in the Jewish War it seems to have risen on its creator and thwarted his original intention, or perhaps rather, it thrived on the deep divide in its author’s soul: like Balaam the son of Beor who came to curse and remained to bless, so Josephus who starts with a stark condemnation of the sicarii, goes on to put two noble speeches in the mouth of Eleazar Ben Yair in which he extols freedom and consecrates martyrdom— —both condemned by the same Josephus as utter folly and transgression in three other speeches, which no less than Eleazar’s speech re ect the historian’s convictions—only that in them his rationality has gained the upper hand. I refer to the speech he puts in the mouth of Agrippa II on the eve of the revolt37—to which I shall return later—and to the one he himself delivers after the fall of Jotapata,38 not to mention his speech under the walls of the besieged Jerusalem.39 Even more disturbing to my mind is the view which sees in the Roman siege and conquest of Masada the key to understanding Rome’s success in keeping its Empire under control. The long survival of Roman power is not to be explained merely by the use of military force—not even by the sophisticated use of such force. The Roman Empire survived for as long as it did not because it successfully put down local revolts, but because it did not have to do so: there were very few revolts. Roman rule was on the whole acceptable to its subjects, especially to the local elites. The absence of revolts is not to be explained by the exercise of force: after all, not all provinces had much of a military presence in them. Rome managed to obtain the co-operation of those subjects who at the end of the process received , shared the bene ts of the empire and nally came to identify with Rome’s history and ideology.40 This is not to belittle the military threat that Rome

(2002), 113f.; see now H.M. Cotton and W. Eck, ‘Josephus’ Roman Audience? Josephus and the Roman Elites’, in Edmondson, Mason and Rives 2005, op. cit. (n. 16), 37ff. 37 Bellum Iudaicum 2.345–404. 38 Bellum Iudaicum 3.361–391. 39 Bellum Iudaicum 5.362–423. 40 Sometimes producing a magni cent fusion of local cultures and Roman govern- ment embodied in gures like the Greek historian Cassius Dio or the Greek jurist M.Cn. Licinius Ru nus, see F. Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford 1964), 189f.,

Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access the roman army in the province of judaea 405 presented; the Roman army’s ef ciency, superiority and cruelty were familiar to Rome’s subjects, at least in the rst years after the conquest. But if Rome had to use its force in the way it used it to suppress two successive revolts in Judaea rather than merely display it, holding it out as an ever present threat, its empire would have fallen apart long before it did. The second half of the last century taught us the limits of the use of military force in keeping down hostile and rebellious popula- tions. Rome would not have survived for hundreds of years as a world empire had its rule not been acceptable to its subjects, sometimes more than acceptable—desirable. It is precisely the bene ts which the empire offered its subjects that the Jews—not all of them, and not everywhere, of course41—in contra- distinction to everyone else, seem to have remained at best indifferent to and at worst rejected out of hand. Full participation in reaping the bene ts of empire held no attraction for them. This is surely the root cause of Jewish-Roman antagonism and the explanation for the fact that here in Judaea/Syria Palaestina the impact of empire for the rst two hundred years was par excellence the impact of the Roman army and the use of brutal military force. Here and nowhere else the lesson which Luttwak speaks of had to be inculcated—twice. Thus it does not come as a surprise that the only argument which the ‘Roman citizen, Flavius Josephus’, puts in the mouth of yet another ‘Roman citizen, Julius Agrippa’, to persuade his fellow Jews in Jerusalem not to rise against Rome is, in a nutshell, that ‘Rome is invincible and all opposition is futile’. As observed long ago by the late Menahem Stern in a little known article,42 what strikes the reader of Agrippa’s speech in 66 ce (Bellum Iudaicum 2.345–404) is the absence of: “any expression of appreciation of the civilizing achievements of Rome or some expres- sion of good will and awareness of aspirations and ideals common to provincials as well as rulers. The speech re ects no awareness of the bene ts of the ‘Imperial Peace’, the renowned which provides security for all the inhabitants of the empire in sharp contrast

and id., ‘The Greek East and : the Dossier of M.Cn. Licinius Ru nus’, Journal of Roman Studies 88 (1999), 90ff. = H.M. Cotton and G.M. Rogers, eds., Rome, the Greek World, and the East II: Government, Society and Culture in the Roman Empire (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 435ff. 41 Surely one must not lose sight of the ; there we know only of the revolts of ce 115–117. 42 ‘Josephus and the Roman Empire as re ected in The Jewish War’, in L.H. Feldman and G. Hata, eds., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity (Leiden 1987), 71ff.

Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access 406 hannah m. cotton to earlier periods when a more or less permanent state of war prevailed over the Mediterranean basin”. This, to continue Stern’s argument, contrasts sharply with Cerialis’s speech to the in 70 ce, as reported by . The Roman general dissuades them from joining the Batavian revolt in 70, not because it is futile to attempt a revolt, but because they have no cause for revolt: Rome has saved them from endemic intestine war and periodic German invasions and shared with them the bene ts of her empire: always had its petty kingdoms and intestine wars, till you submit- ted to our authority. We, though so often provoked, have used the right of conquest to burden you only with the cost of maintaining peace. For the tranquillity of nations cannot be preserved without armies; armies cannot exist without pay; pay cannot be furnished without tribute; all else is common between us. You often command our legions. You rule these and other provinces. There is no privilege, no exclusion (nihilsepa- ratumclausumve).43 No such sharing and solidarity ever existed or could exist between Romans and Jews, at least in their own land. No Jew from Judaea/Syria Palaestina was to command Roman legions unless he rst ceased to be a Jew (like Tiberius Alexander). The integration of the local elite into the imperial elite was possible only in the non-Jewish sector of the population of Judaea/Syria Palaestina. The hope that future excava- tions in the province or elsewhere in the Roman world may produce the rst Roman senator to originate from one of the cities of Syria Palaestina can go no further than the Greek cities and the Roman coloniae of the province.44

I would like to end on a more cheerful note, or at least by introducing a ray of light into the gloom which the hostility and intransigence inherent in the Roman-Jewish relationship have surely caused. In one of the documents from the Judaean Desert, the now rightly celebrated

43 Tacitus, Historiae 4.74: Regna bellaque per Gallias semper fuere donec in nostrum conce- deretis. nos, quamquam totiens lacessiti, iure victoriae id solum vobis addidimus, quo pacem tueremur; nam neque quies gentium sine armis neque arma sine stipendiis neque stipendia sine tributis haberi queunt: cetera in communi sita sunt. ipsi plerumque legionibus nostris praesidetis, ipsi has aliasque provincias regitis; nihil separatum clausumve. 44 Cf. H.M. Cotton and W. Eck in ‘A New Inscription from Caesarea Maritima and the Local Elite of Caesarea Maritima’, in L. Rutgers, ed., What Athens has to do with Jerusalem. Festschrift for Gideon Foerster (Leuven 2002), 371ff.

Hannah M. Cotton - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:51:08AM via free access the roman army in the province of judaea 407

Babatha,45 a Jewish woman from the of Arabia who somehow got involved in the Bar Kokhba revolt, tells the Roman gov- ernor of Arabia of her fondest wish that her son “be raised in splendid style rendering thanks to the[se] most blessed times of the governorship of Julius Julianus.”46 This should be taken with a grain of salt, like a similar expression used by the rhetor Tertullus in his address to Felix: “Seeing that by thee we enjoy great quietness and that very worthy deeds are done unto this nation by thy providence.”47 Both statements hail the advent of Rome as the dawning of a new age of peace and felicity. True, both Babatha and Tertullus, in their attempts to propiti- ate a Roman of cial, may have resorted to self-congratulatory Roman propaganda, but their sincerity should not be dismissed out of hand. For the repeated petitions to the governor of Arabia in the Babatha archive—all of them answered by the governor—reveal a complete adjustment to and reconciliation with Roman rule: it is in his court that justice is expected to be administered. Furthermore, nowhere in the documents is Babatha’s con dence in the ’s accessibil- ity seen to be unfounded or misguided.48 How are we to reconcile this with the erce rebellions motivated by religious and national motives against everything which the empire represented?

45 The Greek part of the Babatha Archive is published by N. Lewis, The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri ( Jerusalem 1989). 46 P.Yadin 15, ll. 10–11 = ll. 26–27: / () . 47 Acts 24:2: , . 48 See H.M. Cotton, ‘The Guardianship of son of Babatha: Roman and Local Law in the Province of Arabia’, Journal of Roman Studies 83 (1993), 94ff.; eadem, ‘Private International Law or Con icts of Laws: Re ections on Roman Provincial Jurisdiction’, Der Alltag der römischen Administration in der Hohen Kaiserzeit, Proceedings of a Conference held at the University of Köln in honour of Werner Eck, 28–30 January 2005 (forthcoming).

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