LETTERS in the WAR BETWEEN ROME and JUDAEA Ryan S

LETTERS IN THE WAR BETWEEN ROME AND JUDAEA Ryan S. Olson Well into a seven-week battle, the Jews at Jotapata were desperate for relief from their Roman besiegers. The city the Jews defended was north of Judaea in Galilee, a region that the Jewish general Josephus had forti ed before he arrived at Jotapata in the spring of ad67 after political leaders in Jerusalem failed to answer a frantic letter seeking new military orders. Long before his epistolary summons at the dénouement of the Jotapata battle to end the siege in triumph, the Roman general Vespasian welcomed Josephus’ arrival at the walled city sprawled across a spoon-shaped hill with its south- facing handle. The estimated 5,000 people from surrounding towns who sought refuge with the 2,000 residents before the siege did not seem to have over-extended its supply of corn, but their ability to withstand a long siege depended more urgently on the supply of water.1 The city (modern day Tel Yodfat, east of Moshav Yodfat) had no subterranean source and its typical internal source, rainwater, dried up during the summer, so the Jotapatans’ mental warfare tactic of pouring water over the city walls provoked another attack from Vespasian, who could scarcely believe the audacity of those who would apparently have preferred to die by sword than by dehydration. Letters requesting resources were carried by messengers to allies outside the city through a steep ravine that the Romans had ignored on the city’s west side. Concealing themselves with eeces and moving on all fours to look like dogs at night, the messengers eluded detection for some time. But as was the case with all such tactics employed by Jewish forces, success was short-lived: the Romans discovered the tactic and blocked the communication channel. Losing the ability to communicate by letter with allies outside the besieged city hastened the siege’s outcome. It was at this moment of epistolary silence that Josephus, responsible for military operations in Galilee beginning the previous year and, a decade later, author of the seven-book history of the war with Rome, said he realized the inevitable outcome of this battle. But he fought on despite the obstacles. Concluding a pre- battle speech typical of Graeco-Roman commanders, he matched words 1 On population, Aviam 2002: 131. 350 ryan s. olson with deeds and led a multi-day guerrilla campaign into the Roman camp, destroying tents and turning siege works into cinders. The Jews’ determina- tion was remarkable not only because they were overmatched, as we will see; their general Josephus also had failed in his attempt to communicate with political leaders in Jerusalem before the battle commenced, meaning that orders and priorities were unclear.2 It was this breakdown that revealed a key diference in the institutions that comprised Judaea’s culture and those that made up Rome’s. Elsewhere in Josephus’ works, there is not epistolary silence. In fact, Josephus embedded hundreds of letters by quotation or brief mention. In this way, Josephus’ literary works have features similar to those of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus, Plutarch or even, briey, Euripides, and in some cases these authors’ works might provide important intertexts for Josephus.3 This is not surprising, as Jewish authors had already been embedding letters in texts as far back as the Hebrew Bible. But Josephus’ level of sophistication when he embeds letters exceeds other Jewish texts, and even innovates upon other Greek-language ones. Adding the time dimension illustrates that Josephus is part of the epistolary tradi- tion’s growing popularity that continued into Late Antiquity. Despite the literary similarity, what is surprising is the diference between Judaea and Rome that becomes apparent when the two cultures confront each other in war. This literary similarity obscures deeper cultural diferences between Judaea and Rome. The diferences become evident when embedded letters are read as indicators of the cultures from which they come, as I will argue below. In war, letters worked—from Josephus to Jerusalem’s political leaders at the inception of the battle; from Josephus to Jews outside Jotapata at the ini- tiation of tactical manoeuvring; and, after a long period without epistolary communication, from Trajan to Vespasian for the purpose of sending Titus to conclude military operations in Jotapata—as a technology that directed destinies. This epistolary technology at this time in history afected the lives of Jews and Romans,4 the future of Josephus’ career and of a Roman imperial 2 B.J. 3.140: ὁ µὲν οὖν ταῦτ’ ἐπιστείλας πέµπει διὰ τάχους ἐπὶ ῾Ιεροσολύµων τοὺς τὰ γράµµατα κοµίζοντας. All Greek quotations of Josephus are from Niese 1894, vol. 6. 3 Argued at length in Olson 2010; Josephus’ level of nuance with epistolary material is not dissimilar to that described in Moles 2006: 143–148, of Plutarch’s use of Greek letters in the Brutus. For discussions of letters embedded in ctional and historical narratives, see Costa 2001: xiv, and Trapp 2003: 33–34; narrative epistolography as a eld of inquiry leapt forward with the seminal work of Rosenmeyer 2001 and Rosenmeyer 2006. 4 A wider view of how the availability of epistolary technology afected the lives of a broad range of people, including women, is presented in chapter two of Bagnall and Cribiore 2006..

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