The Jewish War: Second half of Book 4

[cahn]

Last week: Mass suicide (canonical), Constantinople (not present in canon), pro-surrender factions, the translation of "bandits/terrorists/troublemakers" (apparently "lestes" in Greek). Anyone familiar with the Talmud want to weigh in about the question of marrying a raped-by-a-Roman woman in Jewish society?

This week: Jerusalem continues to be torn apart by various factions. Simon son of Gioras makes his appearance. The Year of the Four Emperors happens, with Vespasian finally making his bid for emperor.

Next week: Half of book 5? To where?

Comments

[cahn]

(Sorry for falling down on replying halfway through the week to both salons -- will try to do this tomorrow -- ) Okay, so I've been realizing that I should just usually (unless there's just one big thing going on) recap so that I can keep track of what's going on...

Right. So this starts with John, that infinitely guileful person, taking control of a faction of the Zealots. (The worst ones, natch.) The Sicarii take possession of the Masada fortress. Vespasian marches on Gadara, which sells out to the Romans; the opposition kills the man thought to be the leader of negotiations with the Romans and then runs away; Vespasian's guy Placidus destroys them and the village where they were hiding out. Meanwhile Vindex revolts from Nero.

Also Josephus talks about the history of a spring near Jericho and about Joshua and Elisha, which was a nice little moment. Also what sound like very yummy dates. Also the Dead Sea, "so when Vespasian arrived and wanted to test the properties of the lake, he had some non-swimmers thrown into the deep water with their hands tied behind them, with the result that they all floated on the surface as if forced up by a column of air." The footnote says, "a remarkably casual reference to this ordeal, imposed solely out of scientific curiosity" which I thought was a bit funny, because Josephus does in fact have a tendency to go on about lots of various horrible things happening without always pausing to reflect about how terrible it is!

Anyway, next Nero meets his end, apparently because he was so terrible as to get freedmen to be his administrators. Galba is proclaimed emperor and then "assassinated in the middle of the Roman forum," then Otho is his successor but gets defeated. Meanwhile, Vespasian may be watching too closely to actually take the time to munch popcorn but that's basically what he's doing. "Some divine prompting sent Titus sailing back from Greece to Syria and hurrying to join his father in Caesarea." The footnote says, "or the beginnings of the conspriacy which was to lead Vespasian to make his bid for supreme power in July of the same year?"

Now there's another dude, Simon son of Gioras, who "could not match the pure deviousness [of John]... but he was a man of remarkable physical courage and audacious ambition." He joins the Masada guys, then gets his own guys to do banditry and it looks like he's gonna attack Jerusalem, so the Zealots decide to do battle with him. Simon then decides he'll conquer Idumaea, and with the help of the turncoat Jacob he does that. The Zealots capture Simon's wife in hopes this'll calm him down, but in fact he gets worse and they are like, never mind, uhh, have your wife back. "Mollified for the time being, Simon made a brief pause in the relentless run of killings." Wow, Simon.

(Vespasian: is going to run out of popcorn at this rate!)

Back to Italy! Josephus reminds us about Otho, and now Vitellius is descending on Rome.

Back to Jerusalem: Vespasian is destroying everything around Jerusalem. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem itself, Simon on the outside, John on the inside. And John's Zealots are so bad that not only do they murder men and rape women, which is bad enough, they "went all effeminate, doing up their hair, wearing women's clothes, drenching themselves in scent, and applying eyeliner to make themselves pretty." (I laughed at the eyeliner. REALLY, Josephus.) But apparently eyeliner is not good enough for these guys; John's army turns on him and decides they'll let Simon inside instead. So Simon "became master of Jerusalem."

Vespasian is not super excited about Vitellius becoming emperor, where by "not super excited" I mean "really angry." His officers are like, hey, you should be emperor yourself! Vespasian is all, aww, nah, I really couldn't... oh, you really think so? If you insist! The footnote here says, "the dating of documents from Egypt suggest a carefully orchestrated coup, with the governor of Egypt already committed to support Vespasian before he was acclaimed emperor by his soldiers."

Anyway, all this is working out for Vespasian, who then remembers that awesome, smart, good-looking guy who prophesied he'd be emperor, and frees him. He goes up against Vitellus and eventually Vitellus is killed.

...okay, so this is clearly the long-promised Year of the Four Emperors and I want everything about it please!