The Jewish War: First half of Book 5

[cahn]

Happy day-after-Easter!

Last week: Eyeliner shows that the Zealot faction is really bad! (No, really!) The Year of the Four Emperors, and those emperors discussed. Nero and his end. Lord Hervey of Frederician salon makes a surprise appearance!

This week: Titus attacks Jerusalem, but the factions have already done a lot of the work for him...

Next week: Rest of book 5!

Comments

[selenak]

Certainly at Jotpata, Vespasian and Titus seem to have been fine with utter destruction, but perhaps the central political and religious role of Jerusalem would have made a difference.

It's possible to argue both ways by precedence. Basically the Carthage versus the Alexandria/Egypt model of Roman conquest of a foe. (In)famously, the Romans utterly destroyed Carthage in the third and final Punic War, and that was not despite but because of his cultural and political significance. Otoh, after Octavian-to-be-Augustus and Agrippa had conquered Egypt, there was no destruction of Cleopatra's capital Alexandria. Granted, Alexandria was a very useful international trade hub and Rome wanted those grain shipments from Egypt to continue, but Alexandria was also the one Egyptian town specifically tied to the Ptolemaic dynasty, and you'd have had other, older Egyptian cities to fall back on to rule your new Roman province from. And Titus is the son of a completely new Emperor, i.e. the Flavians in 70 AD need legitimacy cred. Would it have been more likely to be achieved through complete destruction of Jerusalem (here's what we can do to our enemies!) or through sparing it ("we're like Augustus, magnaminous in victory once our foes are defeated")? Again, I can see either argument.

Though whether Titus intended the destruction of Jerusalem from the beginning (or at least at this point) already or whether he didn't and events unfolded this way despite his original good intentions is a different question from why Josephus is so insistent that he had them. Which I feel is not just flattery of his patron, but very much tied to his self justification - not just for his reading audience but for himself. Because it does make a great difference whether he can tell himself "Titus was well intentioned, and by working for him, I wanted to help saving the Temple and this would have happened if not for, etc." or whether it's a case of "I saved myself by working for the destroyer of the Temple who was always going to do that".

Going from actual sources to fictionalizations for a moment, in Feuchtwanger's trilogy, Titus himself doesn't (let himself) know both whether or not he's going to do it, and then once it had happened why it did. In a way, the narration and (inwwardly, never outwardly) Feuchtwanger's version of Josephus is angrier with him than with the other two Flavians, because they are what they are wholeheartedly and honestly, whereas Titus has it in him to be better, he has a genuine interest in Jewish culture (not just because he's got the hots for Berenice), but not only does he pick his inner barbarian at the key moments instead of his better knowledge, he's then unable to live with the result and keeps rewriting it in his head up to and including his death bed, when he asks Joseph(us) why Berenice left him when he himself sent her away, and then, finally, "why was the Temple destroyed", which completely horrifies and infuriates Joseph(us) (who has his own mental gymnastics going on throughout his life, of course).

Thank you for the Yom Kippur ecerpt! Beautiful and moving.

Lamentations: yes, can see it.

Essenes: this is where we collectively throw up our hands, I suppose. Josephus doing a Victor Hugo? (I.e. the equivalent about the long rambling about the Parisian sewage system midst "Les Miserables"?

[cahn]

Because it does make a great difference whether he can tell himself "Titus was well intentioned, and by working for him, I wanted to help saving the Temple and this would have happened if not for, etc." or whether it's a case of "I saved myself by working for the destroyer of the Temple who was always going to do that".

Yeah... I definitely get the impression that Josephus was all about self-justification, just from what we've read so far...

he's then unable to live with the result and keeps rewriting it in his head up to and including his death bed, when he asks Joseph(us) why Berenice left him when he himself sent her away, and then, finally, "why was the Temple destroyed", which completely horrifies and infuriates Joseph(us) (who has his own mental gymnastics going on throughout his life, of course).

Oof, I'd forgotten about Titus' deathbed mental gymnastics, even about Berenice... I'd remembered a little of the Temple ones, and of course Josephus' own mental gymnastics.