The Jewish War: First half of Book 6

[cahn]

Last week: Sieges are awful. Josephus tells us that Titus really totally felt bad about all the awfulness (even though he didn't stop them) and there is a theory that maybe by "us" he meant "Berenice." Titus had dancing boys?? (Josephus does not mention any, sadly.) Does Samuel the Lamanite in the Book of Mormon owe anything to Josephus speaking truth to the wicked? Unclear. Talmud on the Sages vs. the Zealots as an interesting correlated story to Josephus. Poppea's complexity including both an interest in (conversion to?) Judaism as well as being ruthless; comparison to Constantine's much better press.

This week: The temple is destroyed.

Next week: End of Book 6.

Comments

Re: Recap

[selenak]

Josephus' lament for the destroyed trees and landscape around Jerusalem (which the Romans used to build siege engines) at the start of this book and him saying no one who had seen Jerusalem (which is his home city, it's worth reminding, not "just" of religious significance to him) pre war would have recognized the landscape immediately gave me both WWI and Tolkien associations - you know, the land looking tike moon craters . And certainly there are no more woods around Jerusalem to this day. (At least that I recall, though I was there decades ago.)

Something I noticed that in this book, Josephus starts to list the names of Jewish fighters who have been especially brave in battle at the end of each description of a fight, not just of the Romans like Sabinus the Syrian whom you mention in your recap. Given that these names are irrelevant to his Roman and Greek readership, I think they're there both for the Jewish readers and to give testimony; chances are few of any of these men he lists survived, and he wouldn't be wrong to suspect once their own families are gone nobody would remember them anymore if he doesn't do this.

My translation has Josephus describe the Syrian who does the suicide mission for Titus excplicitly as "black", which I found interesting because from what I recall, skin colour usually isn't mentioned in Roman historical accounts. (Unless we're talking about Suetonius' gossipy biographies of the Caesars; he does mention everyone's skin tone down to the last pimble.)

The story of the woman who eats her own child: made it into Feuchtwanger's novel, minus everyone's speeches, and I do recall looking it up when I read the novel (i.e. whether Feuchtwanger was making this up or basing it on Josephus' account) because it is just so terrible. Now from a writing pov, I think it's meant as the ultimate horror and desecration of humanity, and it's deliberate that it's set immediately before the Temple going up in flames. I.e. after the most fundamental law of human nature is broken within Jerusalem, the Temple is doomed. And Josephus does draw on precedence; googling tells me there is maternal cannibalism mentioned as the ultimate horror in Deuteronomy 28, Lamentations 2 and 4, and 2 Kings 6. However, none of this means I think Josephus point blank invented it and that there was no Mary/Mirjam who ate her child in the siege of Jerusalem. He's publishing only a few years after the event, and if he had made it up, there would have been a lot of survivors on both sides able to say so, because they would have heard about it when it happened. So my guess is that it did happen, but everyone from the mother to Titus making speeches did not, and also it probably didn't happen directly before the Roman assault on the Temple.

I mean, on one hand we know Josephus is going to blame John for anything he can, but on the other, this actually sounds like a welcome exception to the rule that women get blamed for everything... maybe because Josephus is Jewish more than Roman? :P


Possibly. Mind you, the women have actually zero say in whether or not the city surrenders, so quite aside from rethorics, it is a correct statement. Leaving out, of course, that if the Romans just left, there would also be no starvation.

But in favour of Josephus' accuracy in his account of this council are the date he was writing and his knowledge that many of those alleged to have been present could have denied its truth if it was an invention. However, if what selenak said in the last post is true and Titus wanted it to look to, say, Berenice, as if he'd wanted to spare the temple, even if at the time he'd said no, would anyone really have spoken up against him?

Well, don't forget, even if the theory that Titus wanted Berenice to believe he did his best to spare the Temple and asked Josephus to write the acccount with this in mind is correct, it wasn't something Titus could or would have said officially to his fellow Romans. From a Roman pov, efforts to spare the Temple at this late stage of the siege are an unnecessary luxury. Plus Romans don't just have a Cleopatra complex, they also have an Antony complex, i.e. from a Roman pov, it's more in Titus' interests to look like a tough guy putting Roman interests first. So basically, if once "The Jewish War" is published there are veterans from Titus' staff who want to say "what rubbish is this, Titus gave us point blank instructions to torch the Temple", it's not in Titus' interest to stop them saying this. And while we know Josephus had his critics and his feuds, I don't think a contemporary to his life time controversy on this particular point of this narrative was mentioned.

All this isn't to say that Titus' council of war couldn't still have decided the Temple was to be destroyed, just that Josephus point blank claiming the opposite, for whatever reason, would have exposed him to a lot of attacks on the very work with which he wanted to make his name in the Roman and Hellenistic world.

(Feuchtwanger as a novelist presents Titus as eternally torn, as you may recall, between his better and his worse side, so he does give the order to spare the Temple, but he does it in a way that betrays a part of him also wants the Temple to burn, and that's what the Roman officer he gives the order to latches on to and who unambiguously hates the Jews latches on to, and that's what Titus can never admit to himself afterwards, hence him horrifying Josephus years later when dying via the final question "Why was the Temple destroyed?")

A few posts ago, I said that there are basically two opposing historical precedents for how this with the Temple and Jerusalem could have gone in terms of Roman treatment of a defeated opponent - the Carthage model, where the city was destroyed, Temples very much included, and the Egypt model, where basically life in Alexandria went on as before, just that you know paid your taxes directly to the Romans, and all of the buildings survived intact. But of course there was no lengthy siege of Alexandria, while Carthage and Rome fought three lengthy wars against each other, and the longer the war lasts, the lesser the chance that anyone or anything gets spared thereafter. Especially if the conquering party earlier has been made to lose face.

True not just of the Romans. Alexander the Great before he ever left Greece to fight the Persians famously destroyed Thebes for daring to start a rebellion against the Macedonians, and when I say "destroyed", I do mean "torched" and "sold the population into slavery afterwards", and those were fellow Greeks. And if we go back into myth, there is always Troy. Which reminds me: of course everyone of Josephus' Greek and Roman readers would have had the Iliad in mind when talking about a besieged and finally taken city. The Iliad, and the post Iliad dramas and myths around the Trojan War and its aftermath. Because: the Gods who were on the side of the Greeks during the actual war, like Athena and Poseidon, turn from them once the victorious Greeks torch their temples and blaspheme within said temples by raping priestesses like Cassandra. In Euripides' Trojan Women, there is a prologue between Poseidon and Athena where this is explicitly tied to the fact that all of the Greek city kingdoms and most of their rulers will fall or suffer long misfortune. (With the exception of Sparta and Menelaos, but even there his and Helen's only daughter Hermione will be involved in another bloody tragedy elswhere.)

So basically: torching a Temple = REALLY BAD LUCK FOR WHOEVER DOES IT, mythologically speaking, in the ancient world. (Even with Carthage, the Romans had something of a split attitude, in that on the one hand, it was seens as the ultimate triumph, otoh, you had lots of historians declaring it was all downhill from there because without Carthage as a rival, Rome went soft and turned to inner strife and thus the Republic fell.) Now Josephus goes above and beyond to exculpate Titus personally, but his readers would have noticed within their own life time that the Flavian dynasty only lasts for a relatively short while - three Emperors, Titus himself rules only for two years (albeit you can count Vespasian's earlier reign as heavily influenced by him in that he was his father's right hand man, still, it's Vespasian who is boss) and dies at a relatively young age without a son to succeed him, and his brother Domitian while ruling longer ends up assassinated and as one of the few Emperors undergoing a damnatio memoriae. So if you want to go by mythic tropes, it's relatively easy to tie the destruction of the Temple to the downfall of the Flavian dynasty just a few years after it was established.