A second excerpt from Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations by Michael
Goodman; read the first.
This excerpt comes from Chapter Five: Communities
where Goodman compares how the Roman and Jewish communities thought of
themselves. I find this passage so insightful and fascinating.
Dulce
et decorum est patria mori.
[Hor. Carm. 3.2.13] “Sweet it is,
and fitting, to die for the fatherland.”
So wrote Horace, in uncharacteristically somber mood, about old Roman
virtues of endurance, courage, independence and reticence. Thus were the great heroes of the past
remembered, those who had died for Rome.
The glorious Jewish dead, by contrast, were believed to have given up
their lives for God, as in the dreadful tortures inflicted, it was said, during
the persecutions which preceded the revolt of the Maccabees in the 160s BCE:
It came to pass also,
that seven brothers with their mother were arrested, and compelled by the king
to taste swine’s flesh forbidden by the law, and were tormented with scourges
and whips. But one of them made himself
the spokesman, and said, “What do you intend to ask and learn of us? We are ready to die, rather than transgress
the laws of our fathers.” Then the king,
being in a rage, commanded pans and cauldrons to be made hot…[2 Macc. 7. 1-3]
Nonetheless, Jews as much as Romans envisaged their
nation as a person. Rome was a goddess, Dea Roma, much worshipped outside Rome but
also within the city itself from the time of Hadrian. To see Israel or Jerusalem as similarly
divine was of course impossible for Jews, but Israel was envisaged as the
spouse of God within the covenant between God and Israel brokered, according to
the account in Exodus, by Moses and sealed on Mount Sinai, or as the wayward
child of a loving father. In both
societies the body politic could be understood through metaphors of health and
disease. Sallust described the collapse
of morals in Rome during the late Republic: “At first these vices grew slowly;
now and then they were punished; finally, when the disease had spread like a
deadly plague, the state was changed, and a government second to none in
equality and excellence became cruel and intolerable.” [Sall. Cat. 10.6] So too Josephus, writing about the state of
Judean society before the outbreak of war and perhaps reflecting, like Sallust,
the historiographic influence of Thucydides: “That period had become somehow so
prolific of crime of every description among the Jews that no deed of iniquity
was left unperpetrated…Thus everyone, both in private and in public, was sick.” In the 50s CE, as soon as one group of
disorders was reduced in Judea “another part flared up again, as in a sickening
body.” Josephus addressed himself
rhetorically to Jerusalem in the middle of the Roman siege, when the blood of
corpses formed pools in the courts of God: “What misery to equal that, most
wretched city, have you suffered at the hands of the Romans, who entered to
purge with fire your internal pollution?” [Josephus. BJ 7.259-60; 2.264; 5.19]
The differences between Romans and Jews lay in
conceptions of what the state is for.
Neither society indulged as much as Greeks had done in the classical and
Hellenistic periods in abstract political philosophy and analyses of the
structure of the perfect state, but their shared Greek background ensured that
some Jews and some Romans reflected on such matters at least a little, and the
vocabulary and rhetoric conventional in each society revealed much about their
political conceptions. Among Romans,
more extended political philosophizing was not unknown, but in the imperial
period it tended to take the form, as in Seneca’s writings, of personal advice
to rulers on ethical conduct and advice to subjects on how to maintain both
dignity and morality when deprived of power.
Cicero’s treatise On the Republic,
written in the political chaos of the late Republic, contained an analysis of
the constitution of the ideal state which combined monarchy, oligarchy and
democracy, an analysis which owed much to his judgment about earlier Roman
history and the political turmoil of his own times, but such theoretical discussions
were not much favoured under the benevolent rule of the emperors.
[Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient
Civilizations, by Martin Goodman, Vintage Books, New York, 2007. p.196-7]
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