“Reliqua ut de monstro narranda sunt.”—SUET. Calig.
IMMEDIATELY after the hasty flight of Saul from Jerusalem, St. Luke adds,1 “Then had the church rest throughout the whole of Judæa, and Galilee, and Samaria, being built up, and walking in the fear of the Lord; and by the exhortation of the Holy Spirit was multiplied.” At first sight it might almost seem as though this internal peace, which produced such happy growth, was connected in the writer’s mind with the absence of one whose conversion stirred up to madness the prominent opponents of the Church. It may be, however, that the turn of his expression is simply meant to resume the broken thread of his narrative. The absence of molestation, which caused the prosperity of the faith, is sufficiently accounted for by the events which were now happening in the Pagan world. The pause in the recorded career of the Apostle enables us also to pause and survey some of the conflicting conditions of Jewish and Gentile life as they were illustrated at this time by prominent events. It need hardly be said that such a survey has an immediate bearing on the conditions of the Days after Christ, and on the work of His great Apostle.
A multitude of concurrent arguments tend to show that Saul was converted early in A.D. 37, and this brief stay at Jerusalem must therefore have occurred in the year 39. Now in the March of A.D. 37 Tiberius died, and Gaius— whose nickname of Caligula, or “Bootling,” given him in his infancy by the soldiers of his father Germanicus, has been allowed to displace his true name—succeeded to the lordship of the world. Grim as had been the despotism of Tiberius, he extended to the religion of the Jews that contemptuous toleration which was the recognised principle of Roman policy. When Pilate had kindled their fanaticism by hanging the gilt shields in his palace at Jerusalem,2 Tiberius, on an appeal being made to him, reprimanded the officiousness of his Procurator, and ordered him to remove the shields to Cæsarea. It is true that he allowed four thousand Jews to be deported from Rome to Sardinia, and punished with remorseless severity those who, from dread of violating the Mosaic law, refused to take military service.3 This severity was not, however, due to any enmity against the race, but only to his indignation against the designing hypocrisy which, under pretence of proselytising, had won the adhesion of Fulvia, a noble Roman lady, to the Jewish religion; and to the detestable rascality with which her teacher and his companions had embezzled the presents of gold and purple which she had entrusted to them as an offering for the Temple at Jerusalem. Even this did not prevent him from protecting the Jews as far as he could in their own country; and when Vitellius, the Legate of Syria, had decided that there was primâfaciecause for the complaints which had been raised against the Procurator in all three divisions of his district, it is probable that Pilate, who was sent to Rome to answer for his misdemeanours, would have received strict justice from the aged Emperor. But before Pilate arrived, Tiberius had ended his long life of disappointment, crime, and gloom.
The accession of Gaius was hailed by the whole Roman world with a burst of rapture,4 and there were none to whome it seemed more likely to introduce a golden era of prosperity than to the Jews. For if the young Emperor had any living friend, it was Herod Agrippa. That prince, if he could command but little affection as a grandson of Herod the Great, had yet a claim to Jewish loyalty as a son of the murdered Aristobulus, a grandson of the murdered Mariamne, and therefore a direct lineal descendant of that great line of Asmonæan princes whose names recalled the last glories of Jewish independence. Accordingly, when the news reached Jerusalem that Tiberius at last was dead, the Jews heaved a sigh of relief, and not only took with perfect readiness the oath of allegiance to Gaius, which was administered by Vitellius to the myriads who had thronged to the Feast of Pentecost, but offered speedy and willing holocausts for the prosperity of that reign which was to bring them a deeper misery, and a more absolute humiliation, than any which had been inflicted on them during the previous dominion of Rome.5
Gaius lost no time in publicly displaying his regard for the Herodian prince, who, with remarkable insight, had courted his friendship, not only before his accession was certain, but even in spite of the distinct recommendation of the former Emperor.6
One day, while riding in the same carriage as Gaius, Agrippa was imprudent enough to express his wish for the time when Tiberius would bequeath the Empire to a worthier successor. Such a remark might easily be construed into a crime of high treason, or laesamajestas. In a court which abounded with spies, and in which few dared to express above a whisper their real thoughts, it was natural that the obsequious slave who drove the chariot should seek an audience from Tiberius to communicate what he had heard; and when by the influence of Agrippa himself he had gained this opportunity, his report made the old Emperor so indignant, that he ordered the Jewish prince to be instantly arrested. Clothed as he was in royal purple, Agrippa was seized, put in chains, and taken off to a prison, in which he languished for the six remaining months of the life of Tiberius. Almost the first thought of Gaius on his accession was to relieve the friend who had paid him such assiduous court before his fortunes were revealed. Agrippa was at once released from custody. A few days after, Gaius sent for him, put a diadem on his head, conferred on him the tetrarchies of Herod Philip, and of Lysanias, and presented him with a golden chain of equal weight with the iron one with which he had been bound.
Now, although Agrippa was a mere unprincipled adventurer, yet he had the one redeeming feature of respect for the external religion of his race. The Edomite admixture in his blood had not quite effaced the more generous instincts of an Asmonæan prince, nor had the sty of Capreæ altogether made him forget that he drew his line from the Priest of Modin. The Jews might well have expected that, under an Emperor with whom their prince was a bosom friend, their interests would be more secure than they had been even under a magnanimous Julius and a liberal Augustus. Their hopes were doomed to the bitterest disappointment; nor did any reign plunge them into more dreadful disasters than the reign of Agrippa’s friend.
In August, A.D. 38, Agrippa arrived at Alexandria on his way to his new kingdom. His arrival was so entirely free from ostentation—for, indeed, Alexandria, where his antecedents were not unknown, was the last city in which he would have wished to air his brand–new royalty—that though he came in sight of the Pharos about twilight, he ordered the captain to stay in the offing till dark, that he might land unnoticed.7 But the presence in the city of one who was at once a Jew, a king, an Idumæan, a Herod, and a favourite of Cæsar, would not be likely to remain long a secret; and if it was some matter of exultation to the Jews, it exasperated beyond all bounds the envy of the Egyptians. Flaccus, the Governor of Alexandria, chose to regard Agrippa’s visit as an intentional insult to himself, and by the abuse which he heaped in secret upon the Jewish prince, encouraged the insults in which the mob of Alexandria were only too ready to indulge. Unpopular everywhere, the Jews were regarded in Alexandria with special hatred. Their wealth, their numbers, their usuries, their exclusiveness, the immunities which the two first Cæsars had granted them,8 filled the worthless populace of a hybrid city with fury and loathing. A Jewish kingwas to them a conception at once ludicrous and offensive. Every street rang with lampoons against him, every theatre and puppet–show echoed with ribald farces composed in his insult. At last the wanton mob seized on a poor naked idiot named Carabbas, who had long been the butt of mischievous boys, and carrying him off to the Gymnasium, clothed him in a door–mat, by way of tallîth, flattened a papyrus leaf as his diadem, gave him a stalk of papyrus for a sceptre, and surrounding him with a mimic body–guard of youths armed with sticks, proceeded to bow the knee before him, and consult him on state affairs. They ended the derisive pageant by loud shouts of Maris!Maris!the Syriac word for “Lord.”
Encouraged by impunity and the connivance of the Præfect, they then bribed him to acquiesce in more serious outrages. First they raised a cry to erect images of Gaius in the synagogues, hoping thereby to provoke the Jews into a resistance which might be interpreted as treason. This was to set an example which might be fatal to the Jews, not only in Egypt, but in all other countries. Irritated, perhaps, by the determined attitude of the Jews, Flaccus, in spite of the privileges which had long been secured to them by law and charter, published an edict in which he called them “foreigners and aliens,” and drove them all into a part of a single quarter of the city in which it was impossible for them to live. The mob then proceeded to break open and plunder the shops of the deserted quarter, blockaded the Jews in their narrow precincts, beat and murdered all who in the pangs of hunger ventured to leave it, and burnt whole families alive, sometimes with green fuel, which added terribly to their tortures. Flaccus, for his part, arrested thirty–eight leading members of their Council, and after having stripped them of all their possessions, had them beaten, not with rods by the lictors, but with scourges by the lowest executioners, with such severity that some of them died in consequence. Their houses were rifled, in the hope of finding arms; but though nothing whatever was found, except common table–knives, men and women were dragged into the theatre, commanded to eat swine’s flesh, and tortured if they refused.9
But neither these attempts to win popularity among the Gentile inhabitants by letting loose their rage against their Jewish neighbours, nor his ostentatious public loyalty and fulsome private flatteries saved Flaccus from the fate which he deserved. These proceedings had barely been going on for two months, when Gaius sent a centurion with a party of soldiers, who, landing after dark, proceeded at once to the house of Stephanion, a freed–man of Tiberius, with whom Flaccus happened to be dining, arrested him without difficulty, and brought him to Rome. Here he found that two low demagogues, Isidorus and Lampo, who had hitherto been among his parasites, and who had constantly fomented his hatred of the Jews, were now his chief accusers. He was found guilty. His property was confiscated, and he was banished, first to the miserable rock of Gyara, in the Ægean, and then to Andros. In one of those sleepless nights which were at once a symptom and an aggravation of his madness, Gaius, meditating on the speech of an exile whom he had restored, that during his banishment he used to pray for the death of Tiberius, determined to put an end to the crowd of distinguished criminals which imperial tyranny had collected on the barren islets of the Mediterranean. Flaccus was among the earliest victims, and Philo narrates with too gloating a vindictiveness the horrible manner in which he was hewn to pieces in a ditch by the despot’s emissaries.10
Gaius had begun his reign with moderation, but the sudden change from the enforced simplicity of his tutelage to the boundless luxuries and lusts of his autocracy—the sudden plunge into all things which, as Philo11 says, “destroy both soul and body and all the bonds which unite and strengthen the two”—brought on the illness which altered the entire organism of his brain. Up to that time he had been a vile and cruel man; thenceforth he was a mad and sanguinary monster. It was after this illness, and the immediately subsequent murders of Tiberius Gemellus, Macro, and Marcus Silanus, which delivered him from all apprehension of rivalry or restraint, that he began most violently to assert his godhead. His predecessors would have regarded it as far less impious to allow themselves or their fortunes to be regarded as divine, than to arrogate to themselves the actual style and attributes of existing deities.12 But disdaining all mere demi–gods like Trophonius and Amphiaraus, Gaius began to appear in public, first in the guise of Hercules, or Bacchus, or one of the Dioscuri, and then as Apollo, or Mars, or Mercury, or even Venus (!), and demanded that choruses should be sung in his honour under these attributes; and, lastly, he did not hesitate to assert his perfect equality with Jupiter himself. The majority of the Romans, partly out of abject terror, partly out of contemptuous indifference, would feel little difficulty in humouring these vagaries; but the Jews, to their eternal honour, refused at all costs to sanction this frightful concession of divine honours to the basest of mankind. As there were plenty of parasites in the Court of Gaius who would lose no opportunity of indulging their spite against the Jews, an ingrained hatred of the whole nation soon took possession of his mind. The Alexandrians were not slow to avail themselves of this antipathy. They were well aware that the most acceptable flattery to the Emperor, and the most overwhelming insult to the Jews, was to erect images of Gaius in Jewish synagogues, and they not only did this, but even in the superb and celebrated Chief Synagogue of Alexandria13 they erected a bronze statue in an old gilt quadriga which had once been dedicated to Cleopatra.
Of all these proceedings Gaius was kept informed, partly by his delighted study of Alexandrian newspapers, which Philo says that he preferred to all other literature, and partly by the incessant insults against the Jews distilled into his ears by Egyptian buffoons like the infamous Helicon.14
The sufferings of the Jews in Alexandria at last became so frightful that they despatched the venerable Philo with four others on an embassy to the insane youth whom they refused to adore. Philo has left us an account of this embassy, which, though written with his usual rhetorical diffuseness, is intensely interesting as a record of the times. It opens for us a little window into the daily life of the Imperial Court at Rome within ten years of the death of Christ.
The first interview of the ambassadors with Gaius took place while he was walking in his mother’s garden on the banks of the Tiber, and the apparent graciousness of his reception deceived all of them except Philo himself. After having been kept waiting for some time, the Jews were ordered to follow him to Puteoli, and there it was that a man with disordered aspect and bloodshot eyes rushed up to them, and with a frame that shivered with agony and in a voice broken with sobs, barely succeeded in giving utterance to the horrible intelligence that Gaius had asserted his intention of erecting a golden colossus of himself with the attributes of Jupiter in the Holy of Holies at Jerusalem. After giving way to their terror and agitation, the ambassadors asked the cause of this diabolical sacrilege, and were informed that it was due to the advice of “that scorpion–like slave,” Helicon, who with “a poisonous Ascalonite” named Apelles—a low tragic actor—had made the suggestion during the fit of rage with which Gaius heard that the Jews of Jamnia had torn down a trumpery altar which the Gentiles of the city had erected to his deity with no other intention than that of wounding and insulting them.
So far from this being a transient or idle threat, Gaius wrote to Petronius, the Legate of Syria, and ordered him to carry it out with every precaution and by main force; and though the legate was well aware of the perilous nature of the undertaking, he had been obliged to furnish the necessary materials for the statue to the artists of Sidon.
No sooner had the miserable Jews heard of this threatened abomination of desolation, than they yielded themselves to such a passion of horror as made them forget every other interest. It was no time to be persecuting Christians when the most precious heritage of their religion was at stake. Flocking to Phœnicia in myriads, until they occupied the whole country like a cloud, they divided themselves into six companies of old men, youths, boys, aged women, matrons, and virgins, and rent the air with their howls and supplications, as they lay prostrate on the earth and scattered the dust in handfuls upon their heads. Petronius, a sensible and honourable man, was moved by their abject misery, and with the object of gaining time, ordered the Sidonian artists to make their statue very perfect, intimating not very obscurely that he wished them to be as long over it as possible. Meanwhile, in order to test the Jews, he went from Acre to Tiberias, and there the same scenes were repeated. For forty days, neglecting the sowing of their fields, they lay prostrate on the ground, and when the legate asked them whether they meant to make war against Cæsar, they said, No, but they were ready to die rather than see their temple desecrated, and in proof of their sincerity stretched out their throats. Seeing the obstinacy of their resolution, besieged by the entreaties of Aristobulus and Helcias the elder, afraid, too, that a famine would be caused by the neglect of tillage, Petronius, though at the risk of his own life, promised the Jews that he would write and intercede for them, if they would separate peaceably and attend to their husbandry. It was accepted by both Jews and Gentiles as a sign of the special blessing of God on this brave and humane decision, that no sooner had Petronius finished his speech than, after long drought, the sky grew black with clouds, and there was an abundant rain. He kept his word. He wrote a letter to Gaius, telling him that if the affair of the statue were pressed, the Jews would neglect their harvest and there would be great danger lest he should find the whole country in a state of starvation, which might be even dangerous for himself and his suite, if he carried out his intended visit.
Meanwhile, in entire ignorance of all that had taken place, Agrippa had arrived at Rome, and he at once read in the countenance of the Emperor that something had gone wrong. On hearing what it was, he fell down in a fit, and lay for some time in a deep stupor. By the exertion of his whole influence with Gaius, he only succeeded in procuring a temporary suspension of the design; and it was not long before the Emperor announced the intention of taking with him from Rome a colossus of gilded bronze—in order to cut off all excuse for delay—and of personally superintending its erection in the Temple, which would henceforth be regarded as dedicated to “the new Jupiter, the illustrious Gaius.” Even during his brief period of indecision he was so angry with Petronius for the humanity that he had shown that he wrote him a letter commanding him to commit suicide if he did not want to die by the hands of the executioner.
These events, and the celebrated embassy of Philo to Gaius, of which he has left us so painfully graphic a description, probably took place in the August of the year 40. In the January of the following year the avenging sword of the brave tribune Cassius Chærea rid the world of the intolerable despot.15 The vessel which had carried to Petronius the command to commit suicide, was fortunately delayed by stormy weather, and only arrived twenty–seven days after intelligence had been received that the tyrant was dead. From Claudius—who owed his throne entirely to the subtle intrigues of Agrippa—the Jews received both kindness and consideration. Petronius was ordered thenceforth to suppress and punish all attempts to insult them16 in the quiet exercise of their religious duties; and Claudius utterly forbad that prayers should be addressed or sacrifices offered to himself.17