CHAPTER XII

THE CHRISTIANS OF THE FLAVIA FAMILY—FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS.

The fatal law of Cæsarism fulfilled itself. The legitimate king improves as his reign grows older: the Cæsar begins well, and finishes ill. Every year was marked in Domitian by the progress of evil passions. The man had always been perverse. His ingratitude towards his father and his eldest brother was something abominable, but his first government was not that of a bad sovereign. It was only by degrees that the sombre jealousy of all merit, the refined perfidy, the black malice which were ingrained in his nature, disclosed themselves. Tiberius had been very cruel, but this was through a sort of philosophic rage against humanity which was not without its grandeur, and which did not prevent him from being in some respects the most intelligent man of his time. Caligula was a melancholy buffoon, at once grotesque and terrible, but amusing, and not very dangerous to those who did not approach him. Under the reign of that incarnation of satanic irony who called himself Nero, a sort of stupor held the world in suspense; people had the consciousness of assisting at an unprecedented crisis, at the definitive struggle between good and evil. After his death there was a breathing space; evil appeared to be chained up; the perversity of the century seemed to be softened. It is easy to imagine the horror which seized on all honest minds when they saw “the Beast” revived; when they recognised that the abnegation of all the honourable men in the Empire had served only to hand over the world to a sovereign much more worthy of execration than the monsters whom they believed relegated to the souvenirs of the past.

Domitian was probably the wickedest man who over lived. Commodus is more odious, for he was the son of an admirable father; but Commodus is a sort of brute; Domitian is a man of strong sense, and of a calculating wickedness. He had not the excuse of madness; his head was perfectly sound, cold, and clear. He was a serious and logical politician. He had no imagination, and if at a certain period of his life he dabbled somewhat in literature, and made fairly good verses, it was out of affectation, and in order to appear a stranger to business; soon he renounced it and thought no more of it. He did not love the arts; music found him and left him indifferent; his melancholy temperament rejoiced only in solitude. He was seen walking alone for hours; his followers were then sure to see the breaking out of some perverse scheme. Cruel without disguise, he smiled almost in the act of murder. His base extraction constantly reappeared. The Cæsars of the House of Augustus, prodigal and greedy of glory, are bad, often absurd, rarely vulgar. Domitian is the tradesman of crime: he makes a profit of it. Not rich, he makes money everywhere, and pushes taxation to its last limits. His sinister face never knew the mad laugh of Caligula. Nero, a very literary tyrant, always engaged in making the world love and admire him, heard raillery and provoked it. Domitian had nothing burlesque about him. He did not lend himself to ridicule; he was too tragic. His manners were no better than those of the son of Agrippina, but to infamy he joined a sly egotism, a hypocritical affectation of severity, the air of a rigid censor (sanctissimus censor)—all which things were only pretexts for destroying the innocent. The tone of austere virtue which his flatterers assume is nauseous in the extreme. Martial, Statius, Quintilian, when they wished to give him the title which he coveted the most, bestowed on him that of Saviour of the gods, and Restorer of morals.

Nero’s vanity was not less than that which impelled him to so many pitiable freaks, and it was much less innocent. His false triumphs, his pretended victories, his monuments full of lying adulation, his accumulated consulates, were something sickening, much more irritating than the eighteen hundred crowns of Nero.

The other tyrannies which had afflicted Rome were much less wise. His was administrative, meticulous, organised. The tyrant himself played the part of chief of the police and prosecuting counsel. It was a juridical reign of terror. The proceedings were conducted with the burlesque legality of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Flavius Sabinus, cousin of the Emperor, was put to death because of a mistake of the crier who had proclaimed him Emperor instead of Consul; a Greek historian, for certain images which appeared obscure: all the copyists were crucified. A distinguished Roman was killed because he loved to recite the harangues of Livy, possessed certain maps, and had given to two slaves the names of Mago and of Hannibal; a highly-esteemed soldier, Sallustius Lucullus, perished for having suffered his name to be given to some lances of a new model which he had invented. Never had the trade of informer thriven so greatly; tempters and spies abounded everywhere. The mad faith of the Emperor in astrologers doubled the danger. The instruments of Caligula and Nero had been vile Orientals, strangers to Roman society, and satisfied when they were rich. The informers of Domitian—men like Tonquier Tinville, sinister and ghostly—struck a sure blow. The Emperor concerted with the accusers and the false witnesses what they were to say; he then was himself present at the tortures, diverting himself with the pallor painted in all faces, and appearing to count the groans extorted by suffering. Nero spared himself the sight of the crimes he commanded; Domitian insisted on seeing 118everything. He had nameless refinements of cruelty. His mind was so perverse that he was offended equally by flattery and by its absence; his suspicion and jealousy were unbounded. Every worthy man, every benevolent man, had him for a rival. Nero at least found them only amongst the singers, and did not regard every statesman, every military superior, as an enemy.

The silence during this time was frightful. The Senate passed some years in a mournful stupor. What was most terrible was that there seemed to be no way out. The Emperor was thirty-six. The feverish outburst of evil which had been observed up to that time had been short; it was felt that they were crises and that they could not last. This time there was no reason for their coming to an end. The army was content; the people were indifferent. Domitian, it is true, never attained the popularity of Nero; and in the year 88 an impostor thought he saw a chance of dethroning him, by presenting himself as the adored master who had given the people such days of enjoyment. Nevertheless, too much had not been lost. The spectacles were as monstrous as they had ever been. The Flavian amphitheatre (the Coliseum) inaugurated under Titus, had even made progress in the ignoble art of amusing the people. No danger then on that side. He, however, read only the Memoirs of Tiberius. He despised the familiarity which his father Vespasian had encouraged; he treated as childishness the good nature of his brother Titus, and the delusion of governing humanity by making himself beloved, under which he laboured. He pretended to know better than anybody the requirements of a power without constitution, obliged to defend itself, to refound itself every day.

It was felt, in short, that there was a political reason for these horrors, which was not the mere caprice of a lunatic. The hideous image of the new sovereignty 119such as the necessities of the times had made it, suspicious, fearing everything from everybody, head of Medusa which froze with terror, appeared in this odious mask all splashed with blood, with which the cunning terrorist seemed to have shielded his face against all modesty.

It was principally upon his own house that his fury was spent. Almost all his cousins or nephews perished. Everything that recalled Titus to him exasperated him. That singular family which had none of the prejudice, aristocratic coolness, profound scepticism of the high Roman aristocracy, offered strange contrasts. Frightful tragedies were played in it. What a fate, for example, was that of Julia Sabina, the daughter of Titus, sinking from crime to crime, until she finished, like the heroine of a vulgar romance, in the anguish of an abortion. So much perversity provoked strange reactions. The tender and sentimental parts of the nature of Titus reappeared amongst some members of the family, especially in the branch of Flavius Sabinus, the brother of Vespasian. Flavius Sabinus, who was long Prefect of Rome, and particularly in 64, might already know the Christians; he was a gentle, humane man, and one who was already reproached with “poor spiritedness.” For Roman ferocity such a word was equivalent to humanity. The numerous Jews who were familiar with the Flavian family, found, especially on this side, an audience already prepared and attentive.

It is, in short, not to be denied that Christian or Judeo-Christian ideas penetrated the Imperial family, especially in its collateral branch. Flavius Clemens, son of Flavius Sabinus, and consequently cousin-german to Domitian, had married Flavia Domitilla, his second cousin, daughter of another Flavia Domitilla, herself the daughter of Vespasian, who had died before the accession of her father to the Empire. By means which are unknown to us, but probably arising out of 120the relations of the Flavian family with the Jews, Clemens and Domitilla adopted Jewish customs, that is to say, of course, that mitigated form of Judaism which differed from Christianity only by the importance attached to the part of Jesus. The Judaism of the proselytes, confined to the Noachian precepts, was precisely that preached by Josephus, the client of the Flavian family. That it was which was represented as having been settled by the agreement of all the apostles at Jerusalem. Clemens allowed himself to be seduced by it. Perhaps Domitilla went further, and merited the name of Christian. Nothing, however, ought to be exaggerated. Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla do not appear to have been veritable members of the Church of Rome. Like so many other distinguished Romans, they felt the emptiness of the official worship, the insufficiency of the moral law which sprang out of Paganism, the repulsive hideousness of the manners and the society of the times. The charm of the Judeo-Christian ideas wrought upon them. They recognised from that side life and the future; but, without doubt, they were not ostensibly Christians. We shall see later Flavia Domitilla acting rather as a Roman matron than as a Christian woman, and not hesitating at the assassination of a tyrant. The single fact of accepting the consulate was for Clemens to accept the obligation of essentially idolatrous sacrifices and ceremonies. Clemens was the second person in the State. He had two sons whom Domitian had named as his successors, and to whom he had already given the names of Vespasian and Domitian. The education of these boys was entrusted to one of the most upright men of the time, Quintilian the rhetorician, to whom Clemens accorded the honorary insignia of the consulate. Now Quintilian regarded with equal horror the ideas of the Jews and those of the Republicans. Side by side with the Gracchi he placed “the author of the Jewish superstition” amongst the 121most fatal revolutionaries. Was Quintilian thinking of Moses or of Jesus? Perhaps he scarcely knew himself. “Jewish superstition” was still the generic title which comprehended both Jews and Christians. Christians were not furthermore the only people who lived the Jewish life without submitting to circumcision. Many of those who were attracted by Mosaism confined themselves to the observance of the Sabbath. A similar purity of life, a similar horror of polytheism, united all these groups of pious men upon whom the verdict of superficial Pagans was, “they live the Jewish life.”

If the family of Clemens were Christians, it must be owned that they were Christians of a very undecided kind. What the public saw of the conversion of these two illustrious personages was a very small matter. The distracted world which surrounded them could not well say whether they were Jews or Christians. Changes of this kind are recognised only by two symptoms, first, an ill-concealed aversion from the national religion, an estrangement from all apparent rites, on the part of those who are supposed to hold to the secret worship of an intangible, unnameable God; in the second place, an apparent indolence, a total abandonment of the duties and honours of civic life inseparable from idolatry. A taste for solitude, a search after a peaceable and retired life, an aversion for the theatres, for the shows and for the cruel scenes which Roman life offered at every step, fraternal relations with persons of humble station, by no means inclined to the military life (for which the Romans despised them), indifference to public business, as frivolous matters to those who looked for the speedy coming of Christ, meditative habits, a spirit of detachment—all this the Romans described by the single word ignavia. According to the ideas of the time, everyone ought to have as much ambition as comported with his birth and fortune. The man of high 122rank who ceased to take an interest in the struggle of life, who feared bloodshed, who assumed a gentle and humane air, was an idle and degraded man incapable of any enterprise. Impious and cowardly—such were the adjectives applied to him, which in a still vigorous state of society must infallibly result in destroying him.

Clemens and Domitilla were not, moreover, the only ones whom the blast of the reign of Domitian inclined towards Christianity. The terror and the sadness of the times crushed souls. Many persons of the Roman aristocracy lent an ear to teaching, and which, in the midst of the night through which they were passing, showed the pure heaven of an ideal kingdom. The world was so dark, so wicked! Never, besides, had the Jewish propaganda been so active. Perhaps we must refer to the time of the conversion of a Roman lady, Veturia Paulla, who, being converted at the age of 70, took the name of Sara, and was mother of the synagogues of the Campus Martius and of Volumnus, for sixteen years longer. A great part of the movement in these immense suburbs of Rome, where seethed an immense population, far greater in number than the aristocratic society enclosed in the circuit of Servius Tullius, came from the sons of Israel. Confined to a spot near the Capenian Gate by the side of the unwholesome stream of the fountain of Egeria, they lived there, begging, carrying on disreputable trades, the art of the gipsies, telling fortunes, levying contributions on visitors to the wood of Egeria, which they rented. The impression produced upon the public mind by that strange race was more lively than ever. “He to whom fate has given for father an observer of the Sabbath, not contented with adoring the God of heaven, and with putting on the same level the flesh of pigs and the flesh of human beings, soon hurries to get rid of his foreskin. Accustomed to despise the Roman law, he studies and observes, with trembling, 123the Jewish law which Moses has deposited in a mysterious volume. There he learns not to show the way save to him who practises the same religion with himself, and when one asks him, where is the fountain? to point out the road to the circumcised only. The fault is ih the father who adopted the seventh day of rest, and forbade on that day all the acts of life.” (Juv. xiv.)

Saturday, in fact, notwithstanding all the bad temper of the true Romans, was not in Rome in the least like other days. The world of little tradesmen who on other days filled the public places, seemed to have sunk into the earth. That irregularity, yet more than their easily recognisable type, drew attention, and made those eccentric foreigners the object of the gossip of the idle.

The Jews suffered like the rest of the world from the hardness of the times. The greed of Domitian made all taxation excessive, especially the poll tax, called the fiscus Judaïcus, to which the Jews were subject. Until this time the tribute was exacted only from those who avowed themselves to be Jews. Many disguised their origin and did not pay. To prevent that tolerance, the truth was sought in the most odious way. Suetonius remembers having seen in his youth an old man of ninety stripped before a numerous audience to see if he were not circumcised. These rigours brought about, as a consequence, the practice, in a great number of instances, of the operation of blistering; the number of recutiti at this date is very considerable. Such inquiries, on the other hand, brought the Roman authorities to a discovery which astonished them: it was that there were people who were living the Jewish life in all ways who were not circumcised. The treasury decided that that class of persons, the improfessi, as they were called, should pay the poll-tax like the circumcised. “The Jewish life,” and not the circumcision, was thus taxed, and the 124Christians saw themselves subjected to the impost. The complaints which this abuse called forth moved even those statesman who had least sympathy with Jews and Christians; the liberal were shocked by these corporeal visitations, these distinctions made by the state as to the meaning of certain religious denominations, and saw in the suppression of this abuse their programme for the future.

The vexations introduced by Domitian contributed greatly to deprive Christianity of its previously undecided character. By the side of the severe orthodoxy of the Jewish doctors, and afterwards of those of Jabneh, there had been until that time in Judaism schools analogous to Christianity, without being identical with it. Apollos, in the bosom of the Church, was an example of those inquiring Jews who tried many sects without adhering resolutely to any one. Josephus when he wrote for the Romans, reduced his Judaism to a kind of Deism, owning that circumcision and the Jewish practices were good for Jews by race, whilst the true worship is that which each adopts in full liberty. Was Flavius Clemens a Christian in the strict sense of the word? It may be doubted if he were. He loved the Jewish life, he practised Jewish customs, and it was that fact which struck his contemporaries. He went no further, and perhaps he himself would have been puzzled to say to what class of Jews he belonged. The matter was not cleared up when the treasury took it in hand. The circumcision received on that day a fatal blow. The greed of Domitian extended the tax on the Jews, the fiscus Judaïcus, who without being Jews by race, and without being circumcised, practised Jewish customs. Then the categories were marked out: there was the pure Jew, whose quality was established by physical inquiry, and the quasi-Jew, the improfessus, who took nothing from Judaism besides its honest morality and its purified worship.

The penalties ordained by a special law against the circumcision of non-Jews contributed to the same result. The precise date of that law is unknown, but it certainly appears to be of the period of Flavius. Every Roman citizen who allowed himself to be circumcised was punished with perpetual exile, and the loss of all his goods. A master rendered himself liable to the same penalty if he permitted his slaves to submit to the operation; the doctor who performed it was punished with death. The Jews who circumcised their slaves were equally liable to death. That was thoroughly conformable to the Roman policy,—tolerant towards foreign religions when they kept themselves within the limits of their own nationalities; severe when those religions entered upon the work of the propaganda. But it is easy to understand how decisive such measures were in the struggle between the circumcised Jews and the uncircumcised or improfessi. These last alone could carry on a serious proselytism. By the law of the Empire, the circumcision was condemned to go no further than the narrow limits of the house of Israel.

Agrippa II., and probably Berenice, died about this time. Their death was an immense loss to the Jewish colony, which these exalted personages covered by their credit with Flavius. Josephus, in the midst of this ardent struggle, doubled his activity. He had the superficial facility characteristic of the Jew transported into a civilisation which is foreign to him, of placing himself with marvellous quickness abreast of the ideas in the midst of which he finds himself thrown, and of seeing in what way he can profit by them. Domitian protected him, but was probably indifferent to his writings. The Empress Domitia heaped favours on him. He was, besides, the client of a certain Epaphroditus, a considerable personage, supposed to be identical with the Epaphroditus of Nero, whom Domitian had taken into his service. This Epaphroditus was a man 126of a singularly liberal mind, who encouraged historical studies, and who interested himself in Judaism. Not knowing Hebrew, and probably not understanding the Greek version of the Bible very well, he engaged Josephus to compose a history of the Jewish people. Josephus received the commission with eagerness. It fully accorded with the suggestions of his literary vanity and of his liberal Judaism. The objection which the Jews made to learned persons imbued with the beauties of Greek and Roman history, was that the Jewish people had no history, that the Greeks had not eared to know it, that good authors never mentioned its name, that it had never had any connection with the noble races, and that in its past there were to be found no such heroic histories as those of Cynegirus and of the Scævola. To prove that the Jewish people were also of a high antiquity, that they possessed the memory of heroes comparable to those of Greece, that they had had in the course of ages the finest relations of people to people, that many learned Greeks had spoken of them, such was the aim that the protege of Epaphroditus sought to realise in a vast composition divided into twenty books and entitled “Antiquities of the Jews.” The Bible naturally formed the basis: Josephus made additions to it, without value as to the ancient times, since there were no Hebrew documents relating to those times other than those which we ourselves possess, but which for more modern times are of the highest interest, since they fill up a gap in sacred history.

Josephus added to this curious work, in the form of an appendix, an autobiography, or rather an apology for his own conduct. His ancient enemies of Galilee who, rightly or wrongly, called him a traitor, were still alive and left him no repose. Justus of Tiberius, writing, from his point of view, the history of the catastrophe of his country, accused him of falsehood, and presented his conduct in Galilee in the most odious 127light. We must do Josephus the justice of saying that he did nothing to injure this dangerous rival, as would have been easy to him, in view of the favour which he enjoyed in high places. Josephus, on the other hand, is weak enough, when he defends himself against the accusations of Justus, by invoking the official approbation of Titus and Agrippa. It is impossible to regret too much that a writing which would have given us the history of the war in Judea, from the revolutionary point of view, should be totally lost to us.

The fecundity of Josephus was inexhaustible. As many persons raised doubts as to what he said in his “Antiquities,” and objected that if the Jewish nation had been as ancient as he represented, the Greek historians would have spoken of it, he undertook on this subject a justificatory memoir, which may be regarded as the first monument of the Jewish and Christian apology. Already towards the middle of the second century B.C. Aristobalus, the Jewish peripatician, had maintained that the Greek poets and philosophers had known the Hebrew writings, and had borrowed from them all those parts of their writings which have a monotheistic appearance. To prove his theory, he forged without scruple passages from profane authors—Homer, Hesiod, Linus—which he pretended were borrowed from the Bible. Josephus took up the task with more honesty, but as little critical ability. It was necessary to refute the learned men who, like Lysimachus of Alexandria, Apollonius Molon (about a hundred years B.C.), expressed themselves unfavourably with regard to the Jews. It was especially necessary to destroy the authority of the Egyptian scholar Apion, who fifty years before had, it may be in his history of Egypt, or else in a distinct work, exhibited an immense amount of learning in disputing the antiquity of the Jewish religion. In the eyes of an Egyptian, or of a Greek, that was quite sufficient to deprive it of all nobility. Apion 128had relations with the imperial world of Rome, Tiberius called him “the cymbal of the world”; Pliny thought he had better have been called the tom-tom. His book might still be read in Rome under the Flavii.

The science of Apion was that of a vain and frivolous pedant; but that which Josephus opposed to it was scarcely better. Greek erudition was for him an improvised speciality, since his early education had been Jewish, and altogether confined to the law. His book is not, and could not be, anything but a pleading without criticism; one feels in every page the presence of the advocate who cuts his arrow in any wood. Josephus does not manufacture his texts, but he takes anything that comes; the false historians, the garbled classics of the Alexandrian school; the valueless documents accumulated in the book “on the Jews” which circulated under the name of Alexander Polyhiston, all are greedily accepted by him; through him that suspected literature of the Eupolemes, the Cleodemes, the so-called Hecatea of Abvera, Demetrius of Phalera, etc., makes its entrance into science, and troubles it seriously. The apologists, and the Christian historians—Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Moses of Khorone—followed him in this bad path. The public to whom Josephus addressed himself was superficial in point of erudition; it was easily contented; the rational culture of the time of the Cæsars had disappeared; the human mind was rapidly lowering its standard, and offered to all charlatanisms an easy prey.

Such was the literature of the cultivated and liberal Jews grouped around the principal representatives of a dynasty liberal in itself and in its origin, but for the moment devoured by a madman. Josephus formed endless projects of work. He was fifty-six. With his style, artificial and chequered with a patchwork heterogeneous of rags, he seriously thought himself a 129great writer; he thought he knew Greek, with which he had only a second-hand acquaintance. He wished to take the “Wars of the Jews” in hand again; to abridge it, to make it the continuation of his “Antiquities,” and to tell all that had happened to the Jews from the end of the war to the moment of his writing. He meditated, above all, a philosophical work in four books upon God and his essence, according to Jewish ideas, and upon the Mosaic laws, with the object of rendering account of the prohibitions which they contain, and which greatly astonished the Pagans. Death doubtless prevented him from carrying out these new designs. It is probable that if he had composed these writings they would have come down to us as the others have done. Josephus in effect had a very strange literary destiny. He remained unknown to the Jewish Talmudic tradition; but he was adopted by Christians as one of themselves, and almost as a sacred writer. His writings complete the holy history which, reduced to the Biblical documents, offers only a blank page for many centuries. They form a sort of commentary on the Gospels, of which the historical sequence would have been unintelligible without the information which the Jewish historian furnishes as to the history of the Herods. They flattered especially one of the favourite theories of the Christians, and furnished one of the bases of the Christian apology, by the account of the siege of Jerusalem.

One of these ideas, to which Christians held most strongly, was that Jesus had predicted the ruin of the rebellious city. What could more strongly prove the literal accomplishment of that prophecy than the history, told by a Jew, of the unheard-of atrocities which accompanied the destruction of the Temple? Josephus became thus a fundamental witness and a supplement to the Bible. He was read and copied assiduously by Christians. He made of it, if I may so say, a Christian 130edition, wherein certain corrections may be permitted in passages which offended the copyists. These passages, above all, present in this connection doubts which criticism has not even yet allayed. These are the passages relative to John the Baptist, to Jesus, and to James. Certainly it is possible that these passages, at least that relating to Jesus, may be interpolations made by the Christians in a book which they had in some sort appropriated. We prefer, however, to believe that in the three places in question he spoke in effect of John the Baptist, of Jesus, and of James, and that the labour of the Christian editor, if he may be so called, was confined to pruning away from the passage upon Jesus certain clauses, and modifying some expressions offensive to an orthodox reader.

The reduced circle of aristocratic proselytes of a mediocre literary taste, for whom Josephus composed his book, were doubtless entirely satisfied with it. The difficulties of the old texts were ably disguised. Jewish history became as attractive as Greek, sown with harangues conducted according to the rules of profane rhetoric. Thanks to a charlatanesque display of erudition, and to a choice of doubtful or slightly falsified situations, there was an answer to all objectors. A discreet rationalism threw a veil over the too naive wonders of the ancient Hebrew books; after having read the accounts of the greatest miracles, you might believe them or not at will. For non-Jews never an insulting word; provided one is willing to recognise the historic nobility of the race, Josephus is satisfied. On every page a gentle philosophy, sympathetic with all virtue, treating the ritual precepts of the Law as binding upon Jews only, and proclaiming aloud that every just man has the essential qualities necessary for becoming a son of Abraham. A simple metaphysical and rationalistic Deism, a purely natural morality, replaces the sombre theology of 131Jehovah. The Bible thus rendered altogether human, appeared to the deserter of Jotapata to become more acceptable. He deceived himself. His book, precious as it is to the student, rises no higher in point of value in the eyes of the man of taste than one of those insipid Bibles of the seventeenth century where the most awful of the old texts are translated into academic language and decorated with vignettes in rococo style.